Christmas Day I got up madly early because I wanted to go to Mass at 8.30AM. My church isn’t terribly big as churches go, and Christmas Day being rather a busy day for religious folk, I figured it would be a good idea to get there early so as to get a seat. I therefore instructed my taxi service… I mean, Tim… to get me there for 8.15. This turned out to have been a bit of a mistake, as surprisingly few people had actually chosen to get out of bed so early on the most relaxed day of the year, and so the church was pretty dark and cold and empty. It soon filled up though, and Tim was nice enough to stay for the service so that I didn’t have to wait outside for him afterwards in the cold

The business of the day out of the way, it was time to head back home for the presents. I got so many lovely things that I don’t even know where to start with describing them. Tim bought be several games for our Wii – Mario Kart (which is my particular favourite at the moment), EA Active (which I discovered this morning is surprisingly tiring), an Agatha Christie game and a new Sonic the Hedgehog game (which I still haven’t tried yet!). I also got loads of books – my sister bought me the new Hitchhiker sequel (which I’ve now read and can thoroughly recommend), as well as the new Winnie-the-Pooh book, which is beautifully illustrated. Babel had set up various relatives to buy me murder mysteries from different series that I’m following, and he himself had bought me Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh in Esperanto translation, which I was particularly excited about I had all kinds of other things too, including a beautiful new overnight bag from my parents, and various additions to our mug collection. Babel’s parents bought me a boxset of Jurassic Park DVDs, which I was particularly keen to watch after my recent visit to the Natural History Museum, and we now have an entire cupboard full of sweets and biscuits, which is somewhat hindering our chances of succeeding with the New Year diet! First prize for the best present has to go to Babel, however, who designed a personalised calendar for me, with a different duck for each month of the year

We were having Christmas Day dinner at home, which was a tiny bit stressful because we’d never cooked anything approximating a roast dinner before. Nevertheless, it went remarkably well – nothing burnt and there was almost more food than we could eat In the afternoon we headed of to Babel’s sister’s house where we had a pleasant evening of Wii games.

Boxing Day was a bit more hectic as we had to pack and get the house in order in preparation for our holiday to Germany. We’d booked to attend the Novjara Internacia Semajno in Saarbruecken, Germany, but in the week leading up to Christmas it seemed an increasingly unlikely prospect on account of the fact that we’d booked to travel by Eurostar, and the Eurostar trains had virtually ground to a halt I was particularly stressed as it was me who had made the bookings and paid the money, and we stood to lose quite a lot if everything went wrong.

Nevertheless, we checked the Eurostar website on the evening of the 26th, and it seemed to imply that they were running a fairly normal service, so we relaxed a little with some wine and some Mario Kart before bed. We opened a bottle of Rose which Tim’s sister had bought me for my birthday, and it was so incredibly nice that I accidentally managed to down a glass of it within 10 minutes or so, with the result that I suddenly felt exceptionally drunk

I felt a little hungover when I woke up on Sunday morning, and not at all like an early start and a brisk walk to the local station with a suitcase in tow, but nevertheless it had to be done, and we arrived at Nuneaton station with plenty of time to spare before our first time of the day. I thought I’d been rather clever by booking our tickets and reserving our tickets on line, but the train had commenced its journey at Liverpool Lime Street, and whilst we had indeed got a reserved seat, that unfortunately didn’t guarrantee us any space in the luggage rack My fairly small suitcase managed to find a home for itself under my seat, but Tim’s had a brand shiny new suitcase which was nearly as big as me, and he didn’t stand a chance! In the end, his suitcase sat next to me and he found a space elsewhere.

I was somewhat apprehensive on the walk between Euston and St Pancras, worrying that at every turn we would come across a queue of 2000 disgruntled French people who had failed to get back home in time for Christmas. Happily, we arrived to find that there were no queues at all We whizzed through security, met up with some fellow Esperantists also travelling from the UK, and before you knew it we were sitting happily on our scheduled train, which departed 100% on time!

I must confess to being slightly scared at the prospect of going through the tunnel, not least because of all the horror stories which had been on the news with people getting stuck the preceeding week, but it was actually perfectly fine and I would definitely do it again. There wasn’t much of a view, not least because it was pouring with rain as we sped through France, but all the same it was pretty impressive to see raindrops running horizontally across the train windows in demonstration of how fast we were travelling

Having arrived safely in Paris, we had about 50 minutes to get from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est and find our connecting train. I was terribly excited to be in the elusive Gare du Nord, having spent most of my French GCSE saying “Ou est la Gare du Nord?” in a seemingly futile attempt to find it. My overriding impression of my ten minutes in Paris, however, is of dog mess, as the streets appeared to be coated in it. Hmmm

We found the second station with little trouble and made our connection with time to spare. The German ICE which was taking us straight to Saarbruecken was without doubt the most sophisticated train of the entire holiday, with more legroom than you get on most planes and plenty of space for luggage to boot. Unfortunately, when at 7pm we finally arrived at our destination the heavens had opened We were lucky in that one of the Esperantists we were travelling with had lived in the town some years back and hence had a good idea of the direction we needed to go in to get to the youth hostel, but it took us the best part of thirty minutes to get there; plenty of time to curse my stupidity for having left my umbrella on the floor of Tim’s car :cry:

It was a group of rather wet and disgruntled Esperantists which finally arrived at the Youth Hostel, only to be greeted by one of the finest examples of Esperantist disorganisation which I have ever had the misfortune to witness. I would like flatter myself that I am quite a placid person, and I am certainly not a person who swears very often at all, but if I remember correctly I nevertheless was provoked into losing my temper and using a couple of F words within the first 15 minutes of being at the event.

For a start, we walked through the door and there was no one there to meet us, no one to tell us what to do, not even any terribly visible instructions. Then, as per usual, there were hordes of other Esperantists randomly blocking all available doors and corridors because they have their heads so much in the clouds that it genuinely doesn’t occur to them that someone with luggage might actually, y’know, need to get past them. Eventually we figured out that there was a notice board, displaying the names and room numbers of all the participants. Great. Except for the fact that there was no further information, such as where your room might be located or how you were supposed to acquire the key. Hmm.

Luckily I speak German, and so I was able to ask the lady on the youth hostel reception desk. She explained to me that my room wasn’t in the youth hostel at all, but in a local hotel a 5 minute walk away. I asked her if she could give me directions and she said she was sorry, but she didn’t know where it was. She told me I would have to ask the main organiser. Fine, except I’d never met the guy before, so had absolutely no idea what he might look like. The lady was nice enough to give me a reasonable description of him, and we bumped into him shortly afterwards anyway, but the point is that I shouldn’t have had to go through that rigmarole, and what the hell was I supposed to do if I hadn’t, like, had the foresight to learn German in advance?!

Deep breaths. We acquired both our room keys and some verbal directions to the hotel, and made our way to the dining room to get some dinner and calm down. Much as I love attending Esperanto events and find it a truly valuable experience, every time Tim and I attend one we both end up so wound up on the first evening that we could easily hit someone. Whether it’s standing for half an hour in a queue of people in Hungary to have a flipping name badge laminated, waiting three hours in a ridiculous ticket system in Liberec, or being addressed by idiots in Bialystok, arrival is never a pleasant experience.

Humph. On entering the dining room, I was delighted to see that the dinner was spaghetti bolognaise, one of my favourites My delight was shortlived, however, when upon having piled a generous helping onto my plate and gobbled the first few eager mouthfuls, I realised that this was in fact not spaghetti bolognaise. Oh no! Spaghetti it most certainly was, BUT THERE WAS NO MEAT IN IT! Now I don’t know how other people feel about this, but I believe quite deeply that you cannot call something spaghetti bolognaise unless there is MEAT in it. You can call it “a vegetarian rip-off of spaghetti bolognaise”, or perhaps “spaghetti veggie-mush-aise”, or something more catchy if you can think of it, but spaghetti bolognaise it is not. As you can see I was quite wound up about this, in particular because when I checked, there was no meat option which I had missed. I decided to give the organisers the benefit of the doubt at this stage, however, on the grounds that it was the last half hour of a two hour dinner-serving, and perhaps all the meat had simply been eaten already? More on that later.

Babel led us to the hotel, which really wasn’t very far away at all. We struggled to find the door initially, the reception of the hotel being completed shut up and locked, and the premises consisting of two buildings on opposite sides of the road. Eventually we found what we figured must be the correct place, and Babel attempted to enter the door code which we had been given by the organiser.

It didn’t work.

He tried entering it again.

It still didn’t work.

We entered it multiple times, to the accompaniment of much cursing and swearing.

The door remained quite firmly closed.

You have to try to picture our frustration at this point. It’s nearly nine o clock at night and we’d been travelling since nine in the morning. We’re standing outside in the freezing cold, soaked from the rain, with a pile of heavy suitcases, and we can’t get into our hotel. Tim looked like he might just kill someone

To cut a long story short, Tim jogged back down to the youth hostel in an attempt to find out the correct code. In the meantime, a Belgian Esperantist who had been given exactly the same code turned up and failed to get the door open either. We shivered and grumbled for 15 minutes or so until Tim reappeared and explained that we were standing in front of the wrong door. The door we were supposed to be entering through was on the opposite side of the road, through an archway and up a flight of stairs, making it invisible to anyone who might be standing outside the hotel reception. Of course, why hadn’t we thought of that! :ninja:

Happily the code worked on this new door, and I have to say that when we got inside we were all pleasantly surprised by the rooms. Considering we’d only paid a couple of hundred euros each for the entire week, it really was accommodation of a very high standard. We ended up with our own little apartment, complete with a private bathroom and a little kitchenette with kettle, sink and fridge This proved to be particularly useful during the week as we were able to stock up on alcohol at the supermarket round the corner and store it in the fridge for several days. There was a slight snag for the first few days as we all struggled to find a bottle opener (note to self, never go on holiday again without a bottle opener), but overall it was excellent We settled down to watch Jurassic Park on Tim’s laptop, not feeling much like any socialising, and when a good friend of ours turned up with a bottle of wine, the evening really couldn’t have got much better.

