Jestmi zimno!

I think I had the coldest bicycle commute in my life this morning. It was negative 30 degrees Celsius, which turns out to be minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. As my bike's wheels crunched along the frozen, packed snow along the various roads to school, my moustache and the hair that was sticking out of my hat and scarf began to turn white and freeze solid, and then my right ear froze and felt like a rock. I'm glad I was wearing sun glasses, I'd hate to think what the water in my eyes would've done.

But, hey, it's a dry cold!

The last time I experienced temps like these was when I was over 16,000' on Denali (Mt. McKinley) in May of 2003. Then I was fighting with thinner air acclimatization and frostbite, and now I'm fighting with the latter here at nearly sea level. The sharp cold has surely reminded me that a few of my fingers, the end of my nose and I guess my ear did not escape Alaska without a longterm reminder of how brutal these conditions can be for the human body.

I hear that this is the coldest Warsaw's been in one hundred years...but I also here it's warming up a few degrees tomorrow.

So maybe my next ride won't be so frosty!

:)

Oh, and if you'd rather think about sunnier climes, Erden Eruc is about to set off to complete his main crossing solo of the Atlantic from the Canary Islands. Follow him or check out his previous adventures as he tries to circumnavigate the world all under human power...and climb 6 of the 7 continents' highest peaks in the world, too, at:
www.around-n-over.org

As they say in Poland, I'm holding my thumbs for you, Erden! Paddle hard, sleep hard and eat well!

Czesc!

Wow! I suck!

Greetings, Earthlings!

I feel I've returned from a galaxy far, far away. I'm ashamed at how long it's been since my last post...but I've had my reasons. I'm not allowed to disclose them all, but here's a bit of what we've been up to...

1) Got my tooth fixed, and then while climbing in (see #2 below), the clinic called to tell me that my dentists is sick and will have to cancel his appointment with me 8 days from now. "Wow, the dentist knows he's going to be sick that long? Or is it just a coincidence that the appointment was at a ridiculously early hour, and right between Xmas and New Year's?!" (Jan. 8 and still no crown on my tooth!)

