I had stayed in Krakow for about 10 days altogether. Mostly I just relaxed, read, studied Polish, took nice walks, and saw the sights. Notice, I didn’t mention party. Yes, I had a decent respectable life for my days in Krakow, but for the last night I decided that I would go out with a bang. It worked out perfectly that there was a group of 10 beautiful Irish girls staying in my hostel that were happy for me to join them for a night of clubbing. They were all college friends from Trinity College in Dublin on a weekend party trip. They were…umm, how should I say…airhead, high-maintenance kind of girls, but friendly and fun.
I was just hanging around in the hostel common room glancing over my Teach Yourself Polish book when three Englishmen came in and struck up a conversation. They were staying in the cheaper hostel downstairs, which shared the same management and reception. They were nice to me, but hooligans nonetheless. We had a beer and then they went to buy more. They gave me a couple beers and Lay’s paprika flavor chips. Their plan for the evening was to drink as much as possible and make slimy comments to and about pretty women, and they were already off to a good start in the hostel common room. I didn’t want to join them, but they cajoled me into it, saying “Come on Tim, come out with us tonight. You’ve never had a night out with British boys. We will show you how to do it. It will be great.”
I gave in but said only for an hour, and only one or two pubs. Well it turned out to by much longer, because I had trouble getting rid of them. It was still early for going out, maybe 9-10pm. We went into a nearly empty pub and they wanted drinks as fast as the bartender could pour them. One after another. Then the biggest hooligan of the trio (the other two were actually pretty nice and respectable) started talking shit, you know friendly jokes. Stuff like which country speaks proper English, USA or UK. I go right back at him, pointing out his poor grammar, and then saying something like “oh you’re from London; you must be a Man U fan.” Don’t say this to a drunken Brit, it won’t go over well. He promptly showed me his tattoo of his favorite team’s logo, Crystal Palace. He also wanted to fight me. His friends calmed him down. Then this guy gets all friendly again and makes me sing football chants with him, and he tests my memory of the words. They are all horrible things about Germany. One is about English planes shooting down German planes. Another has the line “and if you are from Germany surrender or you die.” I took my leave from these guys at my first opportunity and found the Irish girls at a club. We got a hookah and some drinks and then danced a bit. I got back to the hostel kind of late.
I wasn’t quite in top form in the morning, but I had business to take care of. I had to get a train to Wroclaw this day. I managed to get the ticket in the morning. It was good for any train to Wroclaw for the next 24 hours and they left approximately every 2 hrs. I decided I would go to the hostel and chill out, have a snack, and chat with this really cool girl who worked there. She grew up in Texas, but her parents are Polish immigrants and she returned to Poland for University. Anyway, I decided to take the 1:47 train. I was drinking my juice and drawing some great doodles in the guestbook chronicling my love of Krakow. I totally lost track of the time. I looked at my watch and it was 1:30. It took at least 15 minutes to walk to the train station. I grabbed my bags and said goodbye before setting out, walking at a blistering pace with my heavy bags. I didn’t know where the platforms were, or even which platform my train was leaving from. I found a platform, which had a train. I asked a woman in a uniform if this was my train, speaking in charades sign language. I only understood that this wasn’t it in her long reply. I saw only two other trains in the station so I set out for them. It was 1:46. I had one minute to catch my train. None of the signs under the platform have the name of the city I’m headed for. Only one of them is leaving at the time on my ticket, to Jelenia Gora. This name sounds vaguely familiar from my guide book, and I think it is in the direction of my city. I run up the stairs and see a man in uniform about 20m away looking up and down the train. He is the only person still standing on this platform and I pause, heart racing, and look him in the eye as he blows a whistle. I make a move to a door on the train and pull it open and hop on. Less than 2 seconds later the train starts moving. “Oh shit, I really hope this is the right train. I may have problems. I’m so stupid. I could have just waited 2 hours for the next one and would have been certain to ride the right train,” I scold myself.
I know my ticket is for a seat. I’m in the sleeper section though, and I don’t know which direction to go, or even if it is possible to move between carriages. I begin walking through the train and pass a girl. I show her my ticket and ask where to go. She barely speaks English and is just as clueless as me. I keep walking and find some seats a few cars ahead. I’m carrying heavy bags and sweating a lot. I find a section with a few open seats and enter. I’m pretty worried at this point. I decided just to wait until the ticket inspector comes to find out if I had taken the right train and sat in the right section. It was a very suspenseful 30 minute wait. When he came by and checked everyone’s ticket. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary when he looked at my ticket so I gave a big sigh of relief.
Now I had to make sure I got off at the right stop. Trains only stop for a minute or two at each station and there is no announcement at the stop. I knew the trip would be around 5 hours. I was exhausted from staying out late the night before, but terrified to fall asleep because I would miss my stop. It wasn’t a very enjoyable train ride.
So I made it to Wroclaw dworek glowny (main station) and had scribbled down in my note pad the instructions to reach my dorm from the email my international exchange coordinator sent “no problem I think that is rather easy to get the Olowek from station you can just take the tram number 9 direction Sepolno you get off on 8 stop. The address of dormitory *called Olowek Plac Grunwaldzki 30 *the dormitory is very famous so it will be easy to reach it.”
