A Polish Holiday 2

Even though yesterday was quite the emotional rollercoaster ride, the main event was still to come.  Today, we were booked onto a trip to see one of the surviving death camps at Auschwitz, the German name for the small, leafy town of Oświęcim during the Nazi occupation.

For the purposes of retaining a connection to it's horrific past, even though it is a constant reminder to the locals, two of the three main death camps in the town still stand, and there is no shortage of people willing to travel through the plain, unassuming countryside packed into coaches to experience them first hand.  Today, we would take our turn.

We pre-booked online, and for a little lighter relief afterwards, we added the tour of the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine, as by that point we figured we could do with something to take our minds off what we had just seen.

Early in the morning, we boarded a mini-bus close to the hotel, which was tasked with hoovering up tourists from around the city by negotiating it's way through the narrow, parked car-laden streets.  Once pretty much full up, we headed out of the city and onto the motorway, a grey morning stretching out in front of us.

Fortunately, there was some entertainment of sorts, in the form of an English language documentary of the history of Auschwitz.  It was dry and sober, and as you would expect, mostly in black and white, but it gave us a fair primer of what was to come.

An hour or so later we arrived at Auschwitz-I, the first and most well-built of the death camps in the town.  A large car park, flanked by book and souvenir shops bustled with cars and coaches, and we filed into our spot.  We filed through a security checkpoint and were given our headphones, and exited out of the modern building, into the past.

The view in front of us is one of the most recognizable locations from tales of the second world war.  A neatly trimmed path circles around a grass lawn, innocently passing under the branches of a now-mature oaks and weeping willows, and towards the entrance gates.

'Work sets you free', says the sign, a grimly sardonic hint to the thousands of poor souls who passed under this sign that the only way out was being flogged to death, as many of them were. 

It was clear that in the early days of the regime at least, the Nazi army had at least taken the time and effort to create sturdy, brick buildings to house the inmates.   The majority of the inner compound was made up of a grid of two-storey buildings that looked well constructed and almost homely from a distance, with the sun peeking through the clouds and the sound of birdsong filtering through the voice coming out of our crackly headphones.  We were about to find out what the insides had to say for themselves.

The tour guide took us on a very deliberate route through the compound, stopping off at the few buildings that were open to the public.  Some had been closed for refurbishment, others were too unsafe to go inside.  Almost as a way of darkening the atmosphere, the sun went in and a dismal greyness took over the sky.  It began to rain.

The first couple of buildings were largely empty and devoid of period features, and had been stripped mostly down to just the walls and the unsuitable heating units that must have been little use in the winter months for the inmates.  On the walls hung diagrams of the camps, of the town of Oświęcim, and of the Nazi stranglehold on the entire region.  Krakow was at the epicentre of Hitlers' plans for Jewish extermination, and one room-high map in particular highlighted the extent of the extermination engine.  On it, the three camps at Auschwitz were surrounded by forty or so smaller camps, all set up for the same purpose.  Further afield, as far away as the Netherlands and France, another thirty or so camps were marked on the map.  Their inmates were all destined, sooner or later, for Auschwitz.

Padding through the rain showers between buildings became a source of refreshment and pause, as we moved from the inmates buildings into the 'processing' areas.  In the process of the dehumanization and eventual extermination of the prisoners, the Nazi occupation exploited every resource that the bodies of the inmates could provide.  Their belongings were taken from them, and anything worth money was put aside and sold.

But it didn't stop there.  Personal items - shoes, spectacles, jewellery, and even things like toothbrushes and false teeth were removed and confiscated.  Hair was cut from their heads and hoarded for the production of 'wool'.  And this was while each able man, woman and child was subjected to long hours of hard work, medical experiments, or forced into the Sonderkommando - prisoner units forced to do this work on their fellow countrymen.  The infirm and unable were, perhaps mercifully, the first to the execution chambers.

When the camp was liberated, huge stockpiles of untransported personal effects were discovered, and are now stored in glass booths that take up half of several of the voluminous rooms.  The stash of human hair alone, bundled tightly into sacking, was over 7 tonnes in weight, and sits silently in it's glass presentation case, a pile of human hair six feet high and thirty feet wide.  This, alongside some of the other confiscations, conveyed more powerfully the sheer scale of what was going on more than words or pictures ever could.

Though we were generally allowed to take pictures anywhere in the buildings, we were asked not to photograph the hair as a mark of respect.  Most people were just standing, mouth agape and too preoccupied with the sight in front of them to remember they had cameras in their hands.

Three or four buildings later, we reached the end building, where the yard between it and the adjoining building was open to us.  This was one of the execution yards.  The windows on the buildings either side were boarded up to heighten the mental torture of those inside, who heard the shots and screams of those who were to be executed that day, and when they would be next.  At the far end of the yard, a section of the original, pock-laden wall stands, surrounded by wreaths and candles, struggling to stay alight in the wind and rain.

