the coriolis effect

Back in Poland, after a day in Sofia, a wedding, more time in Plovdiv. A sensation I should be able to understand Polish, because its not in Cyrillic, coupled with missing Cyrillic already (and a little bit of amazement at the Polish I do know. Hiking tomorrow- (or rather, in too too few hours) until Saturday in the Tatras, then a swung through Krakow on the way to Warsaw and home. Maybe I will learn to like tinned ham, after all...:)

According to Bulgaria, I'm fat.
But aside from extreme undersizing of clothing, its a lovely country. Today we visited the beautiful Bachkovo Monastery, and wandered the streets of Plovdiv with folks from school. Yesterday, more of the mountains, and I sounded out the first ever thing I'd read in Cyrillic only to find myself saying "sn...ack....ba...r. snack bar?" Oh well.
I also tried the local version of Rutger's dearly departed fat cat- a kebab with the fries tossed in the pita for good measure. We went to restaurant (with absinthe on the menu) and the lights went out; used to the DR, I expected the generator to kick in any minute. Funnily enough, less is more...unlike my dearly underdeveloped country, blackouts aren't common here, we had to stick to salad in the dark (and dinner lingered 3 hours anyway. impressive!)

I'm at my roomates house in Plovdiv, which is on a winding little street just blocks from (and probably also on top of) Roman ruins, including an unexcavated Colosseum. Language switch- for the first time I'm listening, because I can actually pick out some of the words that are the same in Polish. Although its been hard to stifle the urge to say thank you in Polish...they actually say merci here:)

More hills than I've seen in a long time, Cyrillic for the first time ever, yummy food, hooray hooray...and we've off for a week of mountains and monasteries, and many Bulgarians that I know from school. I still remember, when I found out my sophomore roomie was Bulgarian, pulling out the atlas to figure out where Plovdiv was....

Our first night out in Krakow was marred initially by the tragic and unexpected demise of my favorite pair of shoes. but it was lots of dancing and being goofy after that....it was a nice release after visiting Auschwitz during the day. Today, a 4 hour tour of old town Krakow, then the market and just chilling...a planters punch, a friend, comfy wicker chairs facing the Cloth Market, dreams of things ahead...
including, immediately, Bulgaria starting tomorrow!

Last class finished thirty minutes ago. Does this make me gainfully unemployed?

Three days, over 80 kilometers walked. Thankfully, Poland is remarkably flat; even though I didn't have real sneakers, my yuppy tigers kept my dogs to a low whimper.
Day 1: Wasosz to Rogi, 26 km. We left Rudnik at 3 am to make it to Wasosz in time for the start of that days trek, and to meet up with our group . Six days before pilgrims had left from Warsaw, Rzeszow, Wroclaw, and other cities; our band of 180 was part of a larger Warsaw pilgrimage that traveled as a pack, and that numbered in the thousands. And so we walked, and walked, and walked....our contact and den mother was a nun from Rudnik who was traveling with a group of kids from the orphanage she runs. Aside from the fact the kids were awesome and pretty hilarious, the nun herself has quite the story: born in a concentration camp, she was given to a Polish family because doctors thought her mother and twin sister wouldn't survive the birth. But survive they did, and when the war ended four days later, they moved to Germany and then the US. The nun didn't learn until she was in her forties that she had a twin sister. The sister had even written the concentration camp to contact her, but when the nun wrote the new york address she received no reply. Finding her long lost sister would, supposedly, take a minimum of 5 years. But with the help of a casual conversation and a friend of a friend, she was put in contact with her twin in less than 24 hours- and they were reunited for their 50th birthdays, 50 years after they were separated at birth.
If that wasn't enough, the nun had taken her vows the same hour (even accounting for the time difference) of the same day her twin sister had gotten married.

Day 2: Rogi to Dabek, 33 km. The best part of the day was when we passed a thoroughly confused cow who just stared at the procession, and thoughtfully turned his head back and forth watching the people go by. Until the REALLY best part of the day, which was Odeviz and I and the kids getting to sleep in a hayloft. Hay EVERYWHERE. so cool.

Day 3: Dabek to Jasna Gora, 27 km, plus hours and hours creeping up the main street of C-towa, because over a 100,000 people came to see the Black Madonna, the painting in the Jasna Gora monastery which is the ending point.

Sometime around 3 AM tonight, we're setting out for Częstochowa.
I don't know exactly what this will entail: a lot of walking, for sure, and a tent at night; right now I'm armed with a nifty sleeping bag but also a nasty cold, so I hope things even out. We're taking the shortcut by driving to nearby Kielce and hitting the road from there. The groups of pilgrims from Janow left a while ago. But so, there by Sunday, I think, and coming back *somehow* on Monday for the last week of classes (Odeviz is charge of details, he and his polish host brother/ cousin/cousin's girlfriend. and hopefully hopefully we meet up with one of the other volunteers in the thousands. )
"hit the road jack" just came up on winamp. and thats that!!!!!!!!

