Warsaw

Warsaw. Or more precisely Warszawa (vah-SHAH-vah). Capitol of Poland, population 39 Million. Interestingly the population of the capital is a mere 1.75 million. I’ve been in Warsaw less than 24 hours but my first impression is that of a relaxed city long since moved on from the Soviet era. I fact it is hard to see very much evidence here of the soviet times. Not that I would know what to look for as evidence but there does seem to be a striking absence of anything Soviet. There are certainly no Russian vehicles left on the street, replaced mainly by French and Germany imports. I did see a small Russian van/thingy this morning and you can’t help but smile when you see these. I am sure they were useful in their time but they now look like they have fallen off the page of a cartoon strip driven by some noddy type character in a cap.

I spent a few hours walking the streets as I like to do and watched the passing parade and found the city remarkably colourful considering its past. Having spent time in St. Petersburg and Moscow and a number of other regional cities in Russia there seems to be a characteristic difference here. I know it sounds like a cute term but I’ll use it anyway, it has ‘civic pride’. It is the little things. Potted plants in gardens on the edges of footpaths, people regularly cleaning streets and picking up rubbish and a general sense of order rather than abandonment. When in Russia it seemed the entire population was depressed and there is no doubt many reasons for that. Whereas the Eastern Europeans now look to a future with enthusiasm and a sense of opportunity the life of the average Russian probably hasn’t changed too much and for many the increasing ‘free market’ means little to them and simply moves the wealth and opportunities from corrupt communist officials to a small number of born again capitalists many of whom probably only swapped there army greens for a suit and tie. In most countries the people are the wealth of the nation and it’s major asset yet in Russia it seems it’s people are still regarded as its burden. It is little wonder people piss and shit in the streets and leave their rubbish all over.

Anyway back to Warsaw, I’ll be in Russia soon enough. Warsaw doesn’t have a large city feel, especially after being in London I suppose. Everywhere in London there is a tide of people to negotiate through, people moving quickly and purposefully one way or another often in or out of tube stations. In Warsaw people move more at an amble and there is far more space. The English make haste, Russians trudge, Poles amble. There is certainly a number of new high rise buildings but most of Warsaw remains relatively low rise which with the relatively low density of people reminds me a little of Adelaide especially with its wide promenades, trees and gardens.

Now to rewind as there is a little gap between London and Warsaw, a few countries and a little ocean as well. The first rule when travelling is, don’t commit too much to plans or keep your options open. I was going to head up/out to Bristol and do some volunteer work out there but was driven by an impulse to get out and start travelling. Yes I know England ‘is’ travelling but, well, no it isn’t. It was just all too familiar for me and felt like I hadn’t really left home yet. So, on Friday I decided it was time to go that weekend. Now, when you tell someone you are going to catch a bus from London to Warsaw their eyes glaze over first as they wonder if you are a self masochist or terribly naďve and then they say something like, ‘Oh, that’ll be …an adventure’ when they really want to say, ‘that will be absolute torture and only a fool would sit on a bus for that long when you can fly cheaper!’ Yes, airfares into Eastern Europe are ridiculously cheap yet not at short notice and not during school holidays which both applied to me.

Now bus travel is not too high on my favourite forms of travel yet different circumstances require different priorities and I actually enjoyed the 28 hour trip (maybe I am still delirious from the experience). Flight might be easy but it is a little like being in a teleport that picks you up in one spot and dumps you down at another, forget the in between. Now I have only been in Warsaw less than 24 hours but I spent almost 12 hours yesterday travelling across a fair chunk of Poland and saw a lot of towns, cities and countryside that others simply wont see. I suppose I am compelled to give some description of what rural Poland looks like. Being a photographer I must say it is frustrating being confined to public transport where you can’t stop to take photos and would love to do this trip again in a car or on a motorcycle where I can stop at random. If I said parts of Poland looked a lot like Australia that would be totally predictable wouldn’t it. A bit like when someone eats meat they have never tasted before and surely it tastes, ‘a little bit like fish, a little bit like chicken’. Surprise surprise. No, I feel compelled to articulate it a little better than that. Much of the countryside grows wheat from what I can tell. It must be harvest time as I recognised the ‘headers’ I think they are which harvest wheat. I am not talking about a few small acres, these farmed took up much of the countryside for most of the day we travelled. It was hot and dry and, well, you could have been in the wheat belt of Australia. Their was another aspect of this countryside which reminded me of Australia and I need again to draw on my Russian experience to draw the parallel. I’ll never forget the terrible sense of unease I felt when travelling in rural Russia. There is a really strange phenomenon that occurs almost as soon as you leave any Russian town or city and that is there is nobody there. I had a feeling of foreboding whenever I passed through rural Russia. I am sure there is farming somewhere, prescribed, but I never saw it. So, in Russia rural meant empty space, just hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of forest and I often imagined they probably provided cover for untold heinous crimes. As Kath once said, ‘I didn’t like it !’.

Now back to the chicken, ah rural Poland. The rural landscape is much more like Australia in that the population is still there just further dispersed. In amongst the wheat fields were dotted houses, farm buildings and evidence of people getting about their daily lives; bicycles leaning against a house, children playing or walking the dog, farmers talking by the side or the tractor, someone fixing a fence that kind of thing.

