I am currently in an internet cafe in Bialystok, Poland. Up until about an hour ago, I had not been having a very good day at all

Babel and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, following a long and unpleasant journey across most of Poland, utterly fed up and exhausted. We were fast asleep by 7pm on Monday, but yesterday felt better and decided to explore the town. With the help of some tourist brochures translated into Esperanto, we duly did so, a procedure which lasted approximately three hours. That is to say, within three hours we appeared to have seen every single sight which Bialystok possesses, and were thus rather at a loss for something else to do.

In the absence of any better ideas, we spent Tuesday afternoon getting drunk. Eight glasses of wine later it was time for bed, after a brief stop off at a nearby pizza place to grab an evening meal. We committed the grave mistake of sitting outside to eat with some friends… The result is that this morning I have woken up with in excess of twenty fly bites on my legs alone, with the upper half of my body being even worse off. I can’t count all the bites on my back because I can’t see them all, but I would hazard a guess that I must be the proud owner of about 50 bites in total. And yes, they itch like hell. All 50 of them, at the same time. It was pretty difficult to sleep last night

Yes, these things happen on holiday sometimes and it’s far from the end of the world, but to add insult to injury… Well, come to Bialystok and you’ll see for yourself I know it’s not exactly your typical holiday destination and I wasn’t expecting a miracle, but nevertheless the Esperanto propaganda which we had seen before we came suggested that we could expect something more than it turns out is actually here, otherwise… well, we wouldn’t have decided to come in the first place.

Imagine the ugliest estate of council tower blocks which you have ever seen in the UK. Replicate it over the size of a city with 300k inhabitants. Take the tarmac off the roads and pavements, replace some of the shops with tin shacks a Brazilian shanty town would be proud of, and you’re getting close. Make sure you don’t imagine more than a bare handful of bars and restaurants, and remove any other useful amenities you can think of. Take all the meat off the supermarket shelves, add a swarm of blood-sucking flies, and you’re getting really close. I don’t know. Words fail me now I’m trying to describe it. I shall take some pictures tomorrow and upload them when I get home.

The main problem is not that Bialystok is ugly, but simply that there is nothing here. There is nothing to do during the day, because the programme of the Esperanto congress is not really aimed at people within 30 years of our age-range. There’s nothing to do in the evening, because there’s virtually nowhere you can get a decent meal. We were trying to self cater our own breakfasts, which you’d think would be easy enough, but a visit to the only food shop within reasonable distance of our living quarters indicated otherwise. Stale bread rolls, cheese that went mouldy after one day in the fridge, no meat of any description at all….

Things got so bad today, that at lunchtime I took out my mobile phone and googled ‘Bialystok McDonalds’. It brought up an address, and an hour later, having negotiated our way down a confusing series of sandy cobbled tracks (I refuse to call them roads!), Babel and I eventually saw a big yellow M looming up in the distance before us. Initially we feared that it might be a mirage, a promise of food in this urban desert which would fail to materialise, but it did indeed prove to be a MacDonalds and we went in and ate several meals all at once, so excited we were to see civilisation.

I appreciate that it is not a terribly Esperanto thing to do… to visit Zamenhof’s birthplace and spend hours tracking down a branch of McDonalds, but we were desperate and I don’t care

Anyway, as we were sitting in McDonalds, devouring burgers and chicken nuggets, the week suddenly got a whole lot better I had missed a call on my mobil whilst we were walking about, and the caller had left a voicemail for me. I dialled in to receive it, expecting it to relate to something else entirely, but to my complete and utter shock it turned out to be a message from our mortgage broker. She apologised for the delay in getting back to us – and I have to confess that with the use of the word apology, my heart sunk – and then completely unexpectedly added that a mortgage offer was now in the post to us!!!!

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. We had been waiting for a response for about five weeks now, so I had fully convinced myself that the answer would be no, and had prepared myself for the fact that we wouldn’t be able to buy the house we wanted. Now it seems that we can…. wow…. I’m still in shock really and I don’t know what to say, but I am very, very happy

In other news, Liberec was great fun, Prague is possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been, and if anyone has a holiday booked in Warsaw, please go cancel it now because the place is an absolute hellhole!

Tags: Esperanto

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 2:45 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.