I Present This Without Comment

I’ve had to resign myself to being the kind of guy that crazy things just happen to. I didn’t choose it; in fact, I would sooner that it wasn’t the case. It’s almost like a passive, unwanted and unhelpful X-Men-esque mutation. But there we go. In light of this propensity for attracting insanity, I don’t quite know why I thought that going on a glorified, year-long drinking holiday in Poland would be a good idea. But it certainly has delivered, as far as the madness goes, anyway.

Prime example: Needy Street Performing Girl. We – my flatmates Mark and Jeff the Dutch - were in a bar, and then that bar closed. Despite us paying rent (sometimes before they start nagging and leaving passive-aggressive notes on my door), we can’t get in to our halls between 3 and 4. It’s spectacularly annoying, especially because they don’t trust us with keys. Anyway, it was about 2:45, so just the wrong time to try and get in, so we decided that we’d go for another couple in a 4-zloty bar. 4-zloty bars are great, they really are. You pay 4 zloty, about 80p, for a half of beer, or a vodka or something, with 8zl getting you a plate of food. They’re also open 24 hours, and I think maybe designed solely for students, the homeless and the alcoholics. Anyway, we went to one of those, and somehow – I forget exactly how or why – we ended up talking to a street performer. Her name? I haven’t a clue. She said she “only has a nickname”, which obviously led me to ask what her nickname was. Yeah, it was that kind of conversation. “What name do you like?” I said I thought Charlotte was a nice name. “But that’s the name of a prostitute!” she said.  Erm... Asking someone “what name they like” is also a pretty prostitute-ish thing to do; now you mention it. I think we settled on Dorothy, in the end. Anyway, she seemed nice, so we stuck around chewing the fat for a while. She then, for some reason, decided to stay at our place. We did our best to put her off, saying that the house was a tip and that we were bad hosts, our mothers would disown us, any excuse possible: but no dice. Eventually, 5.30am came, I cracked, and the four of us went home. We wanted our beds, you see, and I thought her presence wouldn’t be too problematic. I’ve always been an optimist. We had all tried to persuade her to go back to her own house (which she had, apparently. She wasn’t homeless or anything. Why did she want to stay with us?), but she wasn’t having any of it. “You seem like such nice guys!” she kept saying. Probably also the kind of thing a prostitute might say. Not that I know. I don’t have first-hand experience at all, mum, honest.

Unrelated, but pretty as anything

Our flat is, let’s be honest, disgusting. Our flatmate, Pete (also known as ‘The Washing Up Fairy’) occasionally cracks and cleans stuff, but he wasn’t there that weekend, so every single item of crockery or cutlery that we possess was piled up in the sink. The floor’s a state, because they didn’t provide us with a mop, so we’ll be buggered if we’ll buy one. The bin was overflowing like you wouldn’t believe, because I’m afraid of the rubbish chute after I shut my fingers in it. To complete the image, there was a mysterious puddle on the sideboard that I was reluctant to touch (not that we had any paper towels with which to clean it). It had been there for some time, but, curiously, wasn’t evaporating. Dorothy looked around with a look of growing horror. I washed up a cup for her, and she said she’d wash up everything else. I would like nothing more than having a strange Polish musician doing our washing up, but to be fair, she was a house guest, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Oh no, don’t worry about that, you’re a guest!”

Then things started getting odd. She wanted to share a bed with someone, so as not to sleep alone. “No sex, I’m on my period anyway,” she announced to a look of mutual panic and horror between the three of us. “I’m alright though. If you tried anything, I’d pepper spray you!” she said, cheerfully, then went and showed us the pepper spray itself. Mark and I looked at each other, and telepathically debated actually getting pepper sprayed to see what it’s like. We decided against it, you’ll be glad to know. Anyway, back to the sleeping arrangements. We made some excuses, and made her up a bed on the floor of our room, like you would an animal. Our dormitory gave us some blankets when we moved in that are actually less than worthless. “In my country, giving someone a blanket like that would be an insult. We use that shit to dry down horses!” Jeff once told me in a fit of bitterness. Accordingly, we collected all of our horse-blankets, and let Dorothy arrange them as she saw fit. We surreptitiously moved everything of value next door, whilst she had a smoke, and Jeff went through her jacket pockets to see if she had any ID. No, she did not. Of course she didn’t. But, to conclude, we had a menstruating street performer with no name who sweet talked her way into staying with us, armed with pepper spray, and who didn’t actually steal anything.  Quite a sweet girl, in her way, I guess.

