Cold cures and seasonal sniffles...

The week before Christmas saw Agnieszka take to her bed in what was an unprecedented bout of coughing, cold and fever. I have never seen her so ill and it's the first time she ever took sick days while here. I was lucky and have so far managed to avoid anything worse than a sniff and slightly clogged nose, which a hefty hot whiskey saw off.

I think one of the reasons I am staying healthy is the thought of having to take some of the myriad Polish 'cures' that are bandied about, usually from tesciowa. Below are two:

On the left, a chopped onion to which has been added sugar. Leave overnight, then drain off and drink the juice. I tried this one, more out of curiosity than anything and I can honestly say that sugary onion is not something I could get a taste for. The jar on the right contains the mother of all cures and has a potentcy far beyond it's ingredients. To make, crush ten cloves of garlic and put them in the jar with the juice of a lemon. Add cooled boiled water and leave for 24 hours to infuse. Drink a couple of teaspoonsful before bed. This one stinks, and so far I have resisted the urge to try it. Agnieszka has been taking it for the last few nights but it doesn't seem to be shifting the cough.

Here she is, all bundled up trying to keep warm in our draughty and damp house. No wonder we get ill.

Holiday in the sun...

After last October and our rain-drenched two weeks, we were determined to get some sun on our holiday this time - and we did! It has been such a comedown, though, being back in the rain-drenched shires that I haven't felt like posting anything. Even now I am struggling to think of how to report the whole two weeks in one post.

The easiest way is through photos, and these are the highlights:

Berlin: The Fernsehturm and World Clock, Alexanderplatz

Sleepy East Germany: Angermünde

Cooling off in Szczecin

Storks in various places, mostly on the top of precarious-looking nests

Breakfast in Osuch by the mill pond

Wheat and barley fields with no sign of pesticides, just a rainbow of wild flowers

A pedalo on the lake; silence except for the creaking of my knees

A barbecue on the beach, in 35 degree heat

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow (part one)...

Under orders from tesciowa we made sure we booked flights early in 2009 so we could go to Katowice for Christmas. We bought them in March for £200. By October the same tickets were up to £500 - half the price they were in 2008 - and they stayed around this level. So why so expensive last year? Maybe the stories about lots of Poles returning home are true and easyJet are finding it more difficult to sell seats. I don't really care, we still got our flights at a good price and it was lovely to arrive in Kraków and hear the pilot say it was minus twelve degrees outside. The looks on the faces of the all-girls school choir were priceless, as was their disbelief when they were expected to cram, suitcases and all, on to the bus to the staion.

From tesciowa's flat on the tenth floor all was clear, crisp and white and we felt sure it would last until Christmas. This meant, unfortunately, that the game of mini-golf was out. Here is the course:

It's been a couple of years since we were here for Christmas dinner proper and I had forgotten just how much food you're expected to eat and enjoy. We had six courses: barszcz, pierogi, cabbage and mushrooms, pasta with poppy seeds, compote and one other I've forgotten. There was no way I could finish it all. This over-indulging continued for the next three days, with course after course being produced from a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. Every time one of the dogs moved there was a rush to see if they wanted to go out for a walk, to get abit of exercise to work off a few calories. At one point, even the dogs got fed up going out and refused to move from their comfy places. It was phenomenal and, at times, painful. It would've been nice to see more of Alicja and less of the food but...

This isn't Christmas dinner, this was the breakfast the day after...

Although Christmas Day in England was, I am told, white, there was no hint of snow in Poland. What there was disappeared along with the sub-zero temperatures and we basked in a balmy five degrees for the best part of a week. We went to Warsaw on the Sunday as we had bank stuff to do and on the Monday, as we tramped around from bank to town hall to court (doing what could and should be done far quicker and more easily online), we were constantly ploughing through snowflakes.

Although it had stopped for our journey back to Katowice, on the Wednesday morning when we got up to go to the airport, it had started again with a vengeance. We waited for the bus, which arrived on time, on this street, and there will be more about snowy roads in a later post.

We were in town on time, on the train on time, at the airport on time. The flight left on time. Compare this to the 6mm (half an inch in old money) of snow that fell the weekend we left which closed several airports for a couple of days, leaving many irate Poles stranded in the UK for Christmas. From what we saw on the television, they weren't impressed at having to spend their festive season stuck at an airport.

