(Polską wersję naszych przygód w Polsce można znaleźć tutaj.)
September 2018 - It is quiet different: at the border of a country where you do not speak and understand the language. Also a country where you have heard so many different stories about .....
On the other side of the river, The Odra, we have our first impression of Poland. We do hope that this is not the best part of Poland! There is work enough for dustmen, but is there enough money? Although we think that you can do a lot yourself. Therefore, also in this country we remain to our tradition: on every spot we stay and sleep we try to leave it a bit cleaner than that we saw on arrival. Our first impression is happily very quickly flooded by the second: on the parking of the supermarket greeted the 2-year-old Stefan enthusiastic our fire-engine, Roadkapje.
Spontaneous we are invited and very welcome to the Polish family at home. We eat together delicious Polish soup and sleep, cozy with the 4 of us, on the sofa bed in the living room. That's a party! Now we see the nice, clean!, wine-city Zielona Gora very different, instead of just drive through. On advice we've a look at the largest gnomes of Europe and also enjoy a nice big playground. We follow the river The Odra upstream and arrive at the town called Wroclaw. Here we also search for gnomes. The very first one there is the symbol of the Orange collectively, which tried to be the city less red. Nowadays there are about 400 gnomes around! The city has a cozy atmosphere and beautifull buildings, certainly worth at night light!
We discussed with the girls to visit Auschwitz (German concentration and extermination camps) and we chose not to visit. In several other cities and with people who we met on our trip up to now, we have seen and discussed all kinds of consequences of wars. (think about the many stones in the city Magdeburg which lie on the places where formerly Jewish families have lived. Or different names of various Polish villages and towns which are controlled, over the centuries, by various countries. And today still posterity claims their part. Or the many memorials of fallen soldiers in and of different countries and wars. Or long time of poverty, impossibility of expressing knowledge and opinions discussed with different people, etc, etc ... because a war has so many consequences!)
As we do this whole trip already, we avoid the Highway. Therefore, we see all kinds of small villages and fun playgrounds. Besides nice, spontaneous encounters with Polish people, we meet a Japanese couple, who are cycling from Japan to Europe. They make us excited for couchsurfing. So we admire Krakow and via couchsurfing we meet a very nice family. It's just like we know eachother for years! We share our meal together: pancakes and salad. The children learn their languages to eachother and have a cozy noisy pillow-fight !!
Also Krakow is a pretty big city and very clean, just like the other Polish cities we have seen.
Via forests and in the distance the mountains we move to the direction of Birzca. There we help a nice couple, who live in the middle of the Forest. They learn us the difference between a real forest and the artificial forest ànd the need for an original real forest. We help harvesting, cooking and drying plums and raspberries from their foodforest. We help with the preparation of building a house, made with big home made bricks of straw and clay. They treat us with delicious food and inspiration for our future!
We hear and see in the forest many woodpeckers (great, small spotted, black, green and grey!), tits, flycatcher, wrens, robinbirds, nuthatchs, treecreepers, buzzards, ravens, jays, thrushes (too high in the trees to see which kind they are), owls, bats (yes, even different types!), squirrels, mice, glis glis, lizards, fire salamander, grass snake, blindworms, many different insects (including grasshoppers, bush crickets, ants, there are a lot of beautiful colored/striped fly/mosquitoes and funny looking beetles, of which we do not know the names!), butterflies and moths (including Atlanta, Peacock, Aurelia), deers (burling!), rabbits, fox and traces of wild boars. In the forest, very many variations in trees, bushes, plants, moss and mushrooms. Mushrooms picking and eating is very popular in Poland!
In the city Przemysl, we are a few days at the footh of the Kopiec Tartarscie. This is an ancient Hill made by the Tartars and part of the fortresses around the city. The hill offers spacious view of the city, the forests, mountains (the Subkarpaten/Karpaty) Poland and a piece of Ukraine. We make food on a fire and exercise a new language .... We look at the border of Europe on a closed unmanned away / transition. That is obviously seen by the customs police. A little later we are held and our papers are checked: "What amazing, have a save journey!"
Papa Unii Europejskiej.
Roadkapje has met tough fire-engines: the road to the middle of the forest became a slightly larger adventure than it all ready is: there is total no verge, but you can't see it (very high grass). While quietly avoiding a hole in the road, the front tire comes a milimetre in the verge, the road crumbles off .... and then drops Roadkapje on her side. Amazed and unharmed we can climb out and get the only two passers to help us. The firemen, with flashing lights and siren, are soon on their way. They, however, need a tow truck! With the help of 10 tough firefighters and a large tow truc, Roadkapje comes right on the road without damage! Thank you very much firefighters of Bircza and surrounding, that was top work!
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