MirmurR

Four months in Estonia

2011-08-07T14:37:00.007+02:00

Time to reappear and update our blog - four months have passed since we moved to Estonia and it feels now almost like home. As somebody recently reminded me - once a new place starts feeling like home it is time to move on :) We have however no intention to move on since we feel very comfortable and cozy. Not to mention that Leon is going to have a sister still this month so it is time for a bit a stability. Another positive aspect of Estonia is that the global warming has nicely warmed up the summers so that you do not have to be afraid that it is going to rain everyday. Unfortunately nothing happened to the long dark days of winter. At least though the amount of snow during that time is incredible so perhaps it will be time to learn the cross country skiing...

Our Leon is nowadays a big boy attending a couple of days in a week the day care and having his strong opinion on all aspects of life. He is not to flexible to change it but it probably goes back to the fact that he is not sure which language to speak :) No wonder sincte he is basically exposed to four totally different languages (Hungarian, Polish, Estonian and English). Anybody want to guess which one he will start to speak first? We were a bit concerned about this but it is quite difficult to get serious advice from any specialist. The good thing is that sites like http://incultureparent.com are always very positive about the outcome of such mixes, if one sticks to a couple of simple rules. Anyway this is our Leonsito expressing his disappointment about lack of breakfast in the morning during our short midsummer trip to one of the small islands in Estonia (Manilaid)...

The change

2011-01-29T22:06:00.005+01:00

I have not managed to post every month last year though I have been having it in the back of my mind. Perhaps it is because we have been in the middle of the process of planning yet another change in our lives and because our little emperor has not been exactly sleeping at nights...

Now since in a couple of days it is going to be Leon's birthday and we have just had a big celebration with the family in Warsaw perhaps it is time to share the news with all the might still be interested in our whereabouts...

There are two serious changes going to happen in our lives. First of all at the end of Summer Leon is going to have a sibling!!! Second of all we are moving out of Poland to Estonia in the coming weeks. Both of us are really looking forward to the new chapter of our lives. Though now it means a total chaos!!!

Connections

2010-10-11T23:01:00.003+02:00

I have managed unintentionally to find a connection between the origins of my grandfather's ancestors (remember the post about visiting Ukraine) and the partitioning of Poland (that part of Ukraine went to Austrian's and Hungarians in the 19th century).

The connection is called Leon Bilinski and used to be the finance minister of Austrian Hungarian Empire and later on the Director of Polish National Bank...

Check it out - though the Polish version is much more extensive than the English...

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Bili%C5%84ski - Polish version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Bili%C5%84ski - English version

The real real connection is however on the photo below - Leon with his cousins during the October visit to Hungary :)))

The season of Summer

2010-09-21T22:13:00.001+02:00

I think I owe this post still to the Summer season. It is actually the last day of Summer today and it would be a shame not to write anything. It just happened that I could not make myself sit down and write anything sensible. I was thinking that actually those posts nowadays would be very important for Leon later on in his life. It is the period which he will not remember but could somehow reconstruct from the posts. At least I have been relatively regularly posting photos to our flickr account.

Actually we were supposed to leave Szczecin by now. Things changed a bit and it seems we will stay for a couple of months more. We have not really had a chance to go for real holidays (what exactly would that be by the way?) - so instead we went with Leon for the first time to his home country of Hungary. He approved it though he did not like the heat :)) It was also the first time he met his grandfather. No - this is not Leon on the picture below - it is his grandfather and I must say they look very much alike even though our Leon cannot sit yet.

Later on in July we flew to London to see his new born cousin Matilde. The whole family enjoyed the colors of London and Leon most of all enjoyed the tube and all the people around him...

Just like his parents love the touch of civilization in London or Berlin, he loves all the hectic around him. From time to time we have thoughts that we will move to Hungary or stay some more time in Poland but just a drive through Berlin makes such silly thoughts fly away :)))

To round up the family tour around your Leon visited his cousin Gyura in the southern part of Sweden. They might make a good match in the future as plants are one of the favorite things of both of them. If you want to see the special relationship which Leon developed with Gyura's dogs check out our flickr.

I intend to improve my posting soon - I might introduce some new ways of doing it. Perhaps twitter is a good way since I do have a relatively short focus span but encounter lots of things which I would be happy to somehow be able to go back someday in the future. I really enjoy posting - somehow though I am not always convinced that I should post what I have in my head...

New friends of Leon

2010-05-17T22:19:00.005+02:00

I have been really lousy with the blog. I cannot really understand why since our life with Leon became very interesting. The little monster changes almost everyday. He now clearly sees, smiles to us and decided to be friends with pineapple. Yellow is his favourite color so he either might in the future be the fan of Brazilian National soccer team or perhaps a player of Borussia Dortmund :) Anyway the good thing is that he also recognizes the night and has no problem with sleeping up to 7 hours - moreover he never mixes the day with the night. Though during the day he requires full attention - he is kind of a social animal. The interesting thing about him sleeping is that he puts a pillow on his face once he wants to sleep so you cannot see him. It is a bit scary but seems that he just decided it is the way he wants it to be.

Anyway - lets get back to business - actually I tried getting our Leon a frequent flyer card since he has already been to Finland three times and has a couple of more trips planned for the coming months - seems though that although you always have to pay something for the ticket he cannot get the miles - a bit unfair I would say.

Some weeks ago we also decided to choose the nameday for him. There are some rules for it but we thought that it would be good if he had it in the second part of the year since he was born in February. In this way he would have evenly spread parties...My mum though said that it would be nice if he had it on the 14th of March since it is right after my me, my bro and his great grandma. We did not see it as a good idea until we learned that Rita's cousin's daughter (Matilda to be born in a couple of weeks) would have her nameday also on the 14th of March. The funniest thing is that in the move Leon the professional - the young girl that "accompanies" him is also called Matilda :)))

The traveller

2010-04-02T22:49:00.010+02:00

Our son has been the traveler from the day he left the hospital. We managed to travel with him around 10 times through the non-existing Polish-German border and it never crossed our mind that he should get some travel documents e.g. a passport. Rita and Leon got even once stopped on the border but somehow Leon was ignored - only potential cigarettes smuggling was of interested to the guys on the border. Anyway it would have probably continued like that for some time but Leon was to have his first real trip to far north to Oulu in Finland. Therefore we bought the plane tickets and somehow forgot to consider how are we going to check him in since he has no papers. At some point - exactly seven days before the flight and additionally right before Easter I decided to go to the passport office in Warsaw to get him the passport. There I learned that it takes two months before he gets all the papers so that he can apply for the passport and then an additional month before they issue it. Additionally since I showed up with him I almost got arrested since I could not explain how he made it to Poland since he was born in Germany...Things started looking very bad - basically the only way for him to have a Polish passport in time for the flight was to smuggle him back to Germany to get him a temporary passport from the Polish Embassy there...Fortunately we tried the Hungarian path - those guys did not inquire how he got to Poland - neither wanted any special documents and with kind help of the Embassy staff who took care of the issue outside office hours he got his Hungarian passport just in time for the flight!!! Btw - the Hungarians issue the first passport for free to its new citizens - in Poland after three months it is going to be around 200 EUR altogether.

I should also propose a special award to the Polish authorities for their stupidity since the first step in the process is to get him a Polish birth certificate even though he has European Union which is recognized in whole EU but somehow not in Poland -I kind of though Poland is in EU but perhaps those guys did not notice it yet. All in all takes a month just for this step of the procedure.

On the picture the result of the very stressful process - Rita with Leon in the sling on the main square in Oulu. Next time we are there he will get a picture with the Santa Claus!!! I must say the little guy enjoyed flying very much. It probably felt like heaven for him because he was fed every 45 minutes...

Last thing - the most interesting picture so far I have found on my bro's blog - the VERVET MONKEY

or you can also google it as BLUE BALL MONKEY - magnified reason for the name below :)

Leon after a month

2010-02-21T19:06:00.009+01:00

Our kid is a month old. He has grown considerably and eats more frequently as well. This makes at least two pit stops every night. With time one can get used to it :)
The good thing is he really behaves well when we go out. It is quite easy to go with him to a restaurant or take him for a longer trip. He sleeps through the whole event. Actually he likes noise very much - whether it is a vaccum cleaner or car engine noise. All sorts of music also help - classical sky radio seems to be his favourite.
He also loves to be warm - either in his tummy tub or under 5 blankets. It does not matter. Last week he actually started his swimming classes:)
I guess after the first semester we will be able to go swimming together. He is already a great partner for me to watch Champions League :) Anyway the guy is definitely making us busy.

Apart for this change in our lives we are looking forward to spring. The snowfall this year has been exceptional. The best since 1979 in this region so I guess the next such winter will come around 2040. The three of us might still go skiing this year and I must say I really look forward to it. Even if I will be spending every other day baby sitting and it is not always that easy with Leon. He clearly so far prefers to listen to Rita but I am trying hard to win him over.

Home again

2010-02-06T22:01:00.007+01:00

We made it home and so far we have it all nicely under control. Or that is how we felt until we got home safe and Leon was asleep. And then a chain reaction started: after the first feeding he got hiccups which prevented him from falling asleep until Rita put him in the baby sling. There he passed out in a nanosecond till the next diaper change. Soon came the second faux pas, when Rita managed to put accidentally the nappy rash cream on his ass causing big shouting till washed away :) Thus arrived the second feeding round for another hour with lots of screaming, then expressing milk, which Rita wanted to save for the night. That was the plan - he finished it all right after Rita completed expressing it. And the hiccups started again.... And here I stop listing all the "first night" challenges before you think it is all a nightmare. Actually despite of all these difficulties it is very rewarding to be with him, seeing his fulfilled expression with a half-smile driven by a staffed belly and then an extended yawn with a big stretch. So far not much else makes him so content, but it is good enough for now. Finally he went to sleep at 11 pm and gave us a good 6 hours rest with a good feeding at dawn since when he has been sleeping "like milk".

By now we know the secret to make him sleep -enough food makes him let everyone else rest. I guess the next big challenge will come once he gets sick - we will not have a clue how to handle him. The only thing we have not figured out is why he gets hiccups.

Lastly on his behalf - thank you for all the wishes from around the world!!! Forgot to mention that right from the beginning our little boy became an illegal crossing the German-Polish border without any papers as we have not managed to get him a birth certificate yet... It will be another funny experiment to get him registered first in Germany, then in Poland and finally in Hungary...

Our kid already with us :)

2010-02-04T13:38:00.003+01:00

Good that Rita made the photos last week. She has stopped working on Friday and must have relaxed so much that the birth started already on Sunday night. By Tuesday our little kid Leon was born...
Until now he seems to be a very relaxed guy taking easy the new surrondings - not too much crying and quite easy to figure out :)

Soon to be mum

2010-01-31T12:00:00.003+01:00

Rita made me a beautiful birthday surprise. Good timing because we only have around two weeks to go and we will have a new member of our family...

Support in writing the blog

2010-01-28T21:04:00.005+01:00

Since I became so bad in writing posts (11 to go if I continue with last year's pace and we will be celebrating year 2011). Therefore I recommend a blog which was started by my brother - he and his girlfriend just started a 6 months trip in Africa. The upper part is in Polish but the lower in English so just scroll down!

Otherwise, tomorrow some very interesting pictures will be posted - and I will write a bit about our Leon moving in Rita's belly and the deals we made with him :)

Best mix of music

2009-12-31T14:06:00.001+01:00

At some point in my life I wanted to be a DJ - lately I even got myself a DJ software to mix live for fun - never had time nor courage to follow up on my new possession.

In the meantime so time ago thanks to Rita I managed to discover a French, Paris based radio station which plays an excellent eclectic mix of music - jazz, world music, film soundtracks, alt.rock and the occasional blast of classical music mixed in a way you cannot complain - a real gem hidden among dozens of radio stations out there...

It is sometimes referred to as the best radio station on earth - check it out - because for sure it is close to being one. Great for breakfast but equally good for late night...

Happy New Year from Warsaw!

Joy

2009-12-23T22:52:00.007+01:00

It seems we have been in Poland for ages since I managed unconsciously to post pictures from our trip to the glacier in Polish - once that happens it clearly means that time has come to start trying to move our lives in a direction of some more exotic place. Perhaps something not as extreme as Nigeria where I went to primary school for two years but somewhere where it is sunny and warm - we will move to Africa in step two of steering our lives into the excitement path...Nigeria came to my mind because we watched yesterday District 9. The other day on our way to Berlin in the car radio on BBC World we heard an official complaint by the Nigeria Minister of Culture against portraying the Nigerian as worst villains in the movie. I had a feeling that the whole humanity was portrayed as a bunch of total assholes and Nigerian looked quite decent in that comparison :)

Anyway today we watched Julie and Julia and enjoyed it very much. Perhaps because of the fact that Rita loves cooking in the same way those two loved it or perhaps because they were following their passion in life - though it was not exactly an easy way. I probably liked it very much also due to the fact that my uncle makes the best Polish food I have ever tasted. Every year it tastes more heavenly. I am not a fun of Polish cuisine but his Christmas dinners are amazing.

Our three days stint in Kaprun is something that made me feel the same way as I guess the two feel about cooking. I always loved snowboarding and the more I do it the more hooked up I get with it. Spice snowboarding with traveling and living in new places - here comes the perfect receipe for me!

Perhaps I will be able to do it with the little Leon pretty soon. They start teaching them at around 3 years so already in 2012 the three of us can go skiing/snowboarding together. Considering that he is very active in Rita's belly I think there should be no special problem in convincing him to do so...

Oh I needed this time the Christmas break big time! Having the best year in my life while touring the world and then getting into high speed corporate world was too big of a strain for me. Hopefully I recover enough by the time new year arrives.

Error 328

2009-12-13T18:01:00.003+01:00

Life.sys error. Please, restart the universe.

I saw this on a t-shirt at the Christams market last weekend in Berlin. General lack of light makes me feel exactly in this way though in reality I should not have too much to worry. We went to see new Woody Allen's movie while in Berlin - Everything works - Rita concluded that I have a very similiar attitude to life as the main character (though I never claimed to be a genious). Perhaps this is why I felt that the error 328 quite well captures the state of reality.

Since April we have not had proper holidays and both of us are really looking forward to Christmas. We might then recharge to erase the error. We will start the process of recharging already next weekend as we plan to go on a glaciar to snowboard...well Rita and Leon will chill and breath fresh air while I will do some downhill activities. A bit unfair - but still should be a good deal for both of us.

We have now 3 weeks left to make new years resolutions - It is difficult to say what thay should be since we have managed to change almost everything in our lifes during the last 12 months - changing more could be an overkill :)

There are some new photos on flickr from a hen party Rita organized at our residence near Warsaw for her cousin...since our camera is working again we will soon start posting pictures again...

my first carved pumpkin

2009-11-08T23:33:00.003+01:00

If you drive to our house from Warsaw you will most likely pass through a small town where most of the Warsaw expat community lives...No wonder that right next to the road we encountered a store selling seriously overpriced pumpkins. I would have never bought a pumpkin for carving but we had two American experts in the car with us so we ended up with a pumpkin. One way or the other - the little monster ended up looking great. He should have been awarded the pumpkin of the village award. All those traditions related to death are quite perplexing. Halloween a day before Saints day and then to top it all we went to see The Tibetan Book of the Dead. One thing is sure - until now for billions of years nobody has ever managed to escape the cycle of being born and dying. At least in that sense we are all very equal. Including the poor pumpkin (more pix in our flickr gallery).

Still alive and kicking in Szczecin

2009-10-23T22:17:00.002+02:00

It almost feels like our life stopped - at least from the posting point of view. It took me over two months to get my act together and post. I guess our new or actually old lifestyle kicked in. The corporate job deprives you of everything except some money.

Last year I read at least 20 books. Nowadays I cannot concentrate enough to be able to finish the second book. Last year we used to go out - nowadays we come back home and think only about going back to sleep to recover energy for yet another day. Last year we were faced with amazing landscapes and sights every day. Nowadays I see the same things on Discovery Channel TV from time to time...In other words I get all those things in a transformed easy to digest McDonald's sort of way, through some media instead of living them.

All this just makes me think that our decision to travel last year was probably the best decision we have ever made in our lives!!! Check it out - travel around the world for a year and then turn on Discovery. See how it feels :)

I must say that the fact that one needs to work at least eight hours per day is kind of totally out of balance in comparison to what one gets out of it. I think that working five hours per day would suit me perfectly. I would feel that I have a life. It is amazing that the whole world is fine with giving up their almost entire life to work. Especially that we probably live only ones. I hope that the next step in development of socities will be to give people more free time to enjoy themselves...

I guess that even our camera got upset with the fact that we do not use it and broke...

Anyway it ain't that bad - we still travel every other week somewhere or we get visitors to Szczecin - Berlin is amazing for the weekend and London anytime. Rita's cousing gave us a great excuse to go there. As hoped our kid will have a playmate :)

Motorbike driving license

2009-08-09T08:34:00.005+02:00

After criss-crossing Nepal and Thailand on motorbikes we decided to legalize our motor biking status and signed up for driving school. We liked the feeling of riding a motorbike so much that basically it was just a question when we could do it.

We have a couple of favourite destinations where we want to ride the bike and doing it with a driving license made more sense. Especially from the safety point of view (getting a driving license should have in theory helped). Anyway we have Brazil as one of our favourites. There is no question that we are going to do it again in Nepal. India is also quite tempting but I am not sure we are ready for that. The highlight in that region could be though Bhutan. I have just read in a German motorbike magazine about tours there. This could probably me the highlight !!!

As to the driving license - obviously it costs one fifth of what we would need to pay in Germany or anywhere west from Polnad. We are more than half way through and we finally understood why people in Poland drive like crazy. I would dare to say that they basically have no idea what proper driving is supposed to look like since nobody ever taught them about it.

The theory lessons instead of at least 10 hours took us around four hours and to large extent had nothing to do with riding a motorbike. Rita had to sit there though she did not understand a word - nobody was concerned - most important thing was the fact that she was physically there. Our practice lessons are of the same quality. We are told what we need to do during the state exam and basically left alone to practice. We have never heard the word technique or safety. It is seriously a joke. It costs next to nothing but also provides you with nothing. As Rita summed it up - we have learned more in Nepal during our half a day course with a Dutch instructor than during the month of the "Polish" driving course.

If everything goes well we will have our motorbike driving license by the end of September - in terms of skills however we will stay where we were. Unfortunately. Some things seem not to change in this country...

The Resident

2009-07-21T22:25:00.004+02:00

The resident moved in with us. For now being only 4 cm's does not takes much space. It does like to eat lots and likes to dance whenever we decide to peep in. The bears sleep during the winter and the resident decided that for Rita it is already winter time. Considering the awesome Polish summer this year (rains everyday) it is a good choice. The resident will most likely get bored and decide to join the outside world some time during the acquarius period...

Life in Szczecin

2009-06-30T22:13:00.003+02:00

I think there is no stronger drug in the world than type of jobs I find or create for myself. They suck you in and one cannot live without them. I never understood it totally what is happening with me but the thing pumps you up so much that it takes a couple of hours every Friday before my adrenaline goes down to a normal level so that I feel I will have a normal sleep. It has nothing to do with the benefits that the job brings - it is only the urge to accomplish or improve whatever I am doing. It is incredible. It is fun but not much different from being permanently stoned...

Rita gets sucked even more so we are always in the same boat :)))

Amsterdam

2009-06-20T21:13:00.006+02:00

It is already the third time this year for me in Amsterdam. The more I come the more I like it. Though I still have trouble navigating. Nowadays I always go for bicycle rides. It does not help much with finding my way but is definitely my favourite pastime there. I love the thing that you can go anywhere on the bicycle - even more that you can go in the evening for a drink and then ride back home not fearing that the police will take your driving license away (like in some other countries were I spend most of my time now). The variety of people and generally the relaxed atmosphere makes me a bit depressed when going back to my highly regulated country where for my own safety I am forbiden to ride my bicycle back home after a nice dinner.

We have had a great dinner at a Thai restaurant where for some reason I started talking to the owner and embarressed my brother. I somehow asked the guy whether he brought himself a girlfriend from Thailand - actually he did but a boyfriend not a girlfriend. I apologized for somehow assuming that it should be a girl and my brother bluntly told me that I have been hanging around too much it those highly tolerant countries like Russia, Poland and Peru...Somehow the openness and variaty of possibilities to live managed to be replaced with some sort of highly unified view of the world hammered into my head by the surrounding environment. I started forgetting that the world is so colorful - I still feel very bad about it.

Whenever I make it to Amsterdam I also try to go to some nice art venue - this time we went to see the Worldpress photo exhibition - good place to see it since the Dutch created the event. I must admit the photos were great and the setting even better. They were on display in the old church in the middle of Amsterdam. I was surprised by the fact of many photos either taken by Poles or having to do with Poland. As soon as such exhibition will be hosted in a church in Poland and at the same time there will be a gay marriage ceremony taking place, I will think about returning to Poland for longer (this is what was going on during our visit there). Until then somehow things are still very depressive here. Somehow Amsterdam manages to remind me why I should not stay in one place - especially a place where I have spent anyway too much of my life...

Back to business

2009-06-04T19:22:00.011+02:00

Back to business - this short phrase explains why it is so hard even to write the blog. In the meantime in order to deprive ourselves of free time we moved to Szczecin in the north western part of Poland. It took us ages to find an apartment and in the end we made sort of a mistake with our choice. Since there is no way out of it for the next 12 months I guess we have to live with the choice. It will make us appreciate the next flat better.

About business - Rita has her own company www.asvanyi-plci.com and in that sense became independent. I think she likes it. Suddenly buying things became cheaper as we get VAT etc. back but suddenly all we own is kind of company property.

My life on the other hand is confronted with the absurdity of Polish law. Starting a new manufacturing plant made me understand why for 20 years it is impossible to build highways in this country even if the government has money for it. Talking about all sorts of permits makes me feel like in the good communist comedy from the eighties (I guess only people from the former communist block will understand what I am talking about). The rest are lucky not to know and should feel chosen not to have this pleasure. It is in general kind of schizofrenic experience because you have shopping malls and on the other hand places which survived 20 years without any changes (visit hotel Brda in Bydgoszcz where we went for Macy Gray concert?!)

Alternatively check some former communist companies that still exist - I suggest Famabud in Szczecin or one of the shipyards perhaps...We might even start a travel agency offering such tours. I find it fascinating. Below the beauty we found in our room at Hotel Brda...Classic...

As absurd as things are in Poland one has to say that things are also quite comic in some other places. I had a chance to visit Amsterdam a couple of days ago and noticed that in coffeeshops you can still smoke joints but only without tobacco. If you want to smoke with tobacco or cigarettes you have to step out onto the street :))) - this is what you call real civilization.

A fringe benefit of moving to the north of Poland is the fact that we are one hour drive from the seaside. Things did change there during the last 20 years - but still finding a decent place to relax is quite difficult. If you feel like having a good coffee in a place with nice ambience - well Polish seaside is still not the place to go (we found only one and we have visited already around 10 different villages/towns around here. If you feel like going for cheap holidays then you found the place. Most of the huts serving food even upgraded the plastic chairs to wooden ones :)) And the fish is great!!!

