Right then ... finally we can get back to the original purpose of this damn blog, which was to tell you where I am at any given moment and what the Hell I'm doing there.
Before I get to that, though, I want to quickly share three facts which may help throw some light onto my present situation.
MY THREE SHARY FACTS
Fact #1
As most of you know, I'm in my final year of a linguistics degree. The core units (i.e. the actual linguistics stuff) are basically done, so now I'm primarily studying some extra units on religion and historiography (which is sort of 'meta-history' – it deals with how we record history and why). Within the religious field, I've chosen Islam as my focus.
Fact #2
A very simple fact, which I've come to realise gradually over many successive visits: Poland is an extremely cool place.
Fact #3
My fitness has declined terribly in the last two years, and I really want to try and claw it back to the level it was at before. So when vacation time came up this year, I started thinking of ways I could have a 'physical holiday'. I wanted to do it in Ukraine if I could, but for various reasons that just wasn't feasible.
So, where does that put me? Well it puts me on the outdoor terrace of a building complex that used to be the stables and granary of a giant castle, in a tiny Polish village called Krasiczyn*.
Not entirely making sense yet, is it?
No, Anthony, it isn't.
EXPLAINY
Er ... ok. Well, I'm here at the end of Day One, and I arrived by bicycle. How many more days there will be after this one is yet to be determined.
See, I've set myself two tasks, which are these: cross the southern half of Poland by bicycle and regional train, and write an essay about the 'Clash of Civilisations Hypothesis' along the way.
Ultimate success in this mission will mean two things: first, I reach Zgorzelec on the German border, almost waving distance from Dresden. And second, I plumb the depths of Islamic theology and politics, and come up with a decent response to Samuel Huntington's thesis (Huntington being the guy who made the phrase "clash of civilisations" famous in a 1993 academic paper, stirring up quite a controversy in the process).
The two goals are quite different, in several respects. For a start, I must finish the essay, but I don't necessarily need to traverse the entire breadth of Poland. It would be nice, of course, but it isn't life-and-death.
There's certainly not enough time to do all of it on the bike, which is what I'd ideally like to do. So I'm gonna cycle as much as I can and do the rest by rail. The regional trains are extremely cheap and also extremely slow (a journey of 40-50kms can last well over an hour), so you can still take in a bit of the landscape as you go along.
AND SO ...?
And so the journey kicked off today in Przemysl**, near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Although in fact, it really started at the bike hire shop in L'viv, where the guy was so keen to tell me all the details of all the local cycling tours I can do with his spanking new company, that I had to make a mad dash across the city afterwards to catch my bus.
In the process of negotiating Lviv's chronically decayed footpaths, I badly ripped one leg of my jeans on the bike chain. That's gonna cost me about two hours of sewing that would otherwise have been devoted to Huntington's Big Civilisation Idea Thingy.
My torn leg tucked into my sock, I arrived at the bus station just as the bus was pulling out onto the road, and stood pleading with the driver to wait for me while I bought a ticket. I guess the guy took pity on this weird, out-of-breath foreigner with a gaping tear in one leg of his trousers, 'cause he agreed to wait, and after grabbing a ticket inside the bus station I ran out to the road and jumped on.
A few hours and an argument with Polish customs later (the bastards took all my $1.50/packet Ukrainian cigarettes!), we arrived in Przemysl. It's a town I've been through many times, but I've only actually been into it twice – both times in the last month.
Przemysl is not likely to appear on any travel website Top 10s, but it does have at least a modicum of charm. Dramatically set on a hillside that leads down to a river, its expansive 'rynek' (market square) features grand churches ranged around at different elevations, and you can find a couple of cosy cafes, one of which is attached to an equally cosy bookshop.
The city is, in a sense, the 'end of Europe'. Going just a few kilometres east from there by road, you come to the Shegyni border checkpoint, which vividly marks the transition from the EU to the former USSR.
It does this mainly by making you sit on a bus/train/bench for a few hours while officials comb through bags, unscrew the ceilings of vehicles to search for contraband, and take your documents away for extended periods to run them through nobody-knows-what kind of computer systems, eventually returning them with a smile (on the Polish side) or a world-weary sigh (on the Ukrainian side).
If you keep going east, the next place you encounter after the checkpoint is the tumbledown village of Butsiv. This place forms a sharp contrast with its Polish neighbour; it's an open sewer kinda town, where bits of metal stick up randomly out of the road, where Przemysl's Volkswagen Golfs are replaced by old Ladas and the occasional hulk of a Soviet-era Kamaz (medium-sized truck), and where an unidentified shape on the roadside can turn out to be a foraging chicken with its head shoved firmly into the long grass.
