Poland

Warsaw, Poland

In the Broadway musical The Producer one of the characters is named Bialystok. We just arrived in Bialystok, Poland. The bus station screams we have entered a new country of less means. The doors are old, there is rusted metal in places of the structure just like in Tbilisi and you have to pay to use the toilet which seems to be a common theme in Europe these days. It is 8.8C but feels much colder with the wind. Welcome to Poland!

Our bus broke down somewhere outside Bialystok around 9pm. For three hours we sat in the parking lot of a Shell gas station waiting for a replacement bus from Warsaw. At 12:15 in the morning a replacement bus arrived and in twenty mile per hour winds the crew moved all the luggage and we boarded again bound for Warsaw. Forget about an eleven o'clock arrival, this was going to be a dead of the night arrival.

At 2:45am we arrived in Warsaw at a closed bus station. There was one lobby open with twelve seats and some heat. An elevator led to a sixth floor hostel which was actually a hotel at $40 a night. Just like I remember Budapest twelve years earlier, there was a room behind reception which looked like the living quarters of the two young female receptionists which could also double as a home or prostitution. In Budapest it was simply where then workers lived, I wasn't sure about the bus station, it felt shady.

The girl at reception didn't know how much a taxi was from the bus station to Old Town. I was the first tourist in Warsaw. I asked some locals at the taxi stand the cost and distance, only the ten year old had a clue. I had a fifty note and thirty seven in coins and smaller notes. A taxi drove me to Old Town for the thirty seven where I expected tons of hostels all over the place. There wasn't one or even many hotels.

I asked the security guys in a car for help, clueless. I asked the police, clueless. Out of four of them, only one spoke English, but was not from Warsaw, he was on loan for Christmas holiday security, in fact they were all over the main street protecting the stores and monuments. Outside tthe high volume tourist spots no police were to be found. Believe me, I walked down enough dark roads beyond my better judgement looking for a place to rest my head.

I walked for about thirty minutes on the main avenue and saw nothing. Then I got to the end and was ready to sleep in the street and a beacon of light was in the distance with the blue and white sign of a tree and wooden bench that I know as Hosteling International. I walked the five minutes to get there and posted on the door was a sign saying they were closed for renovations. It is now four in the morning, around nine degrees Celsius, slight breeze, and lite rain.

I figure where there is one hostel there must be more. I walk a little more and saw nothing. I stop this guy in the street and ask for help. He knows nothing, but has wireless so he invited me into the stairwell to get out of the cold and do some Internet research. Turns out there is a hostel one street over, he takes me there, and we part.

When I go up the elevator and enter the hostel I end up waking the receptionist who proceeds to tell me that they are booked. I ask for help in finding another hostel, he tells me the one he knows is booked, but there is another that is open. He tells me to leave the building and turn left and it is right there. I turn left, then the road ends, turn left again, the road ends, walk down some stairs, and twenty minutes down a dark street at close to five in the morning to find out that is costs $35 for the room because when you travel alone you sleep alone. I have entered the Twilight Zone.

Now, every hostel in the world I know of has this thing called dormitories, a variety of rooms with two, four, six, eight, and sometimes ten or more beds that people basically pay a flat fee for a bed in and share. Not in Warsaw! The girl at the counter tells me is costs one hundred Zloty of which I only have fifty in my pocket. There aren't any banks open and I can't exchange money at this hour. She can't help me. I get frustrated and decide to sleep on the street, she shows no reaction, just a sheep doing her holiday job before going back to the village. I get it, I try unsuccessful to hide my contempt for her bosses, the city, the banks.

In parting I ask where the metro is. She says go up the hill. I go up the hill and again, it is more like a forty five minute walk from Old Town to the central business district to get to the metro. It seems Polish people have spatial reasoning problems. It hits six in the morning and I spot the only thing open, a Subway sandwich shop. There are no twenty four hour convenient stores and taxis are infrequent. The most developed creature I met so far was probably the semi retarded shit housed drunk "security" guard at the bus station who said to me in his best stroke victim impersonation, "There is a hostel for 110 zloty on the sixth floor." The hostel that was a hotel.