Living here is, at best, exciting. At worst? Grim. As I said, you can’t get in between 3 and 4am. That is, in itself, annoying, but last night, we found the creepy flipside to that. We got there at 2.45, and nobody was there to let us in. So we rang the bell, and knocked, and after about ten minutes, one of the Reception Ogres came storming out, shouting at us in Polish. I waited for her to let up, and told her, in Polish, that we didn’t speak Polish. She eventually gave us our keys (we pay her wages, come on) and we went upstairs. About half an hour later, whilst we were having a smoke, we saw a guy downstairs, who couldn’t get in. After a very Italian shouted conversation from our balcony, we went down and tried to let him in. We couldn’t. The doors were locked. That’s right, you can’t leave between 3 and 4 in the morning. Not even if you need an ambulance, I imagine. It’s like the Hotel California, but with a far worse standard of bedding.

See that? Gridlock and misery.

Last week, I was woken up by screaming girls. That’s never a good thing to wake up to, in any circumstances, so I got up and had a look at the (bloody poxy bastard) club over the road. There was a while hoard of young teenagers, mostly girls, crowding around the door. I told my flatmates, so we all stood on the balcony, trying to work out what was going on. Eventually, someone told us that the Polish Justin Bieber himself was playing there. Yeah, that’s right. You couldn’t make that up, really. Obviously, we eventually ran out of cigarettes, and had to go out for some more, and got caught up in the crowd of slow-moving, starstruck Polish teenagers. We were getting towards fight-or-flight responses, when a man climbed up from the crowd, onto a bench, looking over everyone's heads, and bellowed "kurwa piwo!" That literally translates as "bitch, beer!" I'm not suggesting that there is such a thing as universal truth, or true Zen, or anything like that, but that guy came closer to it than anyone I have ever met before. Then, later that day, it started snowing. I really hate snow, in a way that I can't adequately express. It's like a primal, deep-seated hatred that eventually manifests itself as me sitting sadly inside drinking whiskey as it falls from the sky, silently mocking me, daring me to run out of cigarettes again. Also, where I live is basically a wind tunnel - so, horizontal snow. I'm a proud Englishman, a Man of Kent no less, and horizontal rain doesn't bother me in the slightest. In fact, it's a little taste of home. But horizontal snow? Nah, you can keep that. 

As it happens, I’m going back to England next Thursday. I’m quite looking forward to it, I must say. I miss oven cooked food, ale, Marmite and the Southern accent. I was at a party the other night, teaching a French girl to say “bugger me sideways”, which nowadays seems to be my default setting: drinking/teaching foreigners how to say strange English exclamations. I forgot that there was a girl from London there, and nearly jumped out of my skin when she said it after the French chick. Also, I miss a good wardrobe. Thanks to a very badly laid out (learn Feng-Shui, administration, come on) room, when the wardrobe door is open, it blocks out the light, meaning you can’t see anything. I do literally get dressed in the dark. Sadly, I do have to fly back. See, if the Good Lord had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings. He almost certainly never wanted nice boys like me to have to be sat next to a stinky Frenchman for long periods of time. So, that'll be fun, especially because I'm growing my beard, and probably look like a recent convert to Islam. So, always assuming, I make it through customs, prepare yourselves, England, for the prodigal son/king in exile returns! 

Krakow, Creationists and Khazis

The first thing I must say here is that I really like Poland. Like, madly. I was worried that I just liked Wroclaw, but now that we’ve been to Kraków I feel eminently qualified to say that I like the whole country. That’s a 2/2 success rate! It’s 0/1 for Germany. I was actually quite impressed by Kraków, because we were there for a whole five minutes before someone tried to fight us, which I think may actually be a new record. All we were doing was taking pictures of the train station like a bunch of Asian tourists, and he came over, started shouting at us in rapid Polish and trying to grab my mate’s camera. He also started moving as if he was going to throw a punch, then abruptly said “dobze (good)” when he put the camera away. We genuinely don’t know what angered him so much, but he must have been furious, because he didn’t get round to finishing his mouthful of food before kicking off.

There! On the right! Angry Man has us in his sights!