Both towns exercise a certain kind of attraction (partly depending on your taste in decrepit and/or abandoned motor vehicles), but transiting from one to the other leaves you in no doubt that you've just crossed some kind of 'great divide'. It's a memorable experience, for that reason alone.
RAMBLING ALL THE WAY TO THE CASTLE
Anyway ... so I got to Przemysl late in the afternoon, went to one of the aforementioned cosy cafes for a cappuccino and a quick re-read of Huntington, then jumped on my bike and rode about 10kms along winding country roads, some of them flanked by deeply-shaded forests.
It was a stunning ride – though a very short one compared to those I'll be doing in the coming days – and at the end of it I arrived here in Krasiczyn.
I'll try not to bore you with too much detail about this place, but it is pretty damn cool and quite a find (I'd never heard of it until a few days ago). The highlight so far has been dinner at the castle.
I wandered in there at about eight, as the sun was starting to dip below the horizon, and there was no-one around the ramparts at all. I don't think I'd be boasting too much if I said that, for someone born a long way from Europe, I've seen quite a decent number of castles in my time ... but I'm not sure I've ever had an entire one to myself before. It's pretty cool; think I might have to buy one ;-)
Inside the castle walls, I enjoyed a sumptuous meal of shopska (goat's cheese salad) and zhurek (a traditional Polish fermented rye soup with sausage, egg and spices, served in a bowl made of crispy bread – truly one of the finest things you can put in your mouth in Central or Eastern Europe). I also took the opportunity to wash it down with a glass of Chilean dry red, which you can only get in Ukraine if you're prepared to live without one of your kidneys.
All this amid the elegant arches of a proper castle dining hall. And the total bill? A bit less than eight Euros. Amazing.
Then I exited to find myself in near-total darkness. The path leading away from the castle was very dimly lit, and ancient trees with sturdy, angled trunks towered all around me as the full moon poked eerily through their silhouetted leaves. It was spooky ... but in a really, really satisfying way.
Finally I arrived back at my hostel, which was constructed out of the ruins of the former castle granary, and is nowadays guarded by two black cats – one of whom is currently trying to unplug my computer at the wall socket – and a friendly, floppy-eared dog shaped like an oversized marzipan log.
Short version: Krasiczyn had obliged me with a perfect evening :-)
BEWARE THE POLOPHILE
Given all of the above, I have to say that I'm confirmed in my love for this country, partly because of all the unexpected and fabulous stuff it throws at you. I mean, dinner in a castle is so not how I was expecting to end my day when I woke up this morning! Unlike so many other places, Poland retains the ability to surprise, always holding a little more up its sleeve ... and I retain the ability to go "Oh, how verily you rock!" every time it reveals another snippet of coolness.
So yeah ... blah freakin' blah. Now you've got the context, plus a bit of ramble about the country which I currently have a massive crush on. Tomorrow the 'quest' gets serious: I have to cover sth like 40kms to reach a place called Jaroslaw, and start putting pen to paper on this essay.
I like to think of it as my 'road trip with Muhammad'. Let's see how far we can travel together ...
* Polish "cz" is roughly equivalent to the "ch" in English "cheese", so this place is pronounced like "Krasichen".
** Absolutely no idea how it's pronounced! Every time I say my version of "Przemysl" to Polish people, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Polish is quite the challenge ... but a stunner of a language, nonetheless :-)
Before I get to that, though, I want to quickly share three facts which may help throw some light onto my present situation.
MY THREE SHARY FACTS
Fact #1
As most of you know, I'm in my final year of a linguistics degree. The core units (i.e. the actual linguistics stuff) are basically done, so now I'm primarily studying some extra units on religion and historiography (which is sort of 'meta-history' – it deals with how we record history and why). Within the religious field, I've chosen Islam as my focus.
Fact #2
A very simple fact, which I've come to realise gradually over many successive visits: Poland is an extremely cool place.
Fact #3
My fitness has declined terribly in the last two years, and I really want to try and claw it back to the level it was at before. So when vacation time came up this year, I started thinking of ways I could have a 'physical holiday'. I wanted to do it in Ukraine if I could, but for various reasons that just wasn't feasible.
So, where does that put me? Well it puts me on the outdoor terrace of a building complex that used to be the stables and granary of a giant castle, in a tiny Polish village called Krasiczyn*.
Not entirely making sense yet, is it?
No, Anthony, it isn't.
EXPLAINY
See, I've set myself two tasks, which are these: cross the southern half of Poland by bicycle and regional train, and write an essay about the 'Clash of Civilisations Hypothesis' along the way.
Ultimate success in this mission will mean two things: first, I reach Zgorzelec on the German border, almost waving distance from Dresden. And second, I plumb the depths of Islamic theology and politics, and come up with a decent response to Samuel Huntington's thesis (Huntington being the guy who made the phrase "clash of civilisations" famous in a 1993 academic paper, stirring up quite a controversy in the process).