Shattered from the weight of it all, we turned back and were led towards the entrance, but unfortunately we were not quite done yet.  Auschwitz-I had it's own gas chambers, and they hadn't been destroyed like in some of the other camps by Nazi's trying to cover up their atrocities.  We were led inside, and shown the hatch where the Zyclon-B cannisters were dropped through, from the point of view of the victims who died slowly and painfully, often at the hands of their Sonderkommando brethren.

A little way beyond, and through a double-fenced blockade, the world changed.  A heartbeat away from the torturous atrocities were the officers' camps.  Quiet, leafy office buildings of substantially better quality.  Some of the officers, and even their families lived here on-site.  Their children innocently played in the grounds a stones throw away from the gas chambers.

Our tour of the compound ended on a high - of sorts - with the gallows that Rudolf Höss, the first commander of the camp was summarily executed on in 1947, after his trial at Nuremberg.

Our guide gave us a meager ten minutes or so to work our way through the queues for toilets, book shops, or just simply to have a breather outside.  We felt pretty emotionally flattened, even though our minds, used to the detachment of seeing so much through a TV screen, filtered out a lot of the impact.  Looking back on the pictures from the comfort of my front room, is somehow more unsettling.

Our journey into the past was barely half over.  The rain continued to fall from the skies in a manner that suggested it could not make up it's mind whether to turn into a full-on storm or just sod off, and it continued to patter down just enough to be noticeable on the short drive to our next stop.

If the gates of Auschwitz-I drew a blank, then the iconic train tracks and guard house of Auschwitz-II Birkenau should trigger memories of a thousand Channel 5 documentaries.  When it became clear that - even when the prisoners were packed like sardines into the rooms - the first camp was nowhere near big enough a place to carry out the final solution, the Nazi's looked upon the wide open fields on the outskirts of Oświęcim as a suitable location for a second camp.

By this point, the Nazi's were more confident of their aims and goals, and were less motivated to try and hide the true purpose of their construction.  Whereas Auschwitz-I was modeled almost as a 'stopover' for the Jewish people on the way to some better land, Birkenau's buildings were brutally functional and honest.

We were dropped some way from the entrance, as if to heighten the anticipation of entering.  We were told to watch out for cars roaring past on the tight, narrow tarmac - the locals in the houses not so far from the entrance would take no prisoners on a road they considered to be theirs alone to drive on.  It seemed incredulous that some people, with a constant reminder of what it is to be an arsehole so close to their doors, could choose to act in such a way.  Almost on cue, a car whizzed past, and it's irate driver shouted abuse at one of the tourists.  It was surreal.

In 1941, a newly laid track branched off the nearby main-line and into these fields, where brick huts were built by the dozen.  With only a single floor and huge slanted roofs taking up at least as much space, the design required few windows, allowing little to no light to penetrate inside.  No water or electric like they at least had in the other place.  The interiors were dank and dark, with a cold stone floor, and brick and wooden frames for the beds. People slept three high, cramped together as many as could fit.  By 1943, the extermination camp, as it was officially designated by that point, had the capacity to hold 200,000 people - four times it's originally planned capacity.

And it worked like a factory.  Trainloads of prisoners rumbled in, through the guard house tunnel and past the walking dead, staring at them helplessly as they milled around waiting for the inevitable.  Halfway down the long central track, the carriages stopped and they got out.

The infirm were shot immediately.  Those who could work did so at the nearby factories - their pay being allowed to live another day.  Eventually they would become sick or otherwise problematic, and then they were killed.  Birkenau eventually had four buildings - combined gas chambers and crematoria, as well as the famous 'red house' and 'white house' crematorium buildings - converted barns that sufficed in processing the bodies during the early days before the influx of new bodies became too much for them alone.

The rain continued as if it was perpetual here.  We walked the long track next to the railway that cut through the centre of the massive compound.  To the left, the buildings were shabby but mostly intact.  To the right, the semi-complete process of the fleeing Nazi's, covering their tracks by burning everything to the ground, had left the area with little more than a perimeter of razor wire guarding some foot high foundations.

Wherever your eyes wandered was a gruesome mix of nature and the awful man-made structures that it was slowly re-taking.  The walking route, the whole length of the camp, was deliberate to allow time to ponder on the sights in front of us.  We were heading to the memorial at the end.

I'm not exaggerating for effect: as soon as we arrived it began to rumble with thunder ominously, and the clouds, relieved of their static electricity, proceeded to drench the air.  A grey and sombre structure, built at the far end of the compound midway between the two sets of crematoria buildings servicing each side of the camp, was backed by trees and nature and peace.  The structure and it's border appeared to be a final statement, that the horrid excesses of human cruelty should stop at this point and carry on no further.

As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki before, this was a place of international remembrance, and it was clear the cobbled ground would occasionally be populated by rows seating for visiting dignitaries. Flagpoles for each nation stood empty but ready, and plaques were set into the ground in every language, a mirror of the same message over and over.