Monday morning dawned grey and slightly miserable. After breakfast at the youth hostel we met up with some friends and went walking into Saarbruecken to explore our new surroundings. I have to say, I was a little disappointed and of all the towns I have ever visited in Germany (which is really quite a few) this is the closest I have ever come to describing a place as ugly. Saarbruecken really doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it. Admittedly, there are some pretty churches and the town hall is quite impressive, but overall most of it looks like it was built by a 60s town planner who only had his mind half on the job.

That said, there were some compensations A little bit of the Christmas market was still doing business, and so I was able to get a welcome mug of Gluehwein to stave off the cold. Actually I sort of ended up with two glasses of Gluehwein, as I bought one for Tim as well but he didn’t like it The result was that I felt fairly drunk for most of Monday afternoon. There was a nice bookshop which we enjoyed looking around, and we stumbled across a stationers where we purchased two beautiful postcards of ducks. One of them shows two rubber ducks dressed up as wedding costumes – they’re so cute, it would be amazing if we could have something like that on the top of our wedding cake

We found the tourist information office too, and acquired a map and some useful information about what we could do in the wider area. One advantage of Saarbruecken is that it’s very close (about 5km) to the French border, so if you decide you want to get out of it, it’s very easier. By Wednesday, we’d decided that we did want to get out of it, and set off on various adventures.

Unfortunately, the programme at the event left a bit to be desired. That is to say, you may judge that I am not qualifed to comment on the programme on the grounds that (with two exceptions) I failed to find anything in it that I wished to participate in. I don’t wish to sound too harsh, because this is an event which has traditionally been aimed at families, and if you were an eight year old child, the activities on offer may have been excellent. But this year it was being marketed as an event for young adults too, and activities for that age group were severely lacking. Yes, there were some lectures but they were all in the vein of “Why Esperanto hasn’t conquered the world”, “What we need to do so that Esperanto conquers the world”, and that sort of crap. There were some concerts, but Esperanto music isn’t really my thing. If you wanted to get up at 6am in the morning, I think there was some Tai Chi. That was about it.

Tuesday it poured and poured with rain, and we spent the morning confined to our hotel room. I was pretty disappointed because I hate feeling cooped up, but without an umbrella I was too much of a wimp to go through with my original plan of going for a walk in the woods. In the afternoon Tim was chairing a discussion group session on the theme of “fumado” (smoking). Initially it seemed worryingly like no one was going to turn up, but happily people did and we had quite a civilised and intelligent discussion. It could have gone a bit wrong, as Esperantists can be strongly anti-smoking, but actually it went pretty well and it’s a shame there weren’t more things like that in the programme; opportunities to talk *in* Esperanto but not *about* Esperanto. Talking about Esperanto is really rather dull

Tuesday evening we participated in a magnificent session which for me is the thing that redeemed the entire programme: “Kiu estas la murdisto?” (Who is the murderer?). We had signed up for this in advance and been allocated a character by Fabien, who had worked tirelessly to translate all the background and character notes from French to Esperanto. I love detective fiction so had been really looking forward to the evening, until I received my notes and read the first line “Gratulon! Vi estas la murdisto” (Congratulations! You are the murderer!).

I was playing the part of a pregnant woman who shot her husband dead because she was having an affair with his identical twin. This made me very stressed indeed – I don’t like being in the limelight at all, so I hadn’t wanted such a key role, and I was worried that everyone would see straight through me and the evening would be no fun because everyone would know I did it Trying to make myself look pregnant was fun – in the end we rolled up a couple of Tim’s T’Shirts and tied them round my waist. Not a good look!

I needn’t have worried, because the evening actually went really well. I have to admit that chickened out of giving birth to the baby (as I didn’t have a doll or teddy bear to use as a prop). The plot was so well written that there were some major twists and turns, even for me who knew that I’d done it, and it was a really fun group of people who were playing, which made it all the more cool. Tim took us all hostage with a gun which was quite amusing, and when it came to the revelations at the end, no one had guessed that it was me, so I felt quite relieved

By Wednesday we had 100% had enough of the food in the youth hostel. Now I don’t wish to sound rude, because I 100% respect other peoples’ right to be vegetarian, but there is a difference between the right to be vegetarian and the right to prevent other people from eating meat. There was some watery ham for breakfast in the youth hostel, and a token taste of meat at lunch (say, a couple of pieces of hotdog in a stew, or some miniature pepperoni on a slice of pizza) but the evening meal was exclusively vegetarian, which quite frankly I found shocking. Not only were we in Germany, a country which is normally famed for its meat-eating, but we had quite clearly signed up the event as meat-eaters. I completely understand the need for there to be a vegetarian option on every menu, in particular at Esperanto events where perhaps the majority of people are vegetarians, but I 100% expect there to be a valid meat option as well. Why this wasn’t the case, I don’t know. I can only assume it was at the request of the organisers, who felt that the high proportion of vegetarians within the participants negated the need to serve meat every day. Or else there was a vegetarian somewhere on a power trip. God knows, but I wasn’t impressed :cry:

So, on Wednesday we got on a little local train and hopped across the border into France. The nearest town had the very unFrench-sounding name of Forbach, and was a mere 10 minutes journey away. It wasn’t the most beautiful place in the world but it had a pretty old town, complete with a picturesque castle which afforded us a not inconsiderable amount of exercise when we attempted to climb the hill it was situated on. Best of all we found a lovely cafe where we were able to get the first decent meal of the hotel – a beautiful gratin with cheese and onion and bacon

Thursday was another rainy day, but we decided to go further afield and catch a bus to Luxembourg. It was a surprise to me that you could do this, but it was actually only 1 hour 15 minutes away, so it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss Luckily we remembered to pack our passports, as two rather scary German police boarded the bus and demanded to see an Ausweis before we set off. What would have happened if we hadn’t had them I have no idea, but I doubt that it would have been pleasant.

I knew very little about Luxembourg when we arrived there – in fact I still know very little about it now – but I liked it immediately. It must be the most linguistically confusing place in the world, signs being in French, German or the local language Luxembourgish with no particular method to the madness. Still, it was good to have options as to which language to communicate in Before we set off on a sight-seeing stroll, we found a delightful restaurant where we were able to fill up on a much needed steak and chips. Ah, steak, how I love thee! I very rarely eat steak at all, but following the meat-starvation in Saarbruecken it was very welcome indeed.

I have some nice pictures of Luxembourg on Facebook if you want to see them. There were a lot of very posh shops and banks, presumably a lot of accountants too, but there was also an amazingly tall city wall with a beautiful park below it, and despite the somewhat miserable weather we were able to have a lovely walk in the urban greenery.

Thursday was actually New Year’s Eve, so when we got back to the youth hostel we got dressed up in smart clothes and headed off to the buffet. I was expecting great things from the buffet, the one at the IS in Biedenkopf last year having been truly splendid, but this one was a little disappointing. For a start, although we didn’t arrive late, the only seats left when Tim and I arrived were crammed into a little corner, blocked in such a way that we couldn’t stand up without asking other people to move. This is quite a disadvantage in a buffet situation. Secondly, if you get over 150 Esperantists sitting in a room, then place vast quantities of food on relatively few tables and unleash them at it, queuing chaos will clearly ensue. To give the organisers their dues, they did try to suggest that rather than queuing horizantally in a great big line, we should all queue “vertically” in front of the food we actually wanted, but all this achieved was to enable an aggressive old biddy to shout at me when I was standing beside the soup, having let a child push in front of me. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to queue vertically?!”. Hmm. I think perpendicular might have been the word you were looking for

As for the food itself, I didn’t eat very much of it. There was some nice pate for the starter, and for the main course I had a little bit of goulash (made from veal so unethically tasty) and a small amount of chicken curry (I don’t like curry, but I was attracted by the thought of chicken). That was about it. The room was unbearably warm by virtue of the fact that there were twice as many people in it as it was designed to accommodate, and that combined with the claustrophobia of being hemmed in against a random obstacle meant that we soon had to get outside for some fresh air. Upon doing so, I was particularly annoyed to find that our coats, which had been hanging on the back of our chairs, had brushed up against some sort of fake snow made from cotton wool, and were thus absolutely covered by a fine white fluff. I spent the best part of twenty minutes trying to pick the hairs of mine, but the result was so thoroughly unsatisfactory that I have had to come home and purchase a clothes brush on Amazon. I only have one winter coat, and I need it to look smart for work

We were in such bad humour by this stage that we went back to our room and decided to stay there. There had been the promise of icecream after ten but it was too long to wait, and neither of us fancied participating in the ball anyway, dancing not really being our sort of thing. So we read for a bit, and went to bed pretty much on midnight. What an exciting start to the new decade!