Visiting your past

2009-05-07T23:08:00.008+02:00

This god damn time flies. Almost half a year already passed since Christmas. Although it was supposed to be a calm year it seems we managed to spin it out of control. I would call it business as usual. This is anyhow not what I intended to write about.

Some weeks ago we decided to find the roots of my family - at least to certain extent. From my fathers side I have sort of Eastern roots. His family comes from the part of Poland that now belongs to Ukraine. This kind of skewed my personality though I never managed to acquire the Eastern Polish accent from my grandfather. I was shocked to discover at some point tof my life that central Poland Poles are eating potato pancakes with sugar as opposed to salt, cream and garlic as we always did at home...

My grandfather turned 88 this year so I decided that it is the last opportunity to show us where he comes from. He has never been to his village since the end of the second world war... So we took him and my dad and off we went for a longer weekend...The part of Ukraine we visited is God damn poor...people on the fields seem to be doing industrial agriculture by hand even on such days as 1st of May (national holiday in most parts of Europe). Lviv was great and full of young people eager to have fun. We must go there again...

Anyway we found the village. We found the church. We met people in front of the church who had no problems showing us where my grandfather's family lived. He himself was a bit confused since things did change...We found the house - and went in. There I saw the same grapes growing as on my grandfathers summer garden... and understood why he always wants to have wallnut trees (the village was full of it). The old lady leaving there shared the same misery as my grandfather. The only difference is that she was repatriated from Poland (as a Ukrainian) to this nowadays Ukrainian village. She was misarable and very unhappy about her life and what happened to her family...

We also visited the cemetery in the village where suddenly my grandfather exclaimed - oh this is where the colony was... I wondered what kind of colony he is talking about. He then went on how Polish government during the time of between the two world wars was sending hundreds of his citizens to colonize the area. Obviously I have never heard about it in Poland. According to our version of history we have never done such things :)))

We made it back - it was great - though somehow my grandfather used so much energy for this trip that he had to spend the whole week afterwards in the hospital. But he is doing fine...At least he showed us something I really wanted to see.

Spring in Poland

2009-04-04T23:25:00.003+02:00

Although we live only a 1000 km North from my home town, I am quite stunned by the turns the weather makes around here. Until the mid of March I was kind of desperate for some sun and signs of spring - without any hope. It was rainy with a constant overcast sky, and cold. When finally the sun entertained us with some of its rays, I said now it is coming! The warm days with breakfast on the veranda are not so far. And the following morning we woke up to enjoy a winter scenery quite like the ones in the Alps - with about 40 cm snow covering everything with white fur sitting on the trees. Not that it was not stunningly beautiful, it just crashed my hopes. But not for so long - this week it was over 20 C plus! With sunshine, birds singing, flowers blooming in our garden, so heaven on earth :)

But before one could think that I have no better business than observing the weather I have to say our lives also took unexpected turns... We are again on the move, in a way it was almost becoming boring - staying in the same place for 3 months is not so typical of us anyway :) As of April the 1st Tomek is back to working life for an 18 months project - and it is not a joke, as it ought to be on this day. We are organizing our new, temporary home in a place called Szczecin, about 600 km to the NE from Warsaw; one can say the possible furthest point in Poland from the capital.... Not that we would have looked forward to this move, but since we anyway planned to spend a year or two in this country, it does not particularly matter where. It is in a way a good location - right next to the see, 150 km from Berlin with a highway and boat connections to Scandinavia. You can even fly in and out with Ryanair!

Thanks to this change we already had the opportunity to see more of this country: on Monday we went first time in our lives to Szczecin, Tuesday and Wednesday we spent in Wroclaw, Thursday and Friday again in Szczecin, and now we are back to Warsaw again. To be specific, all these destinations are in the far most corners of this country, each of them on average 600 km from each other in a triangle. Considering the laxed days of the past few weeks suddenly it became fairly eventful - and the near future does not look much different either... But all these places are like if they were in a different country. Wroclaw, as Tomek puts it is like if you were abroad; I really recommend it for those who like Krakow or Prague - without their touristy feel it is a pretty town with a very lively cultural life, particularly interesting for those fond of the experimental kind of theatre - see more about Grotowski. Szczecin on the other hand looks more stuck in the previous era - though with a great potential. It has impressive historical buildings and an underutilized old town over the delta of the Odra (Oder) river, but if I wanted to be rather naughty I would assume what is pretty in the town is mostly thanks to its German history, which is unfair, but the Soviet "art noveau" surely did not contribute to its grandness :) And Warsaw - I know most locals despise it - due to the same reason above, but I find something fascinating about its vibe. It is not the rebuilt old town you should look for - though pretty. It is the 21st century skyscrapers next to Stalin's sister, the Palace of Culture, the absolutely interactive museum of the Warsaw Uprising, the crazy-decadent parties and Park Lazienki with its friendly squirrels, posing peacocks and the best hot chocolate I have ever tasted thanks to the Wedel Cukiernia.

And we will have almost white nights - at least compared to the Hungarian standards; now the sun sets around 8 pm, but it will go as far as 10-10.30 pm!

Impossible is a step

2009-03-11T23:43:00.007+01:00

We are still in the so called country side 38km from the center of Warsaw. No change in that respect...Life is moving as it used to in the 18th century - I just read fathers and sons by Turgenev and could identify myself with the relaxed pace of the 18th century Russian country side :))

Anyway continuing with our explorations of the neighborhood we decided to check out the train station - last stop of the suburban train from Warsaw. Takes around 55 minutes according to what it says on the internet to get to the center. We decided that some day we might want to try out the this option. It is kind of difficult because unlike in any other place I know so far the suburban trains go only every hour or sometimes even only every two hours. So it is kind of difficult to just show up and expect the train to show up as well. Since the traffic jams are pretty bad someday we might be willing to change to the trains anyway. Now we have the schedule now. The train station is kind of abandoned. There is however something what you can call park and ride. A place in mud under this tree for two cars I would say. Next to this interesting building at the entry point to the platform - the coolest double toilets ever! As we checked they are also used :))) No danger of vandalism.

Anyway I found this interesting post on the internet- the logic somehow should make sense if applied to this train station either way. I copy & pasted it from here. Perhaps this is what I am missing in understanding how is it possible to have such a cool toilet and train station basically right next to Warsaw. Make your own conclusion :)

Sometimes, you have to take a trip through the impossible to find your way from one possible to a better one.

This is otherwise known in popular culture as the milder “things are going to get worse before they get better”. Conceptually, however, this idea can be pushed to its extreme. Not only are things going to get worse, they’re going to get unthinkably, impossibly worse, in a way that is completely unacceptable.

This is universally useful. When applied to design, this translates into considering and trying out unacceptable solutions that fly in the face of your design principles, as possible stepping stones to an acceptable result. When applied to implementation, it means being willing to try something with no apparent chance of success to probe the problem and discover something more.

When applied to thought, it means being willing to consider all variations of ideas, no matter how bizarre, unpleasant, or repugnant, to respect that they may lead to greater ideas than those we came from. When applied to discussion, it means being willing to embrace strong disagreement and confrontation as a building block of consensus.

This is a dangerous idea, and it demands a caveat. Impossible is only a useful step if you can escape from it back into the acceptable. Some steps into the dark are irreversibly harmful. The means does not justify the end.

My wish for the future

2009-03-06T00:09:00.001+01:00

I have lately stumbled on a web site acting as an Internet Archive. It is amazing to see the first web sites and Internet based businesses which took off in the middle of the 90'ies and which I remember so vividly. I was actually the lucky one to have internet access at home already somewhere in the beginning of 1995 (I sort of landed a part time job with one of the first ISP in Warsaw). So in Poland I was one of the few lucky ones - even my high school at that time had only one computer with access to the internet. Internet fascinated me and already then captured my imagination as the land of endless opportunities...

Anyway, it is hard to believe that Amazon started only in 1996 and Yahoo just a bit earlier...check it out. At that time I had so many ideas to start business on the Internet - ideas that now exist and prosper. I guess I was too young to pull them through - anyway in Poland at that time it was probably easier to start an organized crime group in mafia style than an Internet business. So I have never transformed my ideas into reality...but I know I was right and had a chance...now we also have an idea - and nobody is even close to what we came up with. This time though we will start transforming it to reality. I wish that in ten years my idea will also be listed as a dinosaur in this Internet Archive!!! Not more than that - just being listed there

Adventures of a wegierka in Poland

2009-03-04T00:19:00.003+01:00

For the last two weeks I have been commuting to the centre of Warsaw for my Polish language classes, which finally I started with not much optimism to adequately acquire it. This later part of the sentence stands not for my lack of enthusiasm, but for my amusement for the complexity this language makes you face. Aside the impossible consonant constellations, imagine a language where you have to operate with different forms of plural, depending on the number of items you are talking about, e.g ending with 2, 3, 4 or 5 or more, to put it simple. But it is not so simple of course. The funniest thing of all is the Russian I learned 20!!!! years ago coming back mixing the numbers into a pretty Slavic cocktail.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell about is driving in the city. First I had a navigation system to show me the way to my school from the village, which is as a matter of fact 40 km South from Warsaw, not 10 as I was informed... The only problem I encountered besides the huge jams and quite dynamic driving style (read: total disrespect for any kind of speed limit) was the outdated map in the system. Meaning Poland does develop, they made a pretty pedestrian street from Nowy Swiat, where my class takes place. Which I realized the moment I entered the nicely paved street only with ministerial cars, buses and taxis. I hoped that the 10 year old blood red Fiat Seicento will nicely smooth inot the environment without the police flagging me down. Of course I was already preparing my innocent, no cash, no idea where I am, I am so terribly sorry performance when the police did stop me right in front of the turn to the school. I should not say all this cause it sounds all too desrespectful, so please do not take me wrong, from that day on I found another, legal way, but that day I was so proud of myself making it at least that far and even more was able to get away with a stupid face without paying a 100 Euro fine!

Okay, from then on I did not use the navigation system, but a good old map. It worked. I improved my driving time from 1.45 minutes to 1 hour one way - see above mentioning the dynamism of traffic. Than I had to give a lift to Tomek to the airport, to find my way from there to the school, from the school to his parents house, from here to the school the following day and finally to pick Tomek up at the airport. And I lost my good old map. BUT I succeeded :))) On time! And when I bragged about my proficiency of cracking the roads of Warsaw I realized that I have never seen at least 3/4th of the city... Nevertheless I do have a sense of satisfaction, because I am able to make a left turn at a traffic light without a disaster. Okay, you may wonder what is the deal there, but imagine an elbow fight of cars making their turn when the opposite direction also has green, flowing cars in 3 lanes at least blocking your turn and when finally the flow stops, you have red and the cars start flowing from the other angle of the road - both directions. In second best case you are stuck in the middle of all this waiting for the next green... Well, it is not as bad though as it was in St Petersburg, where there were not even lanes, only 7 cars next to each other fighting for the same one spot when turning :) And Budapest is excused only because there are not enough lanes on the roads...

One of the many good things here is that Poland is the country where Hungarians, alias wengierka (female version) are warmly welcome. Come on girls, the best place to cultivate your feminine ego is here - free drinks, big smiles and loads of compliments from cute Polish guys :)))

Google maps

2009-02-11T23:52:00.004+01:00

We have been lately exploring the forests around our neighborhood on foot or bicycles but so far have not managed to find a map which would show the routes in the forests. So we have decided to check the one and only oracle in today's world - google maps to get a better picture where can we go. Obviously the first thing was to look for the house where we live. We could not believe it but the house (marked by me on the picture below with red dot) is just not there. Nothing special if it wasn't for the fact that the house has been there already for over a year...not too mention that there should be a clear fence around the plot where we live. We got it installed in 2003...If not that there should be another house next to hours that has been built in 2005...Nothing is there...

I would say it is a shame for google. Pictures from the last century in today's world are sort of a joke and I think they are not even satellite pictures but provided by a funny Polish company called PPWK as can be seen at the bottom of the picture saying everything comes from 2009. (PPWK be a state own enterprise specialising in maps but still is one of the biggest cartographic companies on Polish market).

Or perhaps my house has been erased from the pictures for national security reasons - sounds more plausible :))) Thank you PPWK - continuing with the good tradition from communist times then whole towns were not on maps due to their national security significance :))))

Tip of the week

2009-02-10T23:20:00.005+01:00

Now with some sort of Internet at home and a satellite dish which I managed to install on the roof we made ourselves feel homely. I guess soon it will be time to move on :))

Anyway this kind of environment entices you to start following world happenings. I try to stay out of it since somehow I feel being manipulated. Especially the TV with its news channels seems to show the world from one angle. You end up with BBC, or CNN and it seems unbearable. The Polish equivalents spice it up with the local happenings giving me quite hard time too:)

So we have figured out that Aljazeera in English seems the best bet for some fresh views. Check it out if your cable provider allows you to think differently :))) It ain't that bad.

Seems I have too much free time eh? So next week we go snowboarding to Austria to get some fresh air.

This was the tip of the week. Hope that I will still make it into US some day :)

Our new home

2009-02-04T21:04:00.002+01:00

Rita did add some pictures of our home... You can see for yourself...

The month of the movies...

2009-02-01T22:52:00.004+01:00

The scary thing about this year is the fact that I have made just one post. It means that I have only 10 left (excluding) this one and the year will be over. In principle then year 2010 is just around the corner...This is a very disturbing thought - especially since Rita is reading right now a book entitled "A short history of nearly everything" and telling me that the world is 4,5 billion years old. No wonder in fact if the time is flying so fast.

I guess there is no time to spare. So during the last two weeks we managed to visit shortly Berlin, Amsterdam, lovely Utrecht and watch a couple of great movies. The millionaire from Mumbai was an interesting one but the newest movie from Woody Allen - Vicky Cristina Barcelona - explained in various ways why Spain is not only our next traveling destination but a destination where we could stay longer. Apart from that the South Korean movie Hanyo from 1960 which we saw during the Rotterdam Film Festival is one of those movies one MUST see. It is just great - make sure you watch it till the end...The Russian movie Mongol was also not bad though not much dialogue.

Apart from the fact that the unpacking of 200 boxes we managed to accumulate during our corporate and student times took us ages and it also made me feel realize something about me - the best thing was getting read of things...it is kind of pleasure for my mind which is hard to compare with anything. I guess something like the shopoholics experience just in reverse.

But we are almost done so it feels when we get home...not like coming back to the warehouse.

I guess nothing changed - except for the fact that we do not sleep on the buses. And that we do not post pictures on flickr. Though Rita promised some so during the next few days some will show up...

Back in Europe

2009-01-22T14:06:00.001+01:00

It has been a month since our last post. I do not really know what happened that we were not posting but here we go again. We intend to continue with our blog. I enjoy it and Rita supports me by giving some encouragement to go on :)))

Since the last post actually we have travelled quite extensively. We saw condors near Arequipa in Peru taking a private tour to the second deepest canyon in the world, we figured out that our plane tickets back to Europe are on different days so we cannot fly back together, we went to Hungary and figured out that Rita has too many things that fit to the van we had so we had to do two back and forth trips, we spent lots of time in Poland preparing our accommodation for the next year, went to Berlin and we are now in Amsterdam for a week. I would not call it a break from travelling. Thanks God in fact because the thought of having a "organised and repetitive" routine in life gives me chills. Either I am getting old or something changed in me.

We had a great year travelling around in 2008 though one year is clearly not enough to be able to seriously say that - yes, I have seen a lot. One would need a couple of years of constant travelling to be able to say that one has seen at least a part of the world. It was just an appetizer.

We have gave it a thought how to continue with the blog and will decide for one of the following options:

- interesting things happening to us in Poland (for now the winning thing is the fact that 20km from the boarder of Warsaw it is impossible to have Internet - none of the GSM providers has coverage of our village; nobody else either - in total we asked over 50 companies) My other favourite is the electricity provider which needs two years to change the tariffs so that I do not pay a 60% premium over the normal price - still 8 months left. I already know that there will be lots to write. For now I think that the absurdity of the way the country is organised makes Poland a piece of art (somebody said that in the 80'ties during the communism but I think this is still exactly the case)

- starting your own company (since we came out with complicated ideas the implementation might also be quite challenging)

- Or we continue with the travelling theme since it seems we will be on the road anyway during the year and we will definitely move to a different country soon

We have some new photos on Flickr still from Peru so you might want to have a look at them... Hasta luego - we take our bicycles and go on chilling in Amsterdam !!

Christmas party

2008-12-20T00:18:00.003+01:00

So the last day of our mission at Bruce Peru Cusco has arrived on the 16th of December, which was the last day in school. We decided to celebrate the closing of the school with a big party for all our kids, volunteers, teachers and the most important local sponsors and dedicated it to Christmas with inviting a real Santa Clause with loads of presents. The kids have been preparing already for the last two weeks with a little performance so we also tried to do our best; we seemed to have loads of luck lately receiving help from all around without even asking for it. A week before the event I was walking down our street in Cusco to the laundry when one of the neighbour hostel owners greeted me and asked if we needed some help for our Christmas party. He is one of the members of the Confraternidad del Señor de los Temblores, and with a little bit of co-operation we ended up receiving the traditional hot chocolate and Christmas cakes with presents to all our children as a donation, though I shall state we are independent from any religious organization.

Complying with the Peruvian time schedule we finally began our celebration about 45 minutes late but all our kids nicely washed and dressed!!! They behaved so well as we never saw them and the room was full with dwarf like little creatures with their red and white Santa Claus hats on their heads. They sang and danced traditional Peruvian and Quechua songs and dropped their jaws when our favorite Spanish teacher entered the room with a perfect act in a perfect Santa Clause outfit (thanks to Helen and Andy, the owners of The Real McCoy pub, where we organized our best charity pub quizzes). All of them had a little quiz to answer seated on the lap of the Papa Noel before receiving their presents and we learned that the best deed of most of our kids during this year was that they washed their cat, bless them!!! So after we run out of gas to boiled the hot chocolate and had to change also the stowe to a bigger one we finally got through the celebration with dancing and a lot of photos with the kids, who we saw probably the last time...

To properly say farewell to all our staff we invited everybody to the volunteer centre for a traditional Hungarian spicy porkolt lunch with hot wine. After we all got tipsy and cheerful we received the nicest present from our Peruvian colleagues; they all gave one by one - including our cook - a little speech saying thanks and wishing us the best wishing that one day we would return. Indeed it would be the best time to start working together now, that we got through the hard part and we learnt to know each other - and the language! But as my father used to say always it is best to quit the party at its best moment... So we left with the good feeling, that we found a new director, Mario top take over the centre from us and so a new home for our beloved bunny! Bless Monika, our German neighbour, who was so sweet to take in Chaplin with such care and love, though the little bastard greeted her by peeing on her mat!

So we left Cusco with Bryan, our volunteer from the U.S. the same night with a bus to Arequipa to enjoy the last days in Peru with a breathtaking canyon trip to Colca!

Eaten alive by parasites

2008-12-18T02:28:00.010+01:00

Except for the Christmas party our last venture was to test the kids for parasites. Thanks to our volunteer Bryan who checked all the samples of the kids. It was a tedious process but worth the cause. We had to make all the kids bring fresh excerements samples to school in plastic cups we provided to them. More or less 80% of the kids did turn up the next day with them in the school. We agreed earlier with one of the doctors to use his cabinet and microscope to do the screening of the samples. So once we got the samples the only thing left for us was to go to the lab where Bryan was to check them. Michelle, me and Rita assisted Brian with his work.

It was quite exciting since all of us wanted to see some interesting animal. Indeed, there were quite a few as over 70% of the kids were infected with something (for me however it was difficult to see what was normal under microscope and what should not have been there). You can take a look at the few species I am talking about here:

If you do a thorough job of googling you can find some horryfing pictures with more mature stages of life of them (only for people who want to see something really horryfing). There were more problems but I think I do not need to mention them. One kid had four parasites what is quite unusal and even Brian who is a professional in this field was astonished.

By the way - the next day we had a farewell launch in one of the schools - traditional guinea pig. I was not to eager to eat it anyway but I think the biggest surprise was that the food was prepared by a mum of the kid that had four parasites...Anyway the food was very good and we were honored to be served with a guinea pig. We tried not to remember what Bryan discovered the day before...

Anyway our doctors will now prescribe the medicine for the kids and for some time they should be ok. Nevertheless, one would need a more thorough teaching plan for the kids and their parents - preventive measures in the field of hygiene. We started it but the new directors will have to follow up. As for us we decided to test ourselves right before leaving Peru - just in case :))

Christmas present idea

2008-12-10T03:35:00.004+01:00

Giving Christmas presents is always a challenge. What would be though better than the ability to get a business as a present?

Lately we came across an organization that enables to loan funds to an entrepreneur in a third world country and then get the money paid back to you. Since we know people who did it, we know that the probability of getting the money back is very high. You can loan as little as 25 USD.

www.kiva.org creates a possibility to help somebody create a business and at the same time to give the money to somebody you care for as a certificate. We think it is a great idea!!! You can check the business plans and communicate with the persons you will be helping.

Check it out - it is much better than buying one more thing that you are not sure somebody you care for needs!!!

Our last 10 days in Cusco

2008-12-08T02:56:00.007+01:00

We have basically only a week left in Cusco and we will be heading back to Europe. Quite a strange feeling after a year of traveling & quite strange to leave the center and the kids...Time to move on. Otherwise everything becomes a routine :)

One of the more important things left for us to do in Cusco is to prepare for the Christmas Party - we have prepared 40 big presents for each of our kids. We received lots of clothing and toys as donations so I think that the kids will be very happy. We have also managed to secure sponsors who will prepare the traditional Christmas chocolate and give small presents to the kids as well. The only thing we still need to do is decorate the room for the party and make sure Santa Claus comes on time to give the presents to the kids :)))

Most of the things we wanted to do for Bruce Peru have been accomplished...this week we will still test all the kids for parasites. Lets hope they bring the samples for testing as we requested them. One thing that might still cause some problems is our rabbit - we have tentatively found him a new home but he became sick - we are giving him medicines every day but we cannot see any progress. The creature is now terribly thin and quite miserable...Hopefully he gets better within a week otherwise there is going to be a problem with moving him to a new home...

On Friday we celebrated the International Volunteer Day. United Nations organized quite a few events around the world. We had a great chocolate cake prepared by our cook!!! It is incredible what kind of cakes she can make considering the kitchen equipment for baking we have.

We have lots of new pictures from our volunteers. There are lots which are really nice so take your time and have a look.

- pictures from Michala & Sarah (from Denmark) - set 1; set 2
- pictures from Katie & Tom (from Canada) - set 1; set 2
- pictures from Caroline (from Belgium) - set 1; set 2 ; set 3

Together with Rita we also want once again to say thank you for all their efforts and donations we have received only thanks to their circle of friends and family. There are no words which can express our gratitude and we are happy that also next year we will be able to take good care of the kids thanks to them. Very BIG THANKS especially to everyone in Canada!!!

