Day 6 - Vilnius

Distance travelled: 103km Soundtrack: Bob Dylan: "Infidels", "Oh Mercy". Oh Mercy has some duds, but it's a really great album. Even though I've made it my own and listened to it loads as an adult, it calls to mind a specific memory of Dad; October 1989 when we travelled through the UK as a family, and the album had just been released. We heard it non-stop in the car! So Vilnius is a completely different city to Kaunas. I'm really glad I came! It's really, beautiful, is very clean, modern and chic, and is one of those places where everyone seems to look about 25 an is driving a Merc. A complete contrast to the Polish cities I was in only a couple of days ago, and certainly very different to Kaunas. It seems very wealthy and prosperous as well, which makes me wonder why I know so many Lithuanians from my work in Görlitz, who earn next to nothing for the privelege of being tortured and yelled at. The hotel is kind of fiddly and annoying, though - one of those places with "character", which calls to mind goofy middle-aged beardy men who begin to get on your nerves in about 30 seconds after meeting them. It's themed with English-speaking writers, most of them British, and it's decked out in a vaguely Edwardian way, so it's sort of "fussy", and could do with an upgrade. I chose it because it was cheap and because it said it had sound-proofed rooms (singing!) but the room they put me in was anything but. I had a quick word with reception and hey presto - upgrade! Can't say it's that glamorous though, there's a jacuzzi which is something I guess, but it still looks like a B+B from the sixties, somehow. I will never understand why the world hasn't caught on to the idea that this "tally ho" idea of middle class Britishness isn't complete myth, and/or is really fucking annoying. I guess it's helped opened doors for me being an English speaker, but shit if it doesn't piss me off. It goes with that particular brand of Brit, somehow - culturally conceited with very little to show for it. Look at me! I'll remind you every five minutes where I went to school and university, and I have an entirely contrived accent that will have you climbing up the walls in no time.... Bah. I don't mean to be mean-spritied, but seriously, it does really give me the shits. Dicked about for quite awhile in the afternoon, sang, and then had my customary long walk. Very, very impressed with the place - see above! So much so that I broke my intermittent fasting schedule and stopped for a meal. Surf and turf, which was unfortunately a bit disappointing for what I paid, but there you go; I've been subsisting 100% on hotel breakfasts alone so far, so splashing out once or twice isn't going to break the bank. Feeling like I'm definitely on my way now. I'm..... somewhere else, and in a different sphere. That's cool. Tomorrow: Riga, and my 37th country. Will be curious to know what that's like.

Day 5 - Travel Day

Distance travelled: Warsaw to Kaunas, Lithuania - 423km

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “Saved”, “Shot of Love”, “Street Legal”, Singing teacher’s feedback (better), 2nd Test commentary from England versus the West Indies

So here I am in Lithuania.  Country number 36 that I’ve visited, out of a possible 193, depending on what counts and what doesn’t (look up CGP Grey’s YouTube video “How Many Countries Are There” for reference, and no I can’t be bothered linking).  First impressions of Kaunas weren’t that great care of a fairly ordinary hotel with a room that wasn’t too far away from belonging in a youth hostel, complete with shitty internet to boot.  Thought I might stay here two nights, but my wife insisted that I go on to Vilnius, and the internet clinched it for me.  Ain’t got no time for that shit, although I’m struggling with it right this very moment.  Went for a lengthy walk and stopped for a beer later on and got a better feeling for the place, but I do hope that Vilnius might be a little more interesting.

It was a long journey today, through lots of small towns on B roads again.  In and of itself that’s fine - I loved it yesterday - but after awhile I was keen to just kinda get there.  It seemed like all the way up to the Lithuanian border my journey was flanked by a motorway being built beside the road I was on.  Large scale, tearing out big corridors of countryside type stuff.  Poland is obviously on a big economic push (or was - we’ll see what happens with Covid) and is trying to make itself more accessible for freight and trade.  

I’m moving through all the Dylan albums.  Somehow I haven’t managed to include “Blood on the Tracks” which is a major, major oversight, but I still have 25 others to listen to.  The evangelical period is actually quite listenable, and good for a journey.  A common thread or theme when you’re contemplating your innermost being and have a target in mind (the destination) means that the persuasive, Gospel-esque language works quite well.  Dylan does a good rock song, too.  Shot of Love (the song), Solid Rock and The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar are all good tunes, and there others like them.  Street Legal, on the other hand, is rubbish.  There are maybe two good tunes in there in The Changing of the Guard, and Señor (Tales of Yankee Power).  The rest are very forgettable, if not downright annoying.  