Now the bus trip was fairly much like any bus trip with a couple of small variations. I was in the company of 50 poles on a Polish bus heading for Poland so I wasn’t too surprised that the onboard videos where all in Polish. Well, at least they were dubbed in Polish. They must have a famous film dubber here coz they were all dubbed by the one person. Yep, every charter, man woman and child, was dubbed by the one person and yes when the next video was put on, you got it, same voice. Now I might not be able to speak Polish but I can still pick a monotone and this dubber put absolutely no intonation on anything or made any attempt to change his voice from one character to the other so I had this Polish monotone through the speakers from about 8.00 am till 8.00 pm yesterday. I wonder whether this guy ever losses his composure and speaks with emotion in his voice. Probably not, I imagine even in the bedroom with his beloved the monotone would continue, ‘I will touch you on the arm, then I shall slowly stroke your hair. You shall be excited and I shall turn to you with interest as I reach for your hair and you recognise my interest…’ Pause. Ok, I think I said somewhere before that I generally don’t talk about my bowel movements as there is only so far that conversation can go, generally downhill, excuse the pun. Yet, there is an interesting aspect to going to the toilet here in Europe although I have encountered it elsewhere. I call it ‘pay for poo’. I have never had to pay to go to the toilet in Australia. I first came across this in Indonesia well over 25 years ago but I still find it rather…. curious. Thankfully the bus had a toilet yet the driver always locked it at stops, probably to make his life easier or perhaps there was a toilet conspiracy going on, hum. There is not too much else to be said about pay for poo except that interestingly I went into a MacDonald’s restaurant this morning to use their world renowned clean and free toilet and you guessed it, there was an attendant sitting there on a stool. I was so tempted to walk up and say, ‘I’ll have a Mc poo, no fries thanks’. I thought you only paid to eat the shit not to give it back to them! Later considering the totally banal and inconsequential as you do I thought, like the food itself, the management/accounting systems would be fairly universal for McDonalds world wide and somewhere at sometime probably in the US an accountant would have to put another field in the database to accommodate ‘poo attendant’ in their database. OK, they would use a more sanitised euphemism like, ‘personal hygiene control attendant’ but you know what I mean. I am sure McDonalds would ideally like to provide a free toilet but with everyone else in the city making you pay to poo they wouldn’t want to be know more for it’s free toilet than it’s wonderful food, lol.

Tonight I am in the Oki Dokey hostel. I arrived in Warsaw last night just on dark, about 9.30pm. This is not exactly the time you want to arrive in a foreign city especially lugging a large pack around and holding a travel book. Kinda broadcasts to everyone you have no idea where you are or where you are going. It doesn’t help when the guide book gets the hostel you are looking for wrong on the map! I’ll have to write to Lonely Planet and complain and I might get another free handbook. Last time I wrote to them was after travelling to Guatemala City and missing my bus to El Salvador because the book said Australians don’t need a visa for that country when in f act they always have and the bus company refused to carry me without one. I could have understood it if the regulations had changed as happens but if Australians have always needed a visa it is simply bad research and caused a major fuck up for me at the time, and probably plenty of others. The Oki Dokey incident was not in the same league but it does indicate some below standard research from Lonely Planet. I mean checking the accuracy of maps, you would think, would be a paramount priority of a guide book and for a company the size and with the resources of Lonely Planet. You would think before any publication went to print they would have some poor soul walk around and check locations off against map references.

So yes, tonight I am in the Oki Dokey located about one block from where it appears on the map. I’m in the ‘communist’ room replete with a caricature of Stalin on the wall. Just half and hour or so ago I got back from a walk down to the river. It has been fairly hot for all of my travels so far so when I got back feeling hot and sweaty and noticed a ceiling fan naturally I thought I’d turn it on. After some investigation of the room I couldn’t seem to find the switch and proceeded down to the reception. The young Polish man at reception quickly accompanied me back to the room looked up at the ceiling fan and said, ‘oh, your in the communist room’. Riiiiiiight I responded rather vaguely not too sure of the connection then said, ‘ I get it, you have got to make your guests life difficult to follow through with the theme?’ (maybe my short time in London had a positive effect on my humour after all?) He looked at me for a moment not sure what I was trying to say and responded, ‘oh, that fan has never worked’. I was starting to feel I was entering a faulty towers moment just now yet I knew I was no longer in England. Perhaps the Poles had a unique humour I just wasn’t up to speed on yet. I always find it funny when someone uses the excuse that ‘it has never worked’ as an excuse for something not working. It is far more understandable if they say it broke down years ago. At least then you know it did have a period of operation and you are just the poor soul who came along too late after it exhausted itself. But when he said it had never worked I felt like puffing my chest out like Basil Faulty and saying, ‘ what, it has never worked, didn’t someone tell you you have to actually supply power to it. The pixies don’t come in in the middle of the night and wire up ceiling fans do they. I doesn’t work sir because it ain’t got a switch sir. It ain’t got power sir. 240, know what I mean. Zap zap, electricity. We are not using candles if you haven’t noticed, the world has moved on apace. No sir, the fan isn’t working because your electrician didn’t provide electricity or a switch, did he sir. Now, what are you going to do about it’.

Well, that is what I wanted to say but I think I said something other rather profound like, ‘oh’. He then turned perhaps realising I wasn’t completely satisfied with his response and said, ‘no one has ever said anything about the fan before’ and left the room. Yep, I should have known. It was me. I’m weird like that. Got a ceiling fan in the room and I have this obsession to actually turn it on. Anyway, I am heading down the road to another hostel tomorrow. This one is actually quiet OK but they have this silly curfew between 11 and 3 where you have to leave the hostel. Normally this is fine if you are out and about but it can be annoying if you have to come back for something or you like to come in and out during the day. So tomorrow I pack my bags and head two blocks north. Somewhere in the next week or so I’ll find time to upload some photos to my blog and flickr. Bye