Finally, as we come from different cultures and celebrate Christmas in slightly different ways, we find we adopt certain characteristics from each other's culture. Being in Poland I embrace the quiet, family-orientated Christmas, where the emphasis is on a nice meal with close family. However, as I am English I take some of our traditions abroad. Normally this is just crackers for the table (the ones with hats, mottoes and crappy jokes) but this year Agnieszka made a traditional English Christmas cake, although she did substitute the 'dead flies' (currants, raisins and sultanas) for 'proper' fruit like figs, dates and cranberries. We took icing sugar and marzipan and decorated the cake while we were there.

With all belated best wishes for the Christmas season and good luck for the New Year 2010!

Wszystkiego najlepszego!

So pack up your sea stores, consider no longer...

After deliberating for a year, we finally sorted ourselves out and made plans for a trip to Poland. We left Farnworth on a drizzly Monday afternoon and scooted over to Hull, where the sun shone and the wind blew, to get the ferry to Rotterdam. From there it was just a little over 800 miles to Smołdzino and our agro-turystyka lodgings.

We were disappointed, however, to find that Pan Tadeusz (http://www.agroturystyka.pl/index.php?inc=kwatera&id=714) didn't have any animals. He keeps a few ducks in the summer, he said, but there was no sign of them in the yard and we didn't check his freezer. The farm across the road (where a 4x4 from Chapelhouse Suzuki in St Helens sat in the yard) had cows but, out for a stroll one evening in the chilly dusk, we heard one in distress. A young bullock, it was yarking fit to bust, and seemed to have a bloated stomach. The woman from the farm came out to see to it but apart from stroking its flank, didn't seem to do much else. Then, as we walked by, there was a thump and down it went. We think it must have died and was chopped up there and then as there was a lot of activity in the yard that night. In the end we didn't buy any twaróg from them, just in case whatever the cow had was transmittable...

We stayed in an apartemencik here, with views across to Smołdzino Las (the forest) and not too far from a little shop. The view from the window is obscured slightly by the fly netting, but gives an idea of how far from Farnworth this place was, and I don't just mean the mileage.
Obviously, with the forest so close, we had to go for a mushroom hunt. All along the A6 from the German border we'd seen gangs of spindly old men in threadbare coats and cloth caps, smoking like Russian factories, standing over buckets of freshly-picked mushrooms, waiting for customers. We had to have a go and, during a lull in the torrential rain, we wandered off for a couple of hours to see what there was. It felt so nice to be wandering in a 'proper' forest, as opposed to the bits of woods we have in England. I know that might sound a bit snobby, but you haven't been in a forest until you've walked for an hour, completely surrounded by trees, silent except for the wind sighing in the treetops, the occasional birdsong and the hacking cough of a bloke pushing a bike through the undergrowth, also looking for grzyby.
So this was our haul. We had them checked by Pan Tadeusz, who threw out a couple and advised us to peel one or two more. Then they were washed and chopped, with half going on some newspaper by the radiatoor to dry and the rest going in the frying pan with an onion and some garlic. Mniam mniam, picked and fried in under two hours. Can you get fresher than that?

Close to Smołdzino is the seaside town of Łeba, a place I have wanted to visit for some time as I heard it is very pretty, with a winter population of around 4000 people and a summer one of ten times that. It was windy and damp the day we visited, all the shops closed or closing after the hordes of summer. It is a pretty town, one main drag lined with shops selling shells, amber, smoked fish, shells, postcards, amber and shells. At the harbour, a flotilla of boats-cum-restaurants / bars were moored, creaking gently in the gale and empty of punters. The whole town was empty in fact. I don't think we saw more than half a dozen people while we were there.
On one of the postcards, this part of the beach is crammed full of people in bikinis, but in October we had the place pretty much to ourselves apart from a couple of brave souls wind-surfing. Back in town, we asked in the post office how to get to the national park and the woman was very helpful, breaking off from reading her magazine for just long enough to direct us to the nearest car park. The lives of celebrities obviously more interesting than two damp out of season tourists.

