Stranded in Poland
This is the story of how my brother Mark and I became stranded in the middle of Poland.
At around 6am we arrived in Warsaw after an all-night bus ride from Lithuania. In an attempt to sleep on the crowded and bumpy bus, we had each taken two Ambien, and this is why much of the early part of the day is pretty foggy to me. If one Ambien will knock you out nicely for an 8-hour plane flight, two Ambien will punch a hole in your soul. I'm not sure why we thought it would be a good idea to take two each, but I guess it seemed like a better idea at the time than sitting awake annoyed on the bus all night, listening to the Polish guy next to us snore his face off.
I vaguely recall being extremely dizzy as we rented a tiny red Nissan Micro from the Polish branch of Budget Rent-a-Car. Remarkably, we had the presence of mind to pick Budget because it was slightly cheaper than Hertz and the other mysteriously-name Polish rental car company. Now that I look back, however, we definitely should have paid the extra zloty and gone with Hertz.
We did our best to load our getting-heavier-all-the-time bags into the car. I was having trouble walking, but Mark had just thrown up, so we decided that I should drive. In hindsight, we most certainly should not have been behind the wheel of a car in our drugged conditions, but we really wanted to get down to southern Poland and see Auschwitz. Wow, now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.
We quickly figured out which direction to go and what side of the road I should be driving on, but I became obsessed with a clicking I was sure was a nail in one of the tires, and made Mark get out and stand alongside the car on the Polish highway as I drove by, picking pebbles out of the treads with a ballpoint pen. Somehow, this all seemed perfect natural at the time.
Eventually we sobered up enough to realize it was going to take a lot longer than expected to drive from Warsaw down to Krakow. Poland, it seems, does not share America's love for interstates; even the biggest highways in Poland are two lanes at most, and are interrupted every mile or so by stoplights and/or speed cameras, to keep you under the 70 km/hr speed limit. This is highly annoying when you're driving across half the country in a big hurry to go see a Death Camp. We revenged ourselves by making fun of the name of nearly every town name we came across, resorting to our Swedish game of over-pronouncing every strange-sounding retarded baby accents. It occurred to us that our amusement with foreign dialect had been a pretty consistent feature for all of our trip, and that pronouncing every city name we encountered like Jabba the Hut really just didn't seem to be getting old. Warsaw Riga Helsinki, Han Solo. It also occurred to us that yes, we really are stupid Americans.
We finally made it down to Auschwitz (more on this moving experience later), spent several hours there, and started a long journey back. At this point, it was already getting late and we were just hoping to make it back to Warsaw in time to see the city a little before figuring out how we were going to get to Ukraine in the morning. Our minds were on the final leg of our journey, and on most quickly navigating the frustratingly slow Polish road system. Having our rental car break down in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Europe was not something we saw coming.
In our age of cell phone, AAA and instant communication, calling a two truck has become a relatively simple talk. But things are a little different when you're smack in the middle of rural Poland where you cell phone doesn't work, your AAA doesn't apply, and your instant communication is limited to game of charades with Polish farmers who happen along the highway.
As I waited by the car, Mark walked to a nearby farm house, where the man inside seemed perplexed by his gestures of driving, cutting his throat, then making jumper cable shocking motions followed by a shrug. After a few tries, the man indicated that Mark follow him to another nearby farmhouse where the guy inside got into his car, beckoned that Mark follow him, and drove up to me, rolling down his window. "Get in car," said the man, in barely distinguishable English. What could I do? I got in - if he was going to drive us somewhere and kill us, at least it would make a more interesting story than sitting by the side of the Polish highway.
The Polish driver drove us half a mile back up the road we had come down, dropped us off at a gas station, and without another word, drove off. At this point we were at least nearer to civilization, but we still had no idea how we were going to get to Warsaw, mover 100 km away. Our flight from Ukraine as a day and a half away, and suddenly that period seemed distressingly short.