Felt a bit lonely today, particularly after I arrived.  I guess that’s the idea, though.  I’m not doing this to be entertained.  Going for the walk helped - there’s a very long strip in Kaunas with what looks like an Orthodox Church at the end of it.  I had my beer near there at the end of my walk.  

I’m not going to come out of this transformed or anything.  It would be fanciful to expect that.  I think it’s sort of a bit Zen Buddhist, somehow - I’m emptying my head of distractions and seeing if what I find is fertile ground for moving forwards.  When I think of short and medium term plans for when I get back home, they don’t seem bad, though.  I think that’s a good sign.  I have needed this time, though.  

Day Four - Poland is scary

Distance travelled: Wrocław to Warsaw: 365 km

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan “Planet Waves” and “Slow Train Coming”, 2nd Test commentary of England versus West Indies, my singing teacher giving me (very bad) feedback via Skype, sometimes nothing at all.  

There’s something a bit weird about this place.  I find it kind of unsettling, on all sorts of levels.  Two walks book-ended my car travel today, and they were both a bit..... strange.  The car journey wasn’t straightforward either.  

The walk in Wrocław was pleasant enough.  I found the opera house, which is a very nice-looking old building quite reminiscent of the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg.  Did a quick lap of that, took a photo of a church or two and kept moving.  Found myself in the middle of a very big, very empty square, with a very modern, expensive-looking building at the end of it.  It turned out to be the concert hall; obviously recently built, and probably with a vast amount of EU money by the looks of it.  Might bookmark it as a place to do some work at some point, if things take off the way I want them to.  Went about 200m back towards the hotel and the car though, and found myself in the ghetto.  Yikes!  Horrible Soviet-era blocks of apartments that looked like they hadn’t been paid any attention to since they were built.  

This stuff is weird; on the one hand there are these massive edifices of glass and steel that seem to shout “hey, look at us and how successful we are”, but you only need to walk 30 seconds in the other direction to see the most unattractive and depressing evidence of the contrary.  And this is pretty much in the middle of town.  I mean, every city has its ugly points, but it’s pretty uncommon to find them so central.  Wouldn’t you want to do something about that if you could, instead of spending what must have been BILLIONS on a fancy new concert hall?  Or at least find some sort of middle ground, build a slightly less fancy hall and upgrade the social housing too?   

There was also the slightly eerie feeling from the square.  It was very modern too, but you got the feeling that nasty things had probably gone on there.  This is Poland after all, so..... think demonstrations being horribly and violently suppressed.  On multiple occasions.  

The journey was strange as well.  I had bit of trouble getting out of town, the streets are not well-paved or marked and everything’s a bit chaotic.  Got on the motorway though, which was magnificent (again, it seems to be something that is paid a lot attention to here), but then got thrown a bum steer by my SatNav, which kept giving me exits too late.  A crazy storm broke just as I missed the last one and the heavens opened, as I got sent onto all of these B roads.  I thought it was only going to be for a little while, but it was a good 80-100 km worth, I think - although funnily enough it actually gained me time rather than lost it.  And I was driving through lots of little villages and towns, sometimes on terrible roads that were half sealed.  And sometimes the surroundings were achingly beautiful, and sometimes really horribly ugly; sometimes obviously really wealthy, and sometimes really poor.  It was an interesting journey, and obviously much more than being on the motorway would have been.  I got the feeling that I saw more of the real Poland that way.  

Got back on the motorway eventually and made it to Warsaw and my hotel.  Did my best to address some of the short-comings of my previous day’s recorded singing practice in what I hope was a better session, and then went for the second of my two walks.  

Warsaw’s weird, man.  And kind of unsettling.  It’s like there were some very big ideas had here that were never completed, and you’re walking around in the remnants of someone’s long forgotten dream - one that you know you wouldn’t have wanted to have been a part of.  Everything’s either half-done, or magnificently, powerfully and imposingly done, but stood in the middle of a wasteland, like someone painted a masterpiece and no one thought to build a gallery around it.  There’s the same modern versus run-down feeling here too, and everything’s enormous.  I’ve felt that way around Soviet-era architecture before, it can be very off-putting.  Like there was a very deliberate attempt to demonstrate that the state was bigger than the individual by making all the buildings, and particularly the official buildings, absolutely enormous, to the point that you’re hopelessly dwarfed by everything.  