Most exciting places which you should have visited in 2008

2008-11-30T04:30:00.003+01:00

There have been strange things happening to us throughout our honeymoon yearlong trip. First of all it seems that we have chosen the most exciting places on earth to visit:

- it started with Nepal where we arrived to a burned down border town in the middle of the strike
- then Tibet got sealed off - just the second when we wanted to enter it. We never made it there
- right after we got the visa to Myanmar the country got hit by an awful cyclone. Nevertheless we made it there
- once we made it to Buenos Aires the local farmers started burning cars in the middle of the city
- when we were about to visit Bolivia half of the country got blocked by farmers protesting against planned reforms
- in Peru we managed to live through at least two strikes which made Cusco inaccessible
- right now the only modern airport we have encountered in Asia - Bangkok - got totally blocked by protesters
- Mumbai where we started our trip got almost run over by insane terrorists...

Good choice of places wouldn't you say? Not many more places we could have visited where there was trouble this year (actually Kongo, Afganistan and Sudan are some of those places - Rita got job offers from UN to go to each of those places this year :))

I guess it means fun for Warsaw since we are going to spend some time there next year :))) Everyone there get a survival kit handy :)

Secondly, more on the positive note - when we arrived to Peru and started volunteering we both hoped that we won't have to do fund raising. First of all because we had no idea how to do it and secondly because we knew it is going to be damn hard. Of course, we ended up doing it. But guess what - when we started and calculated how much money we needed we both kind of became speechless and very skeptical. We needed USD 4800 - and we were ready to accept the fact that we won't raise even a USD 100.

On the 10th of November we have reached that target so we decided to raise the bar to USD 5800. Well, today we are over USD 6000 !!! Amazing...half of it we raised online and half of it through our activities in Cusco.

Our last event was a big party at one of the dance clubs. We were to receive 50 US cents from each drink during the party. We had to make the publicity, do the decoration including blowing over 300 balloons right before the party and hope that people show up. We did our best and hoped at least that it won't be an embarrassment in terms of how many people would show up. The party turned wild - there were at least 150 people and we raised USD 300!!! We were a bit lucky though. Somebody made us a favor and send the tax authorities to the party. So we really received 50 cents from each drink - they watched over the guys serving the drinks so that they give the bills until 6am and then made them pay us!!! We think it was not a coincidence that they came - we even suspect who was the one that made the tax authorities come but we are not totally sure. One way or the other it has been the most successful fund raising event considering the effort - result ratio and the fact that there were some wild things going on (as you can see on the photos...) We did not plan dancing on the tables but it did help keep the right atmosphere throughout the party.

Still alive in Cusco

2008-11-26T05:30:00.000+01:00

It was a longer than usual break between posts. Perhaps it is because lately we have been getting sick - suffering from food poisoning. Strange that we managed to survive for so long without getting sick and then suddenly everyone was having serious problems. Or perhaps it is because instead of running the show usually with no more than three people (including us) we were seven (for a week even nine)...So it was much more fun...Temporarily we also have another rabbit - our cook bought her and Chaplin takes care of her for the time being.

We have also been preparing some new events for the kids - tomorrow we have a big party at one of the biggest dance clubs in Cusco - we get 50 euro cents for each drink sold. Lets hope lots of people show up.

Anyway sometime ago I was forced to be the quiz master as we are still doing the pub quizzes- for the first time in my life - until now we had a volunteer from England doing the quizzes. She was really good so I had quite a challenge to much her performance.

I think it went well except for the fact that we raised a much lower amount of money than usually. I felt pretty bad about it. On the other hand there were less people as well. At least it seemed everybody enjoyed the contest but somehow did not donate more than was the minimum entry fee to the quiz. However, strange it might sound I still enjoyed myself very much - it felt good to be running the show the way I wanted :)) You never know whether thanks to the quiz we get a new volunteer or a new valuable contact.

This week we again had native speakers lead the pub quiz - they did a great job and we raised more money. We also sold some jewelery made by our Danish volunteers sold, and me having a role as a DJ during the music section of the pub quiz...Now I can call myself DJ Tomekkk :) Alternatively I should go to the store where they had this amazing mannequin to get a suit since we have also enrolled ourselves into a two day seminar about exporting to EU :)) That's tomorrow and the day after...

The world of our kids...

2008-11-15T22:18:00.000+01:00

Our schools provide us with full spectrum of problems one can encounter with kids in terms of learning. One of the problems that I have hard time dealing with are the few kids that somehow cannot learn. We have a couple hyperactive with clear attention deficit disorder - those are ok because if you are patient with them sooner or later you will see some progress. We have also a couple of under aged kids (like 4 or 5 years old ones) due to the fact that often the parents do not want to let their sons and daughters go to school if we do not take the smaller ones. Those obviously are sort of a pain for us because we do not really cater to that age group. Nevertheless, usually they are harmless.

The ones that really scare me are the few that seem not to understand anything they right. They learn to count (and mostly they can) but they are not able to recognize numbers or letters that they have been writing for months. The maximum time they will remember what they have written is five minutes - after that no way. Just like in the movie Memento they somehow do not have short memory. Our teachers try all sort of tricks and are incredibly patient - but it does not help too much. Since we are not a special school and we do not have that kind of background to deal with those kids the best we can do is find them a psychologist.

We have also a couple that seem a little bit retarded and need some more time to learn - but there is hope there. I might be wrong that some of them are a little retarded because of the way they have been brought up or because of the diet their parents "devised" for them...but this is as much wrong as I can be. All the rest of the problems we have with the kids is thanks to the parents. The fact that they have up to ten kids and cannot afford one (afford means that they have trouble with feeding them), the fact that they do not know anything about hygiene, that they make them work instead of going to school, that they make them take care of their smaller siblings...It is not uncommon that they do not allow us to take the kids for vaccinations (because it is going to be bad for them?!) or are not able to administer pills everyday to their kids (we take the kid to the doctor, pay for the medicine and just ask them to give the pills to the kid). With no effect. Last time when I went for the third time with the same kid to the doctor he advised us to take the kid for a week to our centre so that it can finally get better ?! Our kids though are quite good in taking care of their drunk parents after any local holiday (then mysteriously the attendance in the schools goes mysteriously down). In return they usually get back to school badly beaten.

Apart from the parents there are a couple of other institutions that can and should assume the responsibility for this state of affairs - special thanks for the problems of the kids go obviously to the Peruvian government which does not seem to care about kids out of school, does not have any family planning programs running and runs primary schools that are a shame to the word "school". Catholic Church does not help in family planning on its end. It is a vicious circle and most of our kids unfortunately face relatively grim future. It is really scary...

Anyway where I was heading is the way we teach in schools. Both of us have a certain feeling of failure when we see that some of our kids do not make any progress. Actually I think that this is one of the last things which unfortunately we will not be able to change here. We would need another 6 months and somebody really proficient in teaching methods - most likely we would end up implementing one of the concepts (Waldorf, Montessori or HighScope) but it won't happen. I regret that very much because I think we could move our schools to another level and really help the kids. The good thing however is that together with Rita we started studying those concepts and we will continue for the benefit of other children later on in the future :))

Our new Christmas Campaign

2008-11-11T03:24:00.002+01:00

Some of our previous volunteers came up with the idea of another campaign to help get some donations for Christmas to the kids. Actually December in Peru it is also the last month of school year. Right before Christmas two month summer holidays start for the kids. We would like to have a graduation party and at the party give little presents for the kids. We have already quite a few from our previous events but still need some. Last weekend we have designed the poster below and got it printed in a very nice format. We kind of became experts in getting great posters printed. Our Sandra is again going to be all over the town :))

The idea of the campaign is to get 40 hotels and restaurants as partners where people will be able to leave their donations. Once in a while we are going to pick up the donations. Since there are nine volunteers at the moment it should not be that big of a job. The first reactions from prospective hotels and restaurants are very encouraging.

We have also managed to agree to have a party at one of the more popular venues in Cusco where some part of the proceeds will go for our cause. Perhaps we will also manage to introduce Beer Pong in the place where we hold our pub quizzes with the proceeds going to us.

About the donations:

We have to say we are VERY PROUD of all the people who have donated money to our kids. Thanks to you we make their lives a little bit less miserable and give them a bit more chances for the future! It is kind of amazing because all in all we have collected almost USD 4800. Just as we have targeted. Honestly we did not really believe it will be possible and here we are - in the beginning of November and we have reached our target!!!!!

It is almost the end of school year and we are preparing the kids for the entry exams to the state schools. It also means that we have to pay a small yearly fee, get uniforms, notebooks and pencils for kids. Since during the break of January and February we will have to recruit new kids for our summer school - condensed program helping kids who would probably not make it to the 1st grade without our 2 months preparatory summer school - we are also going to have new expenses.

But with all our new events in the pipeline, new volunteers and their networks we hope to raise still more money therefore we have increased our target on our fundraising page!!!

We have new volunteers !!!

2008-11-07T00:19:00.006+01:00

We have managed to do a lots of things in our Cusco centre. We have new teachers, books in the schools, lots of clothing and presents from donations and we have been quite successful in fundraising. The only things we felt we were not successful in was attracting new volunteers. The first thing we did when we arrived here is we designed little fliers. We did not play on emotions and honestly we failed miserably. Then we found fliers from previous campaign "Don't feel sorry for street children" that was supposedly much more successful - and we restarted it some time ago. Even though we met with some criticism that it is playing too much on emotions.

Today all in all it paid back. We will have at least two volunteer girls from Ireland for a week, and perhaps two longer staying Danish girls. All of them in addition to a Canadian couple that has just started today (and the three of us - me, Rita and our Belgian volunteer). So we will be at least seven starting tomorrow and running like that for some weeks!!!

All great!! We have also been today to the doctor with our girl who had an infected toe and she is doing better. Not great but ok...

Sucre & La Paz

2008-11-03T22:41:00.009+01:00

Arriving to Sucre feels like coming from hell to heaven. I guess the Greeks were wrong and the Greek under world of Hades is somehow above heaven not the other way round :) Though Potosi hell at over 4000 meters is also actually under ground - in mines...

We did not expect the positive things by any means. I have been to Bolivia before about five years ago and I did not remember any city that would be close to anything that could appeal to me. I just so a couple but thought it was a representative sample. I was wrong. We arrived after a 3 hour taxi ride to Sucre. We took a taxi because we did not want to risk another hell ride in a bus (nice normal taxi costed us two EUR each - 4 of us in a taxi - I wish taxis cost that much everywhere else in the world). We arrived and we could not believe our eyes. Sucre is a beautiful town with nicely kept houses all painted white, nice green parks, lots of restaurants and nearly perfect climate of around 20 celsius year round. Even though it is at 2600 meters above sea level it felt like heaven. We could not believe it and we were SO happy not to have to freeze at night... Just great - we missed excursions to nearby sights but enjoyed ourselves tremondously.

Good things end though and we took yet another night bus to our last stop in La Paz. In the morning after we arrived we let a taxi driver take us from the bus station to some hotel we did not know anything about (good choice because it was very good quality for the money). Kind of unusal because one should usually not trust such kind of advice. In the city we walked around and honestly apart from markets there is not much to see. Again you can take excursions to some sites or attractions around the city but we did not feel like doing it.

Instead we opted for two things - witches market and a movie theater. On the witches market we bought overselves all sorts of little statues that should make us live long, in happiness, health and have lots of children... The only good luck amulet which we did not buy are the llama fetuses (see on the picture right) which are generally good for your house. We found them a bit to grouse and feared the strict abortion laws in Poland - would they arrest us on the boarder for violating them - do abortion laws include animals? Hopefully they do - is a llama fetus different from a human fetus? Anyway we wondered around the city, enjoyed good food and decided to go to the movies. We ended up in a beautiful modern cinema (kind of multiplex but without a feeling of a shopping center) were we watched a movie entitled "Blindness" - we did not know anything about the movie. We walked out totally shocked - it is like your worst nightmare come true plus shows the worst side of human race. We had hard time putting our act together for at least a day. We went to see one more movie next day partly about Bolivian history but it did not impress us. The only thing we had left was to get back to Cusco - but as we learned later it would not be as easy as we thought...

PS: The sign on the first picture translates to: "Saint Rita - lawyer for impossible cases¨ :)

Visit to a doctor

2008-11-02T02:59:00.001+01:00

We had a very interesting day in school today - actually after school. One of the kids - actually Rita's favorite started crying at the end of the day. It happened at the end of the day and we though that some other kid had earlier harmed her in some way. This was not the case - she showed her big toe which looked terrible. Our teacher at once diagnosed that she has a pulga in her toe...went to the little store opposite our school, bought a needle, took our school first aid kid, placed on of the school benches in front of the school and proclaimed that she is going to clean her wound and take the pulga out. Upon hearing that I decided to occupy myself with the only other kid left in the school. Improvised operations of this kind are not my thing. A little later I heard our kid screaming like she would about to be killed and saw Rita holding her and crying. At that point fortunately everyone was of the opinion that we should take her to the doctor...We have a network of doctors who help us with the kids for free and the appointment we managed to schedule was in three hours so we took our girl to the center where she voluntarily went through a transformation. Rita took her to shower and washed her with all kinds of special soaps and shampoos . I in the meantime looked for knew clothing and shoes for her (instead of plastic sandals she had - we have now lots of donations we got during our culinary event). After all this she looked like a little princess. We fed her - there is no problem with her not wanting to eat as she seems to be able to eat more than me. I think she felt very happy though she has not spoken a word since she entered our center. She just complied with our proposals.

Then we went to the doctor - he tried to persuade her to voluntarily succumb to the anasthetics injection but she refused so together with Rita we ended up helping the doctor. I was leaning over her waist and holding her leg while the doctor was giving her an injection. She was screaming horribly and Rita was holding her head and crying with her...

The poor creature was in the end very brave. After the pain of the injection subsided she sat on the bed where the doctor operated her and looked at him cleaning her toe. In other words she screamed only when she really felt the pain. She also did not become cranky or angry with us that we took her through all this pain. We took herto her "home". She must have been very tired because she fell asleep already in the car. At her "place" we tried to be tough on her mother to make sure that our girl gets the antibiotics and painkillers as prescribed...we also demanded that she shows up in her new clothes in the school during the next days. Usually the parents sell the new clothes we give to the children so nowadays we try not to give new clothing but things a bit worn. It is still incomprehensible for me how could this lady have ten kids and be so inept in taking care of them that from a relatively little wound you end up in this terrible situation. Not to mention that she was not too eager to send her to the doctor at all at the first instance...

We are back in Cusco as one can see...we will still though post two stories from our trip across the South American continent...this is just a daily update :))

Chaplin the father

2008-10-30T03:43:00.001+01:00

Chaplin - our bunny became the father of ten little bunnies. After two days though they all died though they seemed perfectly healthy. Chaplina did not feed them... We all felt she was kind of weird.

Chaplina must have liked it with us because when taken back to her home rejected all food...She lived with us for a week when Chaplin worked on the little bunnies...

Potosi

2008-10-22T01:04:00.012+02:00

Potosi shocks - that is what Lonely Planet has to say about the town located at4100m above sea level. Well for me Bolivia is a shock. Starting from the beautiful salt desert which we crossed staying more or less at around 4000m above the sea level all the time ending on the desolate state of Uyuni and the non existing road to Potosi. Non-existing means that there is no road, not that there is some road in a very bad shape...Anyway we have arrived at 2am after this grueling experience on the bus and checked in to our hostel. By the way the nights in Potosi are freezing cold...The town as such resembles Cusco so in a way it is quite pleasant. As long as you can stand being at 4100meters. On our first day in town we have visited the beautiful Museo & Convento de Santa Teresa where still five nuns live and where there lots of things are just like they were 500 years ago...quite amazing and shocking in comparison to general Bolivian conditions we have seen so far. If you make it to Potosi you should not miss it cause the tours are great!!!

Geneally however, people come to Potosi to see the mines. Sounds innocent until you actually do the "tour". Rita was not so eager since it is generally advised that the ¨tour" is not for people having claustrophobia. She does not have it in a sense but she does not enjoy dark closed spaces. Anyway without much persuasion as soon as we got one of the travel agents offering the tours she signed up...so there we were - next day at 8.30am we should be at the travel agent to start the tour...

Next morning the tour started a bit late with the preparation for the visit to the mines. We got dressed in proper mining gear as you can see on our pictures. Right after that we were transported to the miners market where we were told about the history of the mines etc an we were to buy presents for the miners who we were to meet (we were to visit working mines). It was intriguing but still kind of what could be imagined as possible in the 21st century - meaning that our guide (to the left on the picture below chewing coca leaves) told us that he has been drinking till 5am last morning because on Sundays it is customary and that he offered us 95% sugar cane alcohol (holding it on the picture) to taste and see what the miners drink. Looking back perhaps it was a bad idea not to taste it. Check out the dynamite together with the detonators on the table to the left of our guide!

Anyway he said that buying this alcohol to the miners is a bad idea since most of them have alcohol problems - the same with the buying cigarettes. So we bought dynamite which you can buy just like you would buy potatoes, coca leaves and some soft drinks. It was like buying a Christmas present. We asked about the dynamite since it was kind of weird that anybody could by it together with the detonator just like that on the street. We were told that Bolivia is not like US and people do not blow themselves or others for the sake of it...Obviously Bolivians are different from human species... Then we went to the private processing plants where the first warning signals started reaching our brains...such appalling conditions and lack of safety etc. was not exactly what we expected. I think there is not to add about those pseudo enterprises except that for sure they would win any competition for inefficiency etc.

Anyway our bus took us to the mountain which looks more like a trash dump. We imagined that we will go through some gate or enter something what would at least resemble a mining enterprise. We were very wrong - the mines are private enterprises (locals call them cooperatives)...meaning it is just a hole in the mountain and anybody can wonder into it...There are probably zillions of such holes around the mountain.

Immediately upon seeing what is going on and the black hole in the mountain Rita panicked and proclaimed to me that she is not going in. In a way I was grateful that she did it before entering the mines... I was right about to tell the guide that she is not going in, when she changed her mind and entered the tunnel...The good thing was that our first stop was in a ¨museum¨ where we had some time to get used to the circumstances. The first photo of this post comes actually from this museum - it is the God Tio. In the museum it was kind of dark so we could not follow too much the text next to Tio nevertheless a couple of days after the visit to the mines we have seen an excellent documentary - The Devil´s Miner - where we learned that this ugly creature was created by the Spaniards and is until today worshiped along Jesus in a strange mix of blended Christian and ¨local¨traditions...the story goes like that: at some point when the locals had enough of being exploited by the Spaniards, they went on strike. The Spaniards knowing that locals fear all sorts of Gods created this ugly creature and told them that he will kill them if they do not go back to work...so they immediately did. Since in Quechua letter D does not exist they named the God Tio (meaning uncle in Spanish, instead of Spanish Dios). Nowadays the miners offer him cigarettes, alcohol and coca leaves...

From there on basically because the way was so tiresome it was difficult to panic...there was no time for it. So off we went often crawling through very narrow passages etc. There was so much dust and it was so hot that one did not know what is better - breath through the mask or try to inhale through it what made you feel like in a sauna...with the slight difference that instead of steam you inhaled dust...I have to emphasize again that because it was so tough to move there was no time to think about the dangers etc...

We have seen miners pulling 2 ton wagons, shuffling the stones on them and preparing detonations...we have survived though during the next three days we were not able to walk as our muscles hurt so much from walking two hours in a very awkward for us positions.

About the mines - workers start working there at very young age and die around 40. There is no security nor any kind of oversight over what is going on...It is just unimaginable though only a couple of years ago something like that was happening in Poland near Walbrzych (so called Biedaszyby for the ones knowing Polish) where mines were closed and consequently people illegally started to mine for themselves (there was also a movie made and some articles published in Germany - der Spiegel). The scale is though not comparable - moreover in Potosi this is legalized madness - actually an example of real free capitalism which definitely cannot be encountered anywhere in western world - extremely interesting considering that the country is ruled by Evo Morales who hates US, capitalism and tries to nationalize whatever is possible. Nobody knows how many people are in the mines at one time but definitely over ten thousand. No one seems to care for their well being - perhaps except Tio who they fear so much... I recommend everyone to watch the movie The Devil´s Miner to understand what I am talking about.

The Desert Trip

2008-10-21T04:01:00.007+02:00

We arrived to Chile, San Pedro de Atacama after another never ending bus ride. Chile was a great surprise in the positive sense - things were working, on time, service was excellent and in general the feeling was very different from the other Spanish speaking countries we visited so far. Though we arrived to a village in the middle of the Atacama desert you could indulge in all the goodies one can dream of after a long bus ride: a hot shower, excellent restaurants, Internet and an extremely relaxing middle-of-nowhere feel. We did not plan to spend a long time there as the idea of going to the Atacama desert was mostly rooted in the idea of taking a 3 days 4 wheel drive jeep trip through the desert to Bolivia.

So we enrolled to one of the various gorgeous trips around San Pedro to see the moon-like landscape, the sunset and the rise of the full moon. Which was on the other hand preventing us to participate in the famous astrology expedition - as the Atacama desert being the driest place on Earth providing the clearest sky for astrological and astronomical studies. Check out the ALMA project, it makes me feel like starting to educate myself in astronomy and move there to participate in the research. Maybe we have a chance to hitchhike in the Galaxy some day and not rely only on our dearest friends, the dolphins :))) So the following morning we set on a trip for the coming 3 days during which we crossed the highlands of the Atacama desert, arriving to Uyuni in Bolivia.

So on the 16th of October 8am we were on front of the Bolivian travel agency waiting a good half an hour before anyone local arrived - so long Chile, welcome to Bolivia :) We departed finally around 9 am with a bus to the Bolivian border, where 2 jeeps were waiting for us - all together 12 people. The groups quickly developed into an Irish-English only group of 6 and into a more exciting cocktail of 2 Swiss, a Japanese, a Spanish, a Polish and of course one endangered specimen from Hungary. (South-America is also a place where the border guards are staring at my passport and looking for visa information for 10 minutes before admitting that I have the right to exist, moreover to enter their country without a visa.) During the first day we cruised through a volcanic landscape with lagoons colored by different minerals and beautiful pinkie flamingos. We also had the chance to submerge in a natural hot spring, strongly recommended by our guide as we could not hope for hot water for the rest of the trip... But I am not going to waste words on the first 2 days of the trip because I anyway could not describe them better than the photos.

BUT the third day! That was beyond my expectations; we woke up at 4 am to see the sun rising in the salt flat of Uyuni. Imagine 10 meters of pure salt with a surface resembling to a frozen lake except that it had huge cracks over its surface. And imagine that all you can see in 360 degree is the same whiteness with some volcanoes in the distance. And silence. So thick that you can touch it. And absolutely no life. I have never saw my shadow as long as 50 meters when the first rays of light made its way to the horizon! And when the sun finally raised it is so blinding, that you cannot keep your eyes open, it is as hot as in an oven and the sun roasts you despite of the 30 factor sunblock. Crazy. By 7 am we arrived to the Island of Fishermen, which is in the middle of the salt flat full of cactus of 10 meters high and hundreds of years old. We spent hours of staring into the whiteness, making crazy photos playing with the unusual visual effects the landscape offered. Finally we visited a former salt hostel on the edge of the flat which is effectively built of block of salt. To our amusement we came across 3 guys on bicycle crossing the desert and one of them was Polish!!! Yes, there are much more crazy people than we are...