The two workers at the gas station spoke exactly no English, thought they did have a pair of jumper cables, which we, after some gesticulating, managed to procure. But their still remained the question of convincing a Polish person (without actually being able to talk to them) to let us get into their car, drive us back to our dead Nissan, and let us hook jumper cables up to their car. There was also the question of whether this would even work, since Mark and I were far from car experts. We approached the only other people at the gas station, a group of three men who were eating and drinking beers outside the gas station, which apparently doubled as a restaurant and a bar.
These three chain-smoking gentlemen proved to be an interesting trio. One of them, a Swedish trucker, we learned, spoke a tiny bit of English, and also a tiny bit of Polish, which we used to communicate our dilemma to his friend, who I guess was a more local trucker he was travelling with. The third guy, a Norwegian trucker, spoke neither English nor Polish, and would just shake his head and laugh at everything everyone said.
"Our car," I said slowly, in that kind of slow English you think makes it easier for foreigners to understand you, but mostly just makes you sound like you're talking to a retarded child, "has died."
"We need help," Mark added, not sure how to explain in monosyllables how we either needed someone to come help us jump our car, or else call a tow truck to drive us 2 hours to Warsaw.
The Swedish trucker spoke to the Polish trucker, who pulled out his cell phone and opened his other hand to us.
"Papers," said the Swedish trucker. "He needs papers."
"Pappors!" bellowed the Norwegian trucker, hoisting his beer into the air. The Swedish trucker shushed him.
After some guessing, Mark and I figured he wanted our rental papers for a number to call, and I fished these out and handed them to him. He began to dial. "Budget, Rent-a-Car," I said, pointing to the logo.
"Boodjet!" yelled the Norwegian trucker, spilling some of his beer into the bushes. Apparently, they had been having beers for quite some time.
Someone answered the Polish trucker's call, and he spoke rapidly in Polish into the phone for some time, occasionally reading things off our rental agreement. The Norwegian trucker started to laugh and make fisting gestures into the air, and held up his glass to us. "Skoal!" he bellowed, as if expecting a cheers back from our glassless hands. Mark picked up a water glass from the table, and held it up.
"Skal," Mark said. "Cheers."
"Chears!" yelled the Norwegian trucker, laughing and taking down the rest of his beer. He turned to the Swedish trucker. "Nasdrovie!
The Polish trucker hung up his phone and looked up at us. "They call back," he said.
"Oh, OK," we said. "How long?"
"One hour," the Polish trucker replied. And with that, he got up and went to go tease the driver of a rival trucking company who had just pulled into the gas station.
Mark and I looked at each other. "Well?" said Mark. "What do we do?"
"I guess we do the only thing we can do," I replied. "Fuck it. Let's have a beer."
We spent the next hour drinking with Scandanavian truckers outside a gas station in the middle of nowhere, Poland. I was still unconvinced we might not be able to start the car up if we could just get someone to take us their to try our new Polish jumper cables, but this seemed impossibly to communicate to our three jovial trucker friends, who had now been joined by the new rival Polish trucker, who quickly caught up to and surpassed his comrades in terms of drunkness and loudness. The new drunk Polish guy quickly adapted the Norwegian's fisting gestures, and the two would make huge motions and farting noises every time somebody said something, and then they would cheers each other and the Polish trucker would get up and drunkenly kiss the Norwegian's forehead. Mark and I just sat there, perplexed at what had become of our day of renting cars on Ambien and touring Auschwitz.
At last, a tow truck driver did not call but instead pulled up to the gas station, and the Swedish trucker and his Polish interpreter came with me to deal with him. The tow truck driver didn't speak a word of English, but had brought along a 16-year-old boy who did, and what followed was probably the strangest and least discernable discussion between four men talking and arguing for at least ten minutes without my being able to understand a single word to it. The two truck driver, it seemed, was very unhappy with the prospect of driving two Americans two hours to Warsaw at this time of night, and the 16-year-old boy and the Polish trucker did their best to convince him to do it anyway. The Swedish trucker, by this point, was quite drunk, and just kept laughing and saying "Skoal!" at every pause in the conversation. At last, the tow truck driver gave in, angrily pointed for me to get into his car, and I yelled for Mark before he changed his mind. The 16-year-old boy turned to me. "He will take you to Warsaw. There is no problem."