Obviously this woman doesn’t know me well. I can set out on a simple journey and make it very difficult and get very lost. I found tram number nine and was attempting to buy a ticket from the automatic machine, but was unable to because I didn’t have exact change and the machine had no change. I didn’t care I need a damn ticket but it wouldn’t allow me to overpay for my ticket. I asked some young people what I was doing wrong and they had change and bought a ticket for me. They were so nice. They wouldn’t let me pay them back. I told them I was moving to Olowek and they said they were going that way as well. My stop was only two stops after theirs. Woohoo! Easy like I was told. We chat while on the train. They are students at another University, and they taught me a couple words of Polish and what foods I should try, which I promptly forgot. I got off at the second stop after they got off. I was not on Grunwaldzki, so I asked another person which way. They pointed and I went. I came to ul. Grunwaldzki and looked for number 30. “This neighborhood is really shitty,” I thought. I had been warned that the building was build in soviet style and was a bit run down, but this neighborhood was very dark and unwelcoming to say the least, and it certainly didn’t look like dorms. I arrived in the evening hours but I was told that there would be a reception to give me a key. When I found ul. Grunwaldzki 30 and went inside it was an apartment building with nobody in sight. I rang the first doorbell I came to, hoping that maybe this is how receptionists work in Poland, after all this country does things a bit differently, and in ways I don’t usually find agreeable. An old, angry voice barked through the door, “Slucham?” I know this is how to ask “what do you want?” I say in Polish that I don’t speak Polish, and then in English - I’m an exchange student wanting to move in. Silence…he just ignored me and went back to his business. Then the entrance from the street opens and a guy is dragging a supremely drunk guy into the building. They are both older, around 50 years. The drunken one can hardly stand up and they are yelling at each other. The sober-looking one starts pushing the drunk up the stairs, yells one last thing in his face and leaves. I also leave a quickly as possible. “Shit, what do I do? Where do I go? If I really do have to live here then I’m going to say fuck this I’m not going to study in Poland, I’m going home,” is what I mumbled to myself. I’ve got nobody to contact here. I consider consulting my guidebook to find a hostel for the night and sorting the rest out tomorrow. Again I’m cursing myself for not being more prepared for my inevitable tendency to get lost, especially for this dire case where I know nobody and have all my heavy possessions on my back. Well, I did see a big mall a couple blocks away. I could maybe find some internet there and I may find a phone number for somebody I can call for advice. I look for Wi-Fi in the mall by asking the young woman at information. She speaks no English…dammit Poland. She seems to understand ‘Wi-Fi internet’ though and says “Saturn.” I go to this electronics store and ask. They send me to the second level where I ask again, finally I found the person who speaks English. He tells me they don’t have internet, but the coffee shop across from the store does. I go there and find I have a contact from this university on Facebook. He’s been very friendly and gave his information and offered help to people coming, although he was away on vacation. I called him and told him what I was doing. He told me I had the wrong building, and I realized that I was looking on ulica Grunwaldzki 30 instead of plac Grunwaldzki 30. I had found that this asshole city had made the equivalent of an Elm Street and Elm Avenue right next to each other and I had confused the two. I sighed in relief and blushed with rage and embarrassment. I had to walk another half mile and was sweating, but finally made it to my building. It turns out I got off one stop too soon based on the advice from the strangers who bought me a tram ticket, then I had found the wrong street.
So when I got to the building I had more difficulty understanding what the receptionist was trying to tell me. It seemed important and I judged their message to be something like ‘I will stay in room 77 for one night and I will have to see building administration the next day before 5pm and they will make me move to another room.’ Whatever, they gave me a key and I finally had a bed to sleep on.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Complaints.
Yeah, I've got to do it. The pressure has been building. I need a good rant on everything in Poland that has been frustrating me.
Sometimes I wonder if the powers that be are conspiring against me. My watch battery died about 2 days after I arrived. Two years of faithful service and my watch dies just as I arrive in a place where I don't know the language and will have difficulty explaining my predicament. But it actually wasn’t so hard to find a new battery.
I bought some shoes a few months ago, and they are the only pair I brought because I like to pack light. I've been doing a lot of walking. On my right shoe, at the ball of my foot, the rubber cracked. The shoes were waterproof when I got them, but as you may expect a crack compromises this wonderful characteristic. It has been snowing every goddamn day for the past week. The snow is beautiful, but there is slush all over the sidewalks, and the crack slowly leaks water. I went to a big mall today to buy some new shoes, but was disappointed. I could not find an affordable pair of shoes that was comfortable and not for douche bags. I don't understand this place. There are many stores that have a wide variety of clothes for good prices. All the shoe stores stock only shoes that are too dressy, to douche baggy, useless for walking in snow, not my size, or less comfortable than walking barefoot. I wasted a couple hours checking a half dozen shoe stores. I don't like shopping. Today may be the first time I missed USA, where I can just go to Kohl's and buy a normal pair of comfortable, non-douche bag shoes.
A few nights ago I went out to a bar/club with friends, after we had the obligatory dorm pre-party. Like usual I had a few too many and forget bits and pieces of how the evening went. I do know that I had fun though, and I have seen my friends' photos to prove it. In the morning when I turned on my camera to see if I had captured any embarrassing photos of my friend Anders (we've got a blackmail photo contest), it made a strange grinding sound when the lens extended and then shut itself off after six seconds. This was about a week ago and I have yet to find a place to fix my camera. This is not an easy task. I've asked several places already and have been given business cards for other places that are difficult to find and calling them is useless because I don't speak Polish. Every day is a goddamn scavenger hunt for something.
The post offices here are horrible. It takes an hour of standing in line, no matter which one you go to and no matter what time you go. Then you have to try to explain what you want...
My dormitory has 16 floors and around 450 residents (I'm guessing). It has four washing machines and zero dryers. You have to sign up to reserve a time slot to do your laundry...about two days in advance, but they are free. You have to plan your life around when you want to wash your clothes. Madness I tell you. The washing machines are difficult to use for the first time. The symbols on the knobs are written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I reserved 2 machines and when I got the key to the laundry room I found one of the machines was still in use. A few minutes later a German girl came and said she was confused. The front loading machine had stopped in mid-cycle and was full of soapy water. It had locked itself shut. I had already started my other machine and didn't put in shirts in that load. So I had my time slot and couldn't wash my shirts. DAMMIT, what a waste of my time. I wanted to curse the German girl up and down, but restrained myself.
There aren't American style Laundromats here. I found a laundry place and dropped off a few things there. It seemed really expensive. I found out when I picked the stuff up that it was only a dry cleaner. I found a polish Laundromat when I had to wash some more things and hadn't planned it two days before. At the Polish Laundromat there is a front desk with an attendant. You pay them directly and they give you a token that is inserted into the machine to start it. They will put it in the dryer for you, so I just come back 2-3 hours later to pick up my clothes. It isn't cheap. I cannot believe that in this country you can buy a decent meal for $3, a good bottle of vodka for $9, a normal wage for a part time job is around $3/hr (and possibly less), but to wash and dry one load of clothes is $8!