At least we weren’t hungover on New Year’s Day We got up relatively early and embarked on an epic walk across the suburbs of Saarbruecken to get to the local swimming pool. Contrary to expectations, this actually proved to be well worth it, having not only a virtually empty sports pool for swimming quiet lengths, but a series of smaller pools linked together by slides and whirlpools and all sorts. I was too scared to go on the slides at first but we had a lot of fun in the whirlpool, a circular channel with a strong current to sweep you along as you swim We were there for about 90 minutes, and by the end I finally worked up enough courage to confront my combined fears of vertigo and drowning, and tackle the slide.

To call it a slide is actually a bit misleading, because it was an adventure in three parts and really only the last bit of it was what I would conventionally describe as a slight. You started by climbing a staircase to a deceptively calm pool of water. At one end of this there was a big bump onto which you had to haul yourself, and when you pushed off you were swept down and along a channel by a strong current of water. I survived this first bit and felt pretty proud. The second bit was more daunting and involved some screaming as I was swept into a pool outside the building, whilst having water poured on my head. I became thoroughly submerged and began to see my life flash before my eyes (chiefly as a series of standing in pointless queues at Esperanto events) but before I had time to speculate as to whether there would be steak in heaven, Tim managed to grab me and I was saved Somewhat traumatised by this experience I nearly didn’t embark on the third slide, but I eventually felt shamed into it when a five year old girl went down in front of me, but in the end I did and it was pretty cool; one of those things you’re glad you’ve done once it’s over.

There was just time for a quick McDonalds (we’re such bad Esperantists, we need to work harder at cultivating a proper hatred of all things American!) before we met up with a friend to go ice-skating in the town centre. This was not such a successful experience. I’ve only been skating twice in my life, both times on a date with a previous boyfriend. The first time was amazing and I really loved it; we were there two hours and after a lot of holding onto the edge and a few falls, I was able to do circuits of the rink no problem. The second time I was just getting into the swing of it again when some kid decided to stab another kid and a van of policemen turned up to raid the rink, just like we were in the Bill. A couple of weeks later, someone burned the rink down, and since then there hasn’t been anywhere in Birmingham to go skating at all

So I was kinda looking forward to this opportunity, it may even have been my idea, but I was absolutely hopeless I even needed Babel’s help to get the shoes on properly, and whilst I managed to walk to the rink without falling over, that was as good as it got! I wanted to do a couple of circuits pretty much holding on to the edge before I felt brave enough to let go, but there were so many people outside the rink leaning against the edge that mostly there wasn’t a lot left to hold onto, and I just got kinda scared. The only highlight of the experience was a lovely German man (also struggling to stay upright) who told me that he was glad there was someone worse than him here, and, upon passing me twenty minutes later seemingly still on my first circuit of the rink, laughed and said “Eine Stunde, eine Runde”

Saturday was our last day and we decided to head to France once more, this time to the beautiful town of Strasbourg. We were fortunate enough to be with a group of very capable Germans, who knew to purchase a group ticket and hence saved us rather a lot of money on the train fare It was a pleasant journey on the train, and when we arrived Strasbourg was beautiful, albeit in an bloody freezing sort of way. Having seen the cathedral, which is possibly the most enormous cathedral I have ever seen in my entire life, we found a restaurant serving Flammkuchen and hence had what was possibly the best meal of the entire holiday After than we wandered aimlessly around the town until the light faded, strolling along by the river and noting to our surprise that the audio on the boat tours has Esperanto as one of the language options. Sadly we weren’t able to test it out, because the water in the river was too high for the boats to be running

When evening fell we met up with everyone once more for an evening meal, and I had the best burger I have ever had in a jacket potato restaurant(!), before catching the train back to Saarbruecken. It was gone nine at night before we got back to the hotel – just time to pack and finish the remaining bottle of wine before bed Packing went surprisingly well – Carolin had very kindly brought no fewer than eight German books along for me, and there was no way they were going to fit in my suitcase, but Tim managed to squeeze them into his with no problems. The journey home on Sunday was uneventful, and we were back safe and sound in Nuneaton by 7pm.

Overall… I’m glad we went; it was nice to be in Germany, and fun to travel to France and Luxembourg. It was a good week in fact, but only because there were a few nice people who we knew and because we organised our own entertainment. Would I go to Saarbruecken again? Probably not, unless there was a very good reason. Would I go to NIS again as an event? No, I think not. Will I go to JES, which is supposed to be taking place in Germany next year? I honestly don’t know – Tim and I are going to give it some serious thought and perhaps opt to spend New Year at home, playing with our Christmas presents

And when I say drenched, I mean drenched! The rain was coming down in sheets and I was soon soaked to the underwear. We were all thoroughly miserable, but I couldn’t think of any solution to the problem other than us continuing to walk onwards for another 15 minutes, at which point we would hopefully find the coach. It was at this moment when Babel, who I assumed was not speaking to me because I had failed to organise this segment of the journey satisfactorily, piped up with the suggestion, “Why don’t we just take a taxi?!”.

The idea of taking a taxi had never entered my head, nor would it probably ever have done so, but sure enough there behind us was a taxi rank We positively ran towards it and I was so desperate to get inside that I had no qualms at all about practising my appalling Czech on the driver in an attempt to explain that we needed to get to the bus station. It wasn’t actually far away so he got us there in a couple of minutes and we were so exceedingly grateful that we let him keep the change from a 100Kc note, before setting off into the rain once more.

It was another one of the super yellow buses which took us to Prague, and this time we managed to get our complimentary cup of coffee. Unfortunately we were exceedingly wet and miserable on the bus, and the cool air conditioning didn’t entirely help. I felt especially bad, because I’d managed to bang my head quite hard on the side of the bus when trying to put my suitcase in the baggage compartment By the time we arrived in Prague main station after a tube journey from Cerny Most we weren’t in the best of spirits, and matters weren’t helped by the fact that we didn’t have the correct change for the luggage lockers. This was entirely my fault, me having had the ‘brainwave’ the night before that we should spend all our small change on drinks, seeing as we would only be able to change unused notes on our return back to the UK. It was a reasonable idea in moderation, but getting rid of all the change proved to be a mistake, particularly when we were standing in the station in front of the luggage lockers, desperately trying to make up the amount of 60Kc.

I thought we’d actually managed it, but it turned out that the blasted machine didn’t accept 2s or 1s. Bother it. We needed a 5Kc piece and Babel set off bravely to try and obtain some change, but the people in the shops were most unhelpful and he returned after a fruitless search with nothing but a bar of chocolate. Oh dear. Babel expressed the opinion that we ought to ask someone if they could change money for us, but decreed that he wasn’t going to do such a thing. Oh dear again. I approached some people standing nearby and tried to talk to them in Czech, but it turned out they were German and having exactly the same problem as us.

I don’t honestly remember how the problem was resolved in the end… I can only assume that Babel must have found something else to buy… but that was certainly our first bad experience in Prague

Our second (and only other) bad experience in Prague occurred at dinner time. Being somewhat hungry by this stage, we headed out in the direction of Wenceslas Square in search of something to eat. Neither of us felt like walking far, and try as we might we couldn’t seem to get away from the touristy area with its higher prices into a cheaper part of town. In the end we settled for a moderately priced steakhouse which from the pictures on the outside, looked as if it did decent burgers. The burgers when they arrived were indeed magnificent, but the experience was marred by the receipt of the bill.

I thought the bill was actually going to make Babel explode, containing as it did a significant sum (about 60Kc I think?) for the pleasure of “condiments”. When Babel queried what these condiments might be, it transpired that the charge related to some rather sour tasting bread which had been put on our table without us requesting it, and the use of the tomato ketchup. It was absolutely outrageous, and Babel didn’t hesitate to say so to the waitress.

Frustrating as it was, we didn’t let it spoil our day and spent another hour or so wandering around some of the beautiful squares in the centre of Prague before heading to a bookshop which Babel had identified as selling English books for a coffee. We spent a relaxing hour or so there until it was late enough for us to make our way to our hotel. We were staying in the same place as last weekend, and luckily this time around we didn’t experience any problems with checking in. After a bit of a rest and a shower, we headed out again to the lovely pub we had discovered the previous week.

The waiter was different this time and we had to wait a little while to be served, but the schnitzel tasted just as good and I ended up with an entire jug of wine entirely to myself. For some reason Babel decided that he wasn’t in a drinking mood, and so I felt like a bit of an alcoholic, demolishing a whole jug in comparison to his couple of beers. Needless to say, I fell asleep pretty swiftly after returning home…

The next morning dawned bright and sunny, and Babel and I were all set to make the most of Prague. The only things hindering us were our feet, which were in a bit of a sorry state. To be fair, mine were on the verge of recovery, having been cut before we left home and rather painful in Liberec. But Babel had developed some very nasty blisters which make walking almost impossible for him

Even sore feet couldn’t take away the beauty of Prague, however. We spent the morning wandering round the old town, soaking in the atmosphere and the buildings, and after a delicious lunch in a very cheap little bar, we made our way across one of the enormous bridges and to the other side of the river with the castle. I had always known that Prague had a castle, but I had never realised quite how impressive it was. To call it a castle seems to me in fact to be an injustice; rather it is an entire series of castles and palaces and beautiful buildings. Babel and I climbed up to it in the baking heat and wandered around the gardens, which are free of charge. There were breathtaking views back out across Prague and I’ve got some beautiful photos which you can see on Facebook (maybe one day I’ll manage to shrink them down to illustrate these blog posts too!)