As some point you have to throw in the towel and around five in the morning I did just that. I readjusted my clothes from the eternal bus ride from Lithuania and hit the streets. First stop was the ghetto wall, but before I got there I endulged in a foot long tuna sub because I could. Next stop Prozna Street where a building from pre World War II in what was once the Jewish Ghetto remains. One side is intact and the other is a gutted shell. It's important to note that where one building ends and another begins shows the stark contrast between 1920's and 1990's architecture. It was quite a vision in the dead of night with no activity in the street in what is the busiest part of town come rush hour.

The ghetto walls surround part of an apartment complex that you can't see clearly from the street. You enter the apartment complex where people live and go about their days and right there are three large walls mostly twelve feet high and fifty across of what was once a reminder to Jewish people that they were imprisoned in their own city. One wall is not as wide as the others, but at least twenty feet high and what I interpreted as some sort of guard post atop the wall making sure Jews don't get out and regular citizens don't get in.

As day broke masses of humanity started pouring out of apartment complexes and public transport, traffic started to build, and people had that mad rush on of getting to work while the elderly went for a stroll.

A big part of my day was focused on getting to Treblinka outside Warsaw. It was not to be. First of all, no one knew how to get there at the tourist information center, train station, and bus station. On the advice of the practically useless twenty five year old girl at the tourist information center I went to the bus station which required navigating buses and trams to find out that Treblinka didn't ring a bell with the information officer so I hit a dead end. If I wasn't an experienced traveler, this would be the moment where I would have a breakdown, similar to the painful feet predicament in The Baltic States.

When I exhausted all information options including the Internet I tend to seek out the highest end commercial hotels and ask the concierge who one hundred percent of the time to this day knows more than anyone in the business. It broke down like this, take a train to a town close to two hours outside Warsaw, get a taxi to drive you to Treblinka where he will wait for you and then drive you back to the train station where you return to Warsaw via another train. It would come out to a hundred dollars or something and on the advice of the Marriott concierge I decided to go to the mother of all concentration camps, Auschwitz, instead of all the others. That would prove to be a wise decision as once you go to Auschwitz, the rest must pale n comparision. I can't help but imagine concentration camps are like churches, you can only see so many.

There is clearly a huge divide among English speakers in Poland. Over the age of twenty five and forget it. Over that age it is more miss than hit and when you hit we are talking a word here or there, not complete sentences and nothing more complicated than useful words like, numbers, left, right, go, stop, yes, no, and other level two vocabulary.

People at the train station asked me for money in really poor English. There seem to be a variety of characters with busted up faces lingering around asking for money. In what I would normally say is a junkie looking for his next fix, it appears to be more like an alcoholic looking for another drink or pack of smokes. Meanwhile on the metro I immediately noticed that the train cars are cleaner, more modern but still a decade or two old, people are cleaner looking, have more varied clothing and apparel, and there isn't the smell of body odor or alcohol on people that is common in Georgia. Considering how easy it is to navigate and how much better it is to take public transport, all classes of people take it. That also tells you right away that Warsaw is a big city, one that needs and more importantly has the public infrastructure to accommodate the masses of people living and working here. Warsaw is more sophisticated than other developing countries but they are still a ways off from The Baltics and Western Europe. It's a grey area really, one that takes into account subtle differences. Yes, I am brushing off my shoulder here. Without the experience of traveling to a variety of places, you wouldn't notice.

I did a solid twelve hours of walking on my own today, from three in the morning to five in the afternoon. By the end of the day my feet were worse for wear, bruised, and blistering on the sole. I went to the Wilanow Palaces which got me thinking about Mel Brooks and how he said in his character as the King of France, "It's good to be the king!" I went to a park with this sick bronze statue of Chopin looking to his left while this beautiful lady starts to come out of the bronze by his side only to transform into a crow and appear to be getting ready to attack his head. The grounds of the park went on forever and followed down a hill into a park and lakes area right near the city center with an amphitheater, lots of ducks and birds, the calls of nature, and benches in just the right amount of places.