In total, it was estimated that 1.5 million people passed through the three Auschwitz camps over the seven years of occupation.  We were given a little time to stand and read in our own languages the message of caution to the world, off our respective rain-splattered plaques, and think.

The rain finally made up it's mind and lashed down heavily, so the guide picked up the pace and headed through the destroyed remnants of the crematorium buildings and towards the womens' camp where we shook off our clothing and gathered inside one of the few remaining huts considered safe enough to enter.

The insides felt like a relief from the cold and the wet outside, but they could not have been much comfort for their original residents.  Barely enough room had been apportioned for each person to sleep, several bunks high, with small, dusty windows letting in precious little light, casting ghostly patterns on the ashen-coloured concrete structure within, and dimly illuminating the huge wooden structure of the timber roof above - where any heat would retreat to, out of reach of the freezing prisoners in the darkest depths of winter.

The rain never really stopped, but abated enough for us to chance en masse a trot back towards the entrance, stopping off briefly at the huge communal latrines.  During use, the prisoners would have to defecate together in large groups - no privacy was permitted, as you would have to sit cramped together in long rows on a cold concrete pot.  As bad as the job of cleaning them would have been, we were told that the few prisoners who had that unenviable task were among the lucky ones as aside from the obvious ickyness, it was one of the easier jobs in the camp.

With some gratitude, we finished the tour and emerged out through the guard entrance into freedom once more, where kids waiting for their parents in the souvenir shops balanced on walls and messed around.  We have never had it so easy.

Our day had one final stop.  As the sun hovered midway between the heavens and the horizon, we took the little bus about an hours' drive to the Wieliczka Salt Mine.  After the heavy emotional load around our necks, it would be a duller, but lighter and welcome change to the subject matter.

We pulled up as the clouds were parting into a semi-full car park.  A neat and trim garden welcomed us in, proudly displaying a UNESCO world heritage site sign.  Everything was neat and tidy, and though we were eeking the last of the pleasant autumn days out of the year, the gardeners had worked hard to keep it all flowery and colourful.

(I must confess, at this point I had little idea of what we were going to be seeing. Aside from the vision of some salt in a big hole in the ground, I hadn't got past the whole atrocities thing to consider what it might involve)

The mine was, as you might expect for a tourist destination, not in full use any more.  The office buildings had all been prettified and turned into tourist shops and mini museums, but we were here for what was under our feet.  We were advised to join the long queues for the toilets in the short while before our guide had finished with her current group, and we bought some much needed beverage for our journey.

Eventually it was our turn.  The first part of the tour basically involves traversing a massive staircase - heading down about fifty floors until you hit the upper levels of the mine - which takes some time to do.  When you eventually arrive at the bottom, a massive air lock door (which might have been made a bit more fancy for the tourists than the more functional original) is prised open, and a massive gust of air billows about us from the depths below.

It would have been quite natural to assume that the 1000 or so feet of depth is just salt deposits and the odd rusting bucket - and there was certainly plenty of both.  In most places on the walls and above our heads, the rock was covered in snow white salt crystals, covering the old pickaxe marks of ancient workers by some inches in places.   Nice though it was to look at, the thought of spending the remainder of the day being bustled by wind and having the top of my head scraped off by sharp salt crystals was not so appealing.  Mercifully the depths had a bit more to offer.  Only recently has it totally stopped being mined for salt, and before 2007, it had been a source of gainful employment for the locals going back to the 1200's.  In that time, an awful lot of salt has come out, and thus a whole lot of tunnels have been dug through the rock, and in places these tunnels have opened out into some pretty spacious rooms where the surprises were kept.

As we made our way through a succession of draughty airlocked corridors, the path consistently sloped slowly downwards.  Periodically we passed distance and depth markers, and several branching tunnels off route which were either closed to the public (some volunteer miners still worked in some of the more remote branches) or were being refurbished.

It became quite pedestrian going through the long corridors, and in the early stages the occasional stopoff was not that exciting; often they would containing one of several pieces of antique machinery used to either dig out the salt or transport it back again.  Often these were set in motion by modern electric motors that replaced the grunting labourers, or quite often, horses whose whole life would be spent below the surface.  The machines were often joined by manikins of miners and their horses in action poses.

Other areas displayed scenes from local history; kings and knights doing battle or somesuch.  Life-size stone statues played their part, carved by some of the more artisan miners to make it more bearable below the surface.  Here and there, small shrines or memorials to the hard work of the miners were displayed.  Often, though these were the work of artists and sculptors from modern times,  commissioned works to remember the thousands of men who flogged their bodies and ruined their health over the years.

About two thirds the way to the bottom, we were shown something that, thanks to my lack of research beforehand, took me by complete surprise.

We were several hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and yet here we were in a cathedral, carved out of the granite rock.

We started down the twin staircase from the entrance, and marvelled at where we were.  On the wall was a relief of The Last Supper carved with great precision into the rock.  Huge chandeliers made of salt crystal hung from the ceiling.  Statues of martyrs and bishops lined the walls, and the floor was polished granite, carved to look as if it were covered with hexagonal tiles.