I ordered a cheeseburger at little take away window shop. It was miserable. It was some sort of a flatbread kebab type thing with a scrawny piece of thin processed dog meat, a sticky yellow plasticky thing that might be labeled cheese if you could find it in a store, loads of red and white cabbage, cold canned corn, and some other strange things I've intentionally forgotten. Never again ask for the cheeseburger, especially when the McDonalds is just 50 yards away.
This building I'm living in is nearly 100% foreign students. There is a reception at the front operated by old polish people who speak no English. Every person living here is required to leave the key at the 23-hour reception (it's closed between the hours of 2-3am). When you return you must show your dorm residence card with your room number to retrieve your key. There is only one key for each room. Yes, that's right. One key, two people, share. So what do you do if you’re leaving your room to go to a friend’s room within the building? Lock your room and take the key? Then you're roomie will be locked out if he returns. Leave it unlocked and hope nobody steals your stuff? Or go to the reception and drop off the key, go upstairs to say hi to your friend and then return to the reception before going back to your room? It is soo inconvenient. I'm going to smuggle my key out and make a copy. I mentioned the reception is closed from 2-3am. This is a very common hour to return home from a night out. That means there is no way to enter the building if you stumble home from the club at this time. It is damn cold outside too. However, there are two clubs across the street from our dorm. So if you come during this time the only choice is to hit up one last bar before calling it a night.
I've been a bit sick lately. Many people here have also been feeling under the weather. I've got a cough and sore throat all the time for almost a week now.
Well, this has been a long boring pessimistic entry....for that I'm sorry. I really do love Poland but sometimes I just want to punch somebody when shit keeps going wrong and when polish life is difficult.
The next posts I will tell about my difficulty in arriving here from Krakow. I will also begin sharing some of the running jokes my friends and I have. We're becoming well-known in the building for some of these inside jokes, and they are hilarious.
Sometimes I wonder if the powers that be are conspiring against me. My watch battery died about 2 days after I arrived. Two years of faithful service and my watch dies just as I arrive in a place where I don't know the language and will have difficulty explaining my predicament. But it actually wasn’t so hard to find a new battery.
I bought some shoes a few months ago, and they are the only pair I brought because I like to pack light. I've been doing a lot of walking. On my right shoe, at the ball of my foot, the rubber cracked. The shoes were waterproof when I got them, but as you may expect a crack compromises this wonderful characteristic. It has been snowing every goddamn day for the past week. The snow is beautiful, but there is slush all over the sidewalks, and the crack slowly leaks water. I went to a big mall today to buy some new shoes, but was disappointed. I could not find an affordable pair of shoes that was comfortable and not for douche bags. I don't understand this place. There are many stores that have a wide variety of clothes for good prices. All the shoe stores stock only shoes that are too dressy, to douche baggy, useless for walking in snow, not my size, or less comfortable than walking barefoot. I wasted a couple hours checking a half dozen shoe stores. I don't like shopping. Today may be the first time I missed USA, where I can just go to Kohl's and buy a normal pair of comfortable, non-douche bag shoes.
A few nights ago I went out to a bar/club with friends, after we had the obligatory dorm pre-party. Like usual I had a few too many and forget bits and pieces of how the evening went. I do know that I had fun though, and I have seen my friends' photos to prove it. In the morning when I turned on my camera to see if I had captured any embarrassing photos of my friend Anders (we've got a blackmail photo contest), it made a strange grinding sound when the lens extended and then shut itself off after six seconds. This was about a week ago and I have yet to find a place to fix my camera. This is not an easy task. I've asked several places already and have been given business cards for other places that are difficult to find and calling them is useless because I don't speak Polish. Every day is a goddamn scavenger hunt for something.
The post offices here are horrible. It takes an hour of standing in line, no matter which one you go to and no matter what time you go. Then you have to try to explain what you want...
My dormitory has 16 floors and around 450 residents (I'm guessing). It has four washing machines and zero dryers. You have to sign up to reserve a time slot to do your laundry...about two days in advance, but they are free. You have to plan your life around when you want to wash your clothes. Madness I tell you. The washing machines are difficult to use for the first time. The symbols on the knobs are written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I reserved 2 machines and when I got the key to the laundry room I found one of the machines was still in use. A few minutes later a German girl came and said she was confused. The front loading machine had stopped in mid-cycle and was full of soapy water. It had locked itself shut. I had already started my other machine and didn't put in shirts in that load. So I had my time slot and couldn't wash my shirts. DAMMIT, what a waste of my time. I wanted to curse the German girl up and down, but restrained myself.
There aren't American style Laundromats here. I found a laundry place and dropped off a few things there. It seemed really expensive. I found out when I picked the stuff up that it was only a dry cleaner. I found a polish Laundromat when I had to wash some more things and hadn't planned it two days before. At the Polish Laundromat there is a front desk with an attendant. You pay them directly and they give you a token that is inserted into the machine to start it. They will put it in the dryer for you, so I just come back 2-3 hours later to pick up my clothes. It isn't cheap. I cannot believe that in this country you can buy a decent meal for $3, a good bottle of vodka for $9, a normal wage for a part time job is around $3/hr (and possibly less), but to wash and dry one load of clothes is $8!
I ordered a cheeseburger at little take away window shop. It was miserable. It was some sort of a flatbread kebab type thing with a scrawny piece of thin processed dog meat, a sticky yellow plasticky thing that might be labeled cheese if you could find it in a store, loads of red and white cabbage, cold canned corn, and some other strange things I've intentionally forgotten. Never again ask for the cheeseburger, especially when the McDonalds is just 50 yards away.