The city has a nice buzz with the right amount of calm. It never seems to get to noisy, there are plenty of places to find refuge, and it is hard to knock this amount of parks easily accessible from most points in the city. It isn't overpriced, but it isn't cheap. The metro costs a dollar, the bus a dollar, the trick being to buy in bulk for transport and pay something like four dollars for an all day pass or even less for a monthly or residential pass. The food is cheaper than the Baltics, but like everywhere it adds up. Just to be clear though, potato salad and some sort of pork product like sausages is all pervasive in homes throughout this region all the way down to Georgia with Turkey being an exception from what I can tell. Perhaps a hold over from the Soviet Union but more likely a reflection of agriculture and weather, the Soviets?

Lodging is expensive as there isn't a lot of it. That goes for tourism as well as living. A decent place will run you a third to half your salary in the five hundred dollar range to keep it simple, but more for family homes. Regardless, properties work well with good infrastructure, windows, heating, electricity, water, and fresh paint and less rusted out metal bits. The streets are safe and with some travelers common sense you can avoid trouble if it exists.

Today there has been a constant lite drizzle and the temperature has been hovering around nine degrees which is nice as long as the wind doesn't blow for too long. Younger people seem nice, people in the forty range seem really pissed of at the world and old peope go about there business with the occasional push and shove old people are wont to do at a certain age.

I met my couch surfing host at the train station. Her name is Joanna pronounced with a "y" like Yoanna. She has this great accent which I like to use when doing my best Russian imitation. She ends a lot of sentences with "yes" and "no" which keeps me on my toes when conversing because your response depends on the context. I kept messing up my yes's and no's in response. She really likes to talk and has a great bubbly personality. Her roommate is a mute for the most part. I think given the right environment she would be able to tap into her elementary level English but she is really selfconscious about it.

Joanna busted put some smoked sausage, potato, salad, and bread for us and a few cold beers. We talked about this and that and after a few hours busting out the shisha pipe to smoke apple tobacco. Smoking shisha seems to have taken off in this part of the world. I saw it a bunch in The Baltic States and now in Poland. It was the first time I experienced smoking indoors on this trip. People couldn't imagine how we still smoke indoors in Georgia it had been so long since anyone did it in their countries.

The view from the balcony shows striking contrasts between the old and new. Even though most of the old is a refabrication of the old considering Warsaw was levelled after World War II, it still looks interesting from the balcony seeing church spires in the distance next to multinational corporation signs posted on modern buildings. While there are definately those cookie cutter Soviet buildings everywhere, they have more sophistication than in poorer post-Soviet nations with better windows, fresh paint, nicer entrance ways, and other little things. It important however to keep in mind that while Poland might have been levelled after the war, it does have a long rich history and a time under the sun as a major power so there are elements of that which remains in urban planning and design.

I was so tired I started passing out around eight, but managed to make it to 9:30. I sure as shit can't pull these all nighters as easily as I use to do, but I can hold my own. I only need three minute power naps around two in the afternoon, kind of like a Medicare patient. Once I take my shoes off and know I can crash, it is lights out no matter how many times I pumped myself up which means clapping my hands and exhaling quickly.

Woke this morning with damaged feet, with a two inch bruise on my right foot near the Achilles hell and a blister on the sole. It is going to be a long day of walking and sucking up the pain. Tomorrow, I can sit on the train, chill, and recover. Today though it is go time.

