One of the very exciting things to happen during my blogging drought was the development of the plans Babel and I have for our summer holiday. I had originally managed to get the week from 18th to 25th July booked off work, and ever since January when we booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague, we have been intending to attend the Internacia Junulara Kongreso, a week-long event for young speakers of Esperanto which this year is being held in the Czech town of Liberec. Babel very uncharacteristically offered to arrange the flights, and got us a really good price with Ryanair. The only downside was that they don’t run a flight on the Saturday we wanted to fly back, so we booked a return ticket for the Sunday instead. I certainly didn’t regard this as being much of downside, because it gave us the opportunity to spend a weekend in Prague, a place I have wanted to go to for years

We both knew that the Universala Kongreso, the biggest Esperanto event of the year, was scheduled to take place the following week in Bialystok, Poland, but neither of us had much inclination to go. Some of our friends were admittedly planning to attend, but the age range tends to be a lot older and we didn’t think there would be much to interest us. To me it was all academic anyway, since the only way I’d been allowed to have the week of the IJK off was by convincing a manager to rearrange that week’s audit to the week of the UK.

When we were attending the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury, however, we were able to listen to a talk from a Polish Esperantist called Przemek, who is part of the local committee organising the congress. If I’m honest, I was expecting to be mildly bored by his presentation, but somehow against my will I ended up being completely enthralled, with the result that by the end, both Tim and I were seriously wishing we could attend. This year’s congress is extra special, because 2009 represents 150 years since Zamenhof, the creater of Esperanto, was born and not at all coincidentally, his hometown was Bialystok Tim was actually so enthused by the presentation that he began to consider going to Poland without me, although in the nicest possible way, I did think it was a little unlikely that he would be motivated enough to arrange all the tickets

Anyway as far as I was concerned, that was that… until one day a couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague at work and he happened to mention that the solicitors firm which I was supposed to be auditing in the pertinent week might be about to be lost as a client of my company. A tiny little bit of me began to hope that that might be the case, but all sorts of rumours abound in the workplace, so I didn’t really give much credence to it. It was over a week later when I happened to be working for the guy who was the manager on that job, and he casually mentioned that the client had indeed been lost due to the owners becoming involved in some sort of tax evasion scheme which my firm felt was a little dubious. I scurried back to my desk to check the staff planner, and noted that I was temporarily showing as unassigned for that week. Ooooh!

Booking holiday is never straightforward in my job but the gods seemed to be smiling on me this time because I managed to get it all organised and authorised before anyone evil noticed and booked me to audit a pension scheme Babel said that he thought he would be able to have that week off as leave as well, and so it was all systems go

It wasn’t until we had both got the additional week booked off work that I realised how complicated it was actually going to be to extend our travels. I have to confess that my geography of Poland is not terribly good, and so it was that I was under the naive impression that because Liberec is relatively near to the Polish border, it would be a mere hop, skip and a jump to Bialystok.

Erm, think again Poland is not just huge, it’s absolutely bloody massive! Bialystok is right up in the top northeastern part, near to the border with Belarus, whilst Liberec borders the bottom southwestern side. To get from one place to the other would take a good 14 or 15 hours by train, so involve leaving Liberec pretty early in the morning and arriving in Bialystok rather late at night.

Arriving in Bialystok rather late at night was not something I was keen to do, on account of the difficulties involved in booking any accommodation and the impossibility of explaining that we might not arrive at it until 11pm. Booking the IJK is all very straightforward – you agree to pay a certain amout of money to the organisers and in return you get a room to stay in, meals to eat and as much entertainment as you could reasonably hope to expect from a week spent in a small Central European town with a few hundred young people crazy enough to speak Esperanto. No really, that’s a lot more fun than it sounds if last year’s IJK in Szombathely is anything to go by

Booking the UK, on the other hand, is far more complicated. You have to pay a random and arbitrary kotizo for which, as far as I can tell, you receive sweet FA. Certainly not any food or accommodation, which, unless you request it by some random date in May, the World Esperanto Association declines to help you with. Great. I tried looking at some hotel websites in Bialystok but with a grand total of two Polish words (yes and grandmother!) I quite clearly wasn’t going to get very far, and there were virtually no translations into English. Worse still, hotel rooms in Bialystok were nowhere near as cheap as I assumed they were going to be in that part of the world, and the extortionately high kotizo we had had to pay to UEA (€360 in total) meant that I couldn’t afford a hefty accommodation bill on top of that. What I ideally wanted to do was stay in some cheap student accommodation – halls of residence, that sort of thing – but despite my attempts to politely contact them, UEA wouldn’t give me any details to get in touch or offer to book it for me. I managed to find a solitary phone number via Google, but again, without any Polish I was hardly onto a winner

It was then that Babel had the bright idea that I should try contacting our Polish acquaintance from Salisbury, Przemek. Sometimes it can be really helpful to have friends all over the world, and this was certainly one of them After a brief conversation on Facebook, Przemek offered us a room in student accommodation for the tiny sum of 8 Euros per person per night, on the condition that we didn’t mind helping out a bit with the junulara programo. The promise of such cheap accommodation certainly makes volunteering seem worthwhile, and I can’t imagine that it will be anywhere near so much hard work as the IS in Biedenkopf was for poor Babel!

Accommodation sorted, the only remaining problem was transport. We ultimately decided to stick with our original plan and spend Saturday night in the Czech capital, Prague. On the Sunday night following the IJK there is a Eurolines bus which leaves Prague at 9pm and arrives in Warsaw at 6am the following morning. I gave a lot of thought to the mode of transport, and having read a lot of horror stories online about people being gassed and robbed in overnight sleeper trains, I decided that going by bus would be significantly safer, albeit rather more uncomfortable. I’m not 100% convinced that we shall get a great amount of sleep, but nevertheless it will be an adventure, and when we get to Warsaw we will have ample time to find some breakfast and navigate our way across the city centre before our train to Bialystok leaves around 9.30. It’s still a good two and a half hours by train to Bialystok actually, but luckily direct, and so if everything goes according to plan we will be at the congress by midday on the Monday

Everything may, of course, not go according to plan as it is without doubt the most ambitious journey I have ever tried to plan and the risk of getting mugged or pickpocketed somewhere along the way is not entirely negligible. The adventure doesn’t end upon our arrival in Bialystok, of course, as there is the not insignificant matter of us actually trying to get home again…

When we first booked our flights to Prague in January, we originally booked return flights because we weren’t actually intending to go to Poland. We now don’t need the return part of that flight, and it was necessary to book a new flight home, preferably from Poland. It would have been nice to fly from a nearby and convenient airport like Warsaw, but we’d already paid a substantial amount of money for airport parking at East Midlands, the airport from which our outbound flight was departing, so we desperately needed a flight which would get us back to that airport and enable us to retrieve the Moosemobile.

This was easier said that done. It turned out that over the entire weekend we needed to travel there was a grand total of ONE flight from Poland to East Midlands… and that was from Wroclaw. If your geography of Poland is anywhere near as shaky as mine you will have absolutely no idea where that is, or even how to pronounce it, but essentially it’s all the way back in the direction of Liberec, a good 10 hour train journey across a diagonal of Poland. Needs must though and luckily the flight is late in the evening. With the train tickets booked, so long as there are no upsets along the way, we should be in a good position to get home on time.

Or at least, that’s what I thought when I booked the flight. On Wednesday this week there was a significant upset to all plans which nearly through the entire holiday into jeopardy, but that is something so annoying that it deserves a rant post all of it’s own…

Tags: Bialystok, Esperanto, IJK, Liberec, Universala Kongreso

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Esperanto, Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.