This was, and still is a deeply spiritual hall, known as St. Kingas Chapel.  It has been party to many religious ceremonies; it's acoustic qualities make it ideal for classical music performances and has hosted weddings for a lucky select few.  We had barely enough time to take in the surroundings before we were moved on.  The beloved Pope John Paul II, whose visit here as with many other places around Poland, is commemorated by a statue.  This one was carved from a huge rock of salt rock and stood guarding the exit.

There were several subsequent open areas although none as spectacular as the first chapel.  One of the most eye-catching was a large, open chamber near the bottom.  We entered from a high vantage point and were not able to take in the scale of thingsThe rock disappeared into the darkness high above us, but was replaced by a beautiful and seemingly infinite framework of white painted timber joists, presumably there to stop the whole thing falling in on itself, but lending the spacious cave a strange claustrophobic feel.  Large salt chandeliers hung from the lower timbers and lit the room beautifully.

Right at the bottom - and we should have guessed this given the nature of museums, although it still came as a surprise this far from the surface - was a gift shop.  And a restaruant, and a load of other rooms and facilities that just seemed to be there as if nothing was strange about it.  We were given a hurry-up-and-buy five minutes to look around the trinket shops, including two or three selling off carved jewellery and those lumps of rock split in half to show beautiful crystalline structures inside.  I doubt they were from the area, as none of them looked remotely salty in origin but then at least you could say you bought them from a thousand feet below the earth I suppose.  We ummed and ahhed, but ended up coming away empty handed without regrets.

The final part of our journey was to get back to the top - and this was a bit of a bottleneck.  A single elevator - not much more spacious from being a double-decker one - was crammed full of a score of tired tourists and then sent upwards.  When it was finally our turn, we were placed well inside the intimate zone of several complete strangers, and then sent upwards - in complete squeaky, draughty, creaky darkness all the way back to the top.  The blackness occasionally abated by the bright flourescent lights of areas we had walked through and went back to darkness just as quickly, and then just as it seemed we were all going to start screaming for it to stop, it did and we fell out into the (other) gift shop at the surface.

We gathered our nerves and headed back to the coach.  In our absence, darkness had fallen outside, and once everyone had been accounted for, we went back to Krakow old town, got back into our room and collapsed into bed.

That was our final full day in Poland.  The next morning we packed and were picked up by a cab which took us straight to the airport.  We spent our last Zloty on choccy for workmates back home, and then got on the plane.

Though we had not really looked at Poland as a place to visit, I'm certainly glad we did; the atrocities of Auschwitz and the shadow of the nightmares still present around Krakow in particular are haunting in a way that I had felt when I was at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and it felt somewhat fulfilling to visit all three at last.  Although Poland could have used it's past more to fund it's future with such dystopian tourism there was a sense of keeping it measured and low key, but making sure it is remembered, and the balance feels about right.

It would be nice to go again and explore some more.

A Polish Holiday 1

The following morning brought a fresher feel, but the clouds had still stayed away enough for some pleasant sun as the city started to stir.

The plan was that we would make our way to the Oskar Schindler museum on the other side of the city, and looking at our handy guide map, we could get there by skirting along the imposing Vistula River that cuts through the south just outside the old town, including a visit to Wawel Castle on the way.

Perched on top of Wawel Hill, the entrance route spirals slowly upwards passing a strange sculpture of a dragon, which every five minutes or so (making us jump) spits out a gobful of flames.  Only when you look closer do you realise several of it's 'arms' have heads on them.

As the street-sellers unpacked the wares onto their trollys we carried on upwards until reaching the main castle grounds.  We must have missed out a bit of the tourist trail as we found ourselves in an open area looking at Wawel Cathedral, which shared equal billing, vying for attention from the tourists walking around the primly kept gardens that took up most of the open area inside the battlement walls.

It was a strange concoction of buildings of different styles, seemingly added to down the ages at the behest of several of the castle owners, none of whom seemed to agree with the others on what was a good choice of brick.

Given our time constraints and the rapidly ascending sun, we decided that only one of the two could be given any decent attention before we could go, and so we chose the cathedral as it looked the most interesting of the two.  Certainly the crowds were flocking, encouraged probably by the fact that this was once where the future pope, John Paul II gave mass.

'No entry without ticket' said the sign, alongside some others with a camera inside a crossed red triangle, meant that we had to put up with looking at things with the naked eye rather than through a viewfinder.  After getting the tickets in a clashingly modern building alongside we filed in between guided crowds.

The inside decor was as you might expect for such a prominent religious building.  High ceilings held up by arches decorated with dusty saints of old; a central area for worshiping lined by black wooden pews, pointing at a huge, lavishly draped altar, gilded gold with shiny-worn brass ornamentation and trim, surrounded with heavily trodden stone and marble flooring, large painted frescoes depicting romanticised battle scenes and a general intention of telling whatever god-fearing visitor might enter that the people who preach at these places should be treated with respect and awe.