2) Jill and I went to Spain! KLM was delayed twice out of Warsaw and Amsterdam, so we (I) desired an extra day in Barcelona (say the 'c' like an 's' or better a 'th' with a serious lisp to match the Catalan pronunciation!) so we could get in enough Gaudi and other interesting sight seeing before we hopped in our little rental Citroen and spent nearly 40 frickin' Euro to drive the toll way to the death of all tourist beaches in the Mediteranean, Benidorm-a sin of a place that is so overbuilt with a wide variety of crappy and somewhat nice skyscrapers, not high rises, but buildings that must rival Chicago's skyline in scale and height and...anyway, it's mostly built by British investors, so Jill and I don't want to hear about how Americans overbuild and destroy beautiful places from you Brits anymore...at least we do it on our own land and live with it ourselves! Grr.
Anyway, we actually avoided Benidorm pretty well, and stayed in the interior of Costa Blanca in Finestrat at a pseudo climbers' hostel called the Orange House. Much fun was had freezing to death the first few nights in our tiny room with no heat (I later stole a space heater from one of the nice rooms) and then we felt we deserved better and moved into a fancy room with its own bathroom! Plush! Well the climbing was great, better than what we experienced in Italy last year, when we climbed in and around Arco/Trento...but Italy still wins with scenery...but Costa Blanca did win big with having 2 good Indian restaurants!!! :)
OK, so the climbing was good. It was almost entirely sport, which was good for us mentally so we could push it a bit, but not so good for my tendons...I think I squeezed in the one rest day (Xmas eve) at the right moment to avoid serious injury. Hooray! The one day we did do real trad it wasn't so hot, and the guidebook is really subjective on the ratings.
But, in a nut shell, we'd return definitely to Barcelona and very likely to Costa Blanca for more winter or spring rock climbing.
3) New Year's Eve/Sylwester in Warsaw. Pawel, one of Jill's coworkers invited us to a real, genuine Polish Sylwester party (Sylwester happens to be the 'names day' of Dec. 31 po polsku (they celebrate birth names and birthdays in this country. Polish calendars list every friggin' birth name throughout the entire year. God help Poland on the days of Magda, Piotr, Agnieszka, Marcin, etc....the country must be hopelessly overwhelmed with vodka purchases on these special days...)). Anyhoo, it was also nice because it was a Polish 70s/80s theme/costume party. Jill and I weren't sure if there dress was any different than the states, but we took our chances and all went well. Pawel (Cobra) and his wife Magda looked stunning. Hopefully a pic will pop in here soon. Night was fun filled with lots of talk in another Magda's flat, with some dancing and vodka shots with all the men. Jill was scared for me, but she was rather impressed with my ability to keep up with the Pollocks...my new record was reached in the wee hours of the night...13 shots and still standing...and the slurring began after #12, I think!?! (and had 2 beers, too!). Midnight came and we all ran out into the deep snow and watched the gazillion illegal in the states but plenty legal here fireworks of large size go off all over the place and fortunately didn't see anyone get injured. Fun snowball fight was had, too!
Next day was rough, that I remember.
4) Finally watched Star Wars, Episode III. Nice to see Obi-Won looking more like Alec Guiness with the beard and all, but AG was really unmatchable in acting and charm. I'm sorry he's gone.
And was that really Frank Oz's voice digitized for Yoda? It didn't sound right, so now watch Empire Strikes Back, I must, to learn the ways of the dark side.
5) Jill had 3 weeks off for xmas. I didn't. For once, I worked a lot more in one week than she did. Jill slept alot, in fact she probably had more time to relax than either ever, or in over 10 years or so... long before her teaching days....!
6) We finally made it to Zakopane and the beautiful Polish Tatry mountains!
We trained it to Krakow, then bussed it to Zako. Seriously nice bus facility in Krak, seriously flawed clerks and any sense of order when boarding/paying. They have much to learn, they must, to meet other standards of other EU countries!
Weather was foggy and cold day 1, didn't see much but the famed Krupowki street and all its tacky karczmas, swarmas and more karczmas (these are forms of Polish eateries/restaurants). Day 2, cold, cold, cold foggy start. Got up to Kuznice and took the 7 km long gondola ride into Tatry National Park and into the SUNSHINE!!! We skied at a place I can't pronounce or remember how to spell, all day long in gorgeous sunshine with wonderful views of surround high peaks and may have even stepped into Slowakia. BUT, the ski area has one 2 lifts. and basically 2 slopes to ski. Compared to Austria, where last winter we visited Ischgl in western Tirol, where they literally built a lift or a ski run on every piece of skiable terrain possible, and were in the midst of building more (?!?!?!), here the Poles have thankfully been very rigid in protecting their wilderness and reducing the impact on their precious piece of the Carpathian mountains. So an interesting trade off. We know we sure as hell won't go there for a week long downhill ski trip... but we'll surely return for the climbing, scrambling, XC-skiing and another day or two skiing on another clear day.
Oh, and I found I still really suck at skiing, and that Jill is still really awesome at snowboarding.
7) ? Well, that's a secret for now...until then, Happy belated New Year (Dosiego Roku) to everyone!

Cheers!

JnJ

My Worst Night in Poland or An Enemy Returns

Last Wednesday night, I was visited by a resurfacing arch enemy, the toothache. Mind you, I don't have your average set of teeth. Nearly every dentist says I can thank my birth parents and their kin for my set of choppers. As my mom recently wrote, "Your teeth have always been rotten." Thanks for the support, mom!

This ache wasn't your run of the mill tooth pain. This was an old mercury crown from I'm not sure how many decades ago, and either it, or what was left of the tooth below it, was loose. For the last year this tooth would ache for a few days then go away. Only once before while climbing in the French Alps did the pain get bad enough to take some killers. Wednesday was different.

As the night progressed, the pain worsened and stretched from my lower jaw to my neck, middle of the back of my head and then continued down my spine. Did I also mention a fever? This little loose tooth came on with a vicious infection that sent me spiraling towards a black hole of misery. I was freezing and sweating, my hearing was amplified so any noise was supersonic, my loose tooth had to come out, so out came the pliers...but to no avail. Back to bed, still freezing with a half meter of covers on me. I was so cold that my teeth, as sore as they were, were chattering uncontrollably. I even used a sock. Jill slept through all this, by the way...

5:30 a.m. she wakes to my convulsions and moans and takes my temp: 103.7 F (39.8 C). Not good. We (she) scrambled and started making calls for emergency dentists that would hopefully speak English. My condition was surreal, much like when I was experiencing high altitude mountain sickness after summiting Denali (Mt. McKinley) in 2003, I could move and make decisions, but my motions and thoughts were slower than a snail. Jill thought I was going to drown myself in the bathtub as I couldn't physically quite get to the tap to shut it off.

Dentist #1 was a lovely Polish lady who hung up on her. #2 spoke just enough English to say the doc wasn't in. #3 repeat of #1. #4 was Lux Med and they said come in ASAP. Small vicotories.