"It was a good weekend, but not a good weekend socially"

That, from a friend, pretty much summed up Budapest. Awesome city: I arrived starry-eyed with things to do, and of course ran myself and two others ragged in the futile quest to do them all. I was borrowing money from a friend, and then the bank put a stop on his debit card (luckily not my credit card...) and another friend had to bail us both out...and in the end we were not only breaking even but had 60 bucks worth of forents left- and the very next minute a transportation cop yanked us off the tram and fined us 30 bucks for traveling without stamped tickets (its an honor system...the other group rode free a bunch of times w. no problems...and we'd bought tickets every time but this one plus one, and it was because we didn't have any small change. whimper whimper whine. )

It had its moments, though. Around the corner from the hostel we (meaning three of us, a complete and utter silently acrimonious divorce, for the best but not without frustration, with the other 4. New rule: stick to groups of 3) - we happened on two kids in the act of adding some graffiti to a wall; when they moved on I took a photo. They saw me though, and came back saying something in Hungarian. I scampered off into our hostel, figuring I'd get shot in the back (not even knowing what the graffiti said) but hoping the other two would head them off. They followed us into the hostel and up the stairs and when we stopped and let the artiste speak he just asked: "Are you policemen?" And of course we say no and then he breaks out into a goofy grin, and raised his fingers in a V : "Peace, peace"- bobbed his head and was gone.

Sunset over Castle Hill from the Chain Bridge. The Terror Haza, and a look at the type of torture cells I've been studying for years. The Ludwig Contemporary Art Museum or bust, and though it wrecked havoc on the schedule, it yielded this: "Words are not the termination of the universe but its common cement. Words are to make something possible that was impossible before"- Tibor Hajas according to Laszlo Behe.

Szechenyi Baths. An 80 degree sauna, a pool with lavender, jumping from hot to cold to hot, a rectangular pool with jets that turned it into a whirlpool, around and around. And a peppermint sauna, billows and billows in foggy air, a bit of mentholated heaven.

guilt for the breakneck speed (new cities overwhelm me, and thrill me), hoping its all ok...
In other news, I switch host families today.

Quote of the week: "The man wanted to holy cow his wife so he bought her a necklace."

Lately its been jumping around, and in the house sleeping, and squandering time. Its become really hot out, which puts a damper on the "get over bike riding fears" plan. But its sad, too, because days are slipping by. The kids who have stuck it out, are pretty awesome. My polish...ach. A travesty, a tragedy, a lost cause.

Budapest tomorrow (well, Friday). Fingers crossed that it works out. As in any largish group, battle lines are subtly being drawn. D and O called me simple ...I'm told I deceived them handily:) But thats what I want...a lovely simply trip.

With some modifications- ixnay on the 5 minute layover- we made it. During the trip, occasionally the three of us would try to enumerate the utterly bizarre things that kept on happening, but often when we sat and thought for too long, someone would fall asleep. The summary always was- that's Poland for you.

We were supertroopers til the end, until the second to last leg of the return train trip- and we all fell asleep, all at once. And we were sharing a compartment with a guy and his daughter, and lulled by the familial aspect, let the guard down. Wolf in sheep's clothing, I taught my class today- because now I'm out one wallet, a lot of money I had stupidly taken out right before leaving Torun and not divvied up, and all my ids except for passport....I'm almost saddest about the fact I'm no longer, totally and officially, a student. But.
Three people, 3 days, those events of seemingly vital significance that slowly will become distilled into cocktail party anecdotes. Apologies in advance, in retrospect. One plastic juice bottle that flew out of nowhere and landed at the feet of a startled german tourist, many many strange promo schemes (guy rollerblading with a rolling billboard through the forest, anyone? woman decked out like cleopatra strolling around with a boa constrictor- the obession with egyptian themed restaurants in general, the exuberance of capitalism in a post-communist economy), sand in our hair for days, gingerbread and german tourists by the bushel, the taxi driver who informed us we should walk to the train station despite the pouring rain (we don't have an umbrella, we said- buy one, he snapped.)
The reoccurance of the plastic bottle, in the guise of a dude who strolled to the sea edge, produced an empty bottle he proceeded to swirl around in the waves, shake over his head a couple times (empty, sideways) and then toss into the water. We were watching this ritual from the sandpit we had declared our crepuscular bed, surreptitiously watching him and the lovebirds and the sand zamboni that very nearly ran us over (but we didn't even think to move). War of the Worlds, feeling oh so american as the movie ended and we were filing out, until we walked through the door and discovered cinema city ejects its patrons straight outside. The astronomical clock in Gdansk's St. Mary's church, that has a mechanical display (Adam, Eve, a singing choir of the angels) which has operated faithfully on the hour since 1464- and took the opportunity to malfunction. Staring at a statue of Copernicus, listening to a sports bar singer meander through "Wish you were Here", a down-tempo "Help", "Nothing Else Matters".

The world's largest gyro, parading down the street with it and wondering if the stares were for me and a stuffed pita bigger than my head, or Dahm's bedhead porcupine hair. or the fact we were the motliest crew to take the tri-city area by sluggish storm. The night we crashed in a university dorm (the only 6 hours we slept in a bed), the receptionist asked us where we were born. Dahm handed him his California id, and the guy goes, but you were born in...China? Vietnam? Odeviz: I was born in Havana Cuba. Guy: Ah, yes, Havana, Cuba. Cuba, Fidel Castro, but who is the president of Havana? Me: Washington. Guy, mishearing: Tunisia?
So a Laotian scholar, a Cuban, and a Tunisian stumbled by a pirate ship built for German tourists...