Mark came up with our bags and we turned to the Polish trucker. I reached out my hand and he smiled and shook it. "Thank you very much," I said. "Skoal."
"NASDROVIE!!!" came the boisterous voices of all our trucker friends, hoisting their beers in the air as we got into the tow truck and drove off. Apparently, Mark had paid for their beers.
The Polish two truck driver made quick work of hoisting our car onto the back of his flatbed and heading north for Warsaw, and Mark and I spent the next two hours talking quietly
and trying not to do anything that would piss him off and make him dump us and our car back into the middle of Poland. After some more charades and negotiating with two Polish security guards at the airport, we got them to raise the parking garage gate where we pushed our dead Nissan Micro into a spot on the first floor, dropped the keys into the Budget box with a note that read "Car broken," and found the nearest hotel.I suppose we had it coming, for making fun of Poland's roads and town names all day. We hoped we could reset our bad luck as we turned our eyes toward Ukraine with one last gesture before we went to bed: leaving the jumper cables in the back of the Micro.
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American MeatHeads In Europe - Days 5-7 - 7/2/09
Drinking Our Way Through the Eastern Block
I think we have our plan. Our Moscow flight has a layover in Kiev, Ukraine; if we can make it there by next Thursday, heading down through the Eastern Block and going around Belarus, which also won't let us in, I think we can make it. 5 countries in 5 days. It sounds like a stupid idea. Maybe just stupid enough to work.
Before we leave Scandanavia, here's Spot the American Signs, part 2:
ESTONIA
From Helsinki we took a second (much less luxurious, and much more sober) fartygets down to Tallinn, Estonia to begin our romp through the Eastern Block.
Most bigger Eastern Block cities have a new part, which is fairly modern and not all that different from American cities, and an Old Town, which is where all the historic buildings and tourist traps are. It's also where the traditional and ridiculous food dishes are, for instance this "Meat Feast" thing that Mark and I had to split between us because our teeth were getting tired of chewing on pork.In Tallinn, Old Town was also where the party was. We caught the coat tails of a couple Estonian girls who showed us through Estonia's lively nightlife, kept afloat by a constant stream of bachelorette and stag parties from Helsinki and even the UK who come down for the night by boat to live it up Estonian style. Having somebody show you around is much preferable to taking the recommendation of the info booth lady at the bus station, and we found ourselves in better basement-clubs and backdoor-pubs than anyplace so far in Scandinavia. We even got a tour of part of Old Tallinn we'd missed during our day tour, up on a hill where some of the more historic stone buildings still stood from ancient times. We passed a Soviet-style, prison-looking building that I noted had been converted to the Russian Consolate. The girls grew silent.
"What, you guys don't like Russia? Because neither do we."
"Russia has done many terrible things to Estonia," one of the girls said, somberly. "During the occupation, they shipped thousands of our people to Moscow in cattle cars. Dissenters. Intellectuals. Many of them died."
We walked in silence for the rest of the trip until we said goodbye to the girls. You learn much more during a night out on the town when you're with local guides.
This marked the end of our stay in Estonia, save for several more beers Mark and I had in a bar that was open until 6am followed by a fight we had on the way home where Mark pushed me into a potted garden display and I retorted by taking a huge plant out of its holder and smashing its dirt-encased roots directly on Mark's neck.
Our drunken idiot brawl spilled back into our hostel room, where Mark got me in a headlock and I started ramming his head on the wall, until he pinned me down on the bed as I made loud choking noises. I can only imagine what this must have sounded like to anyone in the next room at 6:30 in the morning. Finally I got a fist free and put it in Mark's face, and told him if he didn't let go, I was going to "start punching and not stop until one of us was unconscious." At this point, we called it a draw.
LATVIA
Quick side note - we still haven't come across a washing machine on the trip (not that we've been looking that hard), and I've started a policy of just throwing throwing socks away after I've worn them three days in a row.