Even in my state, I was still fearful of what this Polish medical experience would be like. The hospitals here haven't had any good press here for nearly a century. At the clinic, my stomach didn't agree with the mixture of sterile hospital smell and the cigarettes being smoked in the entry way, three times, so at least they knew I wasn't kidding about being sick. From then on the clinic did a marvelous job of providing someone who could translate for us and take care of this bastard child in my mouth.

I was smart enough to bring my dental records and x-rays from the states. I thought the Polish dentist would just want to yank it, but he actually wanted to save it. Turns out it was the last tooth on that side that hadn't had a root canal yet! So I ended up getting the old crown pried off and got the fastest root canal I've ever had in my life. The implements (files) were similar, but not as coarse, and he didn't take the time to continually widen the hole, but he did keep dropping in the toxin they use to kill off the rest of the living tissue. The work was complete in 10 minutes. No gloves, no assistant, no sucking thingy hanging off my lip, no soft rock/classical music. But unlike the states, where it'd be a thorough scouring for hours and a temp put on the same session, he left my new hole in my tooth wide open, refused to give me any antibiotics and told me to come in the next 2 days for a 'rinsing' of the hole. If things were bad, then he'd issue the antibiotics. Oh, and I had to eat with a wad of cotton covering that side of my teeth. For comic relief, try it sometime when you're trying to impress someone like the in-laws.

The next three daily visits (an extra was required, apparently) were all with different dentists at the same clinic, and all had various forms of poor English. Since it was just a 'rinsing' no translator was really necessary. The last woman dentist (2 male, 2 female, btw) put in the temporary fill after re-poisoning the tissues again and sent me on my way to schedule the next appointment, where we'll prep for a crown. My pain and misery reduced relatively quickly, but it took several days to recover from the high fever, as I was still weak on Tuesday (6 days).

And the cost for all this suffering and modern Polish dental medicine and procedures at a private clinic, where they didn't even bother asking if I had insurance (was it that obvious?!)?

50 Złoty! ($15)


Hopefully it's not a 'you get what you pay for' experience, but so far so good (no infection, yet!).

Perhaps I'll invest in a new set of Polish choppers while I'm abroad!

Bring on the novocaine!

:-)

Other sad medical news...

Our lovely, little Dudek is getting his little boys chopped this afternoon. I cringed every time the vet said the word, 'castration,' oh, it just sounds so cruel, especially in a Polish accent.

Wish him well. Live and toy mice are welcome.

Poof!

And just like that...

we're off to Spain!

When I haven't travelled in a long time, especially by plane, I tend to forget how easy it is to enter 16 digits online and suddenly have the right and near future ability to travel anywhere in the world. No wonder credit card fraud is such a lucrative business!

So Jill and I had been wondering what to do for xmas, as prices for a trip back to the states had nearly dooubled after we snoozed over a weekend to think about it all...so we loozed.
I'm not sure where the idea came from, perhaps Jill's desire to use at least some of her Spanish language background before we leave Europe for good, but came it did, and after perusing some stuff online and reading over one of the climbing guidebooks we picked up from Rick and Carolyn Nelson from last year, we decided on going to Costa Blanca!

Costa Blanca is a region on Spain's south coast, southwest of Barcelona by about 4.5 hours drive by car. Here's one web shot of one of the places we hope to climb, Peñon de Ifach. Yep, that's multi-pitch rock climbing territory, right over the water and within rolling distance of 2 beaches.

Sweet

So more on that later, but if you'll be in the Costa Blanca 'hood between December 17 and 27th, let us know, we'd love to share xmas with ya!

Adios amigos!

(Yes! Another language I get to butcher!!!)

The Book

No, not the bible, rather the thing that sits kattywhumpus on a table, leans at a funny angle when it doesn't have enough support from its friends, collects all sorts of crumbs, body hair, and coffee stains, gets rubbed raw at the edges, occasionaly torn and written in and fortunately, oh, so rarely, gets burned.

I have been a horrible book reader in my life.

By the age of 16, I think I had read (on my own, with no help from mum): Where the Wild Things Are, all the Curious George books, some of the Dr. Seuss books, James and the Giant Peach (wow, big step, eh!?), a few of the Narnia Chronicles (Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, etc.) and topped it off with Conan the Barbarian (after I had seen the film, so no imagination necessary). I hated Dickens and anything else forced upon me in high school. Pathetic, eh?