In a nutshell, Kraków is lovely, except for being full of English people who are there to get drunk. Yes, that was why we were there, but we actually wanted to see sights before we sought oblivion. We were herded into a pub immediately after our run in with Angry Man by an outstandingly aggressive rep, so we decided we’d have lunch. Turned out we were next to a bunch of fat, balding morons from London, clearly on a lads’ holiday, who spoke of either drunkenness, football or women. We, like true tourists, were talking about seeing the castle or something, when one of them bellowed, loudly enough for people in Dublin to hear, “Yeah mate, but is she FIT?!” Says it all really.

Our youth hostel was surprisingly good actually, for the pittance we paid for it, although someone should tell them that a half-hour bus ride from the centre doesn’t count as ‘close’ in my book, and that maybe they should update their website. Also, they had dogs running around, and I’m terrified of dogs. One night, when we got back, the wretched things started barking at us (surely, living in a bloody youth hostel, they should be used to people coming and going?) so we instinctively raised our hands in a 'calm down/don't bite me' way. Then, the receptionist came charging through, talking to us like we were retarded or something, saying “No! Don’t raise your hands! They think you’re going to hit them!” I genuinely can’t think of anything I can add to that. On a more positive note, I’ve never heard a better snorer than my Italian friend. It somehow managed to wake me up, which is impressive enough in itself. Also impressive was the shower, which got colder when you turned it to the hot side. How does that even happen?!

As you can guess, we have a strange habit of just picking up lunatics in one way or another, and we excelled ourselves in Kraków. We ran into a Canadian guy, who said he was a proof-reader, and had lived in Kraków for eight years, with his wife and children. Which was fine. He then proceeded to show us the sights of the Jewish quarter, which was fantastic. We asked him what he was doing, and he said that it was the one night a week where he could go out, have a smoke and relax. That’s fine, but I would love to know what his life really consists of, where the best way he can spend his evening off is to drink with some scruffy students who were leaving the next day anyway. We didn't even buy him a pint! I can’t complain though, because he took us to a place called House of Beer, and I have never before seen so much, nor such a varied selection of beer. Mark managed to find one which was livid green. Sadly, it turned out that this guy was a bit of a religious nutter. He made a few thinly veiled references to his dislike of homosexuality, then out of the blue started complaining about how the Theory of Evolution is nonsensical. Don’t know how we found him, don’t think I want to stay in touch with him either.

As a man of Canterbury, I can't help but judge other cities'
cathedrals. I find them wanting, but this is a good second.

Anyway, there are a few major differences between England and Poland. One is that, in England, the currency is always valid. The cashiers may bitch about you buying a bottle of water with a £50, but 99% of the time, they accept it. Not so here. They’re fond of cursing you if they don’t have enough change, or can’t be bothered to work it out. Not ‘curse’, actually, but more like ‘make it clear that you’ve disappointed them terribly’. Also, we have more grosze than we know what to do with. You need four or five grosze to make one English penny, so we have genuinely no use for them, and we’re keeping ours communally in a big glass until we have enough to buy bog roll or something. But everyone, in pretty much any shop, will ask you slightly desperately for any small-denomination coins. If I had the Polish to say it, I’d tell them that we have a load that we’re not using and that they’re more than welcome to them, if it’ll stop me having to scrabble about for change like a tramp. Yeah, it’s a sorry state of affairs where you have too much money, and “too much” probably means “about 47p”.

The supermarkets are different in more than just how much change they have. Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, as we do all of our shopping in the Carrefour across the road, which is ultimately a cheap supermarket in a grim area of a post-Communist city. It doesn’t compare favourably with the major British supermarkets, though. The closest comparison I can make for it is a Lidl or an Aldi. I view both of those establishments as Trotter’s Independent Traders made into a supermarket, where you can buy all your groceries or whatever, but also a pair of shoes, a lawn ornament and a deckchair. Carrefour isn’t dissimilar, although fatally flawed in many ways, and far less cheerful than I make it sound. You can’t quite escape the grimness. No effort is made to make anything look enticing. They don’t sell fresh milk, only UHT, there are no colourful displays of reduced products, and the aisles are on the narrow side, so you can’t get two trolleys down them. Also, something that I find absolutely horrifying is that they keep the dog food in the same fridge as the people food. Now, even someone who doesn’t speak Polish can tell the difference between dog food and a chicken breast. I don’t trust the sausages, though. It’s not worth gambling and ending up with a doggy treat.