Our day in Latvia was spent A) being hungover, and B) taking a bus from Estonia down to Riga, the capital city. The scenery along the way was fairly unmemorable, possibly because I spent half the bus ride in the bathroom throwing up. Hangovers are worst in Eastern Block.As we get further south, the percentage of people who speak English is really beginning to fade. We checked into an actually decent hostel in by far the most gangster part of Riga, and I checked off a box on the registration form that read: "With technics of fire prevention it is acquainted." After a nice bowl of stew and beef chunks, we could really do nothing else in Latvia but pass out early. Our livers needed a day off.
In the morning, having done nothing the night before, we decided to start the day off right by firing some guns. The Regro S Shooting Gallery, our guidebook said, promised "Shooting with real guns in an underground Soviet fallout shelter," a prospect that had Mark and I so excited we could barely get to sleep the night before. Apparently, Regro let you fire about anything you wanted into crumbling cement walls of this bunker, including "a wide varieties of pistols and even automatic weapons from old Lugers to Uzis to AK-47s. But after several dead ends and lots of us making the "gun-firing" gesture to frightened, non-English-speaking shop owners, we finally found the location of Regro: in a chain bunker that was closed for the day. Something having to do with Midsummer's, although it had been three days since we celebrated that holiday in Finland. Apparently anything with Soviet origins closes the minute there's a holiday in any of the surrounding countries. Sneaky fucking Russians.
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| On the hunt for the Soviet gun range... | ...Mark is sad when we find it closed. |
LITHUANIA
We climbed on another bus that afternoon and headed to Kauna, Lithuania, which really sounds like it should be a town in Hawaii.
It's the point in our trip where things are starting to look the same. I mean, I suppose in way they ARE the same; 20 years ago, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were all just parts of western USSR. But the trend of these Eastern Block cities continues: Old Towns where the buildings are historic and the citizens are reminded that they hate Russia, and newer towns where they have movie theatres and malls with skating rinks in them. Mark and I took a break to watch the American move "Fighting" (all 7 movies showing at the theatre at the time were American). The movie was in English and subtitled into Lithuanian; I'm pretty sure the rest of the audience liked it more than we did. Still, it was nice to hear people speaking English for a couple of hours.
Our cultural exposure was somewhat limited in Lithuania, unfortunately, tethered by the brevity of our stay there coupled with the fact that again, all the historic buildings were closed, either because it was Monday, or because it was still near a holiday. Hopefully we will make this up when we head to Poland and Auschwitz next. We had our sights set on the Lithuanian Devil Museum, which according to the lady at the bus station was the only one of its kind in all of Europe, but it too was closed. I can't think of anyway to blame this on Russia, but I'd like to anyway.
Spot the American Store (part 1) ANSWERS:
A) Subway, B) 7-Eleven, C) BK. C'mon, that was too easy.
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American MeatHeads In Europe - Day 4 - 7/1/09
Finland: Fire, Finlandia, and Even Longer Words
Hangovers are worse in Scandanvia. After crawling off the fartygets on about 4 combined hours of sleep, Mark and I trudged angrily through a Helsinki grocery store, bought anything that we thought would relieve our headaches, and headed to our hostel, where we slept for the next 5 hours.
If Swedish developed by taking small words and putting them together, Finnish developed by taking Swedish and adding more letters. I'm sorry Finland, but it really gets out of control.
Even the isles of the grocery store are ridiculous.
It doesn't help that all Finnish people are forced to learn Swedish, I guess just to piss everyone off. The result is bilingual street signs where a 16 letter word is followed by a 22 letter word. The forced Swedish may also explain why the drunken Finnish guys on the farty gets were making fun of the Swedish national anthem.
We woke up at our hostel (on the corner of Uudenmaankatu and Tarkk'ampujank), used the toilet, which was in a room so small that the door hit the toilet and I had to ride it backwards, like AC Slater at The Max, and headed out to the Finland Midsummer's Festival.
This traditional Finnish event takes place on the longest Friday of each summer, when it's literally light all night long. There's traditional Finnish food, dancing… but by far the most interesting part to us was when they made this gigantic pile of trees out on a floating raft, canoed out to it, and then set the whole goddamn thing on fire.
Finnish people are awesome, and are pyros.
From there we headed to the Helsinki Clubs, about which not much needs to be said, except that Mark and I together shared an entire bottle of Finlandia (what else?) Vodka, and at one part ended up at this Farm-Bar where half the tables were tractors.