Started out by walking around old town which I only saw at three in the morning when I arrived. Hit the river and the uneventful Praga District which felt like a rundown suburb under construction and lacking public transportation. Met a Georgian guy selling wine retail. I went into my twenty questions routine and left with a Georgian phrase being exchanged. Went to Warsaw University library, it was a library, just in a big old building. I thought libraries, Aren't libraries dead yet?" Most students were using computers not the card catalog. Tried going to the Copernicus Science Museum, but it was packed, with a line out the door and close to wrapping around the building. Went to Chopin Museum, detailed for a composer's life, and then ixnayed the National Museum when I saw the size of the building, it would take days. Warsaw has a lot to offer.

The Jewish cemetery was briefly interesting. The cemetery was overgrown and unkept. I was informed but haven't verified that Jewish cemeteries are not to be manicured and Jews cannot work there. Lots of last names I recognized and Polish ones I haven't heard before. It is a nondescript place except for a long twelve foot high wall made of red clay bricks, identical to the ones composing the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall. Many headstones are inscribed in Hebrew and the only noticeable pattern was the year 1942.

Lets be clear about the size of the ghetto. It was huge! There were something like three hundred thousand Jews living in Warsaw before the war and it shows considering the demarcation line of the ghetto and rest of Warsaw. Jews came here most likely because it was a safe place to live and work. Why do Jews pick certain cities? I can only assume that Jews are attracted to places that will accept them. It also doesn't hurt if the place is comfortable and pleasant like Warsaw.

There don't seem to be a lot of Polish restaurants in town. They must be here, but I have a pretty keen eye and a huge endless gut and it took me a solid two days to find an authentic place and it was called Corso's. As soon as I walked into the place I fell in love.

The smoky interior hits you right away and considering the last time I smoked was in a basement blowing out the smoke through the flue of a fireplace in Kaunas, Lithuania with my couch surfing host, I was pretty happy to be warm and smoking. The interior hasn't changed in forty years with awful red, pink, and dark green walls and tapestries with wooden tables and chairs with pink table clothes barely covering the table. People are drinking heavily and the place is feeding no one under forty except me. like everywhere else in Poland so far it is pleasantly quiet and calm. ER and Friends is softly playing in the background as it is dubbed in Polish.

Round one included three different kinds of Polish sausages served with slightly stall white bread, ketchup, and the mildest mustard known to man. Delicious! Round two were meat perogies, like a dumpling. There were tasty and more meat than dough, a welcome surprise. I should of stopped there but I wanted to see if they could pull off apple pie a la mode. They couldn't.

That night I went to the couch surfing weekly meeting in Warsaw which surprisingly had a big turnout. There were easily one hundred people filtering in and out of the bar. At eight it was standing room only. People were really friendly and there was a large amount of girls there. The couch surfing crew is an open bunch of peope. You have to be a certain kind of person to take a stranger into your home.

I managed a lot considering. I didn't hit a couple of museums, but got a real feel for the place. I kind of like this city. It has the right amount of busy and calm and everything inbetween. There aren't many pretty girls though. They sometimes have nice blue eyes or fill out a pair of jeans, but for the most part The Baltic States ruined me. Warsaw is basically a modern city with bits and pieces of history here and there. The Old Town is brand-new even if done in the old style, you wouldn't really know it and they did a good job. There are lots of open spaces, green, and places to have a sit.

Train to Wroclaw

The night came and went and Joanna and I went to the train station together. We said our goodbyes and I was on my way. It was the first time she ever met a Jewish person. When we parted I gave her a hug and initiated her into my faith. She will forever be labelled as a sympathizer for allowing a Jew to couch surf in her home.

The train ride was uneventful. Met an interesting fellow traveler from a northern Polish city, Bialoystok in fact, ate a few sandwiches, listened to music, wrote some letters, and stared out the window. She was quite interesting and would be one of two athletes I would meet in two days. She was taking a trip to Scotland for the new year. She spent eleven months a year working and one month a year climbing mountains. She was built quite well with strong shoulders and lean features. I was sure she could kick my ass. The other person I met was a female working in a shoe store who was a professional judo competitor who had two instances of using it to fight off would be attackers. She could definately kick my ass. In truth an easy task.