It was a long way up to the castle though, and the way back seemed an awful lot longer, especially for poor Babel’s feet We made it in the end, and set off in search of somewhere to get our last meal in the Czech Republic. We would have liked to have gone back to the pub where we had lunch, but we got a bit lost looking for it and then when we finally arrived, they announced that they were no longer serving food. Instead we dived into the nearest pizza place we could find, and had what was mercifully a very quickly-served meal. I was starting to get a bit panicky at this point about whether we were going to get to the coach station on time, and Babel started doing mean impressions of me :cry:

We made it though, with about half an hour to spare, and despite the seemingly large numbers of people waiting at the bus stop, we managed to get a good seat on the bus. The coach left Prague at 9 o clock in the evening, and arrived in Warsaw at 7.30 the following morning, after a night of bumping and bashing along Polish roads. I purposefully stayed awake until the border, which we passed after a mere two hours, but after that I would quite happily have slept. Unfortunately I couldn’t get comfortable and didn’t manage to doze off until somewhere undefined between Wroclaw and Lodz. I woke up again when we got to Lodz around 4am, but I really needn’t have bothered, because I don’t think I have ever seen a more god-forsaken town in my life. I dozed randomly between Lodz and Warsaw, waking up properly around 6.30 which was the time we were supposed to arrive. Somehow we’d got a bit delayed en route though, so it was an entire hour later when we finally arrived at Warsaw West bus station.

That was where the ‘adventure’ really began! Unfortunately I’m going to Austria tomorrow and so won’t be able to continue the story for a week, but perhaps in my absence Babel will have something to say about it!

I hasten to add that this was not the fault of Liberec, but more the fault of the Esperantists we were with. We set off on a guided tour of the town centre, aiming for the Catholic church where we were meetin up with a group of people more committed than me who had got up early enough to go to Mass. But the people we were with walked sooooo slowly, it was unbelievable. And not only did they walk slowly, the guide stopped for a five minute break approximately every two minutes, talking at great and tedious length about things which weren’t interesting, cracking jokes which were painfully unfunny, and trying to pretend he spoke more languages than he evidently did Within only a few minutes, Babel and I were getting quite frustrated and from the start of the excursion we were at the front of the pack, eventually breaking off into a small group with a couple of others and reaching the town centre way ahead of everyone else.

Liberec is really a very attractive town. There are some beautiful old buildings, much bigger and grander than I expected, and the main square in the centre of the town is dominated by a very impressive town hall. I may add some pictures at a later date if I find the stamina to try to shrink them to a size suitable for the blog. It’s a rather hilly sort of place, so it sometimes takes longer to get to places than it should because you’re going up and down, but it was mostly nice to have some exercise and the surrounding countryside was quite breathtaking; it was unbelievable how many trees there were! It was quite a large, modern town too. There was a McDonalds where we ate one day, and a Tesco where we stocked up on doughnuts for days when we didn’t like the meals at the university, and it general it gave the impressive of being a reasonably prosperous and happy sort of place

Proceeding at a painfully slow place, the excursion eventually made it’s way to a tram stop where we were supposed to be purchasing tickets to travel to the outskirts of the town. This wasn’t terribly well explained so we were all a bit confused about what we were supposed to be doing, and the fact that there must have been about 100 people on this excursion made it a sheer impossibility for us all to manage to buy a ticket before the necessary tram arrived. There was a fair bit of pushing and shoving, and the usual Esperantist trait of continuing to stand in front of a desk even after you’ve been successfully processed was demonstrated on multiple occasions.

Eventually in possession of a ticket, Babel and I squeezed ourselves on to the second tram and prepared ourselves for what was a somewhat hair-raising journey. Trams in Liberec travel very fast; they race down hills and swing round corners at a simply alarming rate, and I for one found it rather difficult not to fall over. During all the time we had been dawdling about in the town the weather had been really quite bright and pleasant, but by the time we disembarked from the tram it was starting to look quite threatening, and as soon as we started walking up towards the lower station of the cable car which we were supposed to be travelling on, the heavens opened and one of Liberec’s special torrential downpours began. It was the sort of weather in which one most definitely did not want to go up a mountain, so Babel and I turned on our heel and raced back down to the tram station, where we managed to jump on a tram and were back in the (sunny!) town centre in no time at all

After a brief stop at the supermarket, it was time to walk back up the the student accommodation if we wanted to be on time for lunch. We had come prepared, armed with a folding map of Liberec, and according to what we had been told by the organisers, we believed that the congress was being held in the Technical University. Good, good. Babel is a bit better at map-reading than I am, so he took control and navigated us back up the hill to the uni. Having arrived there, we were a little confused because we couldn’t see the faintest sign of our accommodation. The accommodation was really quite distinctive, being a series of of large tower blocks, but there was nothing of that size and shape in the vicinity of the uni. We walked around in a perplexed manner for a considerable amount of time, both starting to become a little bit irate, and I can’t even remember how we realised it in the end, but eventually it clicked with us that we were staying in the halls of residence of the technical university, which were in a slightly different place to the technical university itself!

We found our way back there in the end, and were just about on time to get some food, but this still remains as one of the things which deeply irritated me about the congress – it wouldn’t have taken much effort for the organisers to include this information in the antauxkongresilo, for example

Having spent so long consulting the map, we realised that there was quite a large lake not very far away from the university. Once again Babel navigated us there and we had what would have been a very pleasant walk around the perimeter, were it not for the fact that it started raining again. We returned to the uni because we were both keen to participate in a Czech language course which was running at 5pm. We arrived suitably on time, to join a whole horde of other Esperantists who were standing outside a locked classroom. In a typical feat of Esperantist organisation, the teacher arrived late and without the necessary key. Great. She disappeared off to look for it but by this point it was already quarter past five and the ever-impatient Babel had had enough, storming off in the direction of the trinkejo

The rest of us blessed with a little more patience were soon rewarded when the teacher reappeared with key and proceeded to teach what was actually a very good lesson, albeit a little shorter than anticipated. I learnt a couple of useful things which hadn’t been covered in my Teach Yourself book, like how to ask for two tickets, and overall it was a shame that Babel had missed it. I didn’t see him again until some time past eight when I met him after dinner, already slightly inebriated I had quite a bit of catching up to do in terms of drinking, but between then and 3am when I ultimately went to bed, there was plenty of opportunity to drink wine and I had an absolutely horrifying six glasses (!), eventually stopping halfway through my seventh, secure in the knowledge that if I drank the rest of it I would most *definitely* be hung over the next morning. I can’t remember whether there was karaoke that evening… there must have been I suppose… on account of six glasses of wine I can’t actually remember anything about that evening at all… but there was certainly karaoke one evening at the start of the week, and the British contingent put up a very good show indeed Babel certainly did a couple of songs – the ever popular classic “Big Balls” as well as some metal type things which I didn’t necessarily recognise and can’t remember – and most other English people (apart from me who refuses ever to be involved in karaoke) sang very well too

What time Babel got to bed that night I don’t want to know, but let’s just say that when my alarm went off at 8am for breakfast, he was still somewhat drunk. He looked like death (scarcely warmed up), had hardly any voice left at all, and was incapable of walking in a straight line or having a conversation which made coherent sense. I tried quite hard to convince him that he didn’t really want to go to breakfast and should go back to sleep instead, but he was adamant that he want to come along and so he did. Luckily there weren’t very many other people there, and so I don’t think anyone noticed that he was rather the worse for wear As for me, I was relieved that I didn’t feel sick or have a headache, but I did feel hungover in an unspecified sort of way, and resolved not to drink quite so much any of the other nights

Babel being incapacitated, I decided to brave an excursion to the Botanical Gardens on my own. Once again I set off in a band of Esperantists at snails pace, but the botanical gardens were mercifully close to the kongresejo, so it didn’t take too long to get there. It was cheap to get in, and once inside it was really very pretty. Unfortunately, most of the people who were in the group were way more interested in flowers than I was (that is to say, they were interested in quoting the Latin names) and whereas I was in favour of a swift walk around, everyone else seemed in favour of dwelling five minutes by each specimen and taking photos. I put up with this for a while, but once we got to the reptile house staring at the exhibits for so long was starting to make me feel ill, so when everyone was distracted by a turtle I managed to give them the slip and took a leisurely walk back up to the university myself

It was just as well, because one of our friends Mikeo arrived around lunchtime and a now sober Babel and I went down to the bus stop to collect him. Of course, it was too much to ask for him to be able to have his room key as soon as he arrived, and so he had to camp out in our room for half the day until such time as the organisers condescended to process his arrival. After lunch all of us went to a Polish lesson, which was one of the items in the programme which I had been looking forward to the most. Knowing that we were embarking on complicated journeys through Poland the following week, and knowing that we were completely incapable of speaking Polish, learning at least a few words seemed like a very good idea indeed. Unfortunately it failed to live up to expectations as I found the teacher rather confusing and difficult to understand After half an hour, Babel and I both walked out; Babel because he had a meeting to go to, and me because I was just plain bored!