The little wooden poles connected by ropes were in force, turning what was once (and is presumably still, on Sundays) a quiet place of worship, into a linear maze of shuffling feet and whispering crowds.  After cooing at the opulence on display on the ground floor, the route went up into one of the cathedral towers, where visitors were treated to a succession of increasingly large metal hats suspended from the ceiling on wooden joists.  Far too heavy for everyday usage, at one time only royalty were privileged enough to wear them.  In these austere days however, they allow you to be photographed wearing the largest one, for a small fee.

Once down from the tower, and beyond some of the small chapels that lined the outer walls of the main cathedral, we headed down into St. Leonards' Crypt where several high-ranking Polish nobles are buried.  It was quite a serene place, reminding me of the Egyptian tombs at the Valley of Kings, except these rooms were modern and mood-lighted by subtle spot-lighting.  From the earliest burials the passageways edged slowly outwards, the styling of the caskets became more modern, you could tell from their styling and whether they were plain stone or marble, how much money and influence was behind the pile of bones inside.  The last crypt room before the iron gated exit was the most modern.  The body of respected Polish general Wladyslaw Sikorski laid inside a creepy looking bronze metal box in the shape of a coffin, decorated with large domed rivets but seemingly without any seams to be held by them.  The place was decorated with a dour and unnerving set of WWII-era tributes - crossed gun motifs, staring portraits.  It seemed to represent a final goodbye of the cultural influences on Poland of the era.  As we adjusted our eyes to the early afternoon sun, we felt as if we had come back from the darkened past.

On our way out to rejoin the river, we came upon the 'Dragons' Den'.  At the sheer edge of the rock on which we were standing, a thin and slender tower extended downwards.  For a meager fee the bored-looking teenaged ticket attendant opened the gates for us, and we descended the spiral staircase downwards to ground level - except that it kept going some more after that.

We stepped out into an underground cave complex, lit as these things often are by hidden spotlights in little alcoves.  The floor seemed to have a path lifted out of the ground at us.  The air was dank and cool, so we followed the cave through to its' end where we emerged out at the dragon statue, who guffed out a snort of flame to greet us.  It seems that Wawel has an oft-exercised Dragon myth of it's own, making several appearances in various forms in every gift shop in town and even gracing the awards of the Krakow film festival.

We skipped down onto the waterfront and carried on.  The Vistula is wide and winds through the south of the city in a gradual arc, occasionally crossed by industrial-looking bridges and decorated with all sorts of interesting looking graffiti.  On the other side of the river sat a large grey sphere, innocuous aside from it's oddity.  We assumed it was some sort of gas container.

Glancing back as we carried on, it was surprising to see the sphere now fully a hundred feet into the air, tethered only by a single rope.  We resolved to return on the other side, and ride the delicate little basket suspended below.

Some walking later we crossed over on a busy road bridge, and followed our city map into a semi-constructed commercial area.  Fresh new tarmac flanked by half finished pavements, 'business as usual' signs, and lots of wire fencing separating us from yet more building projects suggested we were going in wholly the wrong direction.  Suddenly the evidence of the new dropped away and a far older style of factory building - many of which looked in a poor state of repair became the dominant sight.  We had arrived in the small part of Krakow that had been kept anything like it was during the most violent political upheavals of a city in modern history, and the epicentre was the Oskar Schindler Museum.

From the grey, unassuming frontage - little changed except maybe a little better maintained than it's pre-war self - didn't overtly advertise it's intentions, except as you got closer and studied the windows - full of the pictures of the factory staff who helped keep the factory keep running in the face of intense pressures during the war years.

Though there were no explicit signs inside to ban picture taking, the winding passages told a mesmerising story, starting in the pre-war years where the population - healthily populated by Jews at the time - saw the impending years as possibility for growth and change for the better, but the growing realisation that those entering into power had much darker intentions, began to split and break the community, even before the war had begun.  The most gut-wrenching moments depicted was the room dressed full of posters with the festivities marking the end of summer 1939, just before the Nazis gained power.  Much like the Nagasaki and Hiroshima museums managed, I left feeling emotionally drained, but if you have the chance to go, it is highly recommended.

Needing some air, we headed outside, and, since there was a tourist golf buggy heading round the corner with nobody inside, we took the opportunity to get around a few other sights in double-quick time, since the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky.

The driver had barely given us time to climb aboard before setting off, and we scooted across the busy intersections towards the closest sight.  At one point - apparently - we passed near the site of one of the few preserved remnants of the old wall that was erected around the Jewish quarters of Krakow old town - one of five Ghettos used by the Nazi's to further emasculate it's citizens, but unfortunately we were gone in a blink and I didn't see it. 

What we did manage to see was a monument to the Ghetto Jews.  In the middle of a square was a well-maintained, cobbled square containing evenly-placed chairs.  All around the buildings were modified or replaced entirely with modernity, but the chairs had significance.  Created in 2005, each of the chairs - and there are many situated in the square, including some at the bus stops - represent a thousand Jewish victims of the exterminations in the Old Town alone.  People are encouraged to sit on them, reminding them that anyone is capable of being one of the victims.

