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.
