The Polish Sunrise

This is a quick sketch that Jake wrote, detailing - delineating? our last day and morning in Wroclaw. I have posted it here because it's nice to have the story through someone's eyes, sometimes. Special thanks to Jake for allowing me to include it here, and regards to his friend Harry for digging it out.
Disclaimer: I don't own this. Jake does, though I suppose he would give me the rights if I asked. I don't own any of the people in the story except myself. All events and places are real, unsurprisingly. Jake says he thinks its badly written, but of course he would say that.


-------------------------------------

Four o'clock in the morning and I regret six cups of coffee plus vodka in the bathrooms. For the first time in too long, I couldn't sleep.

I was a fool in the nude to my dorm mates, and now five hours later sobriety was kicking in. But the caffeine was running strong.
The first time on the road that I couldn't sleep.

You've been moving for what feels like forever, and at a moment like this you get a chance to stop and process everything. It wakes you up. Don't expect to sleep. I got up and got more coffee.

Drunk and sober in the same day is not a pleasant experience. You don't forget much. I remember rolling around the halls makes, showering in the nude. I remember that Pavlov guy and his nice hairy arse during the striptease.

I remember Vera. I vaguely remember Viv, but she left too soon. Church bells are ringing, and most of all as the receptionist avoids eye contact with myself in the kitchen, I remember my dick on CCTV. Tomorrow - or today? - you are leaving. Never play truth or dare in Poland.

Coffee, coffee, coffee. I knew four words so far for coffee. Coffee. Kafija. Kafija. Something I couldn't spell, but it sounded like kafija. And café.

Wake yourself up and listen to the bells for a bit. Sleep in the first car that picks you up. Don't talk to the receptionist. He probably wants to kick you out. And shit man, clean up the glass in the bathroom. Why in God's name did we get drunk in a bathroom?

I shot up stairs to the lounge with my coffee. The whole place is vacant. Two hours or so until Polish sunrise. You'll read a book or play guitar or something.

Pay attention to those bells and you're finished. So don't. For the life of me, I had no idea what I was strumming that morning.

As a ground rule, I don't sleep much in hostels. Someone is always doing something in squalor like these. Sleeping outside by motorways, or in public parks is good fuel for paranoia and bad experiences, but in a nice comfy dorm room full of people and a kitchen stocked with coffee I tend to indulge.

But this was pushing a limit. These things happen. I let time slide. Viv woke up as I was brewing another. Something vague... she was leaving for Germany this morning. Berlin.

Shock and horror at someone else waking up for daylight, so offer her a damn coffee. She wants you to walk her to the coach. Carry her bag, that sort of shit. Very civil. Go for it man.

Yeah I will, and yeah I did. So I'm carrying something or other and we make a way to the station. Daylight has spread, but Wrocław is practically empty at this time. I'm trying to make some sort of discussion, so I tell her all the wild shit that happened after she left.

I guessed she missed out. Maybe she did, maybe she's not that sort of traveller. Everything's sort of fuzzy at the moment. Sunrise doesn't help. Bright light should though. Wait it out for the return to normalcy.

What do you talk about? Talk about yourself. "You're hitch-hiking? How much money do you have?"

No, I'm not homeless. Okay, maybe I might be. Technically. Home is just somewhere else at the moment.
Cue the next two questions. The same ones everyone will ask you. The same ones everyone has asked you for the entirety of eternity since the trip began*

If you're born twice, the earliest memory onward seems like infinity. "Aren't you scared?" Or something. "What do your parents think?" Or something along those lines.

I never answer these things properly. Sure, they're fine with it. Who knows what they think? Fuck knows why I'm doing it. Try telling me what there is to gain. At least I have the privilege of uncertainty.

Wroclaw, part II

Wroclaw, as always, is incredibly pretty. Criminally underrated, as most Polish cities are.

I actually didn't take as many photos of Wroclaw as I would have liked to, since I spent far too much time on other things. I spent almost an entire afternoon searching for a sewing kit, since one of my flipflops had broken and I didn't want to buy a new pair. It's amazing how many things fell apart during this trip: my H&M bag which I had to throw away in Vienna, my flipflops, my leggings, practically everything. After spending hours looking for a sewing kit, I then had to spend another hour in the hostel fixing my broken flipflop. Also, the new bag I'd bought at Keplerplatz was falling apart, so I had to mend that too. I guess that's what you get for 15 euros. On the bright side, Wroclaw was so incredibly hot that it was nice to go back to the hostel and do some quiet sewing and cool down.

That was another thing I noticed about this trip, the continental weather. For the first half of my trip, up to Prague, the weather was unbearably hot. It was like being in an oven, or even back in Taiwan. Only exception was Vienna, where it was uncharacteristically cold, and Dresden, where it was also decidedly cooler. Starting from Nuremberg, it started to get very cold indeed, going into the minuses when I was in Hallstatt and Salzburg.

But back to Wroclaw and its picturesque old town, which I would have dearly liked to spend more time in, but it was Berlin the next day.

The town hall again, which I can never get enough of.

The town square, which was peaceful and serene.

One of those red-bricked cathedrals which has those typical colourful tile roofs that's so commonly seen in this part of the world.

Dinner.

Will's blood sausage.

The second night was fully booked and that was when things got a bit out of hand. A Polish traveller named Pavlov treated us all to vodka and someone decided we should all play truth and dare. Truth actually wasn't that fun since we didn't know enough about each other to ask shocking questions and hear equally shocking revelations, but dare got progressively cheekier as the night grew older. One of our roommates, a Turk, told us we were too noisy and we ended up sitting in a bathroom to finish the vodka and dare. Jake tried to make Will put his glasses in the bog but I put my foot down firmly on that one. As the booze continued to flow and everyone got increasingly drunk, the dares got more and more outrageous. Since I had a rather early bus to catch the next morning, I had to leave the scene fairly early, and by all accounts that was when Dare got really out of hand.