The disappearing light told us that it was time to give up on the sightseeing, and so we asked to go back to the city centre, close enough to the hotel but on the other side of the town square so we could pass through.  After seeing the sights for today it was refreshing to return to the crowded and pleasant market square where people were happy and carefree, although we looked with new eyes on the architecture thanks to our history lesson; particularly the central clock, the historical place of hangings and beheadings, and the restored statue of Jewish poet Adam Mickiewicz, destroyed by the Nazis at the start of the war.  The square itself was briefly renamed Adolf Hitler Platz - something the overtly modest dictator had a penchant for doing.

Our day was nearing it's end, but we were not quite done yet.  Our hotel only had it's room available for today, and so we needed to lug our things across from the south to the north side of the town centre, where a swanky new hotel would provide quite a contrast to our delapidated (but more interesting) current one.

Ms. Plants insisted she knew the best route and a tram/taxi was unnecessary.  I was quizzical - and increasingly so as we lugged our heavy belongings through the darkening and busying streets.  Eventually, we found the hotel - an impressive but rather featureless structure no more than a year or so old - and checked ourselves in.  We rested our bones for a while, went out for a meal, and looked around the evening markets in the cool night air.

A Polish Wedding 2, or: How to Find a Friend in the Wilderness

The next morning brought more food than I could possibly want in the form of the breakfast bar.  Filled with processed meats and cheeses, the thought of it rolling over my tastebuds and flopping down on top of last night's partially digested feast, it turned my stomach, so I went back upstairs and put on my jogging gear.  Generally, running on a full stomach is asking for trouble but I was desperate for some fresh air in my lungs.  It would also take away some of that sickly bloat that I had imposed on myself the night before.  Wanting to try something a little longer than yesterday I looked at the route on google and traced a possible alternative - heading out of the other side of town and meeting up with the road I was on yesterday to make a loop of about 10k.  The roads all looked pretty obvious, so I decided to go for it.

Heading out of town down a long, straight road, I felt much better.  The fresh morning air was filling the lungs and the quiet scenery settled the mind into the day ahead.  But soon, the rain began and quickly strengthened.  I didn't mind as the temperature was mild and a bit of rain while running keeps me cool.  I kept on the back road; the map suggested I just stick to that and I would eventually reach the road I was on yesterday.  As the miles went by I was expecting to see signs for neighboring towns, but the turnings came and went and none of them resulted in anything familiar.

An hour or so in and the rain stopped.  So did the road.  The tarmac ended abruptly and a dirt track extended into the fields beyond, obscured by an old tractor.  By this point, I had been up and down several turnings without luck and I was getting nervous.  I stopped and looked around the area - a remote rural road with a couple of houses either side.  The garden at the end was the site of a work in progress.  The shell of a house, little more than a pile of breeze blocks was guarded by a large, barking dog in a kennel.  Fortunately he was on a lead and the garden was surrounded by a high wire fence.

Then came the puppy.  We have a puppy back home who was staying with grandparents while we were away, and so my first reaction to this bounding ball of cute was along the lines of 'awwwww'.  He wobbled towards me; a black retriever of some kind who had just found a new friend.  The wire fence separating us was no match for him, as he burrowed his way underneath and came to give me a personal greeting.  This was nice, I thought.  I petted him and gave him plenty of fuss for a short while, before turning back and jogging up the road.

But the little mutt was not for losing his new best friend.  I ran and he followed.  I ran further and he sped up.  This was getting worrying.  I couldn't have him along for the ride; he'd eventually tire and then be as lost as me, and at this moment I was taking up his full attention, so he had nothing on his mind beyond seeing what new adventures I would take him to see.  As the rain started to pour again, I trotted back to the garden and lifted him over.  He burrowed under again and looked at me with his tongue and tail wagging.  I repeated, and tried to weigh the fence down with stones, then ran for it.  I got thirty yards down the road and then heard the scamper of wobbly claws on tarmac behind me.

I was getting desperate.  Wherever home was I needed to get there soon.  I went back and scanned the houses - every one seemed deserted.  After trying to fool him to get stuck behind a gate, I came across another house a few doors down with a sturdily fenced garden.  I listened for dogs and scanned for warning notices, but found none.  This was his best chance.  I picked him up, and through the grateful licking, placed him down over the fence.  He looked at me forlornly, his best friend had double-crossed him, but I had to go.

I jogged away trying not to think about the possible fate that I had given him.  The owner of the house would find him a few minutes later and give him some food before handing him back to his owner.  Yes.  I choose to believe this is what happened.

It had been a couple of hours now since leaving.  I had given up on the idea of making the circle back to the hotel and instead tried to retrace my steps, but there were so many roads I had been down unsuccessfully I was unsure at each junction.

Then a ray of hope.  In the driveway of a house was a bicycle next to an open door.  Maybe someone was there.  What was the name of the town I had come from?  Come on, brain!