One final anecdote about the social scene in Europe. A guy we hung out with at "Club Fever" (in Europe, giving something an American name is the quickest way to make it cool) because he was wearing a Detriot Tigers hat (which he thought was a Boston Red Sox hat) wanted to stay in touch. We couldn't give him a phone number, because our cells didn't work in Europe, and he couldn't give us an email address, because I couldn't understand his last name because it had twelve 'u's in it, and I was too drunk to write anything down. Finally, he looks at us and says "Ah! Give me your name. I look you up on Facebook."
Facebook. Bringing the world together.
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American MeatHeads In Europe - Day 3 - 6/30/09
To Finland By Fartygets
In Swedish (or Finnish - lord knows I can't tell the difference), the word "cruise boat" translates to "fartygets". The result: signs like the one to the right, and an unending source of giggles for me.I don't know what we're going to do - our return flight leaves from Moscow in a week. But it's time to leave Sweden; with a quick tour of Stockholm's biggest park, via tandem bicycle looking like a pair of gay meat-heads, we climbed on a cruise boat and were off to Finland. I'm sure we'll figure something out. That's what adventure is all about.
Side note: although we admittedly should have thought about Visas more than ten days before leaving, I'm going to go ahead and blame Russia for all this. I'm also going to go ahead and give myself a blank check to make fun of Russia as much as I want for the rest of the trip. After all, it was their unwillingness to work past noon on three consecutive weekdays that will be keeping our tourism money out of Russia. It's not like they can't use the rubles.
After a shockingly high amount of hassle (mostly having to do with our lack of Swedish), we landed ourselves a little room on a Stockholm-to-Helsinki cruise ship. I had pictured something more like a shrimp ferry, but suddenly there we were on this luxurious cruise boat where people were walking around on stilts and everything cost about a million dollars.Things are really expensive in Sweden - it's $5 just to take the subway - but things are REALLY expensive on a Swedish cruise ship. It was $3 for a can of Coke out of a vending machine. Probably the worst of this was when Mark and I meandered into the uber-lux hot tub area, where the many hot tubs were tiered up multiple levels, including a penthouse hot tub that had a waterslide down to a lower hot tub. And to think we stayed in a 10-person hostel room two nights ago. Mark and I were settling down into the top tub when a Swedish cruise worker came up the stairs after us.
"You must pay me," she said in a deep Swedish accent.
"What, to use the hot tubs?" I said. "Isn't that included with the price of the ticket?"
"No, it is extra. You must pay me."
I had apparently forgotten the universal cruise policy of charging for everything, ever.
"How much is it?" The hot tub water felt really good, and might even be worth a couple Kronor.
"Eight Euro." I did the math quick in my head, and realized this was more than twelve dollars. Per person.
"Eight Euro? C'mon, we already paid all this money for the cruise. Can't you just let us stay in for a few minutes?"
"No, you must pay me. And he can't wear trousers." She pointed over to Mark, who was trying to climb into the hot tub in a pair of boxer briefs.
Worried that we had started spending money at an alarming rate, Mark and I opted not to shell out the $24 to sit in a hot tub for a few minutes. Instead, we returned to our room to pre-party with Vodka we had smuggled aboard.
The rest of the cruise was pretty much what you would expect from two drunken meatheads on an overpriced 14-hour cruise, except that the everything was in a new language, meaning that the people we met were especially wacky, including:
- A drunken Finnish farmer we played blackjack with who had tattoos of his four daughter's names on his right arm and a tattoo of a naked Hawaiian woman on his left arm.
- The 18-year-old Finnish girls on a day shopping trip to Stockholm, who came up to us at the "Fartygets Club," very impressed by "New York," where Mark lives, but hadn't heard of "Los Angeles," where I live. I told them it was near Hollywood.
- The 40-year-old, trainwreckedly drunken dude who everyone kept referring to as the "King of Finland," who kept creepily following around the 18-year-old Finnish girls.