This building I'm living in is nearly 100% foreign students. There is a reception at the front operated by old polish people who speak no English. Every person living here is required to leave the key at the 23-hour reception (it's closed between the hours of 2-3am). When you return you must show your dorm residence card with your room number to retrieve your key. There is only one key for each room. Yes, that's right. One key, two people, share. So what do you do if you’re leaving your room to go to a friend’s room within the building? Lock your room and take the key? Then you're roomie will be locked out if he returns. Leave it unlocked and hope nobody steals your stuff? Or go to the reception and drop off the key, go upstairs to say hi to your friend and then return to the reception before going back to your room? It is soo inconvenient. I'm going to smuggle my key out and make a copy. I mentioned the reception is closed from 2-3am. This is a very common hour to return home from a night out. That means there is no way to enter the building if you stumble home from the club at this time. It is damn cold outside too. However, there are two clubs across the street from our dorm. So if you come during this time the only choice is to hit up one last bar before calling it a night.
I've been a bit sick lately. Many people here have also been feeling under the weather. I've got a cough and sore throat all the time for almost a week now.
Well, this has been a long boring pessimistic entry....for that I'm sorry. I really do love Poland but sometimes I just want to punch somebody when shit keeps going wrong and when polish life is difficult.
The next posts I will tell about my difficulty in arriving here from Krakow. I will also begin sharing some of the running jokes my friends and I have. We're becoming well-known in the building for some of these inside jokes, and they are hilarious.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
difficulty with photos
I have some decent photos that will add nicely to this blog, but I'm having problems getting them to work. I'm starving now so I'll get to it later. Until then you can check out my flickr.
http://flickr.com/photos/birthdaybeard
http://flickr.com/photos/birthdaybeard
We like to party
Vienna has museums everywhere, and most of them sound really interesting. I scrawled down my shortlist on my pocket notepad and asked the hostel receptionist to circle them on my map. I know that reading about somebody visiting museums is ridiculously boring, but I must oblige myself for as briefly as possible. If you’re not interested skip down a few paragraphs and the party will start.
So, my memory is really foggy from all the…stimulus overload…and the drinking, but mostly the latter. One day I went to the modern art museum something at an art school. It usually has two rotating exhibits. I visited it, but I’m not exactly sure if it was actually the museum I was trying to find. It cost about $10 admission to see one exhibit called “shooting into the corner” and another about stolen stuff from the Jews. I walked in and saw a huge air cannon pointed into the corner of a big white room. The corner is smeared with a crimson, greasy, chunky substance oozing down to a massive pile of sludge at the bottom. I’m reading about it, it shoots 20 lb wax plugs into the corner, and was made my Anish Kapoor, who also made the famous shiny Chicago jellybean in Millennium Park. Then a guy starts walking around in the exhibit near the cannon, moving some cardboard shells. Then he turns on an air compressor and loads the cannon……..BOOM!!splat. This is the only sound that, aside from the humming compressor, has disturbed the still air. My jaw drops. “haaaaa Holy shit” I say to myself. That was well worth the price of admission, and thankfully, because the Jew stuff upstairs was incredibly boring.
I also found a small museum of medical history. It was hidden in a university med school. It had great stuff, bloodletting instruments, early prosthesis’s (I’m not sure how to say the plural of prosthesis. It rarely comes up, and only in very sad stories I imagine.), super detailed and old wax models used for teaching doctors, and the original hand washing stations used by Semmelweis, who discovered that hand washing in the hospital delivery room decreased infections and infant mortality. OK, so I may be the only nerd who likes this. It was tricky to find and nobody else was there. It was badass though.
At my hostel I met a girl named Anna from South Dakota who teaches English in Cairo (so strange I know, because I didn’t realize people came from South Dakota). Together we went ice skating in a park. It was in two outdoor rinks with a path connecting them. On one side of the park was a massive and beautiful gothic building called Rathaus, on another was the Austrian Parliament. This was so perfect. I think it will long be one of my fondest memories of Europe. Afterward we went to a huge art museum full of Flemish and Italian paintings, mostly scenes of religious stuff and Greek mythology. There was some Egyptian stuff that was really cool, the best being a mummified crocodile!!! The fusion of two of the most badass things, crocodiles and mummies, really made that museum almost worth the 3 hours of wandering through works that all looked similar to me. I enjoyed Anna’s company more than I enjoyed most of the art. Apparently I’m an uncultured stupid American. Oh well. Let’s party.
We rounded up whoever we could at the hostel, played some cards and drank some beer while deciding how the evening should proceed. An Australian guy said he thought he knew a place nearby. I waited in the lobby while a couple people had to go get ready. I saw a Japanese guy (named Masa) quietly reading in the corner occasionally rolling another cig with American Spirit tobacco. He had already been doing this for two days straight, so I was determined he must join us. I thought it was odd to see a Japanese guy smoking a cheap, American hipster brand of tobacco. It turns out it was the cheapest stuff he could find in Germany.
We set out with a party of about 10 or more. It was snowing as it had been doing continuously for at least 3 days now. Of course a snowball fight erupted in the street. I hung back with the Masa. His quiet confidence and long hair gave me the impression he had something interesting to tell, and of course he did. He had worked himself to death in Japan for a couple years saving money for a 15 month voyage to everywhere (in Asia, Africa, and Europe at least). He was on month number 13 and had just come from Germany, where he missed his bus and hitchhiked, alone in the freezing cold with his own thumb. Damn. I had hitchhiked the easy way. I commended him doubly. I was even more amazed that he managed to get around so well because his English was really poor.
We made it to the place and it wasn’t what we expected. It was an empty pub. So somebody else said maybe they knew a place. Let’s take the train. So along the way somewhere, and this is where my memory begins to degrade, one of the French guys in our posse overhears some young Swiss guys speaking French. He quickly befriends them and asks where the party is. They say they were on their way there “just follow us!” So it takes at least 45 minutes on the train, that’s far and I don’t know where we are or where we’re going (this will be important later). There are more young people on this train drinking beer and laughing. Everybody gets off at the same stop. It seems we have found the right party. It turns out to be a club in a basement in some random building. The entrance is in the courtyard and it is packed with people trying to get in. We go to a grubby little pub nearby to have a drink while we wait for the queue to thin out a little. Eventually a couple of the girls with us get antsy and go on a recon mission to see if they can get in and find out if it’s good. Their simple instructions are “if we don’t come back then the club is good.”