Just as I was about to try the gate, a woman came outside.  Praying she understood me I waved hello in as unwierd way as I could.  Just so she was aware, I said 'English' early on so she knew I'd have no clue what she was saying.  I guess seeing an English jogger in Poland must be unusual (I didn't see any joggers anywhere my whole time in the country) but one popping up in the pouring rain must have been even stranger.  So when she spoke a little broken English back to me it was a huge relief.  It was at this point my brain kicked in and recalled the name of the town - Międzybórz! - and my pronunciation was good enough to give her an idea of my predicament.  Surprisingly there was no way through even though Google Maps lied and said there was; my only way there was to go back the way I came, which fortunately she gave me directions for.

It is down to that strangers' great generosity that I made it back about an hour after that.  She actually came to see my progress on her bike a mile or so in to make sure I was on the right track.  The first signs of the familiar town through the gloom and the rain felt like coming home and I finally made it through the door, shortly before my partner sent out the search party.

Showered and dressed, we headed out for a look around the nearby town of Sycow, a relatively bustling place a step up from our sleepy hotel haunt.  A long road split the town in half, and represented the commercial 'district'.  National supermarkets pushed their way into the spaces where corner shops once were, squeezing aside those left from an earlier time.

Beyond the curiosity of greengrocers selling unusually shaped vegetables and the weird and wonderful things lining the shelves of the supermarkets, the place had little to entertain the passing tourist, and why should it?  We sat for a short while in a pleasant little cafe and then headed back.  After all, today was round two.

The general idea is that the wedding guests are assaulted on day one of the wedding with a near infinite barrage of food.  The food not eaten, rather than being scraped indignantly away into a nearby bin, is recycled.  Sometimes over several days, depending on the amount of animals slaughtered and the number of mouths willing to have bits of them repeatedly pushed inside.

And so it was that we provided two of those mouths.  Come midday, the onslaught started again, with familiar friends around the table, and on it.  But, there was something new put in front of us.  A curious-looking soup was being passed around in a big silver bowl.  As an aperitif, it sounded like a good stomach liner, so I beckoned the ladel in my direction.

The thin stock was full of what appeared to be vegetable strands, something like the seedy central bit of a courgette left to boil for a few hours and added to give a little variety to an otherwise boring soup.  Nevertheless, it was quite nice.  It was only after I placed down my spoon that I noticed Ms. Plants and several others had passed on the idea, knowing full well that the stringy stuff was offal.

We ploughed through the reheated food given to us, as much as we could.  It was still pretty good although the once-pristine square cakes had a definite look of being handled a few times, and thus nowhere near as appetizing.

The band was back once more.  They had little sleep since the previous night but were fresh and raring to go, belting out a number of Polish and western hits, which periodically we got up and danced to.  We sat and chatted and alternated between the food and dancing as the day turned to night.

Sometime late on, our attentions turned to John.  John is a part-time helper at the local church, who was invited along to take part in the wedding ceremony.  Now firmly out of his cassocks he had been sitting quietly and it was only now that we noticed he was a bit too quiet.  Unfazed by the banter around him he sat nodding off with his eyes closed.  Initial amusement turned to concern as we clocked the beads of sweat on his head.

Ms. Plants gave an immediate diagnosis, based as much on common sense as from her nursing experience.  He was an elderly man who had lived a sheltered life.  This was his first time abroad, and his normal alcohol intake was usually a sip of sherry on an evening.  For the second day in a row, his liver was having to accommodate the large amounts of beer, wine and vodka that an unrestricted drinking environment was providing him.  He needed to lie down.

We persuaded him to leave the chair and four of us helped the semi-conscious, apologetic man to the cooler lobby where a sofa was conveniently waiting.  We opened the door and sat with him for a while and slowly he started to feel a little better.  Insisting he was fine, we were not so sure, and so with some persuading, we were able to head upstairs, supporting him under his shoulders.  Just prior to reaching his room, the inevitable happened and he puked all over the floor.

We hoofed him onto the bed and after giving him a little water and checking he was okay, left him to sleep things off.

The remainder of the night involved more games and music, and of course, eating.  The last thing I remember from that night was being whirled around in a giant circle of people, sweaty hands holding me to the left and right, getting down to a Polish rendition of 'Yes Sir, I can Boogie'.  It will not be leaving my memory any time soon.

The next day was our last wedding-related day in Poland.  The morning brought with it third-hand foodstuffs, and then in the afternoon we visited the grooms' parents again and they took us all out for a meal. Thankfully, this was at a nice restaurant in the adjascent town, so everything was fresh, and we had no social pressure to wolf it all down.  We spent the evening packing.

The beginning of the new week was also the beginning of our holiday proper.  Up until this point, we were pretty much at the mercy of the meticulous arrangement of the bride, but now we were free to do as we wished.  The bride and groom were staying on a few days;  some of our English contingent were heading home, others doing like us and visiting other parts of Poland and beyond.  We had a room booked in Krakow, but first we had to get there, and that meant a bit of travel.