I don't know what it is with books and me. Once I'm in a good one, I love it, but it's so hard to start a new one. I usually feel too busy to start...and this thing called the internet hasn't helped my behaviour, either. So, what's a lame-bookreader supposed to do? My friends always talk about the books they're reading (how do people read 3 or more books at once?), but I can't say they always enjoy what they're reading...so why bother? I really do like books, I want to read more, but I don't want to be stuck reading something so-so when I could be reading something wonderful. So, when I remember, I try to ask those book lovers what are/were their favorites (top 3 or 5 or 10, they often get flustered when asked to narrow it down so!). I then try to compile the lists of said favorites...if one or more people agree on the same title...bingo, we have a potential winner for me to add to my 'yeah, I'll hopefully read that one someday' list.

So what are your favorites? (feel free to enter in the 'comments' section at end of post)

So, what spurred this post? Well, this year's been good for me as far as book consumption goes. This summer I had a chance to read Lance Armstrong's Every Second Counts (while watching Le Tour de France in person, that was cool (le Tour was better than the book!)), the famed Da Vinci Code, the Dave Egger's Gen-X A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the truly wonderful The Big Open, by Rick Ridgeway. (the latter was bought by Martin in Warsaw, passed on to Tessa in Trento, Italy, then passed to me this summer and returned to Warsaw!) 4 books in one summer, that's a lot for me. (Shows how much crappy weather we had in the mountains, too!)

But the latest is another gem for me, as thanks from Dawn for helping her move from one flat to another, she gave me Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it is. Really.

I like historical books, films and documentaries and this one tops the cake. His understanding of the sciences is as lame as the rest of ours (minus my dad) so he truly tries his best to convey in as simple of terms the history of us, the Earth and the universe. There's too many one liners of comedy and horror to post here now (maybe later), but here's a brief history of the earth if viewed as a simple 24 hour day (note: Earth is roughly 4,500,000,000 years old):

"Life begins very early, about 4 AM, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. (!) Not until almost 8:30 PM, with the day 5/6ths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed 20 minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia (see book). At 9:04 PM, trilobites swin onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 PM plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than 2 hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

"Thanks to 10 minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 PM the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 PM and hold sway for about 3/4ths of an hour. At 11:39 PM they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and 17 seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime, barely an instant.

"Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or larger (we're talking MASSIVE). It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummelled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."

Us homosapiens really don't matter much in the cosmos, eh? But all things are reltive, right? But my dad was famous for once saying, "Relativity sucks!"

:)

Happy Turkey Day

How many turkeys will Bush pardon?

God only knows.

Just over a year and a few months here in Polska, and we're slowly ignoring and forgetting about more and more American holidays. Our Labor day doesn't affect us here. And the Poles really don't care about Columbus, either. Halloween is gaining interest, but this year it fell at the wrong time-when Jill's school was on their autumn holiday week-and no parties were had (unlike Russ and Kim's bash last year, see October '04 archive). But Thanksgiving is upon us and it has enough popularity here that several of my students have wished me a "Super Thanks day" or a "Merry Turkey day." It is, as far as I know, a holiday that is truly unique to America. There's no shopping for gifts for others, no real reason to get dressed up. Your mission is to eat.

So American, indeed!

But here in Polska we have to work today (unless you work at the US Embassy, where they get every American AND Polish holiday off! What a deal!). My students in my 4 classes today are getting to learn more about real American values (food) and the meaning of 'appreciate,' of all the things that we find we're thankful for-for that day, for the week, month or year.

Since we all have to work today, there's no time to cook a turkey, or a tofurkey for us veggies, so in honoring our pseudo-tradition as of late to semi-ignore American holidays while abroad, we plan to have a scrumptious meal of hot, spicy Indian food at Tandoor Palace tonight.

It won't be turkey, but we'll still be bloated!

Happy Thanksgiving to y'all and smacznego! (smach-NAY-go = bon apetit!)

jr

c3Po

Wiwa la Polska!

Oddly, in this modern world, where everyone has mp3 players, died hair and purposely misspelled middle names, there seems to be an abundance of bloggers, not just in the world, but here in Warsaw. Without having met a single one of those involved (Martin excluded, he just got his site up and running 2 months ago at PolandExplorer), I've been invited to join a new Warsaw-based expat community weblog, titled none other than Pijemy po polsku, which, for you who passed Latin but not Polish, translates to "We drink in the Polish way (or style)." Choose your meaning of drink, or the phrasal verb, "to drink in." Sure I've had my fair share of rough nights and mornings in this fine country of the plains, but I prefer the latter definition, as being a foreigner in this unique place allows one to absorb everything with more interest and intensity than dealing with the day to day life back home, and what you soak in is some fine Polish traditions and the occasional outrage at the well-ingrained bureaucracy...but not that we don't have our problems back home...

