Donkey visits Poland

Great - I want to know what happens next!

Donkey Visits Poland volume 2

Part 10

'We go now,' said Bartek. 'To our shop. It's not a shop.'
I frowned.
'You will see.'

We scrambled through some waste ground behind some factories - mostly derelct, and ascended a slope of long grass and young ash trees that had probably been growing since the area had fallen out of use, I guessed some time in the early to mid 1990s.

At the top there was the concrete shell of a building. It had no floor, just sand and broken beer bottles. 'This is the toilet.' he told me, pointing to what may have once been a cupboard. It may have once actually been a toilet, but was now a dark corner strewn with more broken beer bottles. I looked at his trainers, somehow clean despite the terrain we had been crossing. I looked at my new brown shoes. Was I displaying some sort of English sartorial elegance or was I just a bit old?

He told me how he and his mates often went there to drink. He didn't like the way so many bottles had been smashed - they had made quite a collection, but it looked like someone had been shooting them. There was even a board supported by piles of bricks that had proabably been used in this wayward activity.

I sat down on the window ledge over-looking the slope we had just climbed. Through the opposite hole that had once been a window I could see a flat area, possibly tarmac, that looked just as unused as everything else. So I looked down at the wildflowers and the derelect industrial buildings below.

We drank our bottles of Łomża Export. I wondered where they might be exporting this stuff to. You don't find much more than Żywiec and Tyskie where I live.

I put my empty bottle down, he threw his out of the window and it disappeared into the trees. 'Aaaagh!' I made the sound of an animal being stuck by a flying bottle. 'Wiewiórka!' He looked at me with a kind of 'You know the word for squirrel!' expression.

The former power station buildings were full of rubble and asbestos. Climbing over some bricks to keep up with Bartek, we looked into a small room with a tattered flag amongst the rubble. He said something about communist times that I couldn't quite understand. I always get the feeling that if someone doesn't want to talk about those days, you don't ask them. In Bartek's case I didn't ask because of his youth, poor English and the fact he'd move on to another room and was talking about how this was 'Marcin's lounge!'

'Come on. I show you Marcin's swimming pool!'

God knows what it had been, but it looked like a health and safety nightmare. Two very deep, asbestos-lined tanks with some oily liquid in the bottom and a large rusty framework supporting some rusty steps down to a rusty platform. 'Marcin's swimming pool' he said again. Poor Marcin - the butt of most of their jokes - I have to admit that even I had joined in to some extent. It suits him - he knew he wasn't the brightest one, but was probably the most cheerful.

After climbing back up the steps from the Devil's bath-tub, we approached the centrepiece - a huge concrete tower that can be seen from all around Łomża, from the upstairs in the house I was staying in and from the hills above town where we had gone on the first day. 'Great.' I said. 'Shall we move on?' It was just a dirty great lump of concrete - visually dominating, but you can't do anything with it. It actually seemed more dominating by it's omnipresence around town than standing below it.

As we walked back towards the shop for another beer to warm us up for the night out, we walked through a part of the factory complex where men in overalls were actually working and pushing trolleys around. They seemed to pay no attention to us - not even a 'Grrr! Pesky kids!' sort of look. 'Don't worry about them!' We walked on. We walked a kind of 'There's no reason we're not supposed to be here.' kind of walk.

I waited for Bartek to climb over the chain-link fence. I looked at the hollow brick building, the smashed windows, the flowers growing amongst the broken glass below. Then I jumped over the fence. Moments later, we were back in the shop, deciding which mystery brand of cigarettes to buy, but knowing that the beer had to be Łomża. The label on the bottle really ought to have a dirty great chimney on it somewhere.

Part 11

The film stopped and the spare driver made an announcement. We were to stop for a fifteen minute break. The film had been good. I didn't know what was going on or what was being said, but other passengers were laughing from time to time. What made it good was that it was the first Polish film I had seen in Poland - when the television had been switched on in the house, the films were nearly always American, but overlain by the gentle deadpan of the narrator, speaking over all of the dialogue with the translation.

