Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Poland Is a Liquor Store

Well, this is me, happily situated at my hostel computer with a beer the size of 2 newborn children...fat ones.

UPDATES:
My beard: glorious
My belly: full of kebab
The Weather: snowing
My Hair: greasy / unwashed
My Experiences Thus Far: heartbreaking at times, elevating at others
My Love Life: null
My Life: apart from the aforementioned "null" excellent

Things have been carrying on rather excellently of late and here is why:

I realise that my favourite part of traveling (other that meeting and learning from strange new individuals) is the hardships. For instance, today we arrived in Warsaw without a hostel booked. It was raining / snowing / sleeting all at once. Despising the Polish phone system (which is actually quite good) we decided to walk to the nearest...that's not true...cheapest hostel in the vicinity. It was full up except for a triple bunk room costing 55 zloty a night (about $22.50 Canadian); scoffing at this price after walking up 10 flights of stairs we headed out to Oki Doki Hostel in hopes of a room (here they were only 50 zloty...a steal!), but found that this was impossible as there was no vaccancy. We then had them book a hostel for us at Nathan's Villa, and conquoring our fear of the Gypies associated with this name, we packed up and walked another 3km there...only to pay 55 zloty each for the night anyway.

Awesome.

Following this, we met some "interesting individuals"; among these a PHD potential named Mike. Mike is American, weighs 210lbs, plays rugby, is covered in tattoos and speaks fluent Russian. He learned Russian so that he could become cozy with Eastern political refugees in order to interview them to collect data for his disertation on the migratory patterns and theories of political extremists. Mike is awesome. Also, during the several seconds it took to ascertain this profile of Mike, he drank no fewer than 32 tall-cans of extra strong Polish beer. We love Mike. He has a cute little sniffle and sounds nasaly.

We then found ourselves caught in the crossfire of a debate over where the best Kebab was in town. After 30 minutes of heated debate (including a break by one defendant to sample some cottage cheese) we learned that we simply had to cross the street.

At last we arrive moments before this blog, wherein we discussed the culture and Slavic/Baltic/Anglo/Germanic/Soviet history of Poland, at last learning how to pronounce, "Bydgoszcz," the city in which we had originally landed in to gain access to this country of Poland.

"y" is, in fact, a soft "i"; "d" is more or less pointless, "sz" is a hard "sh"; and "cz" is a hard "ch". In conclusion, we could have effectively saved ourselves alot of time by simply calling the place, "By Gosh!"

2 comments:

Angie Pants said...

Like, "By Gosh, we're in Eastern Europe!"

jake said...

Kaare! Enough of this talk of interesting individuals and polish pronunciation! I have a task for you and the woman, see her blog. Immediately!