A half hour or so later without hearing back we decide to go for it. There is still a crowd trying to get in so it takes a while. I enter, pay the cover of 6 Euro and have a look around. Then join the queue for coat check with my Japanese pal. It takes ages. While we’re waiting in the disgusting stairwell to get to the coat check upstairs a girl behind us starts dancing and singing to her friend in English “we like to party, yeah we like to party.” I start talking to her and we hit it off. She’s an Austrian student name Aoifa. We finally dump our coat and make our way to the packed bar. I ask what they like and her friend says tequila shots. “They do like to party” I think to myself. We have shots and a beer and I’m off dancing with Aoifa for a couple hours (maybe more, as I said my memory is a bit foggy). So, eventually 3 or 4 am rolls around and we must get going. But after glancing around it seems my group had ditched me. I couldn’t find anyone that looked familiar. I went to retrieve my coat and hope for a brilliant idea, because I had no idea where I was after all.
“Ahhhh, thank goodness!” I saw a Canadian girl that had come with us. She had also budded up with a person she met in the club and lost our group. We agreed to try to make it back to the hostel. After we walked about 2 blocks back toward a train stop we realized that we didn’t know where to go and the trains don’t start again until 5am anyway. We’re on an empty street, tired and intoxicated, holding up our map against a road sign when two young guys approach. One looks very familiar. “Yes, he is the one who struck up a conversation about Barack Obama with me in the restroom,” I think to myself.
He tells us where to go, but reminds us that we have some time to kill before the trains run. He coaxes us to join him and his friend in their flat across the street to have a beer while we wait. It seemed a little sketchy and was probably not a wise decision, but whatever. I’m in Europe.
I make sure he knows we can’t stay long, only one beer. We talk about music and he blasts some 90’s brit pop loud enough that we have to shout to converse and the neighbors came to tell him to turn it down. We talked about traveling. He spent a considerable amount of time in Africa and had written a book about it, which he showed us. Unfortunately, it was in German and therefore useless to me. The Canadian girl gave me look so I knew she wanted to go. She went to the restroom to pour out her beer while I chugged mine so we could be on our way. We stopped by a street meat vendor on the way to the train and had a raucous fun time with some young people, joking about the quality of the food and Borat while the vendor cooked up some sausages. Mine wasn’t fully cooked and I choked down half of it as a hangover prevention technique. I was wobbly and covered in bread crumbs while eating on the train. The man across from me was wearing a suit and reading a paper.
We made it to the hostel by 7am and I showered and checked out because I had to do it before 10. Then I lied down with my pack on a couch in the common room and did my best passed out wookie impression until noon.
So, my memory is really foggy from all the…stimulus overload…and the drinking, but mostly the latter. One day I went to the modern art museum something at an art school. It usually has two rotating exhibits. I visited it, but I’m not exactly sure if it was actually the museum I was trying to find. It cost about $10 admission to see one exhibit called “shooting into the corner” and another about stolen stuff from the Jews. I walked in and saw a huge air cannon pointed into the corner of a big white room. The corner is smeared with a crimson, greasy, chunky substance oozing down to a massive pile of sludge at the bottom. I’m reading about it, it shoots 20 lb wax plugs into the corner, and was made my Anish Kapoor, who also made the famous shiny Chicago jellybean in Millennium Park. Then a guy starts walking around in the exhibit near the cannon, moving some cardboard shells. Then he turns on an air compressor and loads the cannon……..BOOM!!splat. This is the only sound that, aside from the humming compressor, has disturbed the still air. My jaw drops. “haaaaa Holy shit” I say to myself. That was well worth the price of admission, and thankfully, because the Jew stuff upstairs was incredibly boring.
I also found a small museum of medical history. It was hidden in a university med school. It had great stuff, bloodletting instruments, early prosthesis’s (I’m not sure how to say the plural of prosthesis. It rarely comes up, and only in very sad stories I imagine.), super detailed and old wax models used for teaching doctors, and the original hand washing stations used by Semmelweis, who discovered that hand washing in the hospital delivery room decreased infections and infant mortality. OK, so I may be the only nerd who likes this. It was tricky to find and nobody else was there. It was badass though.
At my hostel I met a girl named Anna from South Dakota who teaches English in Cairo (so strange I know, because I didn’t realize people came from South Dakota). Together we went ice skating in a park. It was in two outdoor rinks with a path connecting them. On one side of the park was a massive and beautiful gothic building called Rathaus, on another was the Austrian Parliament. This was so perfect. I think it will long be one of my fondest memories of Europe. Afterward we went to a huge art museum full of Flemish and Italian paintings, mostly scenes of religious stuff and Greek mythology. There was some Egyptian stuff that was really cool, the best being a mummified crocodile!!! The fusion of two of the most badass things, crocodiles and mummies, really made that museum almost worth the 3 hours of wandering through works that all looked similar to me. I enjoyed Anna’s company more than I enjoyed most of the art. Apparently I’m an uncultured stupid American. Oh well. Let’s party.
We rounded up whoever we could at the hostel, played some cards and drank some beer while deciding how the evening should proceed. An Australian guy said he thought he knew a place nearby. I waited in the lobby while a couple people had to go get ready. I saw a Japanese guy (named Masa) quietly reading in the corner occasionally rolling another cig with American Spirit tobacco. He had already been doing this for two days straight, so I was determined he must join us. I thought it was odd to see a Japanese guy smoking a cheap, American hipster brand of tobacco. It turns out it was the cheapest stuff he could find in Germany.
We set out with a party of about 10 or more. It was snowing as it had been doing continuously for at least 3 days now. Of course a snowball fight erupted in the street. I hung back with the Masa. His quiet confidence and long hair gave me the impression he had something interesting to tell, and of course he did. He had worked himself to death in Japan for a couple years saving money for a 15 month voyage to everywhere (in Asia, Africa, and Europe at least). He was on month number 13 and had just come from Germany, where he missed his bus and hitchhiked, alone in the freezing cold with his own thumb. Damn. I had hitchhiked the easy way. I commended him doubly. I was even more amazed that he managed to get around so well because his English was really poor.