I rolled a ciagrette as I waited for a space in the queue down the aisle. Great! Someone from the seat behind mine getting something out of their bag and holding everyone up behind. I slipped off the coach and sparked up the moment I touched down. The sun was slowly climbing down to the trees on the horizon.

My legs needed a stretch, so I walked around the picinc area by the car park. Others just stood by the coach whilst one or two other people were also just walking to get the circulation going in their weary limbs again. I stopped to roll a second cigarette. There were swifts swooping over the field of wheat that lay before me like a golden sea. I watched them darting and glding, catching their evening meal of insects buzzing in the warm evening air.

I strolled on. There was a small building with a kiosk that was closed and some toilets. As I walked round, away from the huddled passengers, there was a young man wearing a hood and baggy jeans. He approached me and asked if I had a lighter. I dug into my pocket. I had accidentally walked off with three other people's lighters the night before. I offered him a lighter and told him it was his.

He lit a small glass pipe and offered it to me.

The swifts continued their aerobatic display. The corn swayed in the field. The sun skimmed the trees in the distance. The ash tree above me gently shook its leaves. The light was golden brown and the air was sweet.

I walked one more lap of the picnic area. The drivers finished their cigarettes and told us all to do likewise. I climbed back to my seat and back to the film. I still didn't know what was going on, but it didn't matter. The road was rolling along below and the darkening fields and woods rolling by into the night.

I estimate 2400 words here....

That equates to about 2.4 pictures. Where are the pictures???

So, was it tobacco like material in the pipe, or some other type of material? Did you inhale?

I took a couple of pictures on that holiday. Mostly of the nicer one of their two dogs.
Two pictures of the family. In both pictures at least one of them is obscured by a plant or a dog or something getting in the way. There were some pictures, not taken by me of a day-trip to some reconstructed mediaeval buildings and stuff, but they're not representative of the holiday as a whole.


This is all a true account of what happened, just in case anyone thinks this is fiction. However, writing is selective - there has to be a certain amount of my own imagination. Not imaginary things that didn't happen, but an imaginitive way of describing them. I used my imagination. You use yours.

rocky or weedy?

In Monty Python speak, he was a naughty boy. But he wasn't a very naughty boy.

As clear as pickle soup.

Part 12

Marcin's car was a Ford Fiesta. 'Made in England' he told me. For the type, size and quality of the car, I imagined it may have once come with a sticker annoucing its country of origin rather like a toy car might carry a label 'Made in Hong Kong'. We went for a drive early in the evening. He enjoyed pratting about, and he wasn't going to make an exception to this when sat behind the wheel. Pulling away from his house, he attempted a wheelspin that failed. The car jolted forwards. The kids playing nearby seemed to give an 'Even we're more grown up than that' look.

Bartek and I stopped to buy a couple of bottles of beer each. We got back into the car. Bartek opened our bottles with his lighter. I remembered all the times I had attempted to open bottles with street furniture and failed. If it wasn't made to be a bottle-opener, I tend not to be able to open bottles with it. 'Marcin uses his teeth!' he cheekily told me as he passed my bottle over his shoulder.

We were back near 'their shop' - the derelict concrete building amongst the trees overlooking the old factories. They were both still having fun with trying to speak English. Marcin kept saying phrases he'd seen on computer games. His favourite was a humourously mispronounced 'Game Over'. I offered 'Hig-h Stsores.' We polished off our beers and got back into the car. I was grateful that Marcin had the sense not to drink and drive because sense was not his strong point.

We hit some uneven farm tracks, Marcin deliberately aiming for the potholes and wheel-ruts. I couldn't help finding it funny - maybe it was really the sense of danger. And stupidity. Being in a car with such a madman is not the kind of thing I normally do. More and more I understood why the others took the mick out of Marcin. He loved it and it only encouraged him. He had a glint in his eye. He wound his window right down.

Still driving, he started climbing out of the window. There was laughter, accompanied by lots of the bad language I recognised, and a certain upping in the level of fear! He sat on the window ledge, his head and body right outside the car, still driving along the track, still aiming for every lump and bump in the road. I was almost crying with laughter. 'He's trying to kill us all.'