Marko very generously volunteered through his hangover to get us to the centre of Wroclaw, where the bus station would give us the best way of getting to Krakow before sundown.  Suggestions that maybe we could take a train between the two cities were frowned upon by those in the know; the Polish train system, we were told, was not very useful if you wanted to travel from one place to another in comfort or timeliness, so the car it was.

The kart van was nowhere to be seen, so we squeezed ourselves and another couple going to the airport, plus all our bags, into the old estate car Marko pulled up in.  Closer to the ground felt faster still, and the fields and forests went a blur past the windows until we reached the motorways once more.

An hour or so later we reached central Wroclaw, a bustling city with echoes of it's past.  Immaculate architecture stood on one side of a road, and over the other side stooped pock-marked wrecks of buildings clearly not cleared up from the worst excesses of war.  The buildings dropped away to reveal a dreary looking bus station which looked devoid of love, a metal and corrugated eyesore that was still in use simply because it hadn't fallen apart.

Marko helped us find the ticket booths and worked out the best bus to get on.  The tickets were dirt cheap, enough to make us consider buying several and going to random destinations, but we didn't have the time to reach the far corners of the country.  We stuck to Krakow.  Marko said his farewells and we were on our own to wait for the bus.  Flocks of pigeons and sparrows fluttered about stand 8 and we took turns having a walk about while the other went to the loo, or had a bit of a walk around in the half hour before our bus came.

The bus ride was pretty nondescript, as was the scenery outside.  Poland beyond the surviving pre-war architecture is not the prettiest place to view through a bus window; we were thankful for the functional roads but were looking forward to seeing something a little nicer - our fingers were crossed for Krakow.

We reached the Krakow bus station in early evening.  Compared to Wroklaw, Krakow was altogether more beautiful, less dusty, and much more vibrant.  We gathered our bearings and headed in the direction we thought the room was in.  It was warm and sunny, and after a few heated arguments about the correct road to take we started to enjoy the scenery instead.  The Planty park gardens are a thin ring of greenery around the inner core of the city, and we were able to follow them around to get most of the way in.  The well-kept cobble roads and the almost cosmopolitan vibe was a nice alternative to the remote, featureless view of Poland we had so far; it would have been better still without lugging a load of cases over it all.

We finally made it to our stopover for the night.  We had another three days to spend in Krakow but our original choice of hotel was booked up on the first day, so we found a top floor apartment to tide us over for the first night, on the south side of the Planty, next to Wawel Royal castle.  Definitely part of the old town, it was hard to tell whether we had rung the doorbell to the hotel or somebody's house, but an enthusiastic woman buzzed us in through the huge wooden doors, revealing a dark and cavernous entrance hall.  It looked like the entrance to the sort of apartment block that a french hitman from the a sixties noir film might be running through.

Murky, smoke-coloured plaster walls and old fashioned metal-framed windows looking out onto other apartments just a few feet away, made up the scenery of the first three floors, with a reassuring sticker sign on each level telling us the guest apartments were in fact this way.  At the entrance to the upper floors, the decor changed from old-fashioned to modern; a brushed-steel doorway held open by a slim, bubbly young woman who ushered us up a final flight of smooth wooden steps and into a contrastingly modern hallway.  We waited patiently while she took a call, thumbing through the Krakow tourist brochures, and then finally got our room.  A modern, open-plan kitchen/bedroom/living room with a recessed telly, gaudily painted walls and a selection of tightly-screwed down modern art paintings dotted around.

After getting our breath back and unpacking a little, we headed back out to the centre of the city.  We didn't have much daylight left so restricted ourselves to looking around the market square in the epicentre of the old town.  A wide open space compared with the tight and narrow shop-lined streets surrounding it, the square was the place to meet up with friends it seemed.  Large gatherings of people, some just idling around; others watching some of the open-air entertainment.  Others darting through between shops and restaurants.  A handful of men here and there were trying to sell luminous rocket toys as cheap kids presents for Christmas.

In the middle of the square is the Cloth Hall - a slender covered market made up of a single corridor with little shops either side, both inside and out.   We walked amongst the crowds and eyed up the various restaurants and then went inside.

Being September, the theme was Christmas, and many of the little shops either side were buzzing with people looking for something to buy.  A lot of it was just the same as the stuff you see in the German Markets we get around this time, but there were some other more bespoke items dotted here and there, and it still had that feel of selling locally-produced merchandise, even if some of it probably wasn't.

The market was closing up and the night was drawing in, so we spent a little time skirting around the edges of the square to see what choice of food there was (answer: just about everything you'd get in your average English city).  We passed on a rather nice looking Indian, just in case and instead took the advice of a slightly biased young man drumming up business for an Italian restaurant underneath a Christmas shop.  We spent a candlelit evening chatting about what we had seen so far and where we would go tomorrow, as the shadows flickered on the nearly pointed stonework above us.

Our holiday was finally ours.