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.