Arriving in Uyuni after 5 days of Chilean and Bolivian deserts was a bullet in our heads and as a result all 6 of us shaken together in the jeep and sleeping in the same room throughout the entire trip decided not to split but collectively escape to Potosi. Only we were quite unprepared to take a bus ride without a road and to arrive to the city situated above 4000 meters, the highest city in the world :)

Argentinean Steak

2008-10-20T04:02:00.006+02:00

I have been on the vegetarian diet for quiet some time - first in India and Asia because it was the safest bet to avoid food poisoning or basically nothing else was offered, then in Cusco because there was a general agreement that our cook should cook only vegetarian. All in all our cook did not too much enjoy the situation because she does not know how to cook veg food and I felt like being a rabbit...So the closer we were getting to Argentina the more I was convinced that we should be looking for the real Argentinian steak. For the time being even Rita converted to carnivorous practices.

We started already on the Brazilian side of the border of Iguazu falls where I proudly announced that this is already it - we have found the real steak. My bro and to my surprise Rita rejected my claims and said that this is still not it. I could understand Greg´s opinion but I felt kind of uneasy about my vegeterian wife´s claims about the steak. The blame went to the strawberry caipirinha which both of them were drinking while I was tasting the local beer. Perhaps something was wrong with it.

Further on my way to discover the real steak we moved to Argentina. After the Posadas (San Ignacio) where we did not find anything close to a steak we took another night this time across the northern Argentina to Salta - we ended up there on Sunday and Argentina is generally closed on Sundays. Except some restaurants it is hard to find anything open and the streets look like a giant vacuum cleaner from space sucked in all the people. Only stray dogs hang around.

Once we got there of course pretty quickly we got hungry - so in the evening we have found the most fancy restaurant from Lonely Planet. It took us quite some time to get there but the steak was FANTASTIC. I have never tasted something better. Around 6 cm high, and the size of almost three quarters of my head it tasted heavenly. Together with Argentinian wine and excellent service I did admit that the previous one was not so great. I have never eaten in my life such a big chunk of meat...I also finally learned how a real medium steak should look like...Everyone including Rita eat one of his own steaks...

The next day we went to a more local place again with great wines but our steaks did not match the ones from the previous day...feeling like pigs after almost a week of eating huge steaks at 11pm (since in Argentina the dinner is served starting at 10pm - before that most of the restaurants are not even open) we decided to move on.

This is more or less what we can say about Salta - the city as such is pretty lame but has very many beautiful places around it - we did not have that much time so we only know it from the stories of my brother. But all in all our one year trip is also a culinary trip - we have been eating everywhere whatever local thing there was to it (including marinated cows tongue in Buenos Aires) and sometimes it is better than travelling itself...especially that the food is really cheap in most of the places but still excellent.

So feeling like pigs we set off to Chile - into the middle of Atacama desert and Greg set off for excursions around Salta...this is where we split with him and Malgo...we are heading back to Cusco to our kids...

Iguazu Waterfalls

2008-10-14T04:51:00.009+02:00

Having spent a couple of more days than we could actually afford in the mining hills of Brazil we decided to speed up our journey and sat on an overnight bus to Sao Paulo, from where we sat almost immediately on another night ride to the Argentine-Paraguay-Brazil border.

We arrived in the morning like papermashees to Foz do Iguazu, the Brazilian border town. After a warm welcome in our guesthouse by our host who seemed to step out from one of Pedro Almodovar's movies we headed to visit the Iguazu waterfalls. Luckily we passed by the bird park right next to the entrance of the national park and encountered the most lovely creatures of the sky we have ever imagined. There were parrots in all possible striking colors, some of which greeted us with a big 'hola' or 'ciao'. Than there were toucans, with their huge colorful beaks not at all afraid of humans, moreover sitting quite close to us every once in a while pinching us. And we saw butterflies from the jungle with hummingbirds flying around us, turtles chilling right next to crocodiles and other curious creatures of the Amazon.

But the real attraction were the continent's biggest waterfalls, which we approached both from the Brazilian side and from Argentina. On the Brazilian side we took an independent trip in the form of a lazy walk to the Garganta del Diablo, which is basically an iron catwalk from the shore over the river right to the edge where the water bed breaks and the water crashes down to the abyss. To be precise a multiple crashes, as the falls cover a vast area on both the Brazil and Argentina side. Besides the unbelievable energy with which the water explodes when landing in the deep you experience the most perfect permanent rainbows over the water clouds. The noise is so strong you have to shout on top of your voice to make yourself heard and of course you need not to hope to survive the experience without getting absolutely and totally wet just from the water in the air around the falls. We happened to see the falls at the nicest part of the day just before sunset and concluded the long day with an excellent dinner and a couple of cairpirinas, this time with strawberries, not lime, jummmm!

The next morning we decided to accept the lead of out host to the Argentinean side to see the falls from a different perspective, which for me was even more mesmerizing than the other side. We spent almost the whole day walking zig-zag in the park approaching the river from different points and visiting various individual falls and devil's throat from the other side.

We hardly finished the tour when we headed to our next destination with a 5 hour bus ride to cut our journey to Salta a bit shorter. So we arrived at 10 pm to San Ignacio, right next to Pousadas, which are famous of the biggest Jesuit-Guarani missionary 'reducciones' in South America.

Ouro Preto

2008-10-13T19:48:00.008+02:00

It was lately hard to find a place to write a post. Somehow internet cafes are not everywhere... One way or the other we made it to Ouro Preto. A small beautifuly preserved colonial town around 10 hours east by bus from Rio de Janeiro. After walking for a bit we found what could be described as one of the loveliest accomodations in quite some time. It was bed and breakfast place run by a lady who served us great breakfast (small papayas that Rita loved) and made a very cosy place for her visitors...we stayed there for two days wandering around the place. Rita bought herself a very nice ring and we found great places to eat and enjoy the hilly scenery. Together with Malgo they have also spent times visiting lots of jewlerry stores and learning about local precious and semi-precious stones like topaz imperial (I am not sure about the spelling though).

We have also visited a gold mine some 40 minutes by bus from the town. It is not in operation anymore but we were told that all together during its years of operations over 30 tons of gold were brought to the surface - quite an amount. The scariest part of the visit was the ride down with a small train - it kind of felt like sitting on a train taking you right down to hell - and we were the only ones on the small wooden train car as right now is not exactly the high season for tourists in Brazil. On the way back we took a wrong bus so it took us two hours to get back to town - due to that we had very little time to see the Gems Museum...the girls were not happy with that...

We have also had a night out since some of the bars are just perfect for a great caipirinha. Rita found a very nice looking bar where we spent the night enjoying this Brazilian specialty. We ended up in some sort of local gay bar together with locals celebrating the local municipality elections which took place the same time. For us the highlight of the elections was the sky train between two buildings where the results were announced.

All in all the ride to Ouro Preto was our first night bus ride and right after it we have actually made 4 more such rides almost in a row. Thanks God that the buses are comfortable so it is not that bad as it sounds. Brazil is beautiful and great to explore this even this way but we already got committed to our next trip to Brazil - this time all over the country but on motorbikes. This is a perfect place for it with lots of small lovely places and extremly friendly people. Probably the most friendly we have ever met. Anyway we will try to get the motorbike driving license before although we were told that here it is not a must...

Rio de Janeiro

2008-10-04T22:53:00.008+02:00

Jesus - was the word of the day - and we have seen the biggest in the word art deco monument of Jesus The Redeemer - a bit pricey as to the costs of getting up there but the view of Rio de Janeiro was spectacular. It is certainly true that city is located in one of the nicest settings in the world...

Our adventures started at the bus station where we arrived - I started by fighting with the taxi drivers who wanted to rip us off. Actually we almost missed the bus to Rio because at the last minute in Paraty we decided to rent bicycles and see waterfalls. Unfortuntaley the trip was very much uphill and on the way back we decided to stop at a great restaurant by the road and almost missed the bus to Rio...anyway we arrived in Rio, I had a fight with the taxi drivers and then we eneded up in the hostel in a 9 bed bedroom paying in total EUR 60 for this pleasure...as we have not eaten we decided to get to know the locals a bit more and ended up in surreal place selling hotdogs under the bridge near our hostel. It was purely for real locals but we were so amazed that actually we spend around one hour looking at the people dinning there... We were not brave enough to take out our camera to take some pictures. We were also sure that we will in the end poison us with those hotdogs but somehow it did not materialize.

We have been all around the city and found it beautiful from the point of architecture and little cafe´s - it is a heaven for Rita's constant desire for chocolate cakes. We spent quite some time in them. Of course we had to visit the famours Copacabana beach - and it lived up to its expectations for a beach in a huge city - it also made us understand why the Brazilians always win all world soccer and volleyball competitions. Basically the whole beach is lined up with fields where kids play and train those two sports. Actually what they can do with the ball is quite astounding. The last night Greg and Rita decided to have a coconut drink and both loved it - as you can see below...

As to Brazil - it is still quite a surprise as to how organized and developed this country is. For some reason we expected one more shanty country struggling to put toghether a couple of nice squares and we found something amazing though expensive. This is actually the only bad thing about Brazil - it is expensive to travel around and the places to stay though very nice are also way too expensive in comparison to many countries we have so far visited. It can though be also scary - last evening we took a city bus from Copacana to the bus station where we were to depart for Ouro Preto...the bus took us through neighbourhouds that made as speechless and we prayed that the bus driver does not kick us out...leaving the bus would mean quite interesting problems for us and somehow after all those posh districts we have visited we were not prepared for districts from "Mad Max" movie.

Once more BIG thank you for all donations. We have also created a blog for our BrucePeruCusco center - have a look here and read about our culinary event fundraising...

Sao Paulo & Paraty

2008-09-30T20:17:00.010+02:00

Small update: since we did not manage to get pictures from the beautiful town of Paraty please, check out the link - the place is wonderful...perfect for retirement :)

It is quite a trip to Lima by bus from Cusco - it took 21 hours and to certain extent was quite funny. The road winds so much that I have slept holding a plastic bag tight in case I have to vomit...it was a close call but we both survived without having to use it. Actually when we boarded the bus I have somehow not taken it into consideration that the trip is going to be quite hard on us. Since I have been running all day and did not have not to eat - the first thing I did on the bus is had a 1 liter of strawberry yogurt and a big bag of chips. I regretted it very much afterward...

We arrived though on time and already feeling quite ok since the last six hours of the trip where on Pan American highway which is a stretch of straight road by the coast. Another good thing about arriving to Lima again is that we have felt somehow much more self confident...we have been already staying in Peru for three months and we developed some home feeling. We had an excellent dinner in one of the most amazing shopping malls in Miraflores: the three floor building is carved in the ocean side rocks with a magnificent view over the waves. Tomek had his red meat and Rita her ceviche, raw fish marinated in lime, hmmm, jummy! Survining the night in our hostel with earplugs we headed at 5 am to the airport full of expectations to see Greg and his girlfriend in Brazil, Sao Paulo.

We had personalized choice of 32 different movies on the plane (economy class, LAN, which we still enjoy as frequent fliers from our previous jobs...) and we ended up both independently choosing Sex and the City!!!!

After 6 hours waiting at the airport of a city, where more people live than in whole Hungary, we finally got all together and headed to our hostel. Sao Paulo for us was a place to escape from with its prices and urban jungle with very little attraction to our taste, but we enjoyed the first experiments of making ourselves understood in a Portuguese speaking country in Spanish :)

So we were on the bus the next day towards Rio, with a stop in the old colonial town of Paraty, which is a real gem. What we missed in Sao Paulo we found in Paraty with its colonial old town, lovely beaches and carpirinas! So we headed to a boat trip with island hopping, snorkling and most of all stretching ourselves on the sun, a real treat. Though the weather is not always friendly to us with rain pouring like in Macondo, we feel like being in Paradise. Brazil is like a dream come true!!!

Swimming pool adventures with the kids

2008-09-28T07:28:00.003+02:00

Before we made it out of Cusco we had taken the kids from all schools to the local swimming pool. It has been our first time since we came to Cusco that we took the kids out (generally due to financial reasons). It has also been Peruvian kids day - so a good reason to undertake something special. Of course it required lots of coordination and we were quite concerned how we are going to handle our quite hyperactive group.

The task proved not as strenous as we have assumed in the beginning. All in all we ended up with around 25 kids which showed up with signed permissions from their parents and we set off to the swimming pool. One group ended quite late at the pool due to a minor accident of the bus they were travelling on. Nothing at all happened to them but they arrived an hour late. All the kids happily went to the dressing room though two did not reappear from it - there was no way to make them stop crying and agree to come to the swimming pool. Already in the swimming pool though the kids were very obedient and did not require excessive amount of attention. Everybody had a small sandwich after the event and we took the kids back to their homes...quite funny that you can fit around 12 kids into one taxi in Cusco...

All in all no casulties - except one kid with bleeding lip (happened still before she made it to the swimming pool). The bad thing was that the father of this little girl was especially worried about her going to the swimming pool. I guess it is some kind of Murphy's law...Nothing else comes to my mind when such things happen.

In the center Chaplin has been at work - working hard to make sure that the rabbit of one of our teacher's gets back pregnant. I must admit that our Chaplin is much more fit and smart than Chaplina :))) In fact everybody is looking forward to her departure next Monday...right now Chaplin lost all interest in interacting with us and she was making a mess in the patio...

We are going to Brazil

2008-09-24T01:55:00.003+02:00

Yes, we are going to have a roughly three break before we come back to Cusco to stay until the end of the week. It was a great feeling to pack - putting to your backpack only the necessary things you need to survive made me feel great - how little you need to be so happy :))) We also cannot wait to get to warmer climate. It has been lately terribly cold at night here. Anyway we will miss the kids and hopefully the kids will miss us...Our trip will take us to the east coast of South America and then we will make it back to the west coast more or less by bus or any other cheap transportation...

During this week we have been concentrating on preparing our culinary event - below you can see the banner of the event during our pub quiz we held this week (on top of all other things)!!!

Kind of crazy - but our pub quiz has again been very successful and now we will be able to have it every week. We have already sold lots of jewllery designed by Rita. The rest of the items will be hopefully sold at the Saturday event. The worst thing about the culinary event is that we will miss it - we have to leave Cusco by bus tomorrow to be able to catch the plane from Lima to Sao Paulo. The bus ride takes a meager 21 hours! But the seats are business class so it ain't that bad.

The good thing is that we are having here the founders of Bruce Peru so they will represent us at the event. Later on I will also post a small movie from the event...after coming back from Brazil.

So in the coming weeks you will be able to see lots of new photos and posts...For now enjoy the jewllery shots in our gallery...

Last week before a break

2008-09-20T01:32:00.018+02:00

Chaplin is chilling on our sofa - this is his favourite spot. He is actually resting for a good reason - on Monday Mrs. Chaplin will arrive for some time. Our new teacher asked as for some services from Chaplin. She will bring her female rabbit with hope of baby rabbits...so we let Chaplin chill on the sofa before he will be sent on this noble mission.

The good thing is that this week we were having all teachers in the schools. At least one of the teachers is very good - the other is better than the teacher that we had before but we are not sure she can manage the whole class in case she has nobody to help her... at least she has great respect in the eyes of the kids...this definitely helps to keep order in the class. Volunteers are generally abused by the kids - the kids do with them whatever they want. I am the best example of it - unfortunately.

Rita on the other hand is now fully immersed in creating jewellery - our kids are supposed to start putting together necklaces & bracelets which we are to sell at our culinary event. So far though it seems that Rita takes most fun of it - and secretly told me that if we cannot sell them at the event she will appropriate them for herself :))

As to the event - today we should receive the invitations and A2 posters for the event from the print house. It has been quite a battle with the print house to get what we want and when we want but today we should really have it happen. Anyway it is our own design and we will try to post both here on the blog though they will probably look not as nice as in reality. We have them printed on nice glossy paper (poster) and excellent paper especially for the invitations (no idea what it is called in English).

Next week in general will be full of extracurricular events. As mentioned on Monday Chaplin is going to have a date. On Tuesday we will have a Peruvian Children's day so we decided that we are going to take the kids to the swimming pool - I suspect that it is going to be adventures for two reasons at least: first previous directors told us that last time there were quite big problems before they let the big group in as the kids were not exactly clean looking so big washing took place. Secondly controlling those lets say 30 kids at a swimming pool might prove quite challenging. On Wednesday we have a pub quiz and a visit of Bruce Peru founder and his wife (the organization for which we are now working/volunteering). It came as quite a surprise for us - actually we have learned it today...one can say that we provoked it as we have written quite a long email addressing the problems we face here and we think the whole organization faces - we got a very positive response to it and request to meet and discuss how can our proposals be implemented...so here we go...

On Thursday then we will probably visit all the schools with our visitors...On Friday something big will happen and on Saturday we have our Culinary event. In the meantime of course we have to sell 70 tickets to the event, go over our problems and accomplishments with the founder of the organization and make sure our Peruvian Chef does not forget anything for the event. Today actually we are to see our DJ play in one of the local pubs - forgot to mention that we will also have a DJ playing background music though...

That would be it I think what we are up to next week... Otherwise both of us also got a haircut - important milestone as going to get a local haircut is a sign of deep trust in the host country...

I started with the rabbit so I will end with the rabbit - the smart ass learned how to open the door of our room at night from outside and stays the night in our room - I guess he does not like the cold outside. The good thing is that when he wants to pee he makes lots noise so that we have no other choice than to open the door for him (he can open the door only one way). He runs to his "toilet" and is right back in the room - quite amazing. Anyway he is quite in demand as at least three people would like to prepare a dish out of him.

Working in Cusco for the kids

2008-09-16T15:36:00.007+02:00

It has been quite a long time since we last time wewrote here - it is mostly due to the fact that we had lots to do with the schools - a lame excuse I would say but nevertheless true.

Things change very quickly even in charity organizations which in theory should be operating in much more stable environment than private enterprises. Somehow this is not the case. Perhaps it was only last week and a change that could be associated with the rainy season seems to have arrived in Cusco. Actually it feels more like hailing seasons as half of the time it hails instead of raining. It is also even colder than it used to be - brrr....

To start with we had some great success in fund raising on all fronts. As mentioned earlier we are working on a culinary event in one of the most fancy places in Cusco - Club Cusco. It is actually only members club which lets us organize the event in their premises for free. Our Peruvian chef and his friends will work for free doing all the cooking etc. There is also going to be Peruvian handicraft, our photo exhibition and salsa dancing. You can see the plan of the event here - unfortunately only in Spanish.

All the proceeds from the event are going directly to our organization. Last week mostly due to Rita with her excellent Spanish we have managed to secure 10 sponsors for the event (pubs, restaurants etc.) Since we had two days in which we could not even get a single sponsor sign up we were kind of totally shocked that we managed to secure 3 within two hours. As the last sponsor was a dance club and they did sign up and pay at 11pm we ended up having a party and dancing till 1.30am. It was a great relief and great fun. Though next morning at seven I was supposed to go with our cook to the market to buy food for next week. It is quite an expedition because you actually need a donkey to carry all the vegetables etc. back home.

Now we just need to print and sell 80 tickets but we are quite optimistic. In addition thanks to our efforts now we get everyday excellent food for free from La Retama restaurant for the kids and we have an agreement to bring our kids for arts classes to one of the local museums. Rita's Spanish is by now incredible!!! Hard to believe that she made such huge progress.

One unexpected result of the tours around the city is the fact that we have managed to find lovely restaurants and cafe's and additionally got to know their quite eccentric owners - perhaps also some underground Cusco :)) There is hardly any night club, pub or restaurant in the center of Cusco we have not been to so walking around means you stop every 5 minutes to greet someone and pretend that you are best friends :)

In addition or perhaps first of all we have received lots of money through our online donation page - in total 3230USD!!! (excluding the culinary event)...VERY BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE DONORS!!! We have no words to express our gratitude to everyone...We will be back with pictures and reports of how the money was used to support the kids.

Considering the current successes in fund raising this week we finally intend to introduce books to the kids - it is a bit more complicated as it sounds because our kids are not on the same level (not to mention age). Therefore each school will need at least three different books which we are actually compiling on our own.

In addition we are overhauling how the classes are led to increase the effective time that kids learn (in a more structured way) and to teach them a bit of discipline.

On the negative side we are missing teachers for our schools. Two of our teachers have quit and we are in the process of finding new ones. For the time being we have managed to find temporary solutions but we need to have a more permanent setup. Rita has talked to the director of two collages specializing in preparing people to become teachers and we had some applicants from them but so far did not manage to get anybody to fill in our vacancies. Keep your fingers crossed for this week. This is critical but also a great opportunity for us to improve the quality of education our kids get. It is though a very strange process - the candidates come - we agree on conditions and then next day they do not show up at all - or alternatively they show up and next day they say that actually the time of the classes does not suit them. Why they have not mentioned it earlier is kind of strange since we made it clear when the classes start. Weird??!!

Another problem that we are facing is lack of volunteers. It would be much easier to run the show if we had more people. Unfortunately this week there will be only three of us. Next week another volunteer will arrive to us from Belgium but in October we will be down to two people. This is quite worrisome. So far we have not been too successful with our fliers so we will change our campaign a bit - from more subdued to playing more on feelings - lets see whether this will play out better and we have more suitable people knocking on our door. On the other hand we are going to tackle this problem by trying to partner with agencies which specialize in recruiting volunteers (we know from other centers that it can do miracles). With those two new initiatives we hope to get more people to help us.

Therefore after all this stress I come back home and train the rabbit...and in addition we have made a small dinner for eight people on Saturday evening with Hungarian Goulash (I guess Gulyás à la Pecs) which tasted to like real Hungarian goulash - all our respects to Rita!!!

A week of strikes in Cusco

2008-09-08T03:02:00.011+02:00

UPDATE: The kids loved the food we got from one of the more fancy restaurants in Cusco...we were scared they would not like it because it is quite different from what they are used to...fortunately they really like it so we will nowadays take the leftover food from the buffet dinner every day and take it to one of our schools!!! Below the picture of kids having lunch...

This week was relatively quiet for us. The strikes started last week and we thought they would end there, but they went on all the way till Wednesday the following week. The university students did not like the increase in bus prices so they brought the whole country to a halt - especially Cusco. So we spent three days in the center with various activities indirectly relating to the kids. Fortunately some sort of tentative agreement has been reached and for a month things should be peaceful.

Some time at the center gave us a chance to make a small movie about the kids in our schools.

On Friday we started our search of sponsors for our charity event in Club Cusco for the 27th of September. This leaves us go to all the top restaurants and pubs of the city, meeting a lot of different people with very different reactions to our proposal. But we almost never had to leave with an empty hand, e.g. we managed to land an agreement with one of the restaurants to give us their leftover food for our kids. Today we got the food for the first time and it is a bit too fancy - lets see how the kids react to it as we have noticed in the past they do not like changes in their diet...

All in all until now we have managed to fundraise USD 1600 for which we would like to say thank you to all the donors. We are of course all the time hoping for more...

Finally we had a really relaxing weekend with our awaited lie-in hours. Third time this year we had the luxury to dine at a HOME, thanks to our newly established local network. We had an excellent dinner with vine, a long chat with our friends from the US. On Sunday Rita climbed the mountain close to our home with Amelia, one of our volunteer to visit Sacsayhuaman, one of the Inka ruins around Cusco. Though we do not have altutude problems any more, it does feel like being an old bone, running short of breath after a 100 meters walk uphill.