- The 20-year-old Finnish guy who cornered me for thirty minutes telling me that he wanted to move to Canada and get a "yob," but that he didn't have any "yob skills," and he wanted to know if I had any "yob leads" in Canada. I'm not making fun of his accent, that's just how he pronounced it.
- At one point, we were drinking in a hallway with about 8 people who had followed us out of the Fartygets Club (including the King of Finland), and an elevator opened and six mid-twenties Finnish guys poured out and started singing the first two lines of the Swedish national anthem, continuously, apparently to make fun of it. This went on for about 15 minutes until two buff Swedish security guards came to kick us out to another hallway.
Here's a picture of the King of Finland, passed out the cruise ship hallway floor.
There ain't no party like a fartygets party.
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American MeatHeads In Europe - Day 2 - 6/30/09
Bar-Crawling Our Way Through Stockholm
Our second day in Sweden basically degenerated into a giant pub crawl, with Mark and I determined to find the most alcoholic beer in all of Stockholm. European brewers, it seems, are not limited by silly things like FDA restrictions, and sometimes ratchet the alcohol content of their beers up as high as 10-12%, versus the 3-6% of most American beers. The beer we found at a garden in Old Town Stockholm was 13% alcohol, which about a third of the way to hard alcohol. The beer was called Bush, not to be confused with Busch Lite. Not at all. Here are me and Mark after our first sip.
Unfortunately, making a beer 13% alcohol can have an adverse affect on the taste, and Bush tasted something like Bud Heavy with a shot of Whiskey dropped into it. Here are me and Mark after our sixth sip.
We checked into our new hostel, where our room was about the size of a handicap accessible bathroom stall, and headed out to continue the crawl. Although our guidebook had been wrong about either the location or the openness of almost every bar we had tried to hit to this point, we decided to give it once more chance. "The Ugglan bar," the book promised, "holds walls of Swedish beers, and enough Boules (aka Bocce Ball) courts to have a tournament." We went to the address and found this:
Lonelyplanet, if you're out there, I'm coming for you.
Yet appearances can be deceiving. After braving an entrance that looked like it belonged to a meth house and a set of metal grate stairs that looked like it belonged in a Terminator factory, we found the Ugglan bar. And its walls of Swedish beer. And it's Boules courts.
Situated in three gigantic, gloomy rooms in the bowels of a building that looked like it had been bombed, the Ugglan bar looked like a torture basement, which I think is what it was before they renovated is (slightly) and put in a bar. All the floors were made of gravel, and two of them were used solely for Boules courts, 6 of which fit in each huge room. The other dank room contained the bar and, surprisingly, several families who were there eating. One of the rooms had this giant roller, I guess used to smooth out the floor, and Mark got a few more beers in him and started pushing it around, much to the chagrin of our waitress.
Mark and I had been hiking around in our travel clothes all day, me wearing my dress shoes, as my other shoes were giving me blisters, and during our fourth game a Swedish couple came up to us and asked if we were professional boules players from France, because we were so badly dressed.
After Ugglan, we made our first attempt at a European club, where the bouncers were primarily concerned with asking each entering person how many drinks they've had. The correct answer to this, I learned back in college, was never "zero", lest they think you're lying. The correct answer is a small but believable number, for instance my first response of "two, about an hour ago." Though the correct answer was closer to "nine", they let me in. This strategy proved effective even later, when I fell into some bushes trying to get out of somebody's way.
"How many drink have you had?" asked the bouncer, pulling me out of the hedges.
"Three, I believe," I responded in my most sober fake tone. The answer was closer to "all of them".
Our drunken saunter through Scandanavia is off too a good start. You get the idea - there were many shots, and I think some peeing off Swedish bridges. I don't even remember taking this picture of Mark, back at the hostel, hugging milk.
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Oh, and by the way, this morning, I returned to the Russian embassy made one final attempt to get my Russians Visa. The Visa office had more people in it than a Russian breadline, and by the time I made my way up to the front, the office was almost closed, and the woman told me it was too late to get another Visa. There were no exceptions to their turnaround time, especially not for stupid American tourists who didn't file their paperwork early enough. Here's a picture of me being denied a Russian visa.
In Mother Russia, Visa rejects you.
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