Whilst Babel headed off to prepare for a quiz he was taking part in that evening, I went back to the room to catch up on a bit of reading. I genuinely didn’t intend to fall asleep because I knew that after the Polish lesson, Mikeo would need to come back to our room to collect his stuff. Reading made me feel a bit sleepy though so I decided to lie down and before I knew it I had drifted off and didn’t wake up until an hour or so later when Babel came back from the quiz meeting

The quiz Babel was involved in was really quite elaborate and involved a significant amount of preparation, being based as it was on a mixture of BBC game shows. Whilst Babel beavered away at it, I slept some more and then ventured out for a rather disappointing dinner of potatoes and fish. I took one look at the fish and decided I couldn’t eat it, so that left me with the boiled potatoes I managed to eat one, and felt quite proud.

The evening entertainment was being held in another building a few minute’s walk away, so we all traipsed off in an Esperantist procession, following the flag. The best round of all was the karaoke, where each contestant had to start singing a song (in Esperanto) with background music playing. Partway through the performance, the music was then turned off and the contestant had to keep singing, trying to maintain the correct pace and tune, until the music was turned back on towards the end. I think that in this round at least, Babel emerged as the clear winner, with an almost perfect rendition of Jomo’s ‘Al la barikadoj’, which ended with him triumphantly jumping on the table

The quiz went on for such a long time that I can’t actually remember who won, but it wasn’t the sort of quiz where winning was terribly important, and a good time was had by all From what I remember, Babel and I decided to be good on Monday night to make up for the excesses of the night before, popping into the bar only for a glass of fruit juice before we headed off to bed!

Tuesday dawned bright and sunny which was just as well, because Tuesday was the day of excursions. In a surprise turn of events, Babel and I had decided not to sign up for one of the official excursions in the programme. Well, the most exciting excursion was to Prague but we knew we were going to have enough time to explore there at our leisure during the weekend. Furthermore, we hadn’t 100% enjoyed the excursion we signed up for during the IJK in Szombathely the year before, neither of us being the sort of person who deals well with being herded around like a sheep. In the end, we concluded that we were capable of organising our own private excursion, and would probably have more fun that way

Refreshed after a night with no alcohol, we met Mikeo outside the university at 10am.What we hadn’t realised when we sent him a text telling him to meet us at 10 was that he had been up drinking until 6 and possibly wasn’t feeling quite in the right frame of mind for an excursion. Nevertheless, he didn’t actually look hungover, and however he felt he gamely came along regardless

Our plan for the morning was to successfully complete the failed excursion of Sunday morning. Now that we knew which tram we needed and even the word for “ticket” in Czech, it was a piece of cake to reach the outskirts of the town. A short walk uphill took us to the base of the cable car station, where somehow Babel managed to convince me that it would be a good idea to stop and let him have a beer. We duly did so, but the local wasp population seemed quite keen on the idea too, and the amount of beasties pestering us was a bit unpleasant.

Before long we were airborne, travelling up to the top of a mountain whose name I forget, but it began with J, and if I remember correctly, it was about as high as Snowdon. The views from the top were magnificent, stretching out across the countryside for miles and miles. We soaked them up for as long as possible, but were soon compelled to queue for the cable car back down if we wanted to stand a chance of being back at the uni on time for dinner.

By the time we got back to the town centre, we’d actually decided to forfeit a meal of meat and rice in order to go to McDonalds. There was a reasonably sized McDonalds in the main square in Liberec, which lots of nice tables outside where you could sit. The only difficulty as ever was ordering. Whilst this is normally a fairly simple process in McDonalds due to the fact that ‘cheeseburger’ appears to mean ‘cheeseburger’ in even the most exotic of languages, there was a slight complication due to the fact that I normally insist on McDonalds making me up a fresh burger with no what I term ‘gunk’ inside (lettuce, mayonnaise, relish) before I deign to eat it. Our Czech was nowhere near advanced enough to make this a realistic possibility, and Babel and I came the closest we got all holiday to having a falling out when I requested he bring back large quantities of serviettes so that I could wipe the gunk out of my burger.

The serviettes worked remarkably well, although I was left with a slight taste of mustard, and it was nice to have a proper filling meal We walked back uphill to the accommodation where Mikeo headed off for some much needed rest, whilst Babel and I decided to head out again for our second excursion of the day, this time to the zoo in Liberec.

I was very surprised in a pleasant sort of way when I heard that Liberec had a zoo, because I didn’t imagine it would be a big enough sort of place. I was even more pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the zoo and realised quite how many exciting animals they possessed. There were zebras and giraffes, elephants and camels, penguins and flamingos… everything that you would expect to find in a proper zoo The star of the show was undoubtedly the big white tiger, who paced up and down in his cage in a very menacing sort of way, and the lions were pretty impressive too. I was slightly less enamoured with the collection of birds of prey, especially the massive one which had been fed half a fluffy white rabbit for its dinner :cry: But that aside, it was a thoroughly enjoyable excursion, and my only criticism of the place was that they were selling sweetcorn where they should have been selling ice-cream

Whatever the evening entertainment was on Tuesday, I think we skived it. That is to say, I can remember having a drink when we got back to the kongresejo, and I suspect that must have led to more drinks throughout the rest of the evening. This may have been the evening that Babel disappeared for vast quantities of time to smoke, leaving me unprotected and entirely at the mercies of a really weird guy from Austria who tried to chat me up. Yuk.

Wednesday dawned bright and sunny, and was the day which we had arranged to spend with Gavan In the morning we all walked down into the town on a quest to buy stamps and postcards. This was actually quite easy; we located the tourist information office after only one wrong turn, and not only did they stock an ample selection of postcards, they were also able to sell us stamps – excellent We retired to a very pleasant café in the town square where I had an absolutely delicious iced coffee, and settled down to write our postcards. It had been such an action-packed holiday so far that it wasn’t too difficult to find things to write, although matters were complicated by me accidentally forgetting one of my relative’s addresses. Thanks to Babel we even managed to find a post-box on the way home

In the afternoon, the three of us set off on an expedition to the local swimming pool. It seems a little strange that the congress organisers hadn’t proposed a group trip to this location, but seeing as one didn’t seem to be in the offing, we decided to make our own way there with the help of our folding map. I don’t think I would ever have located it, but Babel managed to and it provided a very welcome chance to cool off on what was another hot and sunny day.

Unfortunately there was a small amount of confusion at the start because procedures in swimming pools in the Czech Republic seem to be a little different to procedures in swimming pools at home. We managed to buy tickets without too much hassle, but the difficulties came when entering the changing rooms. I was particularly scared because I had to go to a changing room on my own I walked through the door to see a random bench, and two threatening looking ladies sitting behind a desk. Trying not to catch their eyes, I looked around for clues as to what I was supposed to do and noticed a sign on the wall which had been translated into German requesting that I remove my shoes and put them in a plastic bag before entering the changing rooms. Good good. I sat on the bench, removed my shoes, and entered the changing room.

It turned out that this wasn’t what I was supposed to do at all. That is to say, I was supposed to remove my shoes and put them in the bag, but I was also supposed to give the ladies at the desk 100 Kc as a deposit on a padlock for a locker. Unfortunately the sign telling me to do this must have only been in Czech

In any case, I entered the changing room, found myself a locker and put all my belongings in it. I was slightly concerned about the fact that I had no means of looking at it, but I memorised the number and assumed that the Czech Republic was an honest sort of place with a low crime rate where it was perfectly normal to leave your passport, digital camera, several hundred pounds and your engagement ring in an unlockable locker whilst you went swimming for an hour. Hmmm.

Perhaps I was a little distracted by the joys of being in a foreign changing room The Czech women seemed fairly unreserved about walking around stark naked (despite the presence of a sign which I swear said the lockers were being watched over by CCTV) and some of them were really quite attractive

Meanwhile in the male changing rooms, Gavan and Tim had become embroiled in some sort of dispute about taking their shoes off with the scary ladies, but had done better than me in so far as they had managed to pay for a padlock for their locker, and so all their worldly goods weren’t at risk of being stolen.

When I emerged into the swimming pool area, I was amazed at quite how large the pool was. It turned out that it was a 50m pool, and so I had one of my most difficult challenges of the holiday when I attempted to swim 50m. As someone who is very proud to have a 25m badge, this was a somewhat daunting prospect, but Babel had the good idea that we should swim from the deep end to the shallow end, so that at least when I thought I was going to drown through tiredness towards the end, I was able to console myself that I was getting nearer and nearer safety. In the end I managed it without drowning, and I was really rather pleased with myself Sadly no badges seemed to be on offer!

After a bit of time spent recovering in the main pool, we headed off to the outdoor whirlpool which was another quite scary experience. It didn’t seem as big as the whirlpool in Szombathely last year but there were quite a lot of people in it, making it rather crowded and claustrophobic. Luckily I was able to hold onto Babel for most of the proceedings, but there was one rather dreadful moment at the end when Babel and Gavan were safely exiting the pool but I was in danger of being sucked off for a solo tour of the whirlpool

Anxiously I returned to the changing rooms and was relieved to find that all of my valuables were still where I had left them. Phew When I rejoined the others, Gavan was hungry and suggested we go for a pizza. The establishment attached to the swimming pool didn’t look too promising but we walked up the road for a bit and found a really nice restaurant with a garden where we could sit outside. The pizza was absolutely delicious and the wine was pleasant too, so it was almost a shame that we had to rush back to the uni in order to have a shower and wash our hair before the evening entertainment.