And of course there are long shadows of violent pasts.  I don’t know my Polish history as well as I should, but I know it ain’t great.  Some nasty shit went down in this city, you can feel it - even if you don’t already know it.  I went for a one-hour walk and found the place utterly, utterly fascinating, but I know I could never live here.  It’s..... spooky.  No wonder all the Polish people I know seem have PTSD somehow.  I would too if I was them!

Off to Lithuania tomorrow.    

Holland Hijinks

OK, so I managed to get through the weekend without going online. I was surprised at how little seemed to happen whilst I was away. There was some sport played. There was a fair amount of column inches dedicated to the economic crisis, and when I got home I had seventeen emails. But really, nothing much happened. Probably proof that the internet isn't quite as essential to my life as I'd thought.

Had a great time away, actually. I was taking part in an orientation weekend for first-year students at my school. I had thought that it would be mostly attended by undergrads but that there would be a sprinkling of postgrad students and therefore people in their twenties, too, but when I got drafted into the "getting-to-know-you" games I realised my mistake. Most of the group I was with were just out of high school, and I was older than them by at least ten years! Whoops. Dancing with 18 year-old girls made me feel like just a BIT of a dirty old man, as did being part of the judging of the 1980s-inspired catwalk competition (yes really), but after I realised that the only person worried about my age was me, I decided to just go with it and enjoy myself.

As the weekend progressed I realised that my impression of what a weekend like this would entail was probably entirely based upon my experiences at home. Having attended a university college, as a rule, anything involving the word "orientation" also involved the words "kegs" and "sex". Yep, that's right, pretty much the Australian version of a fraternity. And even now I've realised that my image of how people get to know one another is based almost purely on this alcohol-fuelled, sexually aggressive, Australian model. Now I'm not for a moment suggesting that your average Australian goes to university and is met at the door with a slab of beer and a packet of condoms, but that's certainly what it felt like to me. And it certainly made me feel pretty darn out of place, not to mention inadequate, when at every social event imaginable all the talk was about who just had a "vom" and who just picked up, and that it was pretty clear if you weren't able to participate in either event you might not fit in. Thankfully, a fair amount of participation in the former was good enough to ensure that I wasn't a complete social pariah, but the latter left me completely cold - I just wasn't ready for it, for one thing.

So imagine my surprise when a bunch of 45 students headed to the woods for a good dollop of orientation, only to discover a virtual absence of all these things. Where was the double-fisted binge-drinking? The skolling competitions? The public chundering? The hip-grinding on the dancefloor and face-eating competitions? What was wrong with these kids? Didn't they know how to have fun? What were they, a bunch of poofters or something?

At no point did I see anyone more than merry. I think I witnessed ONE couple share a kiss - and do you know what they did? They left the dance floor and went outside, away from public view. I only saw it because I was on the way back from the bathroom. There was no machismo. No ritualistic, competitive drinking. No elbowing people aside to get to that "hot" girl who was momentarily without a dancing partner. No social heirarchy of who was good-looking and cool and who wasn't. It was almost like..... having a good time. It was NICE. It was FUN. It was CIVILISED. Who'd've thunk it.

I've thought a bit about it since (as you can probably tell), and tried to compare it to my own experience, and the reasons why it was so different from this. Is an Australian versus European comparison actually valid? Was my experience not a little more contextual than that? Is comparing three years at university college with an orientation weekend for a bunch of musicians really fair?

I think that there's something in those questions - but still, the cultural element cannot be ignored. And any sort of socio-ecomomic analysis will probably produce almost identical results for both sides. My college was VERY exclusive - it was the domain of the upper-middle class private schoolkid, who graduated with excellent marks. Talented, bright students from good families. And yet something in their make up meant that when you handed them a beer and said "have fun, kids" that they drank themselves into the gutter and slept around.

Maybe there really is something in the "cultural significance of alcohol in Europe" diatribe that we hear all the time. I don't know. Either way - I know where I would have preferred to have been eighteen!