In Cusco as usual during the weekend there was a parade and fireworks...and our bunny became much more brave - running around the house and stealing bananas from the kitchen and dragging them all the way to his nest...

Machu Picchu

2008-09-03T06:09:00.006+02:00

Our weekend in Machu Picchu has been one of the best in long time. We felt again like during our first half a year of travelling. We went there with Alanna - our American volunteer - so altogether the three of us.

We have decided for the easier option and took the train both ways instead of doing it the cheap way by overnight bus and then trekking for a couple of hours. We have departed very early in the morning and arrived still to have breakfast in Aquas Calientes. We found a decent hotel, had a walk in the town which is nothing more than an artifical chaotically build tourist town consisting solely of overpriced hotels and restaurants.

The rest of the afternoon we have spent in the outdoor spa drinking mohitos and enjoying the excellent views. The evening was a great surprise, as it was so warm that we could eat outdoors our dinner. After Cusco where it gets freezing cold whenever the sun is behind the clouds, Aquas Calientes felt like heaven. Although we had a very nice place to stay overnight we did not take into consideration that till early morning hours we would have a party right under our windows...anyway we had to wake up at 4am to start the claim to Machu Picchu - it was pitch dark and we had no torches so we had quite a challenge - it took us 90 minutes to get to the top - quite a steep ascent and we felt exhausted but happy to have made it. By that time there were already lots of people lining up for the tickets. Once we entered the whole place was covered by fog and we could not see anything. Since the site is quite huge and I have visited it a couple of years ago - I was supposed to know where the things to see where located - although I tried to convince Rita that we have just passed them but they are not visible I had to take the "blame"of being not prepared :))) Anyway after waiting for hours during which Rita got acquited with the llama's (or where those alpacas?) finally the magnificient ruins revealed themselves to us. They are always amazing and the great thing was that we were all in a daze - I think we will need to go there still one day in the future - I cannot get enough of it - it is just as nice as Angkor Wat...both amazing things in the middle of the jungle.

Our bunny Chaplin is also doing great - it is great to have him around as he is very happy in the morning to see us and during the day visits us in our rooms. He is quite social and pretty much understands quickly when it is time for him to leave to his place on the patio.

As to our BrucePeru Cusco center: lots of changes have been recently introduced which have not always been accepted immediately by everyone.

Anyway our schools start nowadays at 9.00 o'clock instead of 9.30 as earlier. There is a weekly meeting on Friday's where the teachers plan the week - we will still revamp it a bit but at least we have some coordination nowadays... We have also introduced everyday reports from school with attendance lists etc. So we know how many kids are in the school and what is needed.
We will also shortly have meetings with kids that have graduated from our schools last two years. Unfortunately we will be closing one of the schools as we do not have enough kids there...this will probably take place next week...

We have uploaded lots of new pictures especially from our Ticatica school. Most of the new pictures were made by Alanna and are just excellent!!!

Last week we have also had our first pub quiz which was a great success - mainly thanks to the queen of the night - Amelia - our new volunteer made a great show and we have managed to raise 140 USD. As of now we have altogether raised in total USD 1220 which is more than GREAT!!! The biggest amount of it thanks to Alanna's dad...We are really happy that there are people who are willing to help like this. We and all the kids are greatly indebted to them and everyone who has helped so far. We are also in the middle of organizing a big party and the most fancy club in Cusco - where we will have a cooking show, dancing etc and all proceeds from the tickets will come to us - not to mention that everyone who comes will have to bring some clothing as donation - it will take place on the 27th of September...

Once again BIG THANK YOU again to everyone - especially to Alanna !!! We are still waiting though for more so if you can please help...

As to our center - things have changed much as well - we have a repainted the bathroom as mentioned before, Sonia our cook makes great dishes and keeps the place clean, bread gets delivered to us every morning and we save costs by doing the shopping on the cheapest market only once per week...so things are changing and it is a great feeling !!!

Cusco - yet another week

2008-08-27T02:41:00.006+02:00

The week has passed - our rabbit is still alive - we were a bit afraid that it might be eaten by a cat since it lives and run freely in the patio. Our Chaplin - the rabbit has by the way fallen in love with Rita - according to the rabbit dictionary we found on the web - the fact that he runs after her and encircles her repeatedly signifies his love for her :))

The weeks pass by very fast - the work we are doing is quite hard - we have lots of ideas and new initiatives going on in the schools and that takes lots of our time. Also lots of problems :)) Besides running three schools (new pictures from the third school are here) and a volunteer center ain't that easy if anyone has any doubts. It is not exactly what we had in the first six months of the year while travelling in Asia. Rita has made amazing progress in her Spanish - I am still struggling but there are signs that my brain finally starts accepting the new language.

Last weekend was quite relaxing - the only real thing we did is visited a local cemetery near one of our schools...favourite place for picnics and kite running - it seems a tradition to visit the graves and drink a beer by it while chatting with the family. Actually only thanks to the fact that we have done kites with the kids and one day went to fly them, we have discovered the cemetery.

Thank you for new donations - we are still hoping to raise some more money so all new donations are more than welcome. Tomorrow we start our first pub quiz night in one of the main pubs in Cusco - we hope to raise some money. of course. The next weekend we will finally go to Machu Picchu...one way we will go by bus and trek the last 4 hours to Aquas Calientes...and back by train...

Pisac - Secret Valley

2008-08-22T05:56:00.009+02:00

UPDATE: Pisac pictures are in our gallery and we added some additional things to the post below.

Finally we have made it out of Cusco - on Sunday we made to the famour market in Pisac. On the picture you can see one of the guinea pig restaurants with a little garden for guinea pigs we found - pick you guinea pig and enjoy your food :) - it is kind of just like picking your fish in Chinease restaurant.

It was kind of tough to get there since the buses were full but after waiting for 45 minutes we finally made it on the bus. The way back was tougher - we did not make it on the bus as they resembled the buses in India in terms of how many people can fit in. Perhaps we would have tried if it wasn't for the fact that those overloaded buses drive through high mountain roads - I would not say we trusted their brakes...

Anyway Pisac as such is beautiful and we went on a shopping spree, haggling tough and ending up with lots of Peruvian clothing. Now we are totally local. It was a great thing to get out of Cusco though considering how long we have been here it is strange when we talk to travellers and admit that we have been here for three weeks and have not seen 10% of what they have in two days - we still have those two days to catch up though :))

As to our kids - one afternoon I went to the dentist with a girl but she panicked so much that in the end it was impossible to pull out her tooth...and her teeth are so bad that she constantly gets fever because of them. I kind of did not know what to do to make her relax a bit...That was kind of a failure...anyway still three teeth to go in her case - I will have some chance to make up for it.
Nowadays we also have weekly meetings in our center with the teachers were we put together the teaching plan for the next week and go through the happenings of the previous week. Above Jessica our Huancaro school teacher with her own little kid - that's how she carries him...

We are very glad for the donations we have received so far...Thank you VERY MUCH...and we are still waiting for more - even very small amounts can make a great difference so go ahead and donate...

By the way - a couple of days ago I got to know that there are some professional photos of me on the Internet - so here comes a photo of the male part of my family taken by our friend Kaktus (thanks!) Navigate to "portfolio" and then "people stills" - check the family portraits :)

New house mate in our center

2008-08-16T18:00:00.006+02:00

On Friday Rita managed to bump into yet another carnival celebration in Cusco while getting back from her school - it seems that the festivities are not slowing down even though it is already the third week since they started. This time though it was more like Rio Carnival with lots of dancing, costumes and girls in high heels and short skirts... I stayed at center that day so I missed all the fun.

At 7 am on Saturday the girls went to the market to make shopping for the entire week - Rita, Sonia, our cook and Alana, our volunteer from New York. They came back with tons of excellent photos (and fruits & vegetables in varieties we have not seen before) and a new flat mate. Some of photos are really gruesome but definitely worth seeing. Have a look at our new flat mate below:

He is beatiful - not scared of us or anything else around so he roams freely around the house and the patio. Incredible - I used to have a rabbit when I was small and now I have one with incredibly fluffy fur...he eats quite a bit and quickly understood that he is not allowed to enter the rooms. Nobody can really explain how come he is so friendly - it is kind of strange as obviously he was raised for food and fur...Anyway he is a great pet and almost as smart as a dog. Next we are getting a book on how to train house rabbits. He is definitely a favourite of mine just like little Sandra below - I mentioned her earlier so now here comes her photo. We need to take her to an optician to check her eyes and get her proper glasses or whatever else is needed.

Through the last week we have also been working on some ways to do some fundraising for the children of our Cusco center - lots of them have various untreated problems just like Sandra. As a result we have created a fundraising web page (see also on the left side of the blog) through which everyone can make small donations with a credit card. We will appreciate all the help...

Cuyeria in Cusco

2008-08-15T05:57:00.007+02:00

We have a new flatmate in our center. His name is Choclo - he is a baby and scared to death - basically does not move whenever he hears somebody around. Right now he lives in a carton box. One of our volunteers received him as a gift from our social worker. Basically Choclo is quite lucky - non of our Peruvian friends have ever seen a guinea pig as a pet. In Peru Choclo's relatives are considered a delicacy. There are restaurants specializing only in serving guinea pigs and most of the tour groups with home stays coming to Cusco end up preparing a guinea pig for dinner as a way of immersing in local culture. For the time being I do not want to develop too strong bond to our new friend as it would be extremly difficult to think that then we would have to it him. Not that we plan but he is kind of doomed as I think he cannot stay with us forever. Anyway for now we were told he cannot get water because his belly will blow up so he eats apples etc. and seems healthy.

Otherwise, the week has passed very fast - we have some new children in the schools - my favourite new student is little Sandra who needs however to have her eyes checked as she is a little cross-eyed. We will need to find a doctor for her. Otherwise, she is a great student and very conversational girl.

We have also made preliminary arrangements for pub quizes where we are going to raise some money (it flips me out a bit since I will have to lead them) and we still have not managed to renovate our bathroom - no one dared to touch the "mud" walls - but we might finally do it this weekend. The plaster we used earlier comes off the walls just like it was the case before we started renovating.

The best thing however, about our days after school is that we have an excellent cook so we have everyday a good lunch and a great Peruvian soup...Everything is vegeterian so sofar Choclo is safe :)

Cienciano Cusco

2008-08-11T05:23:00.003+02:00

Weekends go fast especially if you are aware of them. Last six months we did not know what day of the week it is but by now we do know again how to appreciate weekends. This time we planned to go out of Cusco but did not manage to fulfill our plan. Finally though we managed to visit the art district of Cusco. We have also been to a football game of Primera División Peruana - between the local Cienciano and one of the teams - Universitario. Surprise, surprise after the first half Cusco team was loosing...during the second half though the guests could not run anymore and in the end lost...It was Rita's first visit to live football and at first she did not like the wild crowd. After some time though managed to find her favourite sector with live trumpet music...All in all the spectators were less lively than I would expect from Latino's :))) We are all cursed by stereotyping - aren't we? We went to the stadium with lots of kids from a different NGO and all enjoyed ourselves as long as there was sun - no sun means that you freeze as I have mentioned a couple of time before.

Otherwise our week has started very nicely - we have new volunteers - one American girl speaking Czech so I can practice my Polish...and of course our cook is here so finally we have food, we do not do shopping and general feeling of cleanliness creeps slowly in...We even started renovating the bathroom but got stuck on the point of how to put plaster on adobe - the walls of our bathroom are basically earth structures - same as used thousands of years ago by all sorts of local tribes. We might have a solution but we are still double checking - nobody dared to strip the walls of left over paint as to have the adobe stick out completely. Rita was of the opinion that then the whole structure will collapse. It is a bit like a crush course in home renovation.

The best thing however is that we are going to travel again - not yet but soon and to new places for us!!!

By the way my brain still refuses to process Spanish in a way that anything sensible would come out of my mouth. Russian and German dominate the field and Spanish cannot find its place in my brain - scary.

Cusco - the coldest day ever

2008-08-08T04:32:00.003+02:00

Today was the God damn coldest day ever here - it was raining for the whole night and the day was way too cold to be called a nice day. One had to make it through mud up to your ankles to get to school (it was raining whole night) - half of the kids therefore did not show up in school...

So finally we are the proud owners of a small heater!!! It uses a hell of energy but today was way over the limit of my endurance in terms of coldness...

Tomorrow 7.08am, I am going to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics. We have cable TV in the center so I kind of started being more up-to-date with the most important things in the world (CNN just aired a story about a dog killed by some mad man to a local mayor in the US of whom I have never heard). It is a perfect way of wasting time. Anyway no zapping of channels since we have no remote control and it takes around 10 minutes to move from first channel to the 99th standing in front of it...

Anyway after the opening ceremony (or rather in the middle of it) we will go to school for the arts day which we decided to introduce...we will make small puppets with the kids - photos coming up - international delivery possible :)))

Good thing is I started talking sort of broken Spanish - somehow till now I could not do it...though I still say Russian "paka" to kids when finishing school...somehow it comes out automatically...

A day in Cusco - continued

2008-08-06T05:46:00.002+02:00

We have just added the first set of portraits of our kids. We have three schools so there will be three sets...With time each picture will tell a story (we have to learn them ourselves)...We are also working on setting a separate blog for the Cusco center...ex and current volunteers will post their experiences from their time spent with the kids etc...

As to current events - we have just gotten our hands on our recruiting fliers. They are black and white and Rita decided to color every single one of them. I told her that it is pure madness - but I had nothing to say to her response - she told me that it is like watching soccer games on TV. When she told me that I ought to watch European Championships when they are replayed instead of live (once we were in Asia usually the games started at 2am), I politely refused saying that it is not right since I cannot influence the game any more. Once I watch them live on TV obviously I DO INFLUENCE THE SCORE (sadly with little success what comes to the performance of Polish team)...Therefore she will color all 1000 pieces so that they have a personal touch and better success rate in recruiting volunteers.Lets see...So far going to the schools every morning is kind of hard on me.

A day in Cusco

2008-08-04T05:07:00.008+02:00

Cusco is a probably the tourist Mekka of Peru (if not to certain extent of whole South America) due to its proximity to Machu Picchu...we kind of thought that we will feel like them...though right now our days differ a bit...we have not been sightseeing too much...

Our day starts early
- around 7.30 as we have to start preparing around 40 sandwiches for the kids and boil probably 10 liters of water to make hot local specialty drink for the kids from kiwicha, hava and soya, which are all very healthy and strange tasting :)
- around 9.00 together with the teachers we take taxis to three different schools in three different neighborhoods
- around 9.15 we arrive to schools and we are greeted by all kids without exception demanding to be hugged and kissed...
- around 9.20 the kids first wash hands and get their breakfast
- around 9.40 they brush their teeth
- afterward we start the lessons usually dividing the kids into groups based on their age or knowledge (I usually get the smallest kids and together we start from the basic of counting to 40 or so). This goes on with little break perhaps until 12.15...I can tell you that it is very hard as getting their attention is a sign of genius on behalf of the teacher
- around twelve each kid gets some fruit and after goodbye's we all part (I am usually quite dizzy by that time)
- we are back in the center by 12.45 more or less as we come back with the bus
- as the directors of the center we are responsible for preparing lunch for the rest of the volunteers...in other words cooking
- at 3pm I have individual Spanish class and at 4 pm Rita has her lesson
- right after the class the best part of the day begins...we go shopping for the next day
- we buy 40 little breads, around 4kg of fruits for next day (once we tried buying fruits for 3 days in advance but carrying the load was beyond our capabilities although we have made it to Annapurna base camp without porters earlier this year), vegetables etc. for the volunteers lunch...we could easily compete with the camels
- we are back by 7pm quite exhausted (it is quite a walk to the market and the store - I can assure anyone doubting it - especially at 3400 meters above sea level)
- afterward it is time to eat and do Spanish homework if you are able to think straight still

Actually we have never done it yet but we should be doing fund raising in pubs with pub quizzes etc. in the evenings ...so far though we never had the energy...

==================================================================

So starting next week we have decided that we will have a maid to cook, do the shopping and clean the center..As my mum put it giving employment is better than charity...We have also designed a flyer to start recruiting volunteers from all sorts of tourists coming here...the "print house" will have first 1000 pieces ready by Monday. More volunteers means that we make the sandwiches less often, we have more money - kids get better sandwiches and in general there is more happiness :) We plan to devise a healthy diet for the kids instead of the cheapest as is the case more or less now (don't get me wrong we are still giving them very good sandwiches which we eat with them)...

In other words we will make the world a better place - also for us :) As for the kids we are waiting for proposals of receipes for balanced weekly diet in terms of sandwiches menu...

Cusco

2008-07-31T03:47:00.005+02:00

We arrived to Cusco after a 21 hour bus ride without our backpacks...We were not robbed but they were not on the bus...it quickly became obvious that we have forgotten them in Lima...we did not check them in as we thought but left them at the luggage deposit...our only hope was to ask the bus operator to send them to us the next day. So we did...

The happening has been a déjà vu for me - I have once very long time ago forgotten my backpack in a different country and boarded a bus without it :) - one would think that such things do not happen as you get older...

So we arrived to Cusco - a place where it is warm only when the sun shines. At night it is freezing cold...and honestly our room is by no means warm so instead of waiting to get used to freezing temperatures (as we were advised will happen) but decided to get ourselves a small heater...a week has passed but we still do not have it...we simply have not found one...but we got ourselves ponchos gloves and hats from beautiful alpaca wool.

I am still suffering from the fact that Cusco is located higher than the ski resorts I used to go snowboarding in Alps - 3400m above see level is probably higher than any peak in Alps we visited...and here we live at such altitude - going to toilet makes you gasp for air... The city has also a very lively nightlife with all sorts of nice bars including irish pubs and salsa clubs with live music...good for us as we will have to do some fundraising in them...

There are three schools with a little over 30 kids that we have to take care of - the districts they are located are not as scary as in Trujillo and the kids seemed a bit more disciplined...perhaps it is the weather :) So it is easier to deal with them...so far none has complained about my very basic Spanish - still I cannot help kids over 10 years as their textbooks are too complex for me...right now I am at the level of a preschool...

During the weekend we celebrated our first wedding anniversary and splurged on a nice hotel room and a nice local dinner. But what we enjoyed (almost) the most was a clean and hot shower. To remain on the constructive side we have an opportunity to develop house renovating skills if we want to make our new home somewhat cosy... The following day we chilled on the Plaza de Armas, Tomek enjoying the sun halfway leaning on Rita, when a policewoman with a deafening whistle blow appeared and straightened us not to disturb the local order. Rita has been already once cursed in Kiev by a babushka at an orthodox monastery so this was not so bad. Actually we have been already over 6 months on our honeymoon trip - the time flies...

By the way - the next day our backpacks arrived and nothing was missing despite of the horror stories we hear about pick pocketing and theft...luck is still with us...They must all have been trained in the famous Polish prewar pickpocketing school in Lvov as they are unbeatable in their skills.

Northern Coast of Peru

2008-07-28T07:03:00.003+02:00

Besides our first baby-steps in volunteering in Trujillo, we had some free time to discover the wonders in the neighborhood. We began with a half our ride in a local “collectivo”, which is either a regular car or a minibus picking up passengers on a hypothetically pre-defined route. Though we never had the chance to figure out what the route is... The funny thing about these public transpot vehicles, that the number of people inside them and the speed they are cruising about is unlimited. Once there were 4 of us sitting in a regular car in the front seats and 5 in the rear :)

But coming back to our cultural discoveries, Chan Chan is a is the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas and the biggest adobe city in the world. Built in AD 1300 by the Chimu, it hosted an estimated 60 thousand inhabitants as the capital of the larger empire, until they were conquered by the Incas in 1471. The site would have been beyond comprehension without an English speaking guide, who explained us the functions of the different parts of the remaining citadel, which indeed had very distinguished symbolism and functionality. Unfortunately what we can see today is a fraction of the original leaving your imagination alone with the one and only mud color your eye can detect, melting the enormous structure into the equally mud colored scenery. But it is truly captivating, maybe because of its brutal simplicity.

Our next destinantion was the ceremonial and administrative centers of the Moche empire: Huaca de la Luna, the Temple of the Moon, which is 700 years older than Chan Chan. Actually the real attraction would be opposite, the Huaca del Sol, the Temple of the Sun, if it was not closed for visitors. It is still the largest single pre-Columbian structure in Peru, though one third has been washed away during the last one and a half millennia. It was built with an estimated 140 million adobe bricks, prepared and donated by the Moche people. Many of the bricks wear the unique sign of each household or worker who prepared them. The Huaca de la Luna, a good 500m across the desert is a pile of five temples built on top of each other, each new one completely covering the previous one.

We have also visited a sea resort of sorts – Huanchaco – some 20 minutes by bus from Trujillo. It is a great place to relax though the beach is not exactly the nicest we have seen. The good thing about the place is that you can learn how to surf for almost next to nothing. Of course if you do not mind the cold Pacific Ocean. It would have been our next challenge…

We have also had the pleasure to witness the start of another project related to Bruce Peru – WindAid. Basically a wind power generator to be deployed on rental basis in areas where there is no electricity. We have seen it work next to the coast but it really does not need much wind…Since basically you can find generic manuals how to build one on the internet my next challenge once we stop our nomadic life will be building one for myself…Anyway a very inspiring project which I hope will fly big time.

More or less our exploration of the north of Peru ended there. We were proposed to take over the lead of a Bruce Peru center in Cusco. We still spent the weekend in Trujillo roaming around a bit as we have described above. It was a bit sad to leave our room where we kind of settled in already. We had a two day trip in front of us…We arrived to Lima without any hiccups, took a taxi to the next bus terminal from which we were to depart in the evening to Cusco. After checking-in the bags (or so we thought) we had some breakfast at the bus station (don’t think of the bus station as an usual filthy shack but imagine an airport terminal of sorts)…

Anyway during breakfast we made the final decision to make it to Pachacamac, a massive archeological site from AD 200. We took a taxi to the outskirts of Lima where we were supposed to catch a bus to Pachacamac. On the way the taxi driver gave us a local newspaper so that we could read it on the way (some kind of a perk I guess). There began the terror – on page 1 we see the bus of the company we were supposed to board in the evening, totally smashed after a frontal accident with another bus…On page two there is an article about again the bus of the same company being assaulted on the way to the south. Rita told me that 39 people were shot dead and robbed. I could not believe it since the story was on page two. After consulting the driver we figured out that people were alive but without their belongings and even clothing as the bus was stopped during the night and robbed.