The evening entertainment on Wednesday night was located in the town centre, being a concert from JoMo which aimed to break the world record for the concert with songs in the most number of languages. He managed in excess of 20, but unfortunately due to an organisational bungle, it turned out that this didn’t actually smash the world record Nevertheless, the atmosphere in the square was good, and even a few of the local population turned out to see what was going on. It was a long time to stand listening to music though, and not being the dancing sort, we soon retired to a nearby café where we sat outside and drank alcohol. Soon enough some of the other Brits joined us and we had a very enjoyable conversation until at some point darkness fell, JoMo stopped singing, and we had a long walk back up the hill in a state of some inebriation.

I think Wednesday night must have been a night I got really drunk, on reflection. I think there was karaoke and I stayed up until about 5, listening to people sing and having a very interesting conversation with a friend which involved shouting in each other’s ears whenever the music was in full swing. I had just got comfortable in bed and dropped off into a drunken sleep when Babel barged into the room some time after six and started making vast quantities of noise. He got into bed, turning his MP3 player up to such an obscene level that I was forced to complain, and then he stormed outside again to have a cigarette which I remember thinking was a most peculiar thing to do, but luckily I soon fell back to sleep again and didn’t have long to dwell on it.

Somehow we both made it to breakfast before nine, but Thursday was in effect rather a wasted morning, which we spent lounging sleepily in our beds and reading books. After lunch, which I’m 100% sure would have consisted of meat and rice, we headed down into the town centre to attend the cultural festival. People from those countries who have interesting cultures had volunteered to run stalls in the main square where they were presenting food and other specialities from their homelands to the other Esperantists and the population of Liberec in general. We had a bit of a look around, and then wandered down to the main shopping centre where we managed to buy some new plasters for my feet and sat and had an ice-cream. At some point we came back to the main square for a drink but the sun was so unbearably hot in the café we chose that we couldn’t bear to stay for more than one, so crossed over to McDonalds on the opposite side for a milkshake with Carolin. We had a nice chat, and it was then that I heard for the first time about the curious sleeping arrangements at JES, which make me somewhat unsure about when and where I will be attending my next Esperanto event

We starting walking back up to the uni not a second too soon, because we were just on the outskirts of the complex when the heavens opened and the most almighty storm began. All the Esperantists left in the square were completely drenched, and there was some not inconsiderable damage in the town. The following day we came across a car which had been utterly destroyed by a fallen tree, and the zoo which we had visited only a few days before was completely closed on Friday due to storm damage

Thursday evening… I think it may have been another night we drank juice… Or perhaps that was the night I had one drink, then got bored because Babel was working behind the bar and there was nothing else much happening, and went to bed.

Friday was the final day in Liberec, how sad. In the morning Babel went to some sort of lecture about the Czech Republic and the Euro. It was supposed to be over by 11 but by 11.25 he still wasn’t back and I was starting to get bored being cooped up in the room, so armed with a map I went out for a walk by myself. I managed not to get lost, which I was quite proud of, and even walked round some different parts of the town I hadn’t seen before, coming across a couple of interesting churches

After lunch (meat and rice or meat and potato?!) Babel and I decided that we fancied another spot of swimming so we headed back down to the pool. This time I managed to purchase my locker key and apart from the slight fear that it might slip off my arm in the water and be lost forever, this made the whole experience a lot less stressful. I swam my second 50 metres, although found the experience sufficiently exhausting not to want to swim a third, and all in all we had a lot of fun

Returning to the room we had a shower and proceeded to pack up our things, ready for the voyage back to Prague in the morning. Dinner on Friday night was exceptionally good for the standards of the week, consisting of a rather tasty spaghetti bolognaise. Now anyone who is even vaguely acquainted with Babel will be aware that one of his trademarks is that he is perpetually covered in rather dubious-looking food stains, and so as soon as I saw what was on the menu, I exclaimed that he was going to spill it all over himself. Babel must have protested that he wasn’t, because somehow I got roped into a bet. No sooner had we honourably shaken hands on it then Babel decided to cheat, magicking a napkin out of thin air and tucking it in his shirt. To cut a long story short, he didn’t spill a drop and I ended up in the unenviable position of owing him a book

Friday night was the Internacia Vespero, a sort of talent show which seems to be an obligatory form of torture on the final evening of any Esperanto event. As ever, the acts on display were mixed; some were very very good, some were very very bad, and some were simply given too much time so that very soon Babel and I were incredibly bored. Actually, I was bored before it started, having arrived at the venue at 20.20 (under the impression it was starting at 20.30) but then having to sit until 21.00 when the organisers were finally ready to start. We both had our MP3 players with us to help pass the time, but even so…

The whole palaver was drawn out for so long that by the time we were finally released to the trinkejo, there weren’t many hours of the night left to drink before most people needed to be in bed to get a few hours sleep before their long journeys in the morning. I ended up sitting down at a table where I was roped into playing Uno – a game which I don’t understand terribly well at the best of times – and this was an especially vicious variation on the normal rules. For a start, no one would explain what the rules were and if you were brave enough to ask, you would be greeted with shouts of “stulta demando!” and handed a load more cards. You could also be given cards if you hesitated too long when it was your go, but of course if you asked someone whether or not that was your go that was a stulta demando too… We played about three rounds but I still couldn’t get the hang of it, despite the fact that Tim Morley kept helpfully kneeing me whenever he thought it was my turn!

Somehow we stayed up longer into the early hours of the morning than we intended to, but it wasn’t too much of a problem because we were all packed and our coach wasn’t departing Liberec until 11am

Tim and I set off on our travels on Friday 17th July, and I finally returned home to Birmingham on Sunday afternoon, the 2nd August. The holiday got off to a less-than-smooth start for me, due to the fact that it was my sister’s graduation ceremony the day before we were due to leave. Now I don’t know what you’re like the day before you embark on a holiday, but I’m generally a bit frantic. I need to spend a couple of hours packing and repacking my case; desperately trying to fit everything in, making sure I haven’t forgotten anything, swapping things between my suitcase and my hand luggage… Then I like to spend an hour messing about with the tickets and making sure I haven’t accidentally mislaid any of them and that my complicated itinerary is imprinted on my brain. And then I like to wash my hair and have a last minute drive to answer all the email correspondence I’ve been putting off for weeks, but know I don’t want to come back home to.

Unfortunately none of this was possible this time around, which made me decidedly out of sorts. My sister graduated on the Thursday afternoon, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the actual ceremony because I was stuck at work desperately trying to finish my audit. I had, however, arranged to meet up with my family in the city centre afterwards and go for an evening meal. I envisaged meeting them at half six and being home again for eight, but just in case something went wrong, I decided to pack my case on Wednesday night instead.

It was just as well, because a complication with taking the departmental photograph meant that they didn’t arrive until quarter past eight. I was a litle fed up and stressed by this stage, having finished work at five. I was also a little bit wet, having had to walk from my office to Pizza Express in the pouring rain, on account of prematurely having packed my umbrella Nevertheless we had a very pleasant meal and it was all a lot of fun but it meant I didn’t get home until round about 11, having had no chance to sort out any of the things I wished to sort

The result was that I got up at 6.30am the next morning in order to wash my hair and mess about with my tickets. I’d just got everything sorted to my satisfaction, left the house and was sitting on the bus to the city centre, when I realised I had a missed call on my mobile. I looked at it in horror, thinking it might be Babel ringing to tell me he’d eaten his passport or some such, but it turned out to be from a withheld number. I listened to the voicemail I’d been left, and discovered to my surprise that it was a journalist from the local paper who wanted to write an article about me and Esperanto

When I say surprise, I hasten to say that it wasn’t a complete surprise, because I’d agreed for someone to write a press release about me and send it to my local press, but it was a surprise in so far as I didn’t actually expect anyone to be interest in the news that… erm… I was going on holiday. I called the guy back, answered a few questions and having got to town early, stopped off at an internet cafe to send him a few pictures of Babel and I for use in the article. Phew! It eventually appeared in the local paper the following week, and if you haven’t seen it already you can read it here.

The demands of the Esperanto publicity campaign sorted, I met Babel in New Street Station, where he was keen to show off his rather snazzy new backpack, which is significantly nicer than mine and has lots of useful pockets. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time and treated ourselves to a meal in Wetherspoons where the holiday nearly came to an abrupt end when I accidentally left our passports on the table under Babel’s newspaper. Whoops

Boarding the flight was a little traumatic for me and my phobia of dogs, because we had to be sniffed by a rather aggressive looking specimen before we were allowed onto the plane. The flight itself was full of Brits going to Prague for drinking weekends, one of whom made the amusing comment that the Czech Republic looked pretty flat and it must be because we’d bombed it

I was a little nervous about arriving in Prague as the internet made all the necessary catching of buses and metros sound rather confusing. In reality it turned out that nothing could have been simpler though, and it took relatively little time and effort before we were standing outside our hotel, the Pension Hermannova. It was situated in a pleasant enough street and indicated by a flag and a sign saying “Pension”. Babel helpfully rang the buzzer on the door and we stood and waited. No answer. Babel rang the buzzer again. Still no answer. This went on for some time. Babel banged on the door in a rather aggressive manner. No answer. Babel banged on the door in a highly aggressive manner. Nothing. Oh. Help.

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do next, but Babel made me check the travel documentation and we uncovered a sentence which said that if you were checking in after 19.00, you needed to collect your room key from a nearby hotel. It was only about 17.30 at this point, but we decided to try to find the hotel in the hope that they might be able to help us. My heart was in my mouth at this point because I had booked the room through Lastminute.com as opposed to directly with the hotel itself and so I was worried that they hadn’t been informed and there wouldn’t actually be a room for us.

