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OK, we don't make the title into a trick question. We are currently in
Warsaw, Poland, and about to move on to Krakow. We haven't been anywhere
near one of these machines recently, so the typing is a bit rusty ...
vxghsdagdh
After we left Oulu, Marko and Atte behind, we spent a couple of days in a
"youth hostel" near a place in Finland called Heinavesi (with dots on the
a,
that this Polish keyboard doesn't seem to have) in the lake region,
although
youth hostel isn't really the right word. It's more like a large wooden
farmhouse, 18 km away from anything - and this really means anything- with
a
log lakeside sauna. Basically there is very little to do, except sit by
the
lakeside, read, swim occasionally, spend hours in the sauna and devour the
local food. It's the kind of place we needed to relax, after the hard
lives
we'd been leading in the Arctic :)
From there, we got to Helsinki and it was only a short hop, together with
hundreds of Finns that are after cheap beer, to Tallinn in Estonia. The
minute we left Scandinavian prices, we realized we could afford luxury
items
like beer, wine, vegetables, a 2-course meal at a restaurant for under 10
pounds (!). The tourist crowds seemed to disappear the minute we left
Tallinn, as most tourists are a little bit scared to get on an ex-USSR
bus.
In fact we had a really surreal experience. From Tallinn, we decided that
we
were not going to board the Eurolines bus direct to Riga, as that seemed
far
too boring and expensive. So we opted for the local bus to the town of
Valga. Now, Valga is a nice quiet leafy town, with nothing too
extraordinary
about it, apart from the fact that the Estonian-Latvian border runs right
through it and cuts it in half. So we got off the bus, walked the 2km to
the
official border post for foreigners, and had the usual 10-minute delay at
the border, while the border guards are having a field day with Markella's
Greek passport (you get the feeling it's the highlight of their year).
Anyway, we got into Valka (the Latvian half of Valga) and started walking
towards the town centre. Like any respectable ex-Soviet town, the
outskirts
of Valka consist of those grey towerblocks. You all know the type: square,
colourless, the ones that were meant to look derelict from the minute they
were designed. We were crossing one of those, when an old lady came up to
us
and started saying something in Russian. Within those 5 minutes Kristian's
Russian lessons paid off. She was saying that we could have a room to
sleep
for free, and that there was a Dane in one of those block appartments, and
that some other Danish people had stayed there before. Well, that was
Kristian's translation anyway. At which point Markella thinks: either
there
is something very wrong with K's Russian, or the old lady is taking us for
a
ride, big time. Anyway, having agreed between us a Greek code word for
"let's get the hell out of here" in case we sensed trouble, we followed
the
old lady to the fourth floor of one of those aforementioned derelict
blocks,
she rings the door bell, another Russian lady comes out, they say
something
in Russian and then Russian lady no.2 starts speaking to us in fairly good
English, with that unmistakable Danish lilt in her voice. Suddenly, the
old
lady's story about Danes sleeping there, was beginning to sound real. In
fact, to our amazement we were let into a fully furnished flat (not
derelict
at all), with Danish posters all over the walls, a Danish Gaestebog, and
Danish lys (candles) on the table. And all this in the outskirts of a
border
town in Latvia!!! Surreal or what??? There is of course an explanation, as
there usually is with such things. The Russian lady is married to a Dane,
and he runs a sort of "little Danish embassy" (the Dronninglund-Valka
friendship club) where Danes can stay (and no you can't have the
address).
We fortunately met the old lady at the bus station the following morning
and
managed to thank her properly.
After that little interlude, everything else seemed so unsurprising. We
got
to Riga the next day, the biggest city since we had left Copenhagen, and
then went on to Vilnius. Both cities were very enjoyable in their own way.
They have both been renovated beautifully since the Soviets departed.
There
is much openness now about the Soviet era: we visited the "Occupation"
museum in Riga which gives many details on life in the gulags during
Stalinist times. In Vilnius, we visited the rather grim but fascinating
ex-KGB headquarters, with the prisons at the basement left intact since
the
1960s, except for a coat of paint to hide all the writing on the walls
left
by the inmates. The condemned room was a bit on the grim side.
Foodwise, we have definitely hit the pork-and-potato zone of Europe, with
lashings of beer.
Since Sunday we've been in Warsaw, and have managed to get to one Bach
organ
concert already, and we might even manage another one tonight if we finish
this e-mail. The Stare Miesto (Old Square) is quite spectacular: even more
so, when you see the 1944 photograph of Warsaw in complete ruins with just
a
few walls standing. The whole of the Old Town is a very successful
reconstruction. We are quite looking forward to Krakow, which neither the
Nazis nor the Soviets were quite as efficient in annihilating. As for our
progress in Polish: just say lots of z, s, and w in a row and it seems to
translate into something invariably.
Well, we are heading for the depths of Europe so we don't know when we'll
get another chance to write. Until then,
Lots of love
Markella & Kristian
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