I almost said a prayer when he climbed back into his seat with a little help from Bartek holding the steering wheel.

We didn't go to any bars that evening like I thought we would. We picked up Karol and sat overlooking a stream with the lights of houses in the distance and had just one more bottle of beer. 'Chcę krzaki.' I said so that Marcin might let me out of the car.
'Chceś krzaki?' he giggled.
'Potrzebuję!' I demanded to more laughter.

I got the sense they were all good mates, but all very different to eachother. Bartek liked to think of himself as quite tough. Marcin liked everyone to think of him as a clown. Karol seemed more serious and artistic. He told me he liked films. With help from Bartek's better English, he started talking about Roman Polanski, and I about Krzystof Kieslowski, whom he admired. 'Wolę... Kurwa! I prefer Polanski!'

I asked if any of them had ever smoked dope. 'I used to, but don't any more.' I told them, carefully avoiding the words 'when I was your age!' They liked to give the impression that only the lowest of the low in Poland did such things.
'No. We drink. Hash is for losers.'

Then Karol admitted to having smoked some when he was on some summer camp. I think Bartek didn't want a friend of his father's to think he was too much more disreputable than his father! I wasn't looking for dirt on anyone - I like to find out who people are, what they do. Find out what experiences make them similar and what experiences make them differnt to me. I could picture the same thing happening somewhere back in England, only I wouldn't have been there.

The conversation rapidly descended into impressions of characters from South Park. Night was setting in and we drove back home. It was to be my last night in Łomża.

Part 13 - The Shortest Chapter: Unlucky For Some

We were driving back from the reconstructed mediaeval village. I think it was at a place (seemingly ironically) called Nowogród. It was hot and it was good to have the window open. Sebastian was driving, Ewelina was sat in the front, and I was in the back next to Dana, Ewelina's mother. It had made a nice change spending most of the day being polite and well-behaved.

We were not far from the main road back to Łomża, just passing some farm buildings. I have said before and I will say again, that there is something idiosyncratic, dare I say it, quaint, about Polish buildings. In any country, buildings in the countryside tend to be built according to local ways and as they were designed for particular needs, they do tend to be unique. This seems particularly true in Poland.

I sat looking out of the window at the world going by. Sebastian wasn't driving too fast this time.

Suddenly, through the windscreen, we saw an old man on a bicycle pedalling slowly on the other side of the road, and he was holding a rope, on the other end of which was a cow, slowly dawdling her way along in the shade of the hedge by the roadside. If I could have reached my camera and if Sebastian's 'not so fast' driving had been a little more like scenic-route Sunday driving!

All faces in the car looked round at the spectacle. There were amused gasps and giggles. I remembered some of the comments from Bartek and his mates about 'village people', so the amused gasping may have been more from me and the giggling from the others. I peered through the back window at the man, the bicycle and the cow disappearing behind a turn in the road.

Polish farm buildings. Perhaps there are even cow-sheds complete with bicycle racks! I wasn't too annoyed about not managing to take a picture - I knew this image would be something I would remember for ever.

That wasn't actually all that short, was it?
Hmmm! It still might be the shortest so far.

Here is a picture of Poland

Werka

Is this the big dog who didn't bite you? Which is friends with the little one who did - if memory serves me correctly...

Wera / Werka / Werunia is a lovely dog. Slighlty mad, but well behaved.
I spent a lot of time running round the garden trying, and usually failing, to get that stick off her.
When I did finally win the stick, it was a bit unpleasant so I'd always have to give it back to her. Well, throw it to the bushes on the other side of the garden.

edit: On the last visit, there was a suggestion that she might be a mother-to-be.
Father: unknown!

edit edit: Father: another dog.

edit edit edit: I have a strange feeling the name is spelt Werónia. Help please!

Does this picture look like it could have been taken in any country other than Poland?

This is the one that bit me

No, that is clearly Polish soil.

See how it has turned into a little dog.
Kropka

Is this the tower?!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8HIlb6Y6zo

The omnipresent tower indeed.