The reason for coming here was to see the shifting sand dunes that 'walk' between two and ten metres a year. It's an eerie place. For three or four miles you walk through leafy forest, passing halfway the former V2 rocket launching site, now a museum, before coming out into a wider picnic area. From there the dunes rise up above, white against a (for once) bright blue sky. The dunes are slowly encoaching on the forest and quite a few trees were dead or dying after being enveloped in sand. We plodded to the summit of the largest dune, no mean feat in the soft sand, and it was incredible. On one side: trees and the start of a lake; on the other, dunes as far as you could see and then, twinkling in the distance, the Baltic.

A truly amazing place. I think we would have explored more if the wind hadn't been so strong. Every time you tuned into it you got your face sand blasted, like an eco-scrub. The pair of us looked like we'd just come out of a sauna and we were only up there half an hour. After hiking the few miles back to the car park we headed back to Smołdzino and the warmth of our little apartment, where the smells of wet walking boots and drying mushrooms accompanied our evening.

Spring days and toothache...

With the wind whistling through every gap in the fabric of the house it was a welcome change to get to Poland where Spring had arrived with a vengeance: lots of bulbs in flower, trees beginning to bud and the temperatures during the day soaring. For most of the week we enjoyed mid-twenties Celsius and sunny days, although there was a whiff of winter every night when it started to get dark.

It was another rushed trip, however, legging round to do all the things we can’t do over the internet or phone: paying land taxes, visiting friends and spending time with family. On this trip I had to visit a dentist after a niggling toothache turned into painful mouth. It was on the day we left Warsaw that we called in at the Lim Medical Centre and I was seen by a dentist wearing jeans and trendy knee-high boots. I remember this because her method of checking which tooth it was – hitting all possibilities with the thick end of a probe until I jumped – will be indelibly marked on my consciousness and filed in the little box in my brain marked ‘sadists’. Agnieszka said she did this because I didn’t go in and tell her exactly which tooth it was, but when the pain is dull, you can never work out exactly which one it is. Well, she did. Three times she hit it, just to check she had the right one. And then, when I thought the pain would subside, she tried to drill it without anaesthetic. No need to record my reaction here. After that they let me pay £20 for the privilege and I got a nice temporary filling which promptly fell out when we got back to cold and blustery England.

On a different note, Katowice and its surroundings aren’t very picturesque although I do have a soft spot for the area and its grimy housing and mining industry. We tend not to take many pictures as a lot of places are covered in crude tribal football graffiti but this one we noticed on a bridge, a welcome change from the death threats between local hoodlums:
We wish you a safe shift.

Mind the gap / Uwaga na przerwę

Accessibility is important these days, particularly with regard to public buildings and services. To find a town hall or school without hand rails for the inform, Braille pads for the blind or wheelchair ramps for the disabled is almost impossible thanks to the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act that (and I paraphrase here) said these bodies have a duty to provide for a disabled person’s need. In addition, companies not covered by the act, such as bus and train operators, were given a deadline to make sure wheelchair users and other disabled people could use services normally.

That’s the UK. Abroad, it’s different, natch. So it was with a general sense of disbelief that we witnessed the logic of Kraków’s transport strategy to get people from Balice airport into the main railway station. The powers that be have invested in several brand new trains, smartly painted in red, white and yellow and spotless inside, with staff verging on the polite. When you get off the plane you take a bus to the station (ok, so they didn’t really understand the meaning of ‘integrated transport strategy’) and after a few minutes this sleek, polished train glides in, the doors swish open and passengers board. Twenty minutes later you arrive at Kraków Główny station. No problems there you think. But wait, what’s this? The doors open and…
A gap, and (wait for it)...
A step up.
Someone somewhere needs a good hard kick up the arse. I mean a really good hard kick. Or better still, put them in a wheelchair and get them to try and get in or out of the train at this station. It is hard enough trying to lift a heavy suitcase in and the lady with the pushchair had to unceremoniously throw the whole thing out, to the obvious distress of the child.

So who is responsible? In Poland everyone blames everyone else, but it is obvious that somewhere along the line someone didn’t think that train and platform have to be compatible. One solution would have been to build a new, lower, platform but that costs money. The official response? We didn’t ask but I would guess if you complained they would shrug, and then order you a taxi.