Upon arrival, you notice right away the construction. Train stations all over the country after twenty years are being redone to make Poland look nice for the Euro Cup 2012 which looks to bring in millions of visitors and billions of dollars in taxable revenue. I don't mean to sound like a mean spirited individual, but tourists would much rather prefer more comfortable trains than nicer hallways and timetable boards and it might help to get some English speaking information desk employees. Just saying.

After breaking down the urban landscape and transport system I went out into the suburbs where I would meet my host Agata. She was a thirty five year old spinster in the making. I have limited experiences with cat people, but the few I have met in travels all seem to have a great love of cats, dirty floors, lots of clutter, and horde just a little more than normal if there is such a thing.

Her apartment was really nice, new, and located on the fringe of the city near the airport. It was basically a one room flat with all the new fixtures, well heated and insulated, copious amounts of hot water and even a dishwasher, something I haven't seen in years. Upon arrival she made us a dinner of stuffed cabbage with meat and barley, marinated cabbage, and a small side salad. Everything was tasty and my bowels were exploding within five minutes. That evening I went for a walk around the city center and returned home. We chatted for a bit, she made me a beer, honey, clove, and four star concoction. I slept terribly I think because of the food and drink, but those are sometimes the consequences of putting rocket fuel of cabbage into your gullet. Don't even get me started on legumes.

Her hospitality was really amazing. Besides the arrival dinner, she made a proper bed for me, drive me around the city in a small tour of buildings and architecture as that is her professional, took me to a good pirogie or dumpling joint by the train station where apparently all the good street food is, let me do laundry, and was a good conversalist who knew a ton about Poland, especially her city of Wroclaw. She reminded me of what a mayor would be like.

Old town at night is the same as elsewhere, nice, lit up, old buildings no more than five stories high, tourist traps, overpriced low quality food, and nice places to walk around. They were setting up a stage in the main market area and doing a horrible rendition of No Woman, No Cry sound check. Everyone can't be a singer in the real world, only on YouTube.

I immediately wasn't immpressed by Wroclaw. I felt right away that my couch surfing experience would be the real reason for this visit. After Warsaw and other places, it just lacked luster for me, I am spoiled. So I took the day off for the most part. It was interesting to take a laundry inventory. After thirteen days I got by without stinking up the place on five socks, five underwear, three shirts, and one pair of pants. I am experimenting with lite travel and I have done well so far, but it would of been better to add a few more socks and underwear and leave a few more shirts at home.

I ate like a champ this day. At one place I had mushroom pirogies, borscht soup, and the most oil drenched crispy potato pancakes on earth covered in a stewed meat with the softest chunks if beef on earth, they call it goulash, but it isn't the Hungarian kind people think of. It was so good, but so heavy, I, Steve Diamond, the bottomless pit only ate two of five potato pancakes. Later that evening Agata and I had sour wheat soup with some unidentifable pork pieces in it and homemade meat pirogies.

Shopping this time of year is unavoidable. Luckily Agata wanted wine and it was only sold in this one place which was the megamall. The supermarket in this place was incredibly huge. They make Super Walmart look sizable, but nonthreatening. Not only that, they don't sport much of a clothing section and other wares of our American mega stores, it was just endless food. The pork section alone took up the equivalent of a produce section in Ralph's, Publix, or Albertson's. I went to town on smoked salmon, cream cheese, cured pork, Swiss cheese, Camenbert, salad, and a loaf of bread. After returning home I made a boat load of sandwiches for the five hour train ride from Wroclaw to Krakow.

The girls in Warsaw were fair, but in Wroclaw I started to see a different Poland, a Poland of spandex, legs, ass, fair skin blue eyed cuties, but not hotties. There is something homely about the faces here, a sadness at times, a childish look. It is hard to explain, they aren't striking looking, more kind and caring in the face, but yes, they do have the blue eyes or steely eyes, nice skin, usually straight blondish hair, and wear a fair amount of spandex bottoms. The men are average looking. They don't seem to be balding early, getting too fat, and aging poorly. They aren't particularly handsome perse, but they are reasonably good looking enough to fit with their Polish female counterparts.