We made it to the place and it wasn’t what we expected. It was an empty pub. So somebody else said maybe they knew a place. Let’s take the train. So along the way somewhere, and this is where my memory begins to degrade, one of the French guys in our posse overhears some young Swiss guys speaking French. He quickly befriends them and asks where the party is. They say they were on their way there “just follow us!” So it takes at least 45 minutes on the train, that’s far and I don’t know where we are or where we’re going (this will be important later). There are more young people on this train drinking beer and laughing. Everybody gets off at the same stop. It seems we have found the right party. It turns out to be a club in a basement in some random building. The entrance is in the courtyard and it is packed with people trying to get in. We go to a grubby little pub nearby to have a drink while we wait for the queue to thin out a little. Eventually a couple of the girls with us get antsy and go on a recon mission to see if they can get in and find out if it’s good. Their simple instructions are “if we don’t come back then the club is good.”
A half hour or so later without hearing back we decide to go for it. There is still a crowd trying to get in so it takes a while. I enter, pay the cover of 6 Euro and have a look around. Then join the queue for coat check with my Japanese pal. It takes ages. While we’re waiting in the disgusting stairwell to get to the coat check upstairs a girl behind us starts dancing and singing to her friend in English “we like to party, yeah we like to party.” I start talking to her and we hit it off. She’s an Austrian student name Aoifa. We finally dump our coat and make our way to the packed bar. I ask what they like and her friend says tequila shots. “They do like to party” I think to myself. We have shots and a beer and I’m off dancing with Aoifa for a couple hours (maybe more, as I said my memory is a bit foggy). So, eventually 3 or 4 am rolls around and we must get going. But after glancing around it seems my group had ditched me. I couldn’t find anyone that looked familiar. I went to retrieve my coat and hope for a brilliant idea, because I had no idea where I was after all.
“Ahhhh, thank goodness!” I saw a Canadian girl that had come with us. She had also budded up with a person she met in the club and lost our group. We agreed to try to make it back to the hostel. After we walked about 2 blocks back toward a train stop we realized that we didn’t know where to go and the trains don’t start again until 5am anyway. We’re on an empty street, tired and intoxicated, holding up our map against a road sign when two young guys approach. One looks very familiar. “Yes, he is the one who struck up a conversation about Barack Obama with me in the restroom,” I think to myself.
He tells us where to go, but reminds us that we have some time to kill before the trains run. He coaxes us to join him and his friend in their flat across the street to have a beer while we wait. It seemed a little sketchy and was probably not a wise decision, but whatever. I’m in Europe.
I make sure he knows we can’t stay long, only one beer. We talk about music and he blasts some 90’s brit pop loud enough that we have to shout to converse and the neighbors came to tell him to turn it down. We talked about traveling. He spent a considerable amount of time in Africa and had written a book about it, which he showed us. Unfortunately, it was in German and therefore useless to me. The Canadian girl gave me look so I knew she wanted to go. She went to the restroom to pour out her beer while I chugged mine so we could be on our way. We stopped by a street meat vendor on the way to the train and had a raucous fun time with some young people, joking about the quality of the food and Borat while the vendor cooked up some sausages. Mine wasn’t fully cooked and I choked down half of it as a hangover prevention technique. I was wobbly and covered in bread crumbs while eating on the train. The man across from me was wearing a suit and reading a paper.
We made it to the hostel by 7am and I showered and checked out because I had to do it before 10. Then I lied down with my pack on a couch in the common room and did my best passed out wookie impression until noon.
To Vienna!
I found this website called Ride4cents. It’s a rideshare thing where you find a carpool on long drives. So I was hanging out in Krakow for a while with no particular place to go and I saw a ride to Vienna for 15 euros! I’m there! I signed up and sent the email and in 2 days I was waiting for Maciek by some bus stop on a cold morning. Obviously I didn’t know what to expect and was a little...well I was doubting the sanity of my judgment. Maciek was a really cool guy. He had finished school recently and was going to Vienna for a 3rd round job interview with an engineering firm. I had a super cheap and comfortable ride with an English speaking guide and chauffeur. I really like this digital hitchhiking thing. So after about 5 or 6 hours of pleasant conversation he tells me that maybe this would be the best place for me to get out. He said the city center was that way, and pointed to his left. I set out on a walk. Then I thought, “oh shit. I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing here.” Some of you who know me well enough already know that I am usually in this sort of situation where I am clueless, but this time I was worried that it was too much. I was really cursing myself pretty harshly with that voice in my head that’s always running. I found a bus stop and was looking for that location on my map. But, as I found out a couple days later, I was looking on my map for the word “bus stop” instead of the name of the actual stop. In addition, I was not even close enough to the city center to be on the map of Vienna that I had in my guidebook. To be completely honest and to further embarrass myself, I didn’t even know what language they spoke in Vienna. Yeah, I’m the stupid American.
I walked for ages, and the city just kept getting more beautiful. I went the direction that had the most people and eventually, I knew I had hit pay dirt when I could turn a circle in one place and see three McDonalds restaurants. I was certain I had triangulated the exact center of the city, and quite possibly the center of Europe. God bless American cultural imperialism. Now I could find myself on my useless little map and walk for a few more miles to a hostel that sounded good as described in my guidebook. Once I had the burden off my shoulders of not being totally lost I strolled along down a pedestrian shopping street. I was sure that this must be the most beautiful city with the most beautiful people in the world. I felt unfit to walk this cobbled street. Even the few beggars there were wearing nicer clothes than my slacks and sweater!
I walked for ages, and the city just kept getting more beautiful. I went the direction that had the most people and eventually, I knew I had hit pay dirt when I could turn a circle in one place and see three McDonalds restaurants. I was certain I had triangulated the exact center of the city, and quite possibly the center of Europe. God bless American cultural imperialism. Now I could find myself on my useless little map and walk for a few more miles to a hostel that sounded good as described in my guidebook. Once I had the burden off my shoulders of not being totally lost I strolled along down a pedestrian shopping street. I was sure that this must be the most beautiful city with the most beautiful people in the world. I felt unfit to walk this cobbled street. Even the few beggars there were wearing nicer clothes than my slacks and sweater!