Got up at the crack of dawn the next morning after getting less than three hours of sleep. Whilst you're backpacking, there's always THAT early bus to catch in the morning..

As I went into the kitchen to make myself one last cup of coffee from their very excellent coffee maker (that's the first thing I'm buying when I get a place of my own), I was rather surprised to bump into Jake. I hadn't expected anyone to be up at 4 other than me, much less him. We ended up having one of those conversations you usually see in bohemian films premiered at the Cannes film festival. Lots of musings on carpe diem, 'gather ye rosebuds,' and the temporality of time and space.

Took the DE BAHN bus to Berlin, and came up with a whopping cold there, but that's the stuff of my next entry. Enjoyed my bus ride immensely - buses >>>> trains any day. Trains are way more expensive and incredibly uncomfortable. Buses are the way to go.

Wroclaw, part I

The first thing to know about Wroclaw is that if you pronounce it the Anglo way you will become a laughing stock. I learnt this the hard way. According to google it's pronounced "Vro-tz-wav" which I just kept forgetting for some reason. I kept calling it "Row-clorr." I can't count the amount of blank stares I got when telling people in Katowice that I was going to "Ro-clorr," which would usually then give way to "Oh, you mean VRO-TZ-WAFF/V." Vera told me it was pronounced Vro-tz-luv, and you pronounce the last syllable the same way you do "love." Oh, well. Close enough for the East Asian whose native tongue is weird and tonal.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I arrived at the Dworzec (that's the Polish word for main bus station) at about nine-ish. The directions to the hostel were fairly simple to follow - walk straight, turn right, walk straight again - but it still took me a good thirty minutes to get there.

This is a picture of my last meal in Katowice, by the way, which I forgot to include in my last entry so might as well put it here. The last entry was too gloomy, and I didn't want to put pictures of food there either.

When I arrived at the hostel I was completely knackered. Check in was uneventful - a rather haggard looking boy carrying a guitar came in the same time I did, and asked if there were any available beds in a decidedly southern English accent. I looked at him, he might have looked back at me, and I took my keys and left.

Communal area in the hostel and a tranny Marilyn Monroe.

Walked into the room which, to my surprise, was practically empty. It was an ten-person room, quite large and airy, not one of those sardine tin hostel rooms. There were only two guests there, who introduced themselves as Will and Vera. Will was from Australia and Vera was from Belarus, and both of them were undergrad students in Wroclaw, though not at the same universities. I said hi, we all introduced ourselves (although they'd obviously already been talking before I came in) and we waded through the formalities - where we were from, what we were doing in Wroclaw etc etc. I told them about my visit to Auschwitz and how it was weighing heavily on my mind. Since they had both visited the concentration camps previously, we had quite a bit to talk about. Somewhere in the middle of this the haggard boy from the reception came in and introduced himself as Jake.

I went off to shower and inspected a cut on my foot which had somehow gotten infected, horror of horrors (I obviously don't carry iodine around with me), and had swollen considerably and was incredibly uncomfortable to walk on. I went back, noticed that Jake and Vera had disappeared, and asked Will what he knew about wound infection and whether I was going to get gangrene. Will assured me that I wasn't going to be losing limbs any time soon, and we sat down and talked. It was so nice, being able to speak proper English again rather than gesturing wildly and speaking slowly - "whip-laaaaash," says Pietro. Hands down my favourite mutant of the Xmen movies, including Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult and the incomparable James McAvoy.

Jake and Vera came back pretty late, and Jake strummed away on his guitar while Will and I talked on the lower bunks; Vera was skyping with her mother on the upper bunk. It was a rather magical night, the sort that I try to find every time I travel. Everything seemed so right: having such a large room for such a minimum amount of people, which was a lovely change, no smelly backpackers, no weird older people, no sullen people huddled away on their bunks, no snorers. That and the fact that we were all the same age range and shared common interests. And on top of that, I got TWO POWER SOCKETS AND A NIGHT LIGHT to myself.

Next morning, I went upstairs to the kitchen where there was a coffee machine of all things, and made myself a nice cup of coffee. Jake came up soon after, and then Will, and I put away my tablet and we talked a bit more. Jake went off to busk, and Will introduced me to this restaurant which had been open since the Soviet era and was dirt cheap. Food did not look particularly appetising but was surprisingly tasty.

Mashed potatoes, mysterious meat and pink goulash. Tasted 1000x better than it actually looks.

The restaurant.

Walked around the old town, which was right next to the hostel, so very good location. The old town was breathtakingly beautiful. That's one of the reasons I like Poland so much; it's relatively unknown to tourists, which is reflected by the people who stay in their hostels (have yet to meet anyone from the US, for one..!), very much underrated, incredibly cheap, and takes your breath away. Everywhere you look is an Instagram-worthy picture. Still one of my favourite countries in Europe, and definitely beats some of the overrated and well known European cities such as Paris and Copenhagen. On the one hand I want more people to know about Poland, but on the other I don't want it overrun with tourists and becoming commercialised.

The old city hall.

And the pretty pastel-coloured Flemish-like buildings which I'd seen in Gdansk - another favourite city of mine. Poland never fails to astonish. I've still got Warsaw and Krakow left on my bucket list.

Startling beautiful - I've come to expect this of Poland and yet it never fails to amaze me.

More to come soon. I'm on a roll.