The Conversations in Wroclaw

The first of many conversations started with Malta. What do you know about Malta? I certainly knew nothing, except where it is. Turns out they have a long history of being invaded because of it's strategic location in the Mediterranean Sea, has a lot of people at four hundred thousand, tourism is the biggest source of revenue, and they speak Maltese.

The Warsaw Pact comprised Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany or DDR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugosloavia, and Albania in a cooperative agreement to support one another in the event that one should be invaded by another or potential outsider. Apparently these countries while not in the Soviet Union, were indeed Communist countries who basically reported to Mother Russia, had their own borders, passports, social and political climates depending on the time and the leader. Unlike the Soviets, you were allowed to travel and many defected. It was however not a cakewalk to get a passport because of government control so people had to really be sure about how committed they were to walking away from everything in their lives during this period. Just like the Soviet Union, there were good times and bad. Some of the highlights include the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by five members of the Warsaw Pact and the tyranny of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania.

Apparently illegal goods were alive and well during the Cold War in this region as well as in the Soviet Union. Favorite imports included western music, movies, chocolate, cigarettes, and anything of the pop culture variety really. Apparently Bulgaria and Italy were big players in the game. It would be fascinating to see where these smugglers are now and what they did after the fall of the Soviet Union. Did they move onto drug, human, and weapon trafficking, open restaurants, retire, buy farms, or something totally unexpected like work for corporate America and Europe. Become oligarches?

Borders changed a bunch of times over the last two hundred years or so. It breaks down like this to keep it simple. You had the Polish Empire and Hapsburg Empire, and a few more here and there over the centuries which drew up more lines. What we call nation states today in this part of the world is the result of the Allied Forces carving up Europe after World War II. Russian, US, UK, and even German negotiations on what to do with pat war Europe was questionable at best. Look it up.

So without getting into the details, if you look at borders and areas within a hundred miles or so of these borders whether east/west or north/south, there is some mixing. That was once our land or they took our land is a common thread of conversation all over the world. The spoils go to the victors and the victors here were the Russians. Lviv in Western Ukraine is a Polish city that has been Sovietized.

Affectively the Russians were fighting because they had there own agenda. In many ways they were worse than the Germans because they tended to rape and destroy more whereas the Germans came in, evaluated, and took goods, shipped them off to Switzerland. They were superior to everyone else. The Russians were and remain drunken animals and the Germans were the superior Aryan race that wouldn't waste time and energy raping and pillaging a lower class.

I don't think it is that simple, the Germans after all started the war by invading Poland, but on the other hand Stalin did like killing people and ruling with an iron hand and in modern day Russia Putin puts detractors in jail and storm cities and village killing everything in the path in order to restore peace and order. There is so much nuclear tension build up it seems inevitable that one day some nutjob will get into the Kremilin, White House, or some other nuclear country head of state position and say, "Fuck it, let's see what you do now bitches. We are ready to die for our beliefs. Heaven sure as shit is better than this standardized cattle farm of human life." He or she probably wouldn't talk like that, but it would be an honest appraisal of the general sentiment. Except the Hindus would like a cow's life. See how complicated it all is. Poor play on words?

The influence of American television apparently played a big part in the downfall of the Soviet Union according to some people you meet. People saw images of decadence, wealth, and freedom, and wanted it. Who wouldn't? The televison show Dallas is credited with influencing the region by way of showing excess, greed, alcohol abuse, and sex. People wanted all the material things and that somehow lead to the downfall of communism.

I don't quite see how wanting something translates into bringing down an empire, but let people dream. I don't think we will be hearing stories of contraband bringing down North Korea. That will happen when the leaders decide to open up, kill everyone, or get invaded by a foreign power which guarantees democracy, freedom, and an equal economic spread of the natural resources of the country. It's true, the oligarchs can attest to equality.