The woman in the hotel round the corner mericifully spoke fluent English and was very helpful She tried phoning the pension for us, couldn’t get through to anyone, but eventually uncovered a mobile number and spoke to the proprietor. She assured us that there was someone on site, they just hadn’t heard the bell, and sent us back again. This time when we buzzed the door opened immediately. Thank goodness

The room was basic, but perfectly adequate. Before too long we’d set out again in search of some food. By a stroke of good fortune, we discovered the most lovely pub just around the corner and went in to get a meal. The menu was delicious, containing high quantities of Schnitzel-based dishes, and Babel and I both had a delicious variation on the theme which involved cheese and pineapple. It was a very nice piece of Schnitzel which came complete with thin, crispy chips, just the way I like them so I was terribly impressed, and what made it even better was the prices – about £3 each The wine was rather nice too and I made the mistake of drinking a glass for every beer that Babel had, with the result that by 9pm I was rather drunk indeed

We woke early the next morning and found our breakfast left outside the room as promised. I was highly excited when I caught sight of the first chocolate yoghurt I’d seen in ten years, but otherwise the breakfast wasn’t anything to write home about. There was a bread roll, which at the time I thought was kind of stale, but having since tasted Polish bread I would revise my opinion to say that it was reasonably fresh. There was also slice of rather sour brown bread, some sweeter bread with raisins in, and a tub of meat paste. Meat paste leaves me cold.

Anyhow it was sufficient and suitably nourished, we headed out to see the sights of Prague. Unfortunately for once the weather forecasters had been telling the truth and it was a very rainy day in Prague. We took a metro into the main train station and dumped our suitcases in the luggage lockers before heading out to explore. We were in possession of not just one but two maps of Prague, but we decided to predominantly ignore them in favour of wandering relatively aimlessly. Even in the pouring rain it was a beautiful city and I liked it immediately Before too long we were joined by our friend Chris who had flown in from England that morning, and we all headed off to see the river before looking for a place to get something to eat. We found a rather good pizza restaurant where we all had a thoroughly enjoyable meal, apart from Chris, who the waitress decided to throw beer at as soon as she brought it to the table

Heading out into the rain once more, our aim was to get to Cerny Most, a metro station on the outskirts of Prague from where we were due to catch our bus to Liberec. We arrived a little too early so sat in another bar, and Chris, whose lucky day it was not, ending up paying for one more beer than he actually wanted to drink owing to a misunderstanding with the waiter. There were a few other Esperantists at the bus station, confusedly trying to purchase the appropriate tickets, so we were all able to feel rather smug by virtue of having already purchased them online.

The bus when we boarded it was like no bus I have ever experienced in this country. It was space-age! Not only were the seats incredibly comfortable, as soon as the bus started moving numerous tv screens dropped down from the ceiling and began showing a mixture of advertisements and Czech pop music. There was the option of headphones to plug in if you wanted to listen to this, as well as a free paper or magazine if you had the good fortune to be able to read Czech, and a complimentary hot drink. Our minds warped by flying with Ryanair, we actually declined the hot drink assuming that we’d have to pay for it, but someone explained later that it had been free. Wow. This was a bus like flying used to be! And the curious thing was, the journey between Prague and Liberec was a mere hour and five minutes.

All too soon we had arrived and were thrown out into a torrential downpour. Happily the organisers were very well organised indeed and had a helper on duty at the bus station to direct us onto the correct trams and buses necessary to reach the kongresejo. Within the hour we had arrived at the university halls of residence where the congress was taking place, resembling a bunch of drowned rats more than a bunch of Esperantists, after a ten minute walk uphill in the pouring rain.

It was upon arrival that the good organisation evaporated and there began a process so crazy and tedious that I am not sure I can describe to you without swearing We walked into the hall of the university which had been designated as the akceptejo, the place where everybody had to check in, pay what they owed and receive the keys to their room. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward process. You would be wrong.

The first person to greet you as you walked through the door required you to collect a piece of paper on which were written all your personal details and the amount of outstanding money you needed to pay for your accommodation. You were requested to check this information and make sure that it was correct. Only an imbecile could arrive and find their information was incorrect, seeing as this same document had been emailed to us no fewer than twice within the weeks immediately preceeding the congress, so there was ample time to email the organisers and have any mistakes corrected. Unfortunately, a lot of imbeciles appeared to have arrived ahead of us. On every piece of paper was written a number which indicated your place in the queue for being dealt with. If I remember correctly, my number was 116. At the point at which I arrived, they were still trying to process number 55. Cue first desire to say a swear word.

Now the akceptejo was a fairly small space with a lot of tables in it. There were also a lot of people who had just arrived, understandably with large amounts of baggage, who were standing around mournfully wondering if there was any chance of them managing to check in within the next seven days. What was not needed was those 54 people who had evidently arrived at the crack of dawn and thus already been processed standing around with their luggage and blocking all thoroughfares through the room so that no one else had space to breathe, never mind move. I mean for Christ’s sake, if you’re lucky enough to have been given your room key you ought to take yourself and your flipping luggage to your room and sit in it, instead of cluttering up an already chaotic akceptejo. Grrr!

We stood around for a while but it became clear that there was no chance of us being processed this side of Christmas, so someone said we could go and sit in a room on the fourth floor where it would be a bit quieter. We duly did so, but we were wet and tired and hungry and it wasn’t much fun. It was some time around half five when we arrived. By half seven we still hadn’t been dealt with and there was an increased commotion because it was now time for the evening meal. Obviously the evening meal was something you were supposed to have paid for and so you weren’t entitled to eat it unless you had been through the checking in process and received your food coupons. Luckily the organisers at least had the good sense to realise that this meant the majority of people who had paid for a meal were not going to receive one, and so started handing out the meal coupons regardless. We abandoned the akceptejo and went to get some food, which turned out to be schnitzel and was actually rather nice, returning to the akceptejo half an hour later. There were slightly less people standing around this time, most people still being at dinner, and so we randomly stood in a queue. After a while, someone deigned to explain to us that the queue we were under the impression we needed to be waiting in all afternoon was only for people who needed to pay in Euros, and that people who were prepared to pay in Czech Koruna could join another (shorter) queue.

Within 15 minutes Babel had succeeded in paying – yippee I was next in line and unfortunately it took rather longer, the girl behind the desk informing me that I’d signed up self catering and saying I was a student. I informed her that I most certainly had not, but she maintained that this was what it said on the database, never mind the fact that the piece of paper which they had printed off the database for me to check had my correct details on it. She called the database administrator over to solve the problem and they sat laboriously changing all my details one by one… until the database guy noticed that actually they were looking at the wrong person’s file, there being another girl with a similar name to mine. Crikey
Eventually having paid, I was allowed to queue to collect my meal coupons, then queue to collect my name badge. There was one final queue on the other side of the hall to receive the keys for your bedroom, and this seemed to be taking people forever. With trepidation, Babel and I joined the queue. I have to say that I was incredibly hacked off by this point and barely capable of being civil to anyone who spoke to me. I believe I may in fact have glared quite nastily at two people who had the misfortune to walk into me with their suitcases. It turned out that the hold up was because people had to show their passports or ID cards, but this wasn’t a problem for Tim and I and finally, finally, finally we received a key and were able to go up to our room. Whoooh! It was only, like, nine o clock at night

Despite being on the sixth floor, the room when we got there completely surpassed my expectations. The beds were reasonably comfortable, there was more shelf space than we could possibly fill and best of all we had a bathroom and kitchenette which we were sharing with just one other room To cap it all off, there was a beautiful view out of the window with lots of trees and hills. Babel and I were so pleased to have arrived at our room that we decided not to leave it, settling down for the night with a book. At the time I was vaguely pleased that Babel hadn’t expressed a strong desire to go to the trinkejo, although I did think it slightly strange. Later I think it emerged that he deliberately pretended he didn’t want to go because of my track record of bursting into tears on the first night of Esperanto meetings.

Hmm. In any case, there we were in Liberec, ready to start the holiday proper

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!

I shall be flying to Prague on Friday morning, from where I will travel to the town of Liberec to attend the IJK, the world Esperanto youth congress, which runs between Saturday 18th and Saturday 25th July. Babel and I are heading to Prague for a spot of sightseeing that weekend, before catching a bus to Warsaw on the Sunday night and from there heading on to Bialystok by train. Bialystok is the location for the UK, the World Esperanto Congress 2009, and we will be there until Saturday 1st August, at which point we have a rather complex journey home via Wroclaw. If you can’t figure out why this is complex, try looking at a map of Poland If all goes to plan, I will be home again on Sunday 2nd August… home for a very brief interval, I hasten to add, as I am going to Austria on August 8th

I’ve been planning this for so long that I’m starting to feel rather excited now, but this week I’ve also started feeling scared. Having organised it all myself, I’m worried that something will go terribly wrong and we’ll get stranded somewhere random, unable to speak a word of Polish…

Wish me luck!

My family and I arrived at Dublin airport in good time and searched for our flight on the departure boards. For some strange reason, it didn’t appear to be showing at the time at which we had expected it. Curious. Eventually, a bit unnerved, my mother went over the a customer information desk and enquired. Customer Services proceeded to deny point blank that our flight existed. My mother duly produced the tickets. Customer Services then clarified that our flight had indeed once existed, but had since been cancelled. These were the good old days when you had proper paper tickets and had to go to a travel agent to purchase them. The travel agent had not informed us that our flight had been cancelled, or perhaps more accurately, Ryanair had not informed the travel agent. The time/day of the flight had been randomly moved without us knowing, and thus we had missed it.