Both accidents happened just a day before. It did not inspire us positively but in the evening we nevertheless boarded our bus to Cusco - a 16 hour trip which we thought would be as comfortable as the ride to Lima. The bus was indeed much more comfortable than an average long haul bus in Europe but still not as nice as we expected…We were a bit scared…but there we were – on the way to Cusco…

Trujillo

2008-07-20T02:03:00.009+02:00

Now we are living in the desert - though Trujillo is advertised as the city of eternal spring. It never rains, except when the El Niño arrives. Therefore the landscape is quite a bit eerie; basically your eyes are deprived of green except for some palms on the main square. The good thing is that the temperature is very mild - around 18 degrees Celsius, though at the moment a bit chilly at nights.We have arrived on Saturday morning to our new, more long term destination. After our arrival we were taken to our apartment right in the centre of Trujillo, a pretty, colonial city of circa half a million inhabitants - most of which live in the slams around the city. The apartment is a huge five bedroom flat and at the time we moved in the whole place was for two of us only. After a couple of days two more flatmates moved in from the US. In the light of our plan to spend the coming minimum 3 months in Trujillo we have taken the weekend very easy, leaving plenty of time to discover the beauties of the neighbourhood. We looked around the centre and waited for our first ¨working week¨ at the organization we have chosen to volunteer with. Despite of the universal rule according to which Tomek is always right, he gave up finding our way in Trujillo on the first day. And despite of the other quite universal rule according to which women have sense for directions comparable to a parrot, Rita is quite able to navigate throughout the chess table streets of the centre. We have also learned the meaning of a new sign - most buildings have a green sign, one like the one on the right. Though I am still not sure that in case of an earthquake I would not rather want to run out of the building.The week started slowly. BrucePeru is a Peruvian Non Governmental Organization (NGO) with the mission to help children participate in the National Education. They approach parents, usually single mothers living in poor conditions and try convincing them to let their kids come to a one year school, instead of or besides making the kids work or beg. In the schools BrucePeru teaches them basic literacy and maths and supports them socially and emotionally to be able to succeed in the National Schools. As an induction we were to see various activities of the organization; the first day we spent at the celebrations of completion of first year of microfinance project that the organization is running in order to support women to develop enterprises to be able to finance their children’s schooling. We have not learned much there but it made us curious what is behind it. The next day more than compensated for the first one. In the morning we were taken to the local slums to the schools (each of us to a different one). First of all the slums are quite shocking as such. They are in the middle of a grey sand desert and you cannot see the end of them. There are no trees, no running water and we learned that we go there only in the mornings since later on it becomes dangerous to hang around there. The kids are also not the easiest to get their attention. Both of us in different schools got the ones that pose the most problems and it was quite a challenge even without the obvious language barrier we have. Tomek was told by his pupil that he is a bad professor due to the fact that his Spanish is almost non-existent, and asked whether he is a niño or a senior :) He figured that for now the only way to get closer to kids was to go play football with them...Rita got a mentally disabled girl in a wheelchair with 3 other little boys with behavioural challenges, one of which beat her with his little notebook whenever he got upset. By the end of the day both of us were quite stunned by what we experienced. The next day we went to different schools where Rita had her first admirer drawing hearts with arrows for her and easier kids to deal with...The thing that the schools have usually no floors and something that resembles a roof did not shock us on the second day...
On the fourth day we ´strolled´ around one of the slums with two Peruvian employees from our organization responsible for microfinance project, visiting the homes of the projects participants. We saw their new small businesses, houses, market and in general the local life that takes place there. Nobody there spoke English so Rita really had to do her best in Spanish, but amazingly she was able to make herself understood and translate most of the things. Some of the women set up little shops in the centre selling grocery, some make shoes, others silver jewellery or herbal products. It was great to see that some of the businesses where doing very well. Though the general atmosphere of the barrio was far from uplifting... quite an experience that you do not get as a tourist to Peru just like that...All in all the organization is doing a great job - we had our doubts before coming here and were quite sceptical but both the founders and the local staff are just great. It is quite remarkable how much effort they are putting into helping people and kids avoid a pretty sad future.

By the way thanks to Petra there are two new photos of us in the London set on Flickr (photo1 & photo2). This is how many things one needs for one year of travelling - each of us carrying around 15kg´s on our backs :))

Book Review 2

2008-07-16T15:10:00.000+02:00

Three months have passed so it is time to give you a glimpse of our readings. I guess during the next three months we will not be reading that much - more watching movies as we have bought a set of Cannes Award winning movies (since 1946 I believe), and collections of Almodovar and Bergman movies.

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Shosha

If you would like to learn about Jewish customs in the pre-WWII Poland this book will give you an atmosphere so strong that sometimes you beleive you feel the smell of food cooked on the streets, which by name are still there but without all this milieu. I liked that the author spared the description of the horror Jews went through in Poland, and rather tells about social life, love and culture - making these suffocating times so much easier to embrace and even to like. And of course you learn again something new about the ways love works.

Herman Hesse: Siddharta

Our edition contained not only the novel, but a Hesse biography with an interpretation of the novel. A fully educating piece. The novel itself was just the perfect synthesis for our SE Aian trip, especially the Buddhist part - as you cannot escape the obvious connotations. Though I think just like most of Hesse´s novels it is a must read at certain age and not any other time, when the message becomes unimportant. If you are ready for some relatively staightforward teaching about how to lead a good life, go for it but do not be disappointed if you find, that there is no universal recipe for enlightment :)

Jose Saramago: The Siege of Lisbon

Another book which makes a city breath alive on the pages, especially if you have been to Lisbon prior to being guided around the contemporary and at the same time medieval streets in the novel. Besides the academic theme around the theory of history - wheter history as such exist at all and what history is after all - it is a manicured love story. This book did not shake the way I see life, but made it cosy and so much comfortable. It makes you want to go to Lisbon and rumble down the streets with a map and this book in your hand, drink coffee and eat pastry in those wonderful brasilleries. Oh, and it will give you an entirely new experience of reading dialogues: you will have to use your imagination to find out who is talking and where is the end of the sentence. Do not give up after the preface, it is worth the try :)

Graham Green: The Quiet American

I wonder why I have not read anything from Graham Green till now. He is just genious. Not only because it is great to read a book about the country you are travelling to, but because his writing is such as Leonard Cohen's songs: they are boiled down to simplicity and tell more by silences than with words. It is a not especially unique story told in a very special way about those inevitabely peculiar years when French lost grip in Vietnam but the Americans did not mess around yet too seriously. And as ususal it is principally a love story plus a friendship, a lot of Saigon folklor with the tension of politics.

Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner
It is a book everyone should read. It teaches you about the Afghan culture, which is partially lost, partially hidden for most people who listen only to the news about this unfortunate country. Besides it is a heartbreaking, wonderful story, written in a beautiful fashion, teaching you so much about human nature as ten other books together cannot. There is the finest sensitivity paired with such brutality you would not want to see on film and twists and turns making it not only wonderful but exciting, too. And most of all, you really have to give up thinking about right and wrong, just dive into the ocean of man-made complexity and try surviving it with a full heart.

Yann Martel: Life of Pi
I had this book in my hand so many times contemplating whether I should read it or not that it became an engagement I could not escape. The book finally landed on me as a result of a book exchange from our Australian fellows travelling with us in Myanmar and I finished it almost in one shot on one of our never ending bus rides. It is a refresing peace of work especially for those interested more in the method of teaching literature than enjoying it, though I have to admit, it is a very exciting and unique story. It teaches you a great deal about animals and you become almost a zoo expert by the end of the book - though do not try training tigers how to jump through circles based on the instructions, even if you tend to believe it as a true story :) Besides to Pondicherry zoo my favorite part was the way the three big religions (Hinduism, Islam and Christianity) entered Pi´s life and how he introduced them through his perception, accepting all three of them simultaneously. If you are ready to test your concentration skills and ability to understand the debth of text, try answering the list of questions at the end of the book. It really does show how much blackout we have while reading.

Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram
This is a totally unbelievable autobiographical book written by a guy who used to lead an insane life. It shows Bombay in the 80´ties with its slums and local mafia. There will be soon a Hollywood movie staring Johnny Depp. At the beginning of the book I was totally incaptivated by it but with time I did develop certain distance to the guy as his values or the way he acted on them were inconsistent at best. Below his not so short biography:

* Marriage break-up, loss of daughter in custody dispute, beginning of heroin addiction, 1976
* Armed robberies with toy pistol to support heroin habit, end year 1977
* Capture and imprisonment, 1978; Escape from Maximum Security Pentridge prison, 1980
* Escape from custody (twice) in New Zealand, end 1981
* Arrive in India, beginning 1982
* Six months in remote Maharashtrian village, learn to speak Marathi language
* Live in Bombay slum, establish and operate free clinic for slum dwellers
* Imprisoned in India for 4 months
* Recruited by Bombay mafia, training in currency crime, gold smuggling, passports
* Gunrunning operation to unit of mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan
* Wounded in action, evacuated to Pakistan, recover and return to Bombay
* Appointed controller mafia forgery unit, write short stories, published in popular series
* Passport smuggler to Nigeria, Zaire, Iraq, Iran, Mauritius, Sri Lanka
* Establish casting agency for foreign extras in Bollywood movies, act in movies
* Arrive in Germany, work as singer, establish rock band, receive recording contract
* Manhunt by European police, escape custody in Italy & Switzerland, escape to India
* Act in Bollywood movies & TV dramas, establish travel agency in Bombay
* Passport smuggling to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Nigeria, Zaire, Mauritius, etc.
* Break with Bombay mafia council, freelance drug smuggling missions to Europe
* Teach myself to read & write German, win concessions, extradited to Australia, end 1991
* 2 years solitary confinement, 4 years mainstream prison in Australia, begin novel, 1991-97
* Develop philosophical and cosmoogical model, "Resolution Theory"
* Released from prison, begin novel 1997, end parole 2002
* Sell rights Shantaram, in USA (St. Martin’s Press) & UK (TimeWarner Books UK)
* Publish Australian edition of novel, Shantaram, August, 2003
* Sell movie rights to Johnny Depp, Brad Grey, Graham King, Warner Brothers, October 2004

Lima

2008-07-13T21:58:00.004+02:00

We are suddenly on the Southern hemisphere hanging upside-down - at least compared to our usual Northern hemisphere experience and instead of being ahead of Greenwich time we are lagging behind. All these changes to digest within the frame of 2 and a half weeks during which we have been to six countries on three different continents. It has distorted our sense of time and space in general. While we were used to moving 600km in 12 hours on a bus, crossing thousands of kilometres by plane introduced a bit more of confusion. Especially that the local conditions varied tremendously. Comparing Yangon to Bangkok is one thing, and comparing Yangon to London where we landed one day later is yet another.

Anyway after our six day visit to Buenos Aires we boarded a plane to Lima. For some reason we imagined that it will be a short 1,5 hours maximum type of intra European flight. It was strange though that we got pillows and blankets, we were informed about a coming film and dinner to be served - all in such a short time… We burst out laughing seeing the astonishment on each others face when it was announced that the flight will be 4 hours 40 minutes and it would add another 2 hours time difference to our Central European time (summing up to 7 hours).

Managing your expectations is always the best way to make yourself happy, and anyway, during our trip so far we learned that a new place is always unpredictable. First of all we have sometimes ignored some advice (vide crossing the boarder to Nepal where a general strike took place) or taken it a bit too seriously (vide Myanmar where we have landed with our backpacks full of dry noodle soups in case we had nothing to eat). Based on the information we gathered about Lima we had nightmares how awfully dangerous, polluted and ugly it will be, so we planned as short a visit as possible in the possibly safest barrio.

As we had enough of adventures during the last couple of weeks we decided to book a hotel in advance and pre-order a taxi. When we landed in the modern Lima airport (it is tricky to judge a country by the airport you land in as i.e. Myanmar has also a very modern airport but the rest does not live up to it), found our taxi driver, took local money from ATM, locked the taxi doors from inside as advised, prayed to God to arrive without being robbed and set off on the road...The road led us through a district full of huge shopping malls with all imaginable global brands what already made us wonder how can it be so dangerous if you seem to have all the big companies doing business here ?!

Most of the scary stuff proved to be some illusionary tales by people who never went out of their safe countries...and somehow made it to Peru without being anywhere else...Obviously it might not be the safest country on the planet but it is far from being ultra dangerous, or after the land of Buddha and Hindu Gods we had a very fast acclimatization in Buenos Aires, where after the first shock we safely survived several pick-pocketing attempts and a double attempt to be cheated by our hotel receptionist J ...

We arrived safely and stayed in a nice hostel in Miraflores and the next day went sightseeing...The main square was beautiful and the whole centre was full of extraordinary Catholic churches (in Asia we had an overdose of Buddha temples and here it seems we are going to be cured by an overdose of Catholic ones). As usual we have also seen anti-governmental demonstrations. It seems wherever we go we end up in a place of unrest. Argentina was the same not to mention any of the South East Asian countries we have visited. We ended the day in a very nice cafe sipping Coca de Mate tee and preparing for our bus ride to Trujillo where we are to stay for longer. The bus we took was as luxurious as the premium business class on Thai Air with fully reclining seats, a DVD and bus assistant serving food and drinks. Our luggage was collected at a check-in desk 30 minutes prior to departure, our fingerprints taken and lastly we had to cross a metal detector. So much about the scary Lima... We enjoyed ourselves in Lima as if we arrived home. Our low expectations surely helped, or our survival instinct, since this country will serve as our home for some time now J

Buenos Aires

2008-07-10T04:39:00.003+02:00

After a 14 hour flight from Frankfurt we arrived in Buenos Aires airport very much excited about arriving so far away from our home lands. From Thailand you can always make it overland to Europe - with South America there is an ocean to cross.

Buenos Aires international airport felt a bit like landing in Moscow at the Sheremietievo airport, or perhaps arraiving to Warsaw to the main railway station - anybody who has been to those places will know what I mean. Usually it does not bode well.

Anyway we decided to take the local bus to the hotel we booked through the internet - all went well since people in the capital of Argentina are extremely helpful. A guy on the bus helped us change to the metro line (95 years old metro line that does feel like it WOULD be 95 years old). It definitely feels that no special attention has been paid to keeping it in good shape. It is however a highly atmospheric ride hardly comparable to anything in Europe (except perhaps the old metro line in Budapest which is much better taken care of).

So we arrived in our hotel - it was the worst we have ever been to in our lives - it was kind of disgusting especially that we were paying 20 USD instead of the usual 5 USD which we paid in South East Asia for our hotels. For the price one would expect some kind of decency in the offer. This place was so bad that we decided to check in (it was already midnight when we arrived) and at once go out to eat to think of a strategy for the next days. The street in front of our hotel did not look much better - there was something in the air telling us that we might get into trouble any minute. So not too stretch our luck we went it to McDonald’s. The first one during our whole trip this year. Kind of safe bet at midnight. Obviously we decided to look for an alternative place to spend the next nights…

Since for the first time during our trip we arrived to a city without a guidebook, the next day we bought ourselves a TimeOut magazine…below the description of the street we have managed to book our hotel (Lavalle street) “It is every claustrophobe’s sweat-soaked nightmare…the mother lode of the mayhem is called Florida, the only completely pedestrian street in BA…However, amid the human statues, money changers you can still find traces of its refined past. Lavalle on the other hand makes Florida look chic and classy. It’s packed with blockbuster and B-movie cinemas, advertising hoardings and enough neon to power a nuclear sub”

As you can imagine when we arrived to such place the only thing in our mind was - why was my brother saying that Buenos Aires is so nice? Have we arrived to a different place? TimeOut quickly made it clear to us that we have managed to choose the worst place in Buenos Aires (perhaps apart from Boca district)…

From there on things started picking up. We have managed to find a very nice hostel and decided to enrol for a four day Spanish language crash course combined with induction to Buenos Aires…a very good choice…

We have also managed to find the charm of Buenos Aires - beautiful districts like San Telmo with its weekend markets, Palermo with its bohemian atmosphere and beautiful parks and plaza’s…and everywhere Tango and great places to eat or chill…after 6 months of rice diet, I have decided to change to jamon and Argentinian beef. …

All in all there is no question that Buenos Aires is a great city - where is perhaps a bit too much of pick pocketing and general feeling of insecurity but otherwise it lives up to its expectation…We have just managed to choose another place with demonstrations against the government and street fights with the police. :)

London

2008-07-06T16:05:00.003+02:00

We were so eager to arrive to London that our last 10 days in South East Asia were somehow difficult for us. It was tough on us mentally - we knew that so many things we were used to having while living in Europe are waiting for us there. I was waiting for a wide choice of chocolate which is more or less not available at all (except for Snickers and a couple of others wannabe chocolate types), all kinds of diary products especially cheeses, and weather which will hover around 20 degrees as opposed to 40 Celsius. I am by no means a food freak - neither a shopping freak but I like the idea of having a choice. In fact to fulfil my desires it is enough to see that I have a choice - I do not even feel then a need to buy things anymore. It was enough that once I had a chocolate, some cheese, a döner in Frankfurt (while already on the way to South America) to be mentally prepared for not having these choices for another six months.

Anyway London was wonderful in all aspects; we were staying at Rita’s cousin’s place at Gipsy Hill. She and her boyfriend made us feel very much at home at their beautiful flat. Gipsy Hill is a very quiet neighbourhood where we tried to recover from our extensive travelling.

We both have been to London quite a few times but it is one of those places for me which every time feels like I would be visiting it for the first time. We did not intend to move around London too much this time but just recharge before moving on; nevertheless we managed to experience quite a few nice things; we went to see painting exhibition of Cy Twombly at Tate Modern which did not impress me at all. There is quite much hype about his works but I can admire him only for one thing - with this kind of art to create such hype…There is no visit possible to London without ending up in Camden Town and of course some nice English pubs where Rita could enjoy the jacked potato and fish & chips she has been craving for. We have also visited the famous Banksy graffiti exhibition near the Waterloo tube station. We have found there Pope Benedict XVI posing in Marlin Monroe dress and Madonna kissing Britney Spears - though we are not sure whether any of them was done by Banksy.

On our last day we enjoyed the hospitality of our Indian friend from our yoga vacation in the Trivandrum Ashram in India. Our visit began with the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) Temple in North West London, a contemporary masterpiece of Hindu architecture; its carved white marble with the lace-like windows letting the sun shine through makes your jaw drop when entering the temple’s interior. It is truly the most wonderful Hindu temple we saw out casting the ones in India. First time in our lives we were invited for a dinner to an Indian home, where we had a wonderful evening with our friend’s son and his wonderful wife overwhelming with their hospitality and of course delicious Indian food.

The one week in London passed very fast giving us a fast recovery we badly needed including a full laundry in a real washing machine, muesli and foamy thick coffee in the morning with endless excellent discussions, good smelling bed, a bathtub and washing teeth with tap water first time in 6 months. And of course a gorgeous hair make for Rita by her kuzynka. See for yourself.

Bagan

2008-06-24T12:35:00.005+02:00

Bagan became our last destinations in Myanmar. Although we were supposed to go to Inle Lake because of Rita's food poisoning problems we run out of time. Both of us felt extremely happy though about such course of events. The 16 hour bus ride from Mandalay to Bagan was more than enough of pain and yet another to Inle Lake would have been to much. Imagine the state of the road considering that it was only 145km's from Mandalay?!

Tomek was looking forward to arriving to Bagan for one specific reason - our guide book said that Bagan has two types of food to offer - pizza and non-pizza; and pizza was supposed to resemble Italian pizza. It was more than you might possible want after a long bus ride - and this time the pizza lived up to its promises. He was delighted. The following two days in Bagan we concentrated on eating things that would not make us sick. The thought that in a couple of days we will be in London with all its goodies made every single day quite a pain. We had enough of rice, watching out for getting sick and the heat - we just dreamed about 'summer' in London. It is definitely much harder to survive in tough conditions once you know when you will move on to the less severe ones.

Bagan as such could compete with Angor Wat - it is as beautiful and almost completely tourist free. It was supposed to be a UNESCO world heritage site but the local government rejected cooperation. The ruins of Bagan cover an area of 16 square miles. The majority of its buildings were built in the 1000s to 1200s, during the time Bagan was the capital of the First Burmese Empire. We have spent two days visiting tens of temples in the surrounding area. Most of them in good shape and beautiful setting. The first day we hired a horse cart to look around and the second we roamed on bicycles. The sunset we have watched from one of the temples was beautiful.

The horse cart industry is by the way doing great in this place - every year there are more and more of them on the streets - literally they dominate the landscape at the moment. Obviously it says much about the development of the economy - and unfortunate lack of tourists. Bagan as such is though much better prepared to take in many more tourists - probably some years back there must have been bigger groups coming in.

All in all we took it easy in Bagan - we were mentally preparing ourselves for the last stretch of our trip in South East Asia - back by bus to Yangon (another 14h), by plane to Bangkok and then to London for a week of 'vacation'...

We both have come to the same conclusion about Myanmar - it is very much worth visiting and it is quite easy to travel around (definitely easier than in India which boasts millions of tourists every year). So if you can go there - people will be happy and you do not have to give your money to the government....Burmese people are very friendly and do not deserve to be punished even more by everyone avoiding their country (their government makes their lives hard enough). The sanctions imposed by international community take a heavy toll on the local population but we doubt that on anybody else...

Mandalay

2008-06-19T13:54:00.008+02:00

UPDATE: Pictures are now available in our gallery!

Mandalay is over 600 km north of Yangon and totally unaffected by the cyclone. We made it as usual on an overnight bus. Although very long, the bus ride was bearable mostly I think to air conditioning and an easy going style of the driver. All in all it was a piece of cake in comparison to some of our other trips in the region.

In the morning we arrived to a bus station outside town which looks more like a town lined with houses and innumerable amount of buses run by different companies . How one makes sense of it is a mystery. In fact it is just like in Yangon where we took a taxi to the station and the taxi driver after 15 minutes of roaming around found our bus. In Myanmar we tend to book our hotels in advance and get a pick-up to the hotel - makes life easier after a long bus ride - the reason why pick-ups are readily available is very simple. Already during the ride to the hotel we learned that we were the first tourists since two months in our hotel (one of the more popular in better times). Together with our fellow co-travellers - a couple from Australia who we met on our plane from Bangkok, we have however probably started some better times as everyday since we arrived at least one person additionally checked in to our hotel.

Already the first days we ventured to climb up Mandalay Hill it became clear to us that this is the land of Pagodas. They are just ubiquitous and huge majority of them kept in very good shape (clearly supported by the junta as there are always pictures of the military visiting that particular pagoda). For the second day we had an organized full day program. We hired a mini pick-up taxi (car dating back to the sixties) and drove to visit three former capitals of Myanmar which are in the vicinity of Mandalay. This country has always had a tendency to shift capitals (sometimes as often as every 10 years) that the fact of moving the current capital by the ruling junta to Naypyitaw should not come as a surprise. Though I have never heard of a capital out of reach to anybody as is the case here...

In order to get Inwe (one of the old capitals) we had to take a boat and a horse carriage. There was basically no other way of going around the sites. Among one of the site we visited was a very old wooden monastery in which a single lonely monk lived and was heading a small school for kids. There we learned the Burmese alphabet which for me consists of a set of smiles in different shades (very cute!). On the way back our guide took us to a place where he gives English classes. It was in fact probably a home of the students. The group was very diverse both in terms of age and advancement. In fact they did not have any language books to learn from, just their notebooks to write the phrases into. We offered to send books but the probability that they would reach them would be very small. Anyway everyone was extremely excited to converse with us and we enjoyed it and the sugar cane drink very much.

In the next days we have visited lots of other interesting places including the Manadalay Glass Palace. Although it has been restored very poorly it was amazing for us to see the pictures and main characters of the Glass Palace book by Amitav Ghosh. It was really for some reason surreal.