The two goals are quite different, in several respects. For a start, I must finish the essay, but I don't necessarily need to traverse the entire breadth of Poland. It would be nice, of course, but it isn't life-and-death.
There's certainly not enough time to do all of it on the bike, which is what I'd ideally like to do. So I'm gonna cycle as much as I can and do the rest by rail. The regional trains are extremely cheap and also extremely slow (a journey of 40-50kms can last well over an hour), so you can still take in a bit of the landscape as you go along.
AND SO ...?
In the process of negotiating Lviv's chronically decayed footpaths, I badly ripped one leg of my jeans on the bike chain. That's gonna cost me about two hours of sewing that would otherwise have been devoted to Huntington's Big Civilisation Idea Thingy.
My torn leg tucked into my sock, I arrived at the bus station just as the bus was pulling out onto the road, and stood pleading with the driver to wait for me while I bought a ticket. I guess the guy took pity on this weird, out-of-breath foreigner with a gaping tear in one leg of his trousers, 'cause he agreed to wait, and after grabbing a ticket inside the bus station I ran out to the road and jumped on.
A few hours and an argument with Polish customs later (the bastards took all my $1.50/packet Ukrainian cigarettes!), we arrived in Przemysl. It's a town I've been through many times, but I've only actually been into it twice – both times in the last month.
Przemysl is not likely to appear on any travel website Top 10s, but it does have at least a modicum of charm. Dramatically set on a hillside that leads down to a river, its expansive 'rynek' (market square) features grand churches ranged around at different elevations, and you can find a couple of cosy cafes, one of which is attached to an equally cosy bookshop.
The city is, in a sense, the 'end of Europe'. Going just a few kilometres east from there by road, you come to the Shegyni border checkpoint, which vividly marks the transition from the EU to the former USSR.
It does this mainly by making you sit on a bus/train/bench for a few hours while officials comb through bags, unscrew the ceilings of vehicles to search for contraband, and take your documents away for extended periods to run them through nobody-knows-what kind of computer systems, eventually returning them with a smile (on the Polish side) or a world-weary sigh (on the Ukrainian side).
 |
Enigmatic Chicken
Butsiv, Ukraine, 31.07.12
|
RAMBLING ALL THE WAY TO THE CASTLE
Anyway ... so I got to Przemysl late in the afternoon, went to one of the aforementioned cosy cafes for a cappuccino and a quick re-read of Huntington, then jumped on my bike and rode about 10kms along winding country roads, some of them flanked by deeply-shaded forests.
It was a stunning ride – though a very short one compared to those I'll be doing in the coming days – and at the end of it I arrived here in Krasiczyn.
I'll try not to bore you with too much detail about this place, but it is pretty damn cool and quite a find (I'd never heard of it until a few days ago). The highlight so far has been dinner at the castle.
I wandered in there at about eight, as the sun was starting to dip below the horizon, and there was no-one around the ramparts at all. I don't think I'd be boasting too much if I said that, for someone born a long way from Europe, I've seen quite a decent number of castles in my time ... but I'm not sure I've ever had an entire one to myself before. It's pretty cool; think I might have to buy one ;-)
 |
Annoying "Here's What I Ate on Holiday" Photo
Krasiczyn, Poland, 31.07.12
|
All this amid the elegant arches of a proper castle dining hall. And the total bill? A bit less than eight Euros. Amazing.
Then I exited to find myself in near-total darkness. The path leading away from the castle was very dimly lit, and ancient trees with sturdy, angled trunks towered all around me as the full moon poked eerily through their silhouetted leaves. It was spooky ... but in a really, really satisfying way.
Finally I arrived back at my hostel, which was constructed out of the ruins of the former castle granary, and is nowadays guarded by two black cats – one of whom is currently trying to unplug my computer at the wall socket – and a friendly, floppy-eared dog shaped like an oversized marzipan log.
Short version: Krasiczyn had obliged me with a perfect evening :-)
BEWARE THE POLOPHILE
 |
"Uh oh ... Castle Time! Must Be a European Holliday."
Krasiczyn, Poland, 01.08.12
|
So yeah ... blah freakin' blah. Now you've got the context, plus a bit of ramble about the country which I currently have a massive crush on. Tomorrow the 'quest' gets serious: I have to cover sth like 40kms to reach a place called Jaroslaw, and start putting pen to paper on this essay.
I like to think of it as my 'road trip with Muhammad'. Let's see how far we can travel together ...
* Polish "cz" is roughly equivalent to the "ch" in English "cheese", so this place is pronounced like "Krasichen".
** Absolutely no idea how it's pronounced! Every time I say my version of "Przemysl" to Polish people, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Polish is quite the challenge ... but a stunner of a language, nonetheless :-)