Perhaps I'll even meet these other mystery P3 bloggers in person, as they seem to attend a piwo(a) enjoyment festival weekly at the Warsaw Tortilla Factory!

However, it's a small world in blogland, and it turns out I do know one of the writers, Aaron Fowles, as pictured here 3rd from the left from my CELTA course back in August 2004.
Crazy.

So feel free to click on the little P3-PiwoBlog link on the right to see what a few other expats from the states and the UK are thinking, planning, laughing and crying about a few thousand miles east of y'all. I'll probably be too lazy to post to both sites...
:)

Bonus points to anyone who can see how many languages (or references to) are used in the subtitle of this post! :)

Czesc!

Tamara/Krakow/Auschwitz

Two weeks ago we were fortunate to have our second Seattle guest, Jill's good friend, Tamara.



She was already flying through Amsterdam enroute to Africa for a photography course and some photo work in Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, and used some flyer miles to hop over to Warszawa! It was a quick weekend visit, but here's some of the sights we got to see... Well, first off, our trusty rusty Ford Escort Kombi died, and we had to quickly purchase this alien Fiat fireball so we could all get down to Krakow in a jiffy!

just kidding, thankfully! These cars are all over Poland, and Jill wants every one of them banned from the highways-with one person they can max out around 55-60 mph...but they always seem to be packed to the gills with 4 or more people, and usually large people...then they max out around 40 mph...

But we made it to Krakow and unfortunately didn't arrange a place to stay, thinking tourist seaason was ending...so we got a swanky room at the 'nearest hostel to Old Town', an interesting, young person-filled pinkish/reddish thing west of town, and close to where our half marathon started last spring.

To make up for it, we found a nicer place for her and Jill to stay on night #2, right off the Old Town square, while I headed back to Warsaw to teach in the morning. So we saw the usual sights in Krakow, then on Sunday we catched an hour + van ride, 60 km west to Oswiecim, also known the world over by its German name, Auschwitz.

Not only is it the scene of the largest experiment in genocide in human history, it's also the world's largest cemetaryThe 'town' is split up into 3 camps: Auschwitz 1, 2 (Birkenau) and Monowitz (Monowice). A1 was originally a Polish miltary camp, conveniently converted to a prison camp, torture chamber, and the fist gas chamber for the Jews, Roma (gypsies), and Polish, Russian and even German political prisoners. But it wasn't big enough to hold (and to process) the incoming trainloads of workers and victims, so Birkenau was built in 1941/2-solely for the elimination of human beings. Eventually 40 camps were created in the region, all for the same purpose. In the end, 1.5 million, yes, 1,500,000 human beings from 27 nations, including 1.3 million Jews, 150,000 Russians, 75,000 Poles and 21,000 Roma were wiped from the face of the earth here, just at Birkenau. The total loss in all the camps for WWII was 5 million, 3 million of which were Polish Jews.

With the Russians hot the on the heels of the fleeing Nazis, the Germans had little time to destroy their evidence of their 'experiments' in genocide. Much of the architecture still stands, yet the 4 largest gas chambers were dynamited-a disgusting set of buildings where the Jews were led into thinking they were about to all take a group shower before they started their new life in this temporary camp, until they were gassed en masse, 2000 people at a time, and incinerated on the spot.

The camp's original Polish Army barracks still stand, and if you didn't have a clue about the place's history, it's actually a nice looking place, full of orderly red brick buildings, lined with tall trees, leaning slightly and dropping some of their colorful, golden leaves. But the barracks have been converted to museums, each representing different parts of the camps and what the Russians 'found' after the liberation in 1945, including TONS of human hair, used for weaving hats, scarves, jackets and wigs for the fashionably conscious back in Deutschland. And I don't mean 'tons' as an expression, I mean it literally. There were also rooms full of the luggage the Jews had brought with them, the last of their possessions after leaving their homes or the walled ghettos. Rooms full of glasses (spectacles), shoes, shoes, thousands of shoes. Whatever the Nazis could re-use for their own gain, they did. What we saw was what was left. There's no way to fathom how many of these kinds of items passed through these places.

The barracks were also full of various types of 'sleeping' chambers. They displayed the progression of the structures and living conditions the prisoners lived in-first on wood floors with some hay, then mattresses, then cots, then bunk beds stacked to the ceiling, with as many bodies squeezed on as possible-both because so many people had been shipped there, and for those who hadn't been eliminated yet to try to stay warm and survive the freezing winter nights. Dysentery was the norm, as was starvation. Those who couldn't work were eliminated (the old, young and female). Those who did anything out of the ordinary were eliminated, if not tortured first.