Poland apparently has a divide between the east which is considered poor and the west which is rich and supports all the freeloaders in the east. Poland is quite a big country with at least five major cities, a sea port, and bordered in the middle of successful and fringe nation states, Germany/Czech Republic and Belarus/Ukraine, respectively. According to my hosts it is a nation where the favorite past time is complaining and they don't produce much in the way of athletes or anything else much one would know.

I thought that blacks or more appropriately Africans would be an interesting site in Poland. Most disagreed. If there is going to be any anomisty towards anyone it is likely going to be directed at the Gypsies. Romanians get the worst of it because when people think Gypsies they think Romania, but they are all over this part of the world. Many can be found in The Balkans and surrounding countries. They have darker skin, dress differently in what I perceive as the majority of clothing styles the people at Grateful Dead or Phish shows would wear, and are credited with one thing and one thing only, thievery. I kind of look like a Gypsie, too bad I get caught when I steal things.

To Krakow

Young love is everywhere this holiday season. The train station is packed with young couples traveling near and far. Most are in their early twenties, but some older folks in their early thirties show up time and again. It is very cute to see, I use to be happy like that.

When I entered to cabin there was a skin head sitting alone in the compartment. He was pretty drunk and shaky as if on speed or other racing heart inducing drug. We shook hands like long lost friends. Perhaps I misread the shaved head, black leather boots, metal weapon, and overall drug addict menace look for something that it wasn't.

The rest of the train ride was uneventful. We had a bunch of delays and eventually got to Krakow. It was quieter than I expected. The train station was kind of ass backwards with the main hall being detached from the platforms. The train station main square was empty. There weren't many signs of activity when exiting.

Walking around what was at one time the Old City wall was easy enough. Starting to dissect the streets, map, and distances I quickly discovered that this was a small city. I walked from the top to bottom in twenty minutes and the main tourist section was very compact. It is a university town with Jagellion University being the most respected in the country in the center of town.

I met my couch surfing hosts at their home. It was a couple, an American guy and a Polish girl, both approaching thirty. They met in America when she was working in a bar and he was drinking in it. She over stayed her visa by four years and somehow managed to stay on the books and be an illegal. Basically no one came looking for her and she stayed off the radar and paid taxes. America doesn't frown on that.

He was finishing his second tour in the army. He originally dropped out of school at the University of Tennessee at nineteen after one year, enlisted in the Army to have the government pay for school, went through basic training, was sent to language school for Arabic in California, then sent to Kuwait to defend the borders there as America has been doing for years since Iraq's invasion, then September Eleven happened and he found himself in the Iraq War.

After finishing his tour and four years, the government used a clause in the original contract that allows the military to own you for an additional four years if there are extraordinary circumstances like invading a sovereign nation on false pretenses. They owned him. Work here and there, deployment now and again and meeting a girl from Poland turns into finishing his tour, getting married, and moving to Krakow to get a master's degree.

They are a nice couple and they are both very American even though she only lived there for six years. Their apartment is nice and cozy for a couple, a loft. The couch is comfortable enough and they are very nice people. Little Man and Monkey are the cats and that is home. My hosts are really interesting, I have been lucky so far. They are both native speakers and highly educated. I didn't get out of the house until close to one in the afternoon today because of conversation.

New Year's Eve was uneventful. We walked around for a few minutes and went to the Jewish District which took all of three minutes. People were mostly inside and the bars were not crowded at all. It appears that most people left Krakow for New Year's. At midnight I went outside and was unimpressed by the fireworks thing and it was below zero, so it was time to pack it in and go to sleep.

I walked around the city and immediately though how lovely a city it is with the quiet streets, nice buildings, peacefully meandering river outside the old town, and casual atmosphere of the place. My only beef with the place is the constant reminder of tourists.