We have also been lucky to see the workshops were marble Buddha statues of gigantic proportions were made. In fact the artifacts were wonderful and cheap and we were tempted to buy a 150 kg marble lion but could not figure out how to get him out of the country :)

On other occasion we were taken to goldsmiths were gold is flattened into very thin sheets (by hammer by a guy who does not need a workout for his body). The sheets so thin that they glue themselves to any surface one put them onto (usually Buddha statues here). We bought some sheets since they are also very good addition to drinks.

We had also the pleasure of visiting the famous banned Moustache Brothers who spent years in prison camps for their politically incorrect performances. We met personally two of them. They still cannot perform in public but they do shows at home without costumes for foreigners. Unfortunately they did not perform for us as they were in the middle of preparations for sending rice they gathered for the cyclone Nagris survivors.

All in all we spent quite a few days here and once we were about to embark on the 14 hour boat journey to Bagan, traditionally one of us got food poisoned (there is hardly any electricity here - it is worse than in Nepal and I believe the food storage conditions are terrible). This time Rita got sick so we had to wait two days for her to recover before moving on...

Yangon

2008-06-14T09:17:00.010+02:00

Yet, another early wake up at 4am - we have almost gotten used to it. This time we were to embark on an exciting trip - back to Bangkok airport to catch a flight to Yangon in Myanmar. We were sure that we are going to be the only passengers on the flight but to our surprise the Boeing 737 was full. Later on we have found out that nearly half of the plane was aid workers (had a special visa counter in Yangon) and the rest monks and a very few tourists. Passport control was very quick and our luggage did not get checked at all in a very modern airport building. We quickly found our pick-up guy from the hotel and drove to the hotel. There are not too many cars on the streets (by the way all Japanese from the 70'ties & 80'ties in the best case) and that the traffic is much more organized; no constant blowing of the horn or overtaking at most awkward places. The mystery of very light traffic quickly revealed itself to us - bicycles and motorbikes are forbidden in the city except for the monks and the military.

If we had ever complained about too many tourists Yangon proved to be almost tourists free. One could meet one or two persons who looked like tourists per day at best. We have criss-crossed the city several times on foot - especially the center and found it to be a little bit like India - perhaps because of the smell of Indian spices (although lots of Indian's fled Myanmar after several rounds of unrest one can still find living Indian districts). There are many other ethnic minorities in Myanmar resulting in an exciting "cocktail" of over a 100 different languages. Yangon at the present does not reflect what western media convey. The city is cleaned from befallen trees and damage caused by the storm and the streets are full of sellers selling tasty food, vegetables and fruits and whatever one sells in South East Asia. It seems that at least in Yangon there is more than enough food - in the Delta Region the situation must be much worse nevertheless this city has already the worst behind itself. We have tried excellent food in the ubiquitous tea houses around the town and also went to what was to be one of the nicest restaurants according to our guide book with reasonable prices and great local food. The place proved to have something of a typical Polish country side wedding atmosphere if you know what I mean. Except that again there was nobody except us and the food was just so so.

For the time being we cannot upload any pictures since Yahoo, Hotmail and Google are blocked by the government. Of course all the Internet cafe's go around it but it makes internet very slow and unreliable. We have lots of very nice pictures which will be showing up gradually in our gallery. In general the whole government versus society issue is kind of a mouse and cat game where the people openly criticize "the tiger" and black market exists with very little control.

Anyway going to Yangon as a tourist poses no threat - there is enough water & food of all sorts at VERY reasonable prices. People are extremely happy to see foreigners greeting them with blinks and smiles. It would be great of course if more tourists came and left their money there. Great choice for anyone who wants to escape the main stream tourism and see some stunningly different cultural heritage.

One may get more than enough of paya (pagoda in Burmese) and an overdose of stupas, but these golden gilded upside-down bell-shaped buildings do give a unique ambiance to the city. THE place to visit in Yangon is the Shwedagon Paya, built 2500 years ago (though archaeologists argue whether its origin dates to the 6th - 10th century) and is as much a landmark of Myanmar as the Eiffel Tower to Paris. It dome rises to 98 m enshrining some of Lord Buddha's hair. Depending on the day you were born you can choose one out of the shrines dedicated to the 8 days of the week (Wednesday is divided into morning and afternoon in order to overcome the dilemma of matching a 7 days week pattern). Sule Paya and Botatung Paya are the second and third mostly visited sites with more Buddha hair relics and an educative demonstration of varieties in pagoda and stupa architectural stiles.

Angkor Wat

2008-06-10T16:38:00.006+02:00

Arriving to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh by bus was comparable to travelling in North India; on the stops you could buy deep fried spiders and crickets double the size they are in Europe - if at all they live there. On arrival rickshaw drivers almost broke the bus window to be the first choice. Luckily we organized a room from Phnom Penh with a pick-up from the bus, so we thought and let the only driver with the business card with the name of our guesthouse to take us. We did not drive long when we understood that we are victims of an obvious scam; if you do not commit for a whole day ride the following day to visit temples, the ride is not free to the guesthouse. This made it clear that we are sitting on the wrong vehicle and after some fuss we got on two motorbike taxis and arrived to our planned destination.

The same evening we went on a sunset watch trip to Prasat Trapeang Ropou and observed that the best way for us to discover the ruins will be on bicycle. Tomek came up with the idea that the following morning we should start at 4 am in order to be the first to arrive to the main temple of Angkor Wat and see it in the rising sun. After a one hour ride in pitch dark we arrived together with hoards of toursist, none on such a sporty vechicle though... Newertheless the temple was mesmerizing as the first rays of sun gave color to the ancient stones. We were among the first to enter the center piece of the temple, which was hypnotic in its silent peace. We continued our discovery on the so called "small loop", which is a 17 km circle passing by the most important ruins: Angkor Thom with the Bayon, the Terrace of Elephants, Ta Prohm. By 1 pm we felt totally wretced and decided to pedal back to Siem Reap.

On the next day we rented a moto rickshaw to visit Kbal Spean and Banteay Srei, a good 60 km return trip mostly on dirt roads full of red dust - and of course some tropical rain. To visit the Thousand Lingas, the phallic symbols of fertility in Kbal Spean you should trek an hour and a half in the jungle. The Citadel of Women, Banteay Srey on the contrary is a very easy access. Though it is small and the last temple we visited it could still surprise us with its distinctive carvings and structure.

To finish our trip we settled in a Sports Bar to watch how the Poles perform in F1 and the European Soccer Championship. At 3.30 in the morning we had a romantic walk to our guesthouse to have a blink of sleep before we depart to Bangkok at 7 am. With the hope to have a tight sleep on the bus we placed our hopes in the driver - not for long. After 1 hour of sitting on top of our backpacks in a totally crowded and hot bus the driver entered to a shouting competition with one of the passengers and started the engine only after making sure he is expelled from the trip. The road is less thatn 200 km to the border, but it took us 6 hours, just to learn that we are not going to make it through the border. Visa on arrival is not available contrary to the information we gathered previously, so the devil was laughing at us having another 6 hours in front of us back to Siem Reap. Besides the obvious pain we felt about this mess we were about to miss our next day flight from Bangkok to Myanmar. I will not enter into all the details of finding the way to fly to Bangkok, but for certain if one thing goes wrong there will be as many following it as it is possible. Only the departure tax we had to pay per person at the airport was double the price we paid for the bus to Bangkok, but the airport in Siem Reap is tip top - no doubt. Arriving to Bangkok, rushing through our To Do list gave us another 4 hours to sleep before we headed back to the airport to fly out to Yangon.

Southern Coast

2008-06-10T14:32:00.005+02:00

We left Phnom Penh on a motorbike though we were really reluctant how is it going to be to ride a dirt road motorbike (no others seem to be available for rental). Since neither me nor Rita has ever sat on such a bike we had our concerns (mentioning the fact that we do not have a driving license for motorbikes should excuse our shyness). The rental agency guy sensed our reluctance and offered to teach us how to ride a bike in case we do not know how to do it - no problem just pay for the bike and off you go :) - it does not make you feel to confident about the skills of other participants of the traffic...

Anyway we decided to make life a bit more challenging and rented one bike instead of two - I became the lucky one to be the first to get the responsibility for acting us the "driver". We have not made more than 500 meters when on the first traffic lights Rita made me cross the red lights since as she put it "all the locals do it so I should not obstruct the traffic flow". A moment later we got stopped by the police and my driving license (for the car of course) got confiscated and a certain ransom was communicated to me...

Our trip all in all was a success - we enjoyed the south as it somehow felt it was just left to us (pretty much everyone else visiting Cambodia must have traveled to the north I guess). We have visited sleepy Kampot where we found the house in which my father used to live, forgotten Kep where we met the first real Hungarian during our trip (who has just opened a great Hungarian restaurant called Eldorado), went to Bokor Hill where we saw destruction and beauty of the nature in one and chilled on the beaches of premier beach resort in Cambodia - Sihanoukville. All in the span of five days.

There was something fascinating in each of the places - Kep because it could be a very successful resort town but there are so far no tourists there. We also had a great dinner there - eat a huge crab - our business with eating this beast took us two hours.

Bokor Hill due to the destruction of what used to be a beautiful hill station with a casino and a hilarious road there and in the end Sihanoukville with great accommodation and nice beaches. To Sihanoukville I arrived sitting on the back of the bike - Rita made the whole 150km trip. My task included finding a bungalow for us - so we safely arrived, I went into a hotel to check our place while Rita stayed sitting on bike - when I came back I found her right at the moment when she was falling together with the bike - Murphy's law I guess :) - she is alright so no needs to worry...

The road to the south was much more easy that we suspected - although we got lost since there are not too many signs on the roads we also managed to see beautiful country side, establish that 4-5pm is not the best time to be on the road since the cows, buffaloes and kids from school are heading home...and practice riding in torrential rain (you do not get cold since the temperature anyway does not drop below 30 degrees).

We got back to Phnom Penh where we made a fatal mistake as to what concerns visa issues...

Phnom Penh

2008-06-05T15:46:00.008+02:00

Arriving to the capital of Cambodia was a little bit like landing in Bangkok; another surprise, especially considering what nightmare this country went through not that long ago. First of all it is huge, you can drive for hours and still not reach your destination and it is very nicely resaturated. Funny though that instead of names the streets have numbers, but actually I liked it this way; very logical and almost totally apolitical - save the Mao Tse Tung Boulevard :) To be fair, the country is very far from anything like communism, the competition created an excellent value for your money, much less "copy pasting" in business and no price cartels at all, unlike in Laos. So we like the place.

After squatting at the budget travelers hot spot on Street Nr. 93 at the Lake Side we started out with the Royal Palace, which is a real beauty. Nicely renovated with manicured gardens it is the sister of the one in Bangkok, but somehow more serene and peaceful - maybe because there are hardly any tourists. The next day we rented a motorbike and immersed in the local traffic, which bears the same traffic characteristics as any of the other SEA countries we visited so far; if I will not lose my sense of humor I will compose a post about the "Alternative Traffic Rules in Asia".

But anyway, the driving was not more chaotic than before, except that we did not have a real map and the signs are really really poor. After driving an extra 10 km finally we found the Museum of Killing Fields, which is a terribly sad memorial of something similar to what happened in Europe under the Nazis. Except that this outrageous mass crime was committed within one nation, not even between ethnic groups, but grotesquely the "New People" against the "Old People". (Old People stood for everybody without discrimination who lived in a city and/or was considered part of the intelligentsia, the New People meant everybody, who lived in the countryside and was basically illiterate) The referred museum is built on mass graves, prison and forced labor camp - one out of hundreds throughout the the country with a tower like pagoda filled with the bones and clothes of the deceased. If you want to know more about the Red Khmers and this part of Cambodia's history, there is a museum in Phnom Penh about the period in a former school, which the Red Khmers used as their torturing and exterminating institution. We rather choose to see a documentary film, "Death and Rebirth" in the Meta House made by former East German film makers in the beginning of 80's - not totally free from socialist propaganda, but still extremely informative about the happenings in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.

Though before you rush to participate a program in Meta House I would like to warn you, that there is a probability, that something similar will happen to you, too: half an hour after the advertised starting time one of the organizers stood up to announce, that she is terribly sorry, but she does not have the film. A second later it turnes out that the film in question supposed to be shot the day before; after some confusion it turns out that the organizer does not know what the day is and finally relieves everybody with a cute laughter that everything is all right, she thought it was Sunday, though it is Saturday, the film will be soon shown. Until another half an hour passes and she makes another announcement that no one finds the DVD in question. By this time half the audience leaves, luckily we entertain ourselves respectively with a gin and tonic and beer, undisturbed by these events and about two hours later to our greatest surprise the planned film began.... Now had I done something so silly it would not have been a great surprise, but this was a lady in her late 60's, obviously the director of the institution. :)

As our last program in Phnom Penh we visited the former Russian Market, where some years ago you could buy hash or for the more aggressive a Kalashnikov. Today the range of choice is equally wide, though illegal in a different, somewhat more sophisticated way: you can acquire any of the latest softwares for as much as 2 USD and on the next stand you can choose from pig's ear and Khmer antiques....

Mekong Delta

2008-06-04T06:34:00.006+02:00

We have learned a bit on our past adventures with crossing the borders (remember our crossing to Nepal and horse carriage?) and decided to buy two day tour from Saigon to Phnom Pehn through the Mekong Delta. It cost next to nothing and we assumed it will save us a lot of hassle.

The first day of our trip was relatively easy going - we were on the bus most of the time but also visited a floating market where you can buy wholesale and retail quantities of fruits and vegetables straight from the boats...in other words you are on a boat in the middle of the river and trade with other boats also floating in the middle of the river. We have also seen how all kinds of coconut candies are made, sort of popcorn from rice in local villages etc.

We spent the night in a rather grim town next to the Cambodian border, Chou Doc - the next day we had a very early wake-up and right after a light breakfast were taken to a boat as we were to arrive to Phnom Pehn by boat. Obviously not on a luxurious Caribbean line cruiser but on something but floats. On the way we visited very interesting floating fish farms - houses under which fish are being held so to say and a Cham minority village where Muslim population lives. Almost each of those houses had a satellite TV although otherwise they were very poor. As we have learned the satellite TV's are being subsidized by the Vietnamese government as a contraceptive. There are two reasons for it - people watch TV instead of having sex and the second that TV takes space so on small boats there is less space for kids...Supposedly it is effective.

Now, the trip was supposed to be quite smooth and fast - it did prove smooth but definitely not fast. We spend four hours on the first boat cruising pleasurably through the Mekong Delta - it was great although the sun was really strong. We then arrived on the boarder in a middle of nowhere, had lunch and crossed it on foot. On the Cambodian side another boat was waiting for us - we assumed that it will be a quick ride but it took another 3 hours plus around two hours with a bus to our final destination in Phnom Pehn. During the second boat trip at some point the air stopped moving and it became so hot we could barely stand it - of course right the movement we were to disembark it started to rain...

Phnom Pehn was a shock to us with lots of nice buildings, clean streets and a western look - we did not have expectations as we knew that they started from zero in the beginning of nineties. We went to the tourist ghetto for budget travellers called Lake Side were we found nice accommodation right next to lake for 4 USD (for one or two USD more you can have a room with TV). Of course, if you wish you can have a room for 200 USD as lots of new hotels have been lately constructed.

For the rest of Cambodia we decided to follow the steps of Tomek's father who was stationed in Cambodia with the United Nations in the beginning of the nineties.

Ho Chi Minh City - Saigon

2008-06-02T07:41:00.009+02:00

Saigon is definitely the most modern and biggest city of Vietnam - it has a much more metropolitan feeling than Hanoi. From time to time it is nice to be in a big city. We have arrived to the city right in the middle of the afternoon rain showers that now became very frequent. They basically start always around 3pm and last for 1-2 hours. Of course we have arrived directly to the tourist ghetto since almost every South East Asian city has one. There you can feel a bit like at home (whether you like it or not).

In the city we decided to make our lives easier and rented one scooter to go around the city. It is kind of liberating experience but on the other hand also a bit stressful. The good thing is that once you get into the traffic it becomes much less intimidating than what it seems when you are a bystander - perhaps something like jumping into the river and let the current take you with it... To make it simple we choose a full automatic scooter :)

We were set to see a couple of landmarks in the city - though to be honest there are not too many. Saigon has nice parks, Notre Dam Cathedral (French legacy as in most bigger cities of the former French colonies) some nice pagodas especially in the China town and all the modern buildings etc. which you would expect in a 21st century city. We decided to take it easy and go to botanical gardens which turned out to be more of a zoo than the botanical garden. Nevertheless, the animals were kept in captivity under what we would call good conditions (if you can say anything like that about keeping anybody in captivity) and there was a nice variety of them. The thing that shocked me thought the most was a little rabbit sitting undisturbed in a relatively big aquarium. It would not have been anything special except that in the other corner of the aquarium there was a huge snake chilling and I guess waiting for a good moment to eat the poor black rabbit for dinner...

Anyway we have also found the best dinning experience in Vietnam so far. Perhaps even during our trip - at least from the culinary side. It was a very nice restaurant in an old villa, with cooks all around the compound preparing traditional Vietnamese dishes. Then we would be helped by the staff to get to know how to make wraps etc. Excellent service and great food and very reasonable prices. Absolutely a MUST for everyone visiting the city. This was the first place we got to know how to eat things that are sold on the street but you have no idea what to do with them. No wonder the restaurant is always full...(Quan An Ngon Restaurant- 138 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia street in District)

This would be our last destination in Vietnam - we would only see the Mekong Delta and head to Phnom Pehn.

Dalat

2008-05-27T15:27:00.006+02:00

Another stretch on the North-South coast of Vietnam was completed by our bus ride from Nha Trang to Dalat, the place of eternal spring, as locals call it. And it is really very much different from the rest of the country we have seen; it is 1475 m above the sea level with a cool climate, beautiful mountains and lakes and a highly organized agriculture full of greenhouses. It is a famous honeymoon spot for locals, and in general seems like the former French hill station made itself a famous local tourist attraction. The city of Dalat itself did not especially impress us with its hundreds of hotels mushrooming next to each other with very little creativity other than copying the neighbor's business, but the surrounding countryside is really worth the effort.

We decided to rent a scooter and drive to Lang Bien Mountain for a trek and climb to the 2170 m peak. We had a lovely spring day with small fat clouds floating in the blue sky, beautiful evergreen forest, red soil, 4 bananas and a bottle of water in our bag, wild horses gazing at us on an ideally 3-4 hours return trek. All was like in a fairy tale - though a bit more sweaty - until the macadam road ended and changed into a narrow path leading into the depth of the rain forest. The familiar pine tree forest changed into a full jungle so dense, that you had to make your way with your arms to get through the diverse fauna of a totally unknown forest for a European eye. We had 4 km behind us and another 2 to get to the peak, when we realized that our almost invisible path has been swallowed by the jungle and simply turning back to leave the mountain unmounted led us into a labyrinth of thin traces leading to other thinner paths. We finished our bananas and most of our water, had no watch with us to calculate how much time we have till sunset, when we heard human voices. After a not especially relaxed 1 hour rush to the direction of voices hoping to bump into other than jungle living creatures or at least a signed trek we found a reasonable path with a red arrow pointing uphill. By that time we were ready to leave the place and surely uphill was not a guarantee, but since the voices came from the same direction we started climbing up basically on all four. You cannot imagine my relief when the voices manifested themselves in the form of two little Vietnamese boys, and then another two and finally a big group of boys with one single of them speaking English. As it turned out they also lost their way after 5 hours of climbing, but just before finding us they reached the peak, which was 5 minutes uphill from us. Miracles truly do happen; they turned out to be almost on their way down and offered us help downhill. So we finally mounted the monster and a breathtaking panorama and threatening storm clouds greeted us - not that we could catch our breath anyway. Why would life be simple? Our descend was a good two hours struggle in the tropical rain, but accompanied with Vietnamese songs and all kinds of fruits offered by our little friends, who by the way turned out to be all catholic novices :)))

Of course by the time we reached the village the rain disappeared and the "eternal spring" was in full swing for one more hour, before the moon came up... We were becoming a little bit bored if I can say so, hence our little adventure made us feel alive again. Especially when we found a big bloody bruise on Tomek's foot, without doubt caused by a leech. Luckily I did not have to perform an operation, because it had sucked itself full andw fell by the time we realized the damage. After all I am glad this was the biggest price for our experiment to find out is we are still alive :)

Nha Trang

2008-05-25T14:53:00.004+02:00

There was one highlight of our visit to the Vietnamese Riviera - our day trip to neighbouring islands. We did not expect much of it since we were hoarded on a boat together with 30 other tourists early in the morning (also locals - Vietnam seems to have developed local tourism quite well). The visit to the first island with an aquarium full of weird fish generally made us feel quite depressed as the trip seem not to develop in any way that would seem like fun. Our next stop where we went snorkling did not improve our mood. Since there were several boats like ours docked around the sea life moved further and we could not see too much. It was good though to be in the water for a while. Lunch on the boat was the time when the first brakethrough took place - the food was good. Then after lunch something extraordinary happend. The whole vietnamese crew stood up and performed - one guy playing drums (or to be more precise something that resembled a drum plus two buckets), another playing guitar that remembers probably the sixties and our "captain" singing in Viet-English and Viet-Spanish. Their performance was great! Then the crew gave an ultimatum to all passengers. Basically everyone had to jump to the water. I had no idea what was going on since I have some trouble with understanding Viet-English and forgot to read the leaflet describing our trip before we got onto it. So we jumped in and found out that a floating bar with a crate of Vietnamese has "opened" right next to our boat. We had to "dock" around it with our feet on the bar while floating in the water and basically got flooded with literes of Vietnamese blueberry wine by the "floating bar tender". Saying "No" was forbidden and every offence of such type was punishable with wine poured straight from the bottle into you.

The next hour we chilled on the beach nearby to recover...Whole thing was very entertaining...

Our stay in Nha Trang coincided with the Name Day of Rita. We have celebrated it on the beach in a very nice restaurant with a pool while playing chess and drinking Mojito. Rita had shown her mastery and won for the second time. This time however in a very sophisticated, fast and smooth way. Respect! - I think I should not let her read the advanced chess book which we have bought somewhere on the way otherwise I will have to get used to the feeling of getting swiftly beaten...

Nha Trang as such has a nice beach, lots of hotels for very good money ($7 gets you a very nice room with AC, minibar, hot shower etc.) and nice restaurants. In general if you are looking for peace this is not a place to be. If you are after some action like diving or to some extent partying you have found the place.

Hoi An

2008-05-23T16:33:00.006+02:00

Hoi An, the former imperial capital - another of the numerous former capitals and another UNESCO World Heritage Site :) - looks like the imagined dream of Asia, or rather Indochina in the mid twenties. Or 200 years ago.