 But there are solutions! After a long, harrowing shopping trip, Jeff the Dutch recently turned to me and said “You know what? I could run a better supermarket, and I’m a mad alcoholic. For one, widen the aisles. Get rid of the shoes and tennis balls and all that shite, nobody buys those on an impulse in a supermarket that predominantly sells food. They look like they fell off the back of a lorry anyway. Then, either have a stop selling dog food that requires refrigeration, or invest in a separate fridge for it, for Christ’s sake. This set-up isn’t natural. Then, if they kept bigger floats in the till, bought proper till rolls, and hired some cashiers who weren’t rude and terrifying, it wouldn’t be such a pain in the arse to come in here.” He wasn’t wrong, I must admit.

The most annoying aspect of life here, apart from when the receptionists shout rapidly at me in a language I don’t understand, is that the Polish powers-that-be seem rather preoccupied with how we cross the road. We can get a fine if we cross when the little man isn’t green. By a fine, I think it amounts to about £20, but it’s the principle! Instead, we have to stand there, with no cars or trams visible for as far as the eye can see, like simpletons. Or, if you prefer, like animals in an abattoir. I think we could make it a status thing, where we can afford to cross the road, but I’m worried that would make me into a far worse person than I am already. Also, I’m glad we decided to get a ticket on the tram the other day, because a big fat man with a ticket-checking machine got on, and demanded to see everyone’s tickets. It was absolutely terrifying, but I don’t know why. That is why I’ve decided that if I ever get caught, I’ll just keep saying the name of the station that I want, and speak rapid Spanish, because they’re less likely to understand that than English. What was I saying about being morally reprehensible?

We've spent, I would say, a full
week of our lives here, in the past two months

Another big difference is the toilet situation out here. I’m vaguely grateful that they don’t write “men” and “women” on the doors, because that would have been remarkably hard for us when we first arrived. Sadly, though, they don’t even put crude illustrations of men and women up. That would be far too simple! No, instead they show which toilet is which with: either a circle – for women - or a triangle on the door. Yep. It’s not intuitive in any way, and the only way I can remember it, even now, is that a circle is the most basic form of Yonic imagery I can think of. How is that any more simple or effective than a stick man?! Just to add insult to injury, half of the bloody bars we go to have unisex toilets. Which is fine until you go somewhere else, presuming that they also have unisex pissers, and it turns out that they don’t, and you have to do your best non-creepy smile and explain that you don’t understand anything because you’re from England and you’ve been drinking for three months. So much for that. On the bright side, any toilet related mishaps are more than made up for by being able to smoke in a bar, and being able to get a pint and a pack of cigarettes for about £6. Speaking of which, we regularly frequent the most pretentious bar in Wroclaw, called ”Kalambur”, which is a bit like a French jazz bar from 1959 – same soundtrack, air of cigarette smoke and wankers drinking coffee. I can’t tell if drinking in a hipster bar, and feeling superior to the hipsters actually means that I myself am a hipster. The mysteries of life, right there. I’m going to ponder this tonight, whilst we wait for wigga-watch. This is what happens when the club over the road has a big hip-hop event on, and all the wiggas (or ‘piggas’ – Polish wiggas) get brutally drunk and fight each other in the street. It’s great fun to watch, especially with a cup of tea and a cigarette. Also, to finish on a positive note, my food poisoning has got slightly better! I don’t know what I was expecting from a fast food outlet, under the stairs of a supermarket, in a skanky part of Poland, but yes, I got wonderfully ill from it. Not throwing up ill: that would have been easier. No, instead I just felt sick as hell for a couple of weeks (weeks!) and gagged whenever I smelt a burger or anything. It got to a point where I dreamed someone was eating something from there, and I nearly threw up in real life. I don’t think I’ll be returning. Still, you live, you learn, or so I’ve been told.