Blog title
In case you're wondering about the title of this blog, and you should, there is a little story behind it.
At a welcome party at No Name Club I met a cool girl named Regan from North Carolina who studied here last semester. In our first conversation in between Mad Dog shots (rasberry syrup, Tobasco, vodka, 5 zlotych or <$2, their cheapest shot), we discussed the difficulties of getting settled in Poland and the constant frusterations inherent in every small task that make this place so much fun. An excerpt went roughly like this:
"So you must have something you always say when you get frusterated and just want to give up while at the post office or shopping," I asked.
"Yeah, I often find myself saying 'Dammit Poland'." She replied.
"Oh really, how do you say it in Polish?"
"No I just say in English, Dammit Poland!"
"haha that's good. I think I'm going to get a lot of use out of that."
At a welcome party at No Name Club I met a cool girl named Regan from North Carolina who studied here last semester. In our first conversation in between Mad Dog shots (rasberry syrup, Tobasco, vodka, 5 zlotych or <$2, their cheapest shot), we discussed the difficulties of getting settled in Poland and the constant frusterations inherent in every small task that make this place so much fun. An excerpt went roughly like this:
"So you must have something you always say when you get frusterated and just want to give up while at the post office or shopping," I asked.
"Yeah, I often find myself saying 'Dammit Poland'." She replied.
"Oh really, how do you say it in Polish?"
"No I just say in English, Dammit Poland!"
"haha that's good. I think I'm going to get a lot of use out of that."
Saturday, February 14, 2009
phrasebook
It had been about two years since I’d been outside the U.S. before I came to Poland and I had forgotten that feeling of being surrounded in a language that I can’t understand. I had forgotten how intimidating it can be just to do simple things. The truth is that English is understood and spoken at a pretty good level in general. I think especially so in Cracow because of the large numbers of tourists. Nevertheless, the first words spoken to me are always in Polish, which I take to be a complement that I could be mistaken for a Pol. Naturally, since I plan to be in Poland for about 6 months I want to learn the language the best I can no matter how useless it will probably end up being to me in the future. I have been studying Polish (lazily for about 3 weeks) from a lesson book my friend Patrick, oddly enough, had lying around. I immediately found that of the several dozen of words I could read, I could speak or understand none of them when spoken. Teaching myself a language from a book wasn’t good enough, but I was in Poland so I feel like if I can just get my foot in the door with a few phrases I can pick up a bit as I go along. But my book was not really designed to be of use as a phrase book so I set out to find one in Cracow.
I want to take this opportunity to say what great people there are working at this hostel. If a person makes and attempt to be friendly with the staff here at the Mosquito Hostel, I’m sure they will find nobody friendlier in all of Poland. Also, they are helpful when looking for various things not typically searched for by the two day tourist. I was able to find a battery for my watch (baterie do zegarka), the post office (poczte), stores to compare the price of mobile phones (komorka), a weekend flea market, and quiet Polish restaurants. They are also happy to teach me a few words of Polish everyday and are patient in assisting my pronunciation.
Back to my search for the phrasebook. I went to a bookstore in a big mall and they didn’t have an English to Polish phrasebook, then I went to a smaller English book store called American Bookstore. They also lacked phrase books. I headed for another English bookstore that was listed in my guidebook. I searched and then asked an employee. He checked the shelf where the 3 copies listed in the digital inventory were supposed to be located, but none were there. At this point I was thinking there are two possibilities why it is so damn hard to find a Polish phrasebook. Either nobody thinks Polish is worth knowing unless you are born in Poland, or Cracow is suffering from a shortage of phrasebooks of massive proportions. I asked the employee if he could think of any place that may have such books and was drawn into conversation with an old Englishman. He’d been in Cracow over 10 years teaching at a University, and was happy to tell me all about Poland and good places to see. We bought some beers and started walking around drinking…
I eventually just gave up and got a Polish-English phrasebook. It’s difficult to use because it is…for Polish.
I want to take this opportunity to say what great people there are working at this hostel. If a person makes and attempt to be friendly with the staff here at the Mosquito Hostel, I’m sure they will find nobody friendlier in all of Poland. Also, they are helpful when looking for various things not typically searched for by the two day tourist. I was able to find a battery for my watch (baterie do zegarka), the post office (poczte), stores to compare the price of mobile phones (komorka), a weekend flea market, and quiet Polish restaurants. They are also happy to teach me a few words of Polish everyday and are patient in assisting my pronunciation.
Back to my search for the phrasebook. I went to a bookstore in a big mall and they didn’t have an English to Polish phrasebook, then I went to a smaller English book store called American Bookstore. They also lacked phrase books. I headed for another English bookstore that was listed in my guidebook. I searched and then asked an employee. He checked the shelf where the 3 copies listed in the digital inventory were supposed to be located, but none were there. At this point I was thinking there are two possibilities why it is so damn hard to find a Polish phrasebook. Either nobody thinks Polish is worth knowing unless you are born in Poland, or Cracow is suffering from a shortage of phrasebooks of massive proportions. I asked the employee if he could think of any place that may have such books and was drawn into conversation with an old Englishman. He’d been in Cracow over 10 years teaching at a University, and was happy to tell me all about Poland and good places to see. We bought some beers and started walking around drinking…
I eventually just gave up and got a Polish-English phrasebook. It’s difficult to use because it is…for Polish.
arrival
I should begin this with a disclaimer: I don’t like when travel logs begin with details of the flight/train/bus there. I typically find it tedious, pointless and boring. That being said, I think for my journey here it was a bit different, which may be the trap that causes so many boring travel stories. I feel that my first impression of Poland was shaped a bit by my journey here so I will discuss it anyway.
So to begin, en route to Krakow I stopped in Munich, which is only an hour and a half away by air. So the weather in Krakow was bad, foggy and snowy, but I didn’t know about it and apparently the pilot didn’t either because we still went for it. When the announcement to secure your tray tables for descent came over the speaker in German, Polish, and then a shorter version in English, it was also mentioned that maybe we couldn’t land but we will circle for one attempt in any case. “Ahh shit” I sighed to the woman next to me who I had exchanged a few words of broken English with earlier. “Yes, shit” she replied.
