Monday morning 4:30am we left Tavistock Place on our trip 'do Polski'. I love walking through cities before dawn, especially on non-party nights, so the walk to King's Cross was a good start to the trip.
Wizz Air have redeemed themselves somewhat after the ACC tour of 2007 (in which we found ourselves waiting 5 hours in Sweden, followed by a 2 am train to Toruń). We departed and arrived on time! I sat next to a London policeman who sounded like a Scouser. Turns out he was Polish! Go figure. His favourite perk of the job... When drunk Polish guys in London try to get out of being reprimanded or arrested by asking for a Polish translator, and he replies in Polish "this is a service I can offer". The look on their face... Priceless.
Passport control was less of an ordeal than I expected. The just did the usual "first time in Poland??" "no" "when did you come before??" "July 2007" "hrmph" and checked all the pages of my passport to make sure I wasn't visiting dodgy drug smuggling type places. Easy.
As we waited for the bus there was a man putting up a new billboard poster. Fascinating to watch him work, but even funnier was the juxtaposition of the two halves. The top half of the old poster said: Mam mniej w portfelu... (I have less in my wallet). We think it was an ad for a newspaper. But what made it funny was the bottom half of the new poster: bo kupuję w Biedronce (because I shop at Biedronka). Biedronka is like a polish version of Aldi or Lidl. It means Ladybird, so their logo is a cartoon ladybird.
We think he should have stopped after putting up the bottom half...
Mam mniej w portfelu... bo kupuję w Biedronce. he he.
I wish we'd had the presence of mind to take a photo!
Naja, the trip from Gdańsk to Elbląg was very easy, involving only one change Malbork. The scenery along the way was interesting. Everything seems to have been built with Besser-bricks, and only about half the houses have been rendered, but the ones that are are often in nice bright colours. It makes all the difference in winter. It's hard to tell where the city stops and the country begins. There seem to be random clumps of buildings dotted across what would once have been farming land, and the fields seem very small. I wonder if this is a result of some kind of free-for-all land grab division after the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe I'm imagining too much into it.
On the train from Malbork we decided to start taking some transport photos for our anorak friends, so I headed to the front of the train to get a shot looking through the driver's cabin to the tracks ahead. The driver's cabin door was open, but I didn't go in, but I didn't need to. In the first compartment were the two conductors, sitting having a smoke under the "no smoking" sign. My entrance seemed a little unexpected and one of them asked me something - I think it was "What's up?" but I could only reply with "przepraszam... umm... Angielski?". After a couple of very frustrating minutes for me, I established that it was ok to take a photo. Snap! Dziękuję, Dowidzenia. Phew!
Upon reaching Elbląg we managed to get on the wrong bus, but realised soon enough to change. Each bus stop has a Sklep Fortress where you can buy tickets. It's all bars and grilles with a tiny window for the transaction, all other windows are full of the available wares. It must be pretty miserable working on one of those.
We're staying with Agata's aunt Lila, who lives in The Family House. Agata and her parent's have the attic apartment, so we're up there fro the week. Lila makes dentures for a living. While I've never met anyone who does that before, the most fascinating thing I find is that it is a "cottage industry". Lila has a workshop divided between two rooms of the house, one in he basement, and one on the ground floor. Two colleagues come to work here. Apparently when the State run health system was overhauled, a whole bunch of people decided to 'go private'. But it's not just the denture-making industry! Across the street there is a normal looking house with a big "Solarium" sign out the front. It seems the land-use laws are less strict here. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be allowed to set up your solarium business in your basement in Australia or the UK.
For Obiad, Lila had cooked us a Polish favourite: Bigos. It's meat and cabbage, somehow transformed into something thoroughly delicious! Lila doesn't speak English, but I'm picking up bits of Polish and Agata is doing an excellent job of translating. It must get pretty boring for her having to say everything twice. My most useful phrase so far is "Przepraszam, nie mowię po polsku" I'm saying it over and over again so that when I'm unexpectedly confronted by some well-meaning interrogator, I don't forget it.
In the evening we headed to the local top hang-out, namely the shopping mall, the main tenant of which is Carrefour. It continues to depress me that shopping malls are the same the world over (insert Paul Kelly song here) but they do have things here we can't get in England - like basic graph paper! - and some excellent bargains. Having recently found my mid-range black shoes to have a huge split in the sole, less than 3 months after I bought them, I'm in the market for some black shoes, and this is the perfect place to find them. London destroys shoes, so I've decided not to spend too much on everyday pairs, and keep the good ones for special occasions. Deichmann in Elbląg, here I come!
After our shopping trip, we stopped off at the local - and I mean local, as in, at the end of our very short street - pizza place, La Capra, for a pizza and a much longed-for beer. The beer was Lech. They had run out of the good stuff. I'm told it's the preferred drink of football fans. Nuff said. The pizza was proper thin italian style. Delish!
When we got home we sat for a bit of a chat with Lila. She had the tele on and I was introduces to the idea of the Lektor. In Australia we have subtitles for non-English films, in Germany they overdub each character with a different "actor" (although the same six people seem to do every film!), in Poland, they leave the original audio running very quietly, and have one guy saying ALL the lines, and in the same tone of voice. The movie in question last night was Bad Boys (1995, Will Smith et al.). It was pretty exciting, with lots of shouting and shooting. But the Lektor delivered every line as though he were saying "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me". What was even better was that the female characters were read by the same guy!! And if this weren't funny enough, apparently the translation is completely watered down! Bad Boys is pretty blue, but I'm told the translation for "F*** you, Motherf***er"" was along the lines of "go away now, you bad man". Classic.
When it came, sleep was very welcome. Coming up... Day 2.
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