What happened when we went on a drinking holiday... whilst on a drinking holiday

When, late one evening, after beer has been taken, a German friend asks you if you would like a lift to Dresden the next afternoon, there is generally only one answer: flip a coin to decide. We’d planned to see a Doors tribute act that evening, you see. Lady Luck smiled on us, and we asked another German friend to see if he knew anyone who would be willing to put up two drunken, English, Erasmus students - whom they had never met before - in their house. Strangely enough, we had a taker. So, the next afternoon, we got into The Dude’s car. He pulled away, only to hear a dramatic crunching noise, which I think set the tone for the whole weekend. We decided, when we stopped for petrol, that we needed some kind of ashtray, not thinking to use the empty can of Coke that we’d previously saved for just such a purpose. Obviously I bought a beer, which turned out to be 6%. I cracked it open, and The Dude turned round from the driver’s seat to ask for a mouthful. When in Rome, and all that. Now, fate had been kind to us so far, which meant that our luck had to run out eventually. We got stuck in a big old traffic jam, that lasted for around an hour and a half. A little quirk of Polish traffic lights is that they’re rubbish. They stay green for up to 30 seconds at a time. They also have a little timer, so you can see just how much of your life you’re wasting whilst sat there. In a nutshell, they have a unique capacity to destroy your soul and cause huge tail-backs. And, as everyone knows, beer has a habit of going straight through you, especially the stronger ones, so that was a very long hour and a half for Mr. Mungo. 

Anyway, life moves on, and so did we. In the first 20 minutes away from the tailback, we covered more ground than we had done in the entire afternoon. I was quite excited about the prospect of seeing some authentic Polish countryside. I was also excited when I saw The Phantom Menace in the cinema: pretty similar experiences, really. It turns out that it’s boring as anything. They also have a propensity for putting big billboards in the middle of fields. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but I wasn’t sure what they were advertising. Could have been dental care, life insurance or internet providers.  Anyway, we made it out of Poland, at last. I’d never actually been to Germany before that weekend, so I had plenty of stereotypes and expectations. The first is that the autobahns are fantastic. You can thank my sixth-form Kraftwerk habit for that. And you know what? They’re pretty cool, as motorways go. Sadly, the second we got onto it, the heavens opened like you would not believe, which made things interesting to say the least. We were driving at around 160 k/h when the Dude turned round, wearing his trademark smile, and said “boys... at this velocity, if I made a mistake... none of us will survive”. Thankfully he didn’t. He’s an excellent driver, to be fair. And quite the showman, he knows how to make an otherwise dull drive exciting. 

Dresden is actually quite a beautiful town. You can thank the Soviets for rebuilding it. When we arrived, we went to The Dude’s friends’ flat. He rang the intercom, and belched loudly into it. I thought then that these were people I could get on with. I wasn’t disappointed. They were like something from a cult film. They certainly enjoyed smoking and drinking, which is a trait I like in a person. They spent much of the evening trying to teach us how to open bottles with a lighter. ‘Trying’ is the key word in that sentence. They put on Disraeli Gears, by Cream, which is one of my favourite albums, and very fitting to the general atmosphere. They then got completely sidetracked by eating cornflakes. Absolutely fantastic, and so accommodating, I was very grateful to them. Lovely set of guys, the only problem being that we were a bit worried about where we were going to be sleeping, seeing as the girl whose house we were staying in wasn’t answering her phone. We needn’t have worried, as she and her flatmates were lovely as well. Marek and I were on a sofabed, complete with blankets. It was better than any of the beds that I’ve seen in Poland. Anyway, the second we’d put our bags and what-have-you down, we were off to a club. Something that the German youth does like is walking down the street drinking beer. Me, I’m not so keen on it. I always think that that kind of behaviour is reserved for the homeless, those with a drinking problem, scummy teenagers and hooligans of one kind or another. We had dinner in this little Turkish place, which was nice enough, until The Dude forgot to pay. Thankfully, everyone was very nice about it. I’ve always been nervous about Turkish people working in food outlets after a friend of mine in Guildford tried to complain that he had been given a large kebab instead of a small one, and one of the guys came out of the backroom, holding a big knife, telling him that that was what he’d got, and he’d better pay. The nightclub was strange. You couldn’t smoke inside, for a start, which is one of the things that I now look for in a bar. It also had a kind of games room, with table football and pool. In England, they would be broken down to their component pieces and used as weapons, which I took to mean that they don’t know how to party properly. I found the club to be a bit soulless actually. Nice, but I just didn’t enjoy it. It could be something to do with the fact that I realised I was using Euros. Whilst the Euro is vastly inferior to the Great British Pound, it is an actual currency, and it does have a real world value, as opposed to the Polish Zloty, affectionately referred to as “Monopoly money”. It was unsettling to say the least. 