So we took a few hard right turns, hit some harsh turbulence here and there, then dropped like a rock for a very long second and a half. After slowing the descent a bit the plane’s gear drops and we eventually get low enough I can see the ground. It is so foggy I can barely see the wing tips, so we are damn close to touchdown, then we just blast off back into the thick white clouds. A moment later the pilot announces in that permanently calm and confident, matter-of-factly pilot’s voice something like “the weather conditions are not good. we will land in Warsaw in about an hour. I don’t know what we will do with you but we will make some calls, maybe we can get you on a bus to Krakow.”
We land in Warsaw and are told to retrieve our baggage and they will send a bus for us. Great! Simple! I follow the crowd and wait around in an empty baggage claim area for 30 minutes. Then the conveyer starts, people snatch their things and start booking it for who knows where. I do as they do. Most of them speak Polish and have been asking questions to people in uniforms. So we headed to the street-side arrivals doors and see a mob of people waiting at the cold, cold bus stop. I think my flight wasn’t the only one diverted here. I ask a person or two from our flight what the hell is going on and determine we are clueless all around. A Polish news crew tried to interview me because I must have been the most desperate looking person of the whole lot. She rattled of something fast and confusing in Polish to which I interrupted with an “ehhhhh I don’t know.” She left quickly. We will not know which bus is for us but we get a guy at the information desk inside to make a call for us and he says wait with the angry mob in the cold…
Every bus that pulls in gets swarmed. People push to get their bag in the cargo box and squeeze onto the bus. I have 6 months worth of stuff, a big 45 pound pack and a smaller backpack. I haven’t slept in at least 26 hours so I’m cranky and I cannot bring myself to brave the mob to get on a bus that may not even take me to the right place. After waiting for maybe an hour, the crowd was a bit smaller, and then two buses came in at once. Covertly, I sneaked to the second to stow my things and board. Nobody said a word to me or asks for a ticket so I think I’m good to go. Not many are on this bus yet except for some rowdy Pols passing a bottle of vodka around laughing. I wish I could join in but I don’t speak Polish (yet) and it seemed like the longest day of my life. So I asked if this bus went to Krakow. “Yes, this Krakow bus,” one man said after refilling his girlfriends plastic cup with coke and vodka. Five uncomfortable hours later we pulled into the Krakow airport. The information desk receptionist told me there was a free shuttle to the city center just down the street. I found the stop, but after a half hour of hanging around in the cold trying to get on buses I gave up and followed a group of people to the train stop.
So far I had such difficulty in getting to Krakow, and the day was so long for me that I was in a pretty pissy mood. As soon as I walked out of the train station in Krakow toward my hostel near the city center I saw the streets in the quiet of night and snow and quickly forgot any ill feelings toward my new home of Poland.
So to begin, en route to Krakow I stopped in Munich, which is only an hour and a half away by air. So the weather in Krakow was bad, foggy and snowy, but I didn’t know about it and apparently the pilot didn’t either because we still went for it. When the announcement to secure your tray tables for descent came over the speaker in German, Polish, and then a shorter version in English, it was also mentioned that maybe we couldn’t land but we will circle for one attempt in any case. “Ahh shit” I sighed to the woman next to me who I had exchanged a few words of broken English with earlier. “Yes, shit” she replied.
So we took a few hard right turns, hit some harsh turbulence here and there, then dropped like a rock for a very long second and a half. After slowing the descent a bit the plane’s gear drops and we eventually get low enough I can see the ground. It is so foggy I can barely see the wing tips, so we are damn close to touchdown, then we just blast off back into the thick white clouds. A moment later the pilot announces in that permanently calm and confident, matter-of-factly pilot’s voice something like “the weather conditions are not good. we will land in Warsaw in about an hour. I don’t know what we will do with you but we will make some calls, maybe we can get you on a bus to Krakow.”
We land in Warsaw and are told to retrieve our baggage and they will send a bus for us. Great! Simple! I follow the crowd and wait around in an empty baggage claim area for 30 minutes. Then the conveyer starts, people snatch their things and start booking it for who knows where. I do as they do. Most of them speak Polish and have been asking questions to people in uniforms. So we headed to the street-side arrivals doors and see a mob of people waiting at the cold, cold bus stop. I think my flight wasn’t the only one diverted here. I ask a person or two from our flight what the hell is going on and determine we are clueless all around. A Polish news crew tried to interview me because I must have been the most desperate looking person of the whole lot. She rattled of something fast and confusing in Polish to which I interrupted with an “ehhhhh I don’t know.” She left quickly. We will not know which bus is for us but we get a guy at the information desk inside to make a call for us and he says wait with the angry mob in the cold…
Every bus that pulls in gets swarmed. People push to get their bag in the cargo box and squeeze onto the bus. I have 6 months worth of stuff, a big 45 pound pack and a smaller backpack. I haven’t slept in at least 26 hours so I’m cranky and I cannot bring myself to brave the mob to get on a bus that may not even take me to the right place. After waiting for maybe an hour, the crowd was a bit smaller, and then two buses came in at once. Covertly, I sneaked to the second to stow my things and board. Nobody said a word to me or asks for a ticket so I think I’m good to go. Not many are on this bus yet except for some rowdy Pols passing a bottle of vodka around laughing. I wish I could join in but I don’t speak Polish (yet) and it seemed like the longest day of my life. So I asked if this bus went to Krakow. “Yes, this Krakow bus,” one man said after refilling his girlfriends plastic cup with coke and vodka. Five uncomfortable hours later we pulled into the Krakow airport. The information desk receptionist told me there was a free shuttle to the city center just down the street. I found the stop, but after a half hour of hanging around in the cold trying to get on buses I gave up and followed a group of people to the train stop.
So far I had such difficulty in getting to Krakow, and the day was so long for me that I was in a pretty pissy mood. As soon as I walked out of the train station in Krakow toward my hostel near the city center I saw the streets in the quiet of night and snow and quickly forgot any ill feelings toward my new home of Poland.
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