Over the Border and Through the Fields...

With the hassles of the border behind us we were finally in Poland. We distanced ourselves 20 kilometers from Lithuania and stopped in a small town to check whether the advance of the ATM machine had worked its way into the country. John ran to the bank and I sat with the van protecting it from the Russian Mafia car thieves we had heard so much about. We have finally purchased a wheel-lock, next to being with the car, our second line of defense. But the car we parked next to had the ultimate security system, one that would surely deter any would-be thief, or for that matter anyone at all. There, attempting to get at me through two panes of glass were two teeth-baring, semi-crazed Doberman Pincers. I wondered about the tensile strength of a window pane and I rolled mine up as fast as I could. With every lunge of the dogs, the small Polish Fiat swayed until I thought its tires might give up their grip on the pavement. I sat poised at our steering wheel ready for a quick getaway should the dogs succeed in their attempt to punch through glass. I watched a woman walked out of the store ahead of me, jump and then run when the security system momentarily forgot their initial target, me, and lunged at her; the car lunged along with them. I smiled at her as she fled. "Cute pups aren't they?"

John returned empty handed; no ATM machine existed (we had risked my life for nothing) and we regretted not stopping at the first non-stop money exchange we had seen on this side of the border. We continued driving and found a campground, but, with no Polish zloty to pay for it, we parked at the hotel lot which shared its gate. We weren't the only ones stopping here; a chubby old man and woman had set up camp here as well. The man was standing next to his car in his underwear about to pull on his pants. His wife gave us a funny look and held his pants to cover as much of him as she could. She was probably waiting for us to pull away, but we didn't; we pulled in beside them. This was to be our home for the night.

Worldwide, it seems all campgrounds are noisy. Sometime after we had settled into bed, a car stereo began blasting rock n' roll. It didn't matter that we weren't actually in the campground, one chain-link fence gave us no sense of separation. Somewhere between the loud voices that joined the racket and the banging of pots and pans, I vowed to avoid future campgrounds whenever possible. In the morning I pulled back the curtains to see which campers could have been the culprits, but my eyes never made it that far. The chubby old man was standing next to his car giving me another funny look. He was standing in half of his pajamas. I gave him the benefit this time and pulled the curtains closed.

We spent the morning driving along Poland's bumpy roads to Lublin in the southeast. When we got there, we found a puzzling network of roads that left us driving up one toward old town that ended with a 'do not enter' sign and a group of children pointing for us to turn around. Apparently we had missed the small sign set against a building at the beginning of the street, written only in Polish, telling us that during certain hours this was a street for buses only. The police officer who pulled us over tried to explain this. It wasn't too difficult to figure out what we had done wrong, despite the fact that all his words were foreign, but we shook our heads and said we only spoke English and we didn't understand. Then I opened to the map in the Lonely Planet guide, picked a dot and said "Here, we want to go here." The policeman pointed down the road, motioning that we should do a turnaround and said the words 'Unia Hotel'." I repeated "Unia Hotel." Then he pulled out his ticket book. But we pretended not to understand - after all the sign wasn't obvious and had no internationally recognizable symbol telling us not to turn. In fact the arrow in the road did turn. Eventually he shook his head and waved us on - too much effort for 10,000 zloty.

When we finally were successful at finding how to get to downtown Lublin, we parked the car, fastened on the wheel-lock (I checked for dogs nearby) and spent two hours wandering the streets. Aside from old town which is in need of renovation, we discovered a cosmopolitan city. A far different impression of Poland than we'd gotten on the way into the city where we'd moved with the waves of pavement on tree-lined roads, avoided pot holes, slowed for bicycles, tractors, hay carts, horse-drawn wagons (each driven by an old man in a wool cap beside old women with faces framed in babuskas), passed children selling wild mushrooms and berries and cows that were being led from pasture tethered to women's arms. We felt we had stepped back in time.

But time hasn't stood still and Poland's cities, while still retaining a flavor of their pasts, show signs of Westernization. In Krakow we were exposed to an array of modern inconveniences - traffic jams, grid-lock, trolley crossings, Do Not Enter signs and no place to park. But despite these urban obstacles, Krakow gets our vote for the best city we've visited so far (and that title comes after we've covered a lot of ground).

Finally we left urban life behind and headed again for the rolling hay fields. We buried ourselves off one road near a row of haystacks and watched a 360 degree sunset finish our first few days in Poland.