The next day, we decided to look at Dresden’s old town, just Marek and myself, neither of us capable of speaking German. It’s a very pretty place – the buildings even look authentically pre-war and everything. For some reason there was a large number of horses and carts roaming around. Horses unsettle me, I don’t understand people that willingly have them around. They can kick, bite and stamp, as well as being completely unrestrainable, should they take a mind to be so. Anyway, it turns out that Dresden is full of bloody fountains as well. I still don’t understand why people go mad for them. I don’t care for German food overly much either. I don’t really eat meat, if left to my own devices, which kinda makes me stand out like a sore thumb in the Fatherland. I don’t consider a big sausage as a meal in itself. On the other hand, the bona fide German market we were in partly redeemed itself by serving beer by the litre. I felt like a hobbit in the Prancing Pony, it was fantastic. Until I realised that they expected me to pay a five Euro deposit for the glass. I actually thought that five Euros for a big old glass like that was a bargain, but I decided against it. I wish I had, it might have shown them that their system is theoretically efficient (important word to Germans) but doesn’t work. I do regret being taken in by the comparative good looks of the barmaid. That brings me on to another point. The two towns aren’t that far away, but the women in Dresden are far, far less attractive than the ones in Wroclaw. I don’t know why that should be, but it was disappointing nonetheless. Someone else who was disappointed was the singer in a busking duo. Both were wearing military uniforms, with one singing and one playing accordion. I wanted to show my support, but I didn't want to part with any money, so I threw them a handful of (worthless) grosze, the sub-unit of the Zloty. I'm not certain what they shouted after me, but it sounded a lot like a threat or a curse of some description.

Anyway, we decided that we’d exhausted the joys of Dresden, so went back. That involved a train ticket, which was a bitch to buy. Eventually we got on one, and had a German family come and sit next to us, and start eating some sandwiches. That was fine, but two minutes before the train departed, they got off. I still don’t understand what was going on there. The train stopped at literally every station between Dresden and Wroclaw, and mercy me, were some of them grim. Grey, dull, clearly hadn’t progressed since the early 70’s. Reminded me a bit of my housing estate back home. As a parting note, regarding the whole escapade, when I got back, I realised that the bloody Germans had sold us a ticket to Breslau. For those that don’t know, that was the old German name for the city, before Poland was shifted West. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it, but that strikes me as being both bitter and arrogant. Our answer to that? Use the damn thing as roach paper, because we’re living the dream.  

I want to see fountains, Gandalf... Should've come to Wroclaw then.

They always say that you should start as you mean to carry on. I think my time here did that by itself. I'd never flown before I came, and for some reason I decided to go with WizzAir, which I don't think is a proper airline. The air hostesses were an unexpected highlight, seeing as they had minimal English and a dead-eyed, haunted look. They clearly hadn't been taught much about how to do their job, because they said "pay attention" before making any announcement. English is a rich and subtle language, with a whole load of different ways of saying the same thing, yet they still chose to go with "pay attention", rather than "please listen" or "if I may have your attention please". Says it all, really.

Our flat is great, in a grim, hideously inadequate kind of way. The fridge: Soviet era, with a freezer compartment about the size of a lever-arch folder. The cooking facilities: two Soviet era hotplates, that take half an hour to boil a kettle of water. Oven: we don't have one. Electrics: fridge, nothing else. Cupboard space: inexplicably generous, but I'd sooner have less space and something to cook lasagne in. In our shared room: two adjacent desks, bookshelves, wardrobes, bedside tables, lamps. One of the lamps doesn't work. The beds are covered in a strange, rough, rug-type affair, with a sheet that's too big and a duvet that's too small. The bedclothes inexplicably smell of Plastecine. We have internet facilities, but we had to either buy a splitter cable, as there's only one internet socket, or a router. Neither of us knew what a splitter cable might look like, so we went with a rubbish router that doesn't seem too keen on working. The curtains, of course, don't cover the windows. We have a door to our balcony, but when we open it, that makes the curtains detach from the pegs that hold them up. I'm too short to rehang them. The balcony is okay, with a view of some cranes and the cafe across the road. It's covered in bird shit and feathers, and an increasing quantity of cigarette ends. That's well over a week we've been meaning to buy an ashtray, now. The first thing we did when we got here was to shave my room-mate's head, and the resulting hair was out there for around five days before we decided to sweep it up. The overhead lamp has some bare wires, where it has come slightly out of the ceiling.We have a radiator, but that doesn't get turned on until mid-October, in a country with absolutely no transitory months. It was summer when we came, and all of a sudden, it's now winter - and what a winter it'll be.