Returning home to another lengthy interesting conversation and an impending decision I must make, where to go next? Trains are a hundred dollars here or two there, buses are twenty to fifty. It is a no brainer, but a lot of buses travel through the night and arrive at midnight or the next morning. I like to see the countryside, but arriving at night blows. I don't know what to do, but I do know that this is a good problem to have and complaining is comical.

Auschwitz / Birkenau

Getting to major tourist attraction early is a must. The town of Florence, Italy turns into a crowded mess of camera toting, hiking apparel wearing, group tour herds by ten o'clock. My suggestion for these places is to start your day at four in the morning and witness a sleeping city as it was in many ways hundreds of years ago wake up. You can nap in the middle of the day.

When it comes to tourist attractions that have an open and close time, be there first. I arrived at Auschwitz thirty minutes after it opened and only five other people had the same idea. It was basically all to ourselves. I went in winter on purpose to get a feel for those conditions in this horrible place of starvation, torture, and death. The prisoners had a thin cloth as clothes and must have suffered terribly. It was oddly warm in the low forties, but still eerie.

When I entered the exhibits alone, it was pretty sweet until I saw the displays. There are photos of prisoners lining the walls with shaven heads and in the pin stripe outfit, pictures of starving children, women weighing around thirty kilograms or seventy pounds, mounds of human hair which was accumulated and sold for stuffing, glasses, loads of brushes for shaving, brushing hair, and toothbrushes all made of wood, and of course the shoes, pots and pans, and photos of the ghettos, trains, and lines where people went either to work or the gas chambers. The whole thing is mind blowing if you really dissect it all.

Personally I found the barracks at Birkenau the most startling after the hair. The barracks are cold, the bunks are three levels and was used as a horse stable in some of them previously and it feels like a stable, that chill. The prisoners were less than animals. The platforms where the arrivals came and never left were surrounded by guard towers, and on both sides were bobbedwired electrified fences and in the far distance what I can only imagine was a plumb of smoke coming from the gas chamber crematoriums. Birkenau is an open field and everything is in clear view. The chances of escape had to be minimal with all the security and its' location was isolated far from any civilization, as if the civilians would of been in a position to help or want to. People have built a community around the site and ride their bikes along the outside to and from work, the market, and school. My how things have changed and continue to.

Conclusion

That night Gosia prepared pirogies made with farmers cheese, potatoes, and fried onions from scratch. I got my things together and headed to the train station for the overnight to Lviv, Ukraine. I got excited when the cashier told me there were only three beds in the compartment, that is, three beds means first class to me. I was disappointed to find that modern train cars now cram three beds one on top of another in a compartment and call it second class instead of the four or six beds, two or three on each side as in the past. At least they were wider if not higher. Being late in buying my ticket, I ended up on the top bunk with a clearance of a foot and a half between my head and the ceiling. It was not comfortable and I had to use the ladder to get up and down. What can you do?

Poland started in Warsaw, continued in Wroclaw, and finished in Krakow. I take from it that Warsaw is a big city with a pulse and vibe, a place I could live. Wroclaw was nice, but to stuffy feeling for some reason that is hard to explain. Krakow of course is a gem city if it wasn't for all the tourists including myself. A great university party town with a long history, beatutiful architecture, easy to get around, and chill.

Poland wasn't what I thought it would be. I thought it would be poorer, less developed, and people wouldn't be able to speak much English. I found a country that is quite wealthy, functional, loaded with stores and shops for the better part of a decade, and quite friendly even if a little standoffish. If you are under twenty five you speak English.

The presence of foreigners creates its' own feel, similar in some ways to Korea but more student orientated, in short it is saturated with Americans and Europeans, but that can be a good thing. I guess at this stage of the game, I prefer places that are poorer, a bit more raw, and cheaper than what Poland is. I am not saying I am a huge fan of calling Chad home, but something in-between before they open up all their markets and become a cookie cutter place like the rest of Europe and the developed world has become. A place with character.