The prospect of being stranded in Dublin airport was not one that appealed, and after various arguments between my mother and Ryanair staff, we were booked onto a new flight. There followed a mad dash across the airport to try and make it, which culminated in us actually running out onto the runway, so lax was airport security in those days But ultimately we missed that flight too and had to sit around in the airport for many boring hours before Ryanair condescended to fly us home.

Over the past ten years, Ryanair has metamorphosed from a slightly dodgy airline which sold flights to Ireland slightly cheaper than Aer Lingus, to the incredibly dodgy European budget airline that it is today. A lot of things have changed, from the online check-in system to the staff’s desire to sell you scratch cards during the flight. It appears that some things, however, remain the same.

Babel booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague in January and got a very good deal on them with Ryanair. I was pleased that he had organised it so far in advance and thus saved us money Something went slightly wrong with the booking, and in a moment of confusion he entered the first half of his personal email address followed by the second half of his work email address, but at the end of the day I didn’t think that this was a big issue. What could possibly go wrong which would require Ryanair to contact us?

Hmmm. Well the holiday is getting closer now, and as I was in the process of putting together a private webpage from which we will be able to download all our travel documents and itineraries, I randomly ended up on the Ryanair website on Wednesday night. I was confident that our flights were correctly booked, but sometimes flight times do change by half an hour here or half an hour there, so I decided to log into the Ryanair system and check. There are three different ways in which you can manage your Ryanair booking, two of which involve entering the places you are flying from and to, together with some personal details. I tried it these ways multiple times, but my input of East Midlands to Prague was continually rejected as incorrect. How strange

Eventually I had to opt for the third method which was more of a hassle because I needed the reservation number and Babel’s card details. It took me a while but eventually I located the necessary information and logged in. I was relieved to see that my flights were still there, but imagine my surprise when I noticed that I was now flying from BIRMINGHAM to Prague, and on FRIDAY 17th July rather than Saturday 18th!!!

I stared at the computer screen in confusion for some time, trying to absorb what had happened. Seemingly Ryanair had cancelled the flight we had purchased and allocated us a different flight on a different day from a different airport How rude! A bit of further investigation on their website confirmed the worst – the airline is due to stop operating the route between East Midlands and Prague before Babel and I are due to fly. The only Ryanair flight from the UK to Prague on the day we had booked to travel is from London Stansted at 6am, hence, I suppose, them reallocating us to a geographically more convenient flight from Brum.

But on a different day?! I knew there was a real chance I wouldn’t be allowed to have the Friday off work, and if so I stood to lose a lot of money, as well as having the disappointment of a ruined holiday.

In a bit of a panic I spoke to Babel and he recommended that I give Ryanair a call. I duly did so the next day, but I might as well not have bothered. As Damon so rightly said on my Facebook status, their customer service policy equates to the two words, “Fuck off!”.

Yes, my flight had been cancelled. Yes, I had been given another flight. Yes, this was the most convenient flight available for me and they’d gone above their obligations by transferring me to it with no extra charge. No, I couldn’t have my money back if I wanted to cancel it. Well, only the government tax back, but that would be subject to an admin fee for processing the refund. No, they didn’t think this was slightly unreasonable, nor did they think it was their fault that I stood to lose £65 Babel had already paid for airport parking at an airport we were now no longer flying from.

GRRR!

I had to hang up before I exploded :cry:

The situation was eventually resolved by my manager allowing me to have the Friday off work, but that’s not the point and we’ve still been put to a lot of inconvenience. Our return flight was booked from Wroclaw to East Midlands on the assumption our car would be there. It now won’t be, so we’ll arrive at East Midlands some time around midnight and have to check into a hotel. If I hadn’t thought we needed to fly back to East Midlands, there’s no way on this earth I would have booked a flight from Wroclaw which is not in the remote vicinity of Bialystok. Etc etc etc.

The upshot is that I will never, ever be flying Ryanair again. If anyone else has any horror stories, feel free to share…

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…

Easter 1998 is one which will forever be imprinted on my mind. On Coronation Street Deidre Rachid had just been put in prison following her involvement with that evil airline pilot… in the real world, many parts of the country (including nearby Stratford-upon-Avon) were seriously flooding… and on the morning of Easter Sunday, my grandad had the heart attack which would result in his death a few weeks later. Whilst the date of Easter changes from one year to the next, for very many years afterwards my entire family were habitually depressed on Easter Sunday, unable to disassociate the feast day from my grandfather’s death. This year, by pure coincidence, Easter Sunday happened to fall on the same calendar date as in 1998, so this could have been a mournful Easter indeed, but instead I think it has probably been the happiest I can remember

For once I wasn’t actually terribly depressed on Good Friday. I was more on a euphoric sort of high, having survived my first week in London and knowing I had four days to catch up on my sleep and recover. I went to the hairdresser in the morning and had some much needed inches off my hair. No one – neither my family nor Babel – subsequently said anything terribly complimentary about the end result, but I was pleased with it and that’s all I’m bothered about

Easter Saturday I got up earlier than I would usually choose to at the weekend, because my sister had suggested that we bake an Easter cake. We used to bake a chocolate cake at Easter every year, but being honest I think this is another tradition which faded away after the death of my grandfather. We hadn’t done it for very many years anyway but because my mother had invited the entire family around for tea on Easter Sunday, it felt like it would be a nice idea. It was indeed very good fun, although there were a couple of sticky moments, and the sponge didn’t rise as much as we’d anticipated, perhaps because we’d used so much cocoa powder. Even when we’d made the filling and iced it, we felt like it wasn’t going to be big enough for 10 people, so we decided to bake some little Easter fairy cakes as well.

We’d literally just finished icing these when Babel arrived to pick me up. We’d decided to go to Nuneaton for the day, in order to get a feel for the place and decide whether we liked the idea of it being our future home. Apart from the fact that we struggled to find somewhere to eat and I managed to make Babel quite angry by my general slowness at reading maps, it was a thoroughly positive experience I can’t lie and say that Nuneaton has the ‘wow’ factor, but it’s a pleasant, unextraordinary sort of place, and based on what I saw on Saturday afternoon there’s nothing negative I can think of to say. The shopping centre was adequate, the suburbs seem prosperous enough, and it’s an awful lot more appealing than you’d think when you go past the massive gravel pits on the train

Our exploring finished, Babel and I headed to the cinema to watch ‘Knowing’, a film which I had wanted to see for a couple of weeks, after I saw it get a very positive review on BBC News 24. I don’t have a talent for choosing very good films sometimes, but for once I appear to have succeeded It tells the story of a Dad, played by Nicholas Cage, who’s little boy brings home a piece of paper covered in seemingly random numbers from school. The paper was put in a time capsule 50 years earlier by a little girl, then pupil at the school. One night after a few glasses of whiskey, the father realises that the numbers represent the dates of all major world disasters which have happened in the last 50 years, including the location coordinates and the number of people who were killed. An exciting adventure story follows, as he tries to stop the remaining three disasters which have as yet not occurred… If you like end-of-the-world action movies with a few opportunities to cry, I definitely recommend it

Easter Sunday morning I went to Mass and was cheered to see how busy the church was, particularly how many young people were there. There seemed a better atmosphere than Christmas, even On Sunday afternoon my entire family plus Babel were invited to tea, so there was a bit of prior preparation and rearranging of furniture to be done. I was a little worried that Babel was going to be terminally bored, but if he was he hid it well and spent the afternoon being utterly charming to all my relatives, who now appear to like him more than I do My little cousin seems particularly fond of him, if the number of times he insulted him can be taken as a measure of fondness!

I’m very grateful to Babel for coming and making such an effort, and I’m also very grateful for all the lovely presents I received. Not only did I receive *two* Easter eggs (yippee!!), I also received a copy of ‘The Winter Queen’ by Boris Akunin, a book which I have been hoping to own for years. That was a very thoughtful present indeed And as if that weren’t enough, I later received a further present in the form of a massive framed photo of a mallard, with the date of our engagement written underneath I feel a little guilty about this because I had been with Babel when he bought the frame and had made a comment to the effect that I wouldn’t want a picture of anything *that* big hanging in my house. It *is* a very big picture, and we may struggle to fit it into our house when we eventually purchase one, but it is nevertheless a beautiful duck, and even if it were an ugly duck (is it possibly to have an ugly duck?!), it was a very sweet thought of Babel’s to create such a personalised present, and I do appreciate it

Today was the last day I’ll be spending with my family for quite some time, and we went out to the countryside to get some fresh air. We visited two different National Trust properties and between them managed to see two bunny rabbits, five baby ducklings and more lambs than you could shake a stick at, as well as hundreds and thousands of beautiful daffodils. It was all very refreshing, and Babel has had a lovely day with his little nephew too (although if I weren’t so tired, perhaps I should be jealous that he invited another woman ) so all in all I think that everybody has had a thoroughly enjoyable Easter

Back to London and the daily grind at the crack of dawn tomorrow, of course, but I do have a little something to look forward to as I’m having a catch-up dinner with someone I’ve pretty much lost touch with of late, so that should be fun