I'm sharing a room with my friend from university, who has now been christened Marek, to go with me being called Mundek (I got sick of nobody being able to pronounce my name right, so I had to take matters into my own hands). Our hobbies seem to be living like pigs, drinking, and bodily functions. You could be forgiven for thinking that we were raised by wolves. Next door we have two Belgians, one of whom, hereafter known as Presto Pete, is wonderfully enthusiastic about everything, except walking any distance. We spent a good few days teaching him how to pronounce the word "law". He kept calling it "low", something which it emerges is common across most Europeans with English as their second language. I wouldn't ordinarily have minded, but that's the name of his course. The other Belgian is a little older. I accidentally locked him out last night, for which I feel very bad now. We let him in - we were still up, by some miracle. My drinking has got worse since I've been here. I don't think I've had a single dry day, but on the other hand, I haven't really drunk much vodka. Vodka seems to be only the tip of the iceberg, though - we saw something in the supermarket called Spiritus, which claimed to be 95%. I think that has crossed the border between a strong alcoholic drink and rubbing alcohol. It'd probably send you blind if you actually consumed it. I'm tempted to spike Marek's tea with it to see what happens. Whenever we're on a night out, we can't seem to avoid getting stopped by people advertising the Go-Go Club - 'real lesbian erotic show'! We always say that we don't want to go, that it's not for us, but I'm going to stop saying that. Lying is a sin, after all.

This country is fantastic if, like me, you enjoy drinking and smoking, but are also a miser. A packet of Camel costs about 13 PLN, which is about £2.66, with pints costing less than half of that. Food is cheap as well. In a pretty fancy restaurant yesterday I had a whole trout (complete with head, much to my friends' dismay and my amusement) with chips and salad for about £4.50. It generally costs about that to eat in the cafe across the road as well, and I struggle to clear my plate, though that could be more to do with how heavy Polish food is. We bought some bread, but I can't eat more than about three slices in a sitting - it's simply too much. It's a bit like a trampy verson of the Elves of Lórien's lembas bread, but that you can have with jam. The food here is often inexplicably sweet - not with dishes like salads, that could work as sweet, but stuff like their bolognese sauces and their sausages. I think the best bit about the food here is that it's perfectly socially acceptable to have pickles with pretty much everything, which pleases me no end, since I'm like the Cookie Monster, except with things in vinegar, and at a much lesser risk of developing diabetes.

A little quirk about Wroclaw: they really like their fountains. Like, REALLY like their fountains. Both the traditional kind and the 'multimedia' kind with lights. I don't consider water and light to be multimedia, which is why I didn't go with a bunch of other students to see the Fountain Show, which seemed to be water and light for about 15 minutes. "Like fireworks but with water" it was described to me as. So, like fireworks, but less impressive, then. There's one fountain that reminds me of a hosepipe with holes punched in it, but with intermittent streams of water shooting up. We saw a retarded dog trying to chase and bite the water, and getting very excitable: we thought nothing more about it, but came back the next day to see a kid doing pretty much the same thing. You can't walk down a street without finding a fountain. I don't know why they're so keen on them, considering they can't really use them in the winter, without it freezing. I really don't get it, myself.

Because it's 1973 forever here, Wroclaw still has a tram system. Soviet era trams of course, but they're actually pretty helpful. It costs about 40p to get wherever you're going, but nobody seems to check the tickets, so you can get around for free. Obviously, they're fairly crowded, and less frequent than I might like, but they're still helpful. What I particularly like, in damp weather, is when you can see the sparks coming from their overhead lines. Nothing here seems to fill me with anything approaching confidence, especially their driving. They seem to take great pleasure in generating wheelspin whenever they go round corners, or pull away from lights or whatever. I have no idea how they do it, but the novelty of it is starting to wear off, especially late at night. The rest of the time, they drive as if they're possessed, or getting someone to hospital. I would dread learning to drive here, it wouldn't really teach me good habits. You know, it's always good if you remember that you should stop at level crossings, and that you should slow down if you see a pedestrian in the road.


As a final note - I'm still in two minds about what the theme song for this year should be. "Tell Me It's Not True" from the Blood Brothers soundtrack is a possibility, as is "Music to Watch Girls By" by Andy Williams, although maybe that would be better if the girls also watched us back. This is going to be a very strange year.