We arrived with our spaceship bus from Hue on the 19th of May in the evening and got drifted by the charm of the Old Town with its lovely little houses, the river and the number of tailor shops beyond imagination. Tailoring anything which goes, ready within a couple of hours is one of the local attractions with very inviting prices, quality fabrics and a temptation to get a dress made here which you would otherwise never think about. OK, I did resist the devil to get a full length silk evening gown and also a red hand made pair of shoes with a little flower embroidery, but I gave in for a thick cotton coat :) You can choose any model from most recent catalogues (how about made to order Puma sneakers?!) and have them ready next morning. In addition Hoi An is full of bookstores with only photocopied books...look "same same but different" but we thought it is a disgrace to books to have them sold like this :)

Other than indulging in such vanities we tried Hoi An culinary specialities, like White Rose and Wonton, which I do not even try explaining, but they were delicious! We bought a combined ticket allowing us to visit five historical locations from a greater choice, including the former Assembly Hall, local traders' houses, temples and even a singing-dancing folklore performance. My ever favorite, most beautiful instrument is the Vietnamese "violin", which has only one string, otherwise quite similar to the violin in concept, but the sound it makes is sooo wonderful, that young girls were forbidden to listen to it in order to prevent falling in love with the musician. We could have spent more time in this miraculous place, where Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Hoi An-ese cultures used to live next to each other in peace, but decided to continue our stroll down the coast of the South Chinese Sea.

By the way, today we learned that Viet Nam in Chinese means "More South", implying that Vietnam is actually the Southern part of China :)

Hue

2008-05-18T15:30:00.013+02:00

We finished our visit to Cat Ba island by taking a 5.45 am boat - kind of to punish ourselves for getting up late during a couple of last days and to catch the best light for photos in the morning. Once on the boat around 6.00 am the national anthem was played on TV. No-one though paid any attention nor bothered to stand-up - then in the middle of it a little girl stood up and switched the channel to early morning aerobics which we have seen live on the streets in Hanoi - no one protested. This is in great contrast to Thailand where even in cinemas before a movie is played everyone stands up while the anthem is being aired...

The research which we have made on finding the right travel agency for our Halong Bay trip payed off in a very handsome way. Although we ended up doing the Halong Bay and Cat Ba island trip on our own we did use the travel agent services - we bought ourselves an open bus ticket down South to Saygon. Basically, we can travel any day and stop anytime along the route. We have also decided to buy a sleeper bus since it was only marginally more expensive. We did not expect much considering our previous experiences with sleeper buses in India and with travel agents in general. The moment of truth came yesterday. We got picked up by a nice taxi to an unknown location for the departure of the bus - nice taxi's do happen...but this time a nice vehicle arrived which considering all what we have seen so far resembled more a plane than a bus - we boarded and felt almost like flying in business class. At least this time we have not gotten screwed :) Newertheless lately Rita has been slightly disappointed with my general unwillingness to bargain - in general it was my job to get the prices right but somehow I run out of steam. Since our adventure with the Cat Ba 'mafia' I have however regained my willingness and it is quite tough to take advantage of us or even get slightly more than what it should be. Hotel rooms feel now like real bargain and pineapple like it would come for free. My confidence came back and it is as easy as before. Our ususal initiati0n period has been completed, though it costed a bit more than in the previous countries...

We have arrived to Hue early in the morning, checked in, took shower and set off to discover the town. We also had an excellent breakfast (Rita nowadays already eats local breakfast - I cannot in-take additional noodles for breakfast - eating noodles or rice twice per day is the maximum I have achieved so far.) After breakfast we rented bicycles as this is our favourite mode of discovering new places.

Hue served as the political capital from 1802 to 1945, when the 13th emperor of the Nguyen dynasty surrendered to the communists, opening up the Imperial Enclosure with the Forbidden Purple City to the public. The sights in town, especially the Forbidden Purple City which in the past was reserved only for the private life of the emperor have seen greated times than today, but being listed amongst the UNESCO World Heritage Sites it is now under renovation. We did not emabark on discovering the Demilitarized Zone which served as the dividing line between South and North Vietnam during the last war, nor the Royal Tombs, which can be visited in the frame of organized trips, instead visited the Thien Mu Pagoda which was quite different from what we have seen in any other country we have visited so far. Chinese seem to have much more influence here so the pagodas here have 'courtyards' which you have to cross before you get to the most important place.

Hue during our visit was preparing for celebrating the The fifth United Nations Day of Vesak - a Buddhist festival - both locals and foreigners see it as a prove that religious freedom is being restored in Vietnam. Before I guess communism was the official religion - I think earlier religions had to be banned because communism is as vague as a religion - you just have to believe in it since you will never see any benefit of it during your mortal life :) Anyway in the evening we saw a huge parade of portable shrines - something a bit similiar to Songkran celebrations in Thailand but without splashing the water.

Halong Bay

2008-05-17T10:51:00.006+02:00

After a Sherlock Holmes like investigation to find THE Sinh Cafe - which mushroomed to an incredible number of copy-cats after being mentioned by Lonely Planet as the most reliable travel agent, we took a bus to discover Halong Bay on the 15th of May without the "help" of a travel agent.

Taking a bus to Halong city from Hanoi is not a big deal and if you arrive before noon you have a good chance to hop on one of the thousands tourits boats for a tour around the bay or to Cat Ba Island. Of course we did not arrive before 2 pm, so we could choose between a private boat trip for 1 million VND and upwards, or spend a night in Halong city, which is described by our guide as an option to avoid. We did not have to consider the first option and the second was not so bad after all; it is an oversupplied tourist town for the local crowds with an OK beach and overpriced restaurants - which is not much different from the establishments we found later on Cat Ba Island. Hence the following day we took a toursit boat for less than half the price the agents started selling it (do not fall for the compulsory insurance without which you are not allowed to enter the boat, nor the tax or the Red Little Riding Hood they will come up next to lure you into further expenses). The bay is truly wondeful; as if God played dice with rocks and threw hunreds of islands to the sea, which accidentally landed on their sides (most of them are greater in height than latitude).

Arriving to the island we soon understood that we are the only ones making the effort on our own putting ourselves into a not too favourable negotiation poition with the local bus and motorbike maffia. I will waste some of my thoughts on this very educative event in order to possibly save fellow travellers from similar excercises: as an individual traveller your first option is to agree with the tour group to give you a lift to the city still on the boat (matter of fact 18 km from the harbor, but you will hear everything up to 60 km if you listen to the local mob). Your second option is to take the local bus, which is the cheapest and most reasonable solution unless you let yourself bullied and not allowed to enter the public bus by the same mob. You third option is really miserable - get a lift on a scooter or a minibus for double the price of the roughly 300 km return trip between Hanoi and Halong city. Well, you can imagine that our two men little commando voted for the most extreme action after being forcefully deprived from all options and followed by the scooter drivers to threaten all possible by-passers willing to give us a lift for less than their price when we walked out on them. Our solution was far from elegant, but served all of us right: I stopped the last passing minibus, agreed their outrageous price, declined to pay them in advance and upon arrival Tomek told them we were not paying unless they call the police to clear things up. He also took photos of the driver and the bus which flipped them out so much thet they would have rather left without any payment then get into further trouble. We collected a pretty audiance and interpreters for the scene...at some point it looked like they will pay us to get lost and not make any more trouble with police. At the end we payed them some money just to clear things up which they were reluctant to take :)

We spent the following day in perfectly opposite mood - on the remote and peaceful Cat Co 2 beach, which was apparently our "private" beach for the whole day, reading, swimming and chilling the whole day. However attractive would have been to stay one more day for a trek in the national park, we decided to leave and spare time for other parts of Vietnam.

Though we are still in the awakening stage to get a grip on the magnitude of the phenomena of cheating and lying in every single possible interaction. Hard to swallow, but probably one should just think beyond the worst intention whenever someone approaches you. For instance it is quite possible that a bus pushes another off the road and then the driver threatens the passengers with a hammer to disembark and get on his bus. This is not science-fiction, it happened today on our way back to Hanoi! Fortunately we were on the bigger bus.

Hanoi

2008-05-13T12:07:00.009+02:00

It was precisely 24 hours sitting on a bus from Laos to Hanoi in Vietnam which made my bum hurt so much, that I am not willing to torture myself in a similar fashion in the closest future. Arriving 5.30 am to a suburban bus station in Hanoi after all does not seem to be the best apetizer to fall in love with the place; 20 motorbike riders and twice as many taxi drivers were more than willing to give us a ride for 10 USD, which was quite a contrast to the peace we enjoyed in Laos an more or less also in Thailand. Our Indian experiences flashed back and made us wake up which was enhanced by a morning rain, too. Miraculously I found the way to the center with a local bus (lately my greatest achievement according to Tomek, but not too flattering). Though we could have enjoyed Hanoi waking up with the street sellers and the group of ladies excercising on the lake side, but our wearyness made us crawl into bed after a shower (these showers after a 20 plus hours travelling are revelative experiences; even the filthiest bathroom makes you feel like in heaven, especially if you know that a clean bed is waiting for you. :)

So after a good 6 hours sleep and a bit of a jet leg we walked around the Old Town and soon found out, that the thing here is more the charm than a great historical or cultural heritage. Unless you get a kick from the Uncle Ho and communist stuff, which is plenty and is not especially our cup of tea. Though it is fascinating to see a place which is happily communist in its ideology and bureaucracy and seemingly comletely capitalist in its economy. There are a few things to visit though, like the Hoan Kiem Lake with a small island and the Ngoc Son Temple on it. You will find a lot of veteran Vietnamese men playing games under the pagoda's shelter, which appears to be quite an exciting competition supported by an audiance giving constant advices for the two players and big aplauses for a good move. Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature is a bit prettier attcation, even if more so due to its historical importance, being the fist royal university in Vietnam from as early as 1070, than its actual shape. However, the Vietnamese Communist Party declares itself open for religion, the shape in which you find temples seem to prove quite the opposite. To be on the fair side I should mention that the French and Americans probably took their part in destroying a lot of Vietnam's architecture during the unnumerable wars this country suffered from. On the contraty the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex is in its full grace and tip top shape with similarly endless que as in front of the Lenin mummy in Moscow. For some strange reason the museum closes at 11 am and we never made it there so eary in the morning :))), so I can narrate only about the exterior, which is competing with the Red Square (but this is grey).

For a change we enrolled to an organized one day trip to the Perfume Pagoda outside Hanoi just to make sure we will not do it again; we started to feel outcasts already on the bus among very neatly dressed senior tourists from the part of the globe, where paying five times the normal price goes without notice. Though the landscape was beautiful with a lovely boatride and a 1 hour climb to the cave, which used to be the center temple of Buddhism in Vietnam, it was more of a disappointment. The trek was full of trash with sellers offering all the same shameful plastic kitch and you'd better be on the watch if you do not want to enter into a bargaining about how much you should tip on top of the "tourist" price.

But not to sound so grim I should mention also the fun part: we treated ourselves with a performance in the Water Puppet Theatre, which is a traditional music and puppet show just on the lakeside, really nice! But the biggest fun for us in Hanoi was roaming the streets on foot or on a bicycle, which is a guarantee to get lost and drifted by the river of traffic made of a constant flow of scooters and bicycles. For culinary delights we had two inspiring experiences: Highway 4, which is famous of its choice of traditional spirits made of all sorts of things alive and its menu listing similarly incredulous specimens, just to mention a few: cricket salad, crocodile filet and smoked dog meat. KOTO is another favorite, being extreme on the other side of the scale: it is not only a gorgeous restaurant and bar, but a fascinating concept how to create future for street kids with an immediate evidence, that it works. Check it out!

Phonsavan

2008-05-11T15:38:00.012+02:00

Our last destination in Laos was Phonsavan - it is a less touristy place which proved to be intersting for a couple of reasons. In order to get to Phonsavan we had to take our usual share of pain - a long bus ride through the mountains. We got however upset right at the beginning of the trip. We had the pleasure to be on the bus station together with some locals taking a small pig for a bus ride. This as such is ok with me but not that the little big was put into a sack without any opening for air whatsoever - it was squeeking like hell - definitely suffering. See the picture of the sack in our gallery. This is not the first time we have seen bad treatment of animals in this country. The most shocking sight was a truck full of dogs in cages on the top of each other. The truck was the size of huge European truck and had hundreds of dogs in cages frying in the sun - we were so shocked we even did not take any pictures...Barking was overwhelming...

Anyway we got to Phonsavan - a relatively grim town with a couple of small restaurants and one that catered to expats that live there (as we learned later). There was however a decent choice of hotels. The town itself is around 1500 meters above the sea so it was really chilly in the evening - probably around 20 degrees celcius but we felt cold when dinning outside :)

The reason while we came to Phonsovan were mysterious fields of huge jars in the surrounding area. At first we thought that we will rent a motorbike and look around ourselves (even found a Hungarian speaking owner of a rental shop!) but we ended up in a small organized tour...

The most interesting part of our visit however was the "enlightment" to which we were subjected. First of all during Vietnam war between 1964 and 1973 US dropped over two million tons of bombs over Laos and most of them are still laying around - the so called unexploded ordnance (UXO). Basically it is dangerous to walk anywhere outside an offbeaten track. Moreover, people in villages do not dare to use more fields for their crops because they find more and more bombs which explode and injur or kill them. The most shocking fact is however, that more or less nobody is doing anything about it. There is a British organization called Mines Advisory Group which is doing a great job clearing UXO since 1994 (why only since then?) which is sponsored by European Union and a couple of other governmental organizations from around the world. However, its operations seem pretty limited. We watched a movie about their work in Laos and learned lots about the current situation with UXO in Laos in their office in Phonsovan. Why is UN, US or anybody else who has serious resources or is able to mobilize such is doing close to nothing about UXO in Laos remains a mystery to us. Or perhaps it is incredible that Lao government is doing so little about it - in the end it is their business...

Anyway, three sites which contain dozens of huge jars have been cleared by MAG and are now open to tourism. UN is working with the local authorities on making the sites certified as UNESCO World Heritage and progress is visible. In the whole area there are around 20 sites with jars and they all need to be cleared of UXO and then can be put on UNESCO World Heritage list making them a magnet for tourists and uplifing the local economy which is in dire straits. It was very uplifiting to see such initiatives and talk to people directly involved in working on the project.

The jars themselves are huge - up to a couple of tons and nobody really knows what was their purpose. They lay scattered in the fields - a couple with huge lids. Among them huge craters from exploded bombs and around beatiful greenery of Lao fields.

Luang Prabang

2008-05-09T15:46:00.010+02:00

After yet another long and windy bus ride we arrived to Luang Prabang, the former royal capital. This is where the Mekong meets the Nam Khan river forming a nice, long peninsula, the home of the so called temple district and the center of tourist attractions. I could also say the old town is like an open museum full of ancient Buddhist temples, French colonial villas, local handicraft market and street food stalls, a complete mix of what you can wish to see together. After our first day stroll across the tiny streets of the old town zig-zagging from one beautiful temple to the other what stroke us most was the silence; despite of many tourists, typical laid-back Lao everyday life and hundreds of monks and novices in the temples, the place is sooo charmingly peaceful as none of our previous destinations alike - if anything like such is possible at all. It took us by hand and slowly, comfortably let us sink ourselves in to its live and stay one day longer than intended.

We missed the Royal Palace Museum unfortunately - Tuesday is the only day of the week when its is closed, guess when did we want to pay our visit? - but it definitely looks something you should see if you are around. Phu Si is a landmark in Luang Prabang, the stupa and small temple on top of a 100 m high hill in the middle of the old town, which I think is mostly beautiful due to the view you gain over the city if you make the walk, and the walk itself through a foresty park full of strange colorful bugs and smelly frangipany flowers (we saw also Buddha's footprint there). But the most unique theme in is observing the life of monks and novices - as it is an integrated part of the daily city life starting at 5.30 am with the silent walk of monks collecting alms every day till sitting through the chanting ceremonies in one of the numerous temples around.

The third day we took a deep breath and hired a tuk-tuk to visit the Pak Ou Caves 25 km out of town, with some suspicion after witnessing other tourists attempts to make their way through the lengthy bargaining process from irrationally high prices just to learn on the way that the driver took it as a one way price... Though we were prepared for the unexpected, I have to admit our driver exceeded my imagination: first he took 50% of the price for petrol, then we found ourselves in a village where we did not intend to go and shortly being stopped on the roadside for a lengthy conversation in Lao with another driver. It cleared only quite some time later what really was cooking, but the immediate outcome was an attempt to take us to a different cave pretending that there was a misunderstanding about the destination. When we stopped the third time and our driver sat next to a checkpoint looking hut without saying anything I learned that our vehicle is not allowed to drive outside the city limits. It might have all been possible to sort out if our driver would have not considered that the half price we already paid for a trip which never got even close to its destination is not to be returned. Now I am not going to describe in such detail what happenings followed, only the conclusion: never loose your coolness, forget about time do not panic and it will all sort itself out. After an hour or so we were riding to our destination - I guess it was a calculated risk or rip off attempt we did not buy and there was no other choice on either side. Anyway, I do not recommend this ride on a tuk-tuk, there is a reason why these hardly vehicle-like creatures must not ride on dirt roads... I think instead of 1,5 hours which was the original quote it was around 4 hours excursion including a river crossing to enter the caves and getting acquainted with the local kids, who were selling small birds for your improved karma and luck. Maybe we have seen enough caves to be too fascinated by these ones in particular, but it is a nice trip, especially if one can avoid the tuk-tuk drivers. Before I forget to mention, when we returned to the city he did not miss the opportunity to ask us to pay more than the agreed price. I wonder and wonder what is on their minds, but about this some time later. By the way Tomek developed a general allergy to tuk-tuk's since we always end up in some trouble and the guys notoriously lie.

Vang Vieng

2008-05-06T13:23:00.000+02:00

Our following destination on our way to the north of Laos was Vang Vieng. As usual we took a bus (just 4 hours ride) since there is no other way unless you hire a car or rent a motorbike and return it in the same place you took it - kind of nonsense if you want to proceed in certain direction.

The good thing about our journey to Vang Vieng was that we went through the "BACI" ritual on our last day in Tham Kong Lo homestay. Lao people believe that everyone has 32 spirits. Sometimes one or couple of our souls may wonder away and that is pretty bad. Therefore the ceremony makes sure that all of them come back to you. So we are back to our state of 32 spirits and ready for more travelling...

Anyway the atmoshpere Vang Vieng can be best described by the picture of Rita in the hammock with the cat - very easy going. For some reason cats nowadays adore Rita and this one took special pleasure in letting himself be petted.

Vang Vieng is sort of an intersting phenomena of the ubiquitos globalization in sort of wierd way. It is located amid greenery of the surrounding beatiful hills and right by the Nam Song river. Beautiful setting for relaxation one could say - some years ago though the town has been discovered by tourists - mostly backpackers. By now the town is a neverending stretch of restaurants, bars, interent cafes, tourist agents, late night discos etc. A very artifical creature in itself feeding itself on neverending stream of tourists. Whether it has anything to do with Laos is questionable. It has been created entirely for the tourists who would like to get similiar experience as at home while eating pizza and drinking beer - just cheaper. It has indeed helped the local economy but it is wierd - imagine that there are about 80 guesthouses in what really used to be a small village...Now everyone sells banana pancakes.

Nevertheless, the scenery is great and as usual it is up to you what you make of it. We rented bicycles and went to a blue lagoon near a big cave where we had lunch. The way to the cave was an ordeal because the sun was frying us, but during lunch a short lived storm arrived and our way back was very pleasant. We missed the tubing on the river due to our late morning wake up. We usually make it before 9am to breakfast but that day we did not.

In Vang Vieng Rita found us another great accomodation in a little bungalow right next to the river. Though again we had the pleasure to get scared to death during yet another powerful night storm - a bit freaky especially considering the typhoon in Myanmar...Hope it gets better there since we have already got both the visas and the plane tickets.

In the evening we decided to enjoy a little cake and watch one of the blockbusters on a big screen in one of the cafes - Vantage Point. I got more hooked up since it was all action and I do not go to the cinema too often nowadays but somehow got dissapointed in the end. Rita was really bored - to the point that she sipped my beer (and she hates beer).

All in all we spend two days in this civilization made especially for tourists and boarded yet another bus to Luang Prabang.

Tham Kong Lo

2008-05-04T15:06:00.005+02:00

While waiting for our Myanmar visa we endeavoured on a little trip South from Vientiane, to visit the cave in Tham Kong Lo. To be more precise it is a river disappearing in a monolithic limestone mountain creating a 7 km pitch dark cave, which you can cross on a boat. Honestly, when Tomek came up with this idea I was not full of enthusiasm, as a black hole is not a most attractive thing I can imagine, especially if you ought to spend a couple of hours in it. But since this is supposed to be one of the natural wonders of Laos I gave in hoping if nothing else but for personal development...

We took an early morning bus from Vientiane to Ban Khoun Kham, a good 6 hours shaker on a local bus accompanied by live stock chicken, a couple of sacks of rice and a bus driver, who thought himself to be also a DJ entertaining the full bus with Thai pop music on maximum volume. At Ban Khoun Kham we figured that we do not have to test our fresh motorbiking skills across rice fields, because the road has been built to Tham Kong Lo. So we took another local bus, which was apparently a pickup and we were seated on its back with gallons of petrol in plastic barrels, 50 kg rice sacks and some Laotians. Within 3-4 hours we arrived to our destination where we headed to look for accommodation before the sun would disappear. It was not long before we understood that the only option we have is to stay at one of the local homes, which institution is called Home Stay, including a mattress to sleep in their home, breakfast and dinner. Luckily we found one where we had our own room and enjoyed the hospitality of a 3 generation Lao family without a single person in the nearby speaking even a word of English nor anyother tourists.

Next morning we walked to the riverside, where the Boat Committee had its' headquarters, a dozen of boatmen sleeping on benches, but in a strong cartel with regards to the price - which seems to be the case all over Laos; that is all about communism so far :) So we got our two men with headlights and a wooden arch and a long tail engine entering the mouth of the cave. Soon I realized that my personal development has begun, because within 1 minute we were totally cut from daylight in a 20 something meter high, 10 meter wide cave, in a shaky arch. But actually not long after my eyes got accustomed to the new light, or rather dark conditions and could start relaxing and enjoying the view provided by the torchlight of our boatmen. Not yet being in the wet season the water level inside the cave dropped so much that 4-5 times we had to get out and walk in the water while our boatmen earned their hefty fee, which in light of the harsh working conditions did not seem so much expensive. After a good hour we saw the sunlight again at the other end of the cave for a half an hour break when we understood that we shall make our way back through the cave. It turned out to be a good half day program including a walk inside the cave to a "gallery" of stunning stalactites, which meant that the only bus back to Ban Khoun Kham was gone for that day and we are to spend another night with our hosts. Well, it is not only hearsay, you really have to take it easy in Laos; time is very cheap over here and there is plenty of it. So we decided to enjoy the rest of the day getting acquainted with the local restaurant-grocery-petrol station-garage-in-one and its customers and returned to Vientiane with a similarly bumpy and lengthy multiple bus and pick-up ride. Good that these guys are so practical that they build their houses on stork legs a good 2 meters above the ground, otherwise we would have been seriously terrified, not only scared out of our whits that the night storm will wash us out from our bed.

By the evening we were fully set for glass of red wine and fettuchini with pesto, blue cheese and walnuts to celebrate the Labor Day, which is actually only a cover story for humankind to commemorate my birthday.

Vientiane

2008-05-03T14:00:00.000+02:00

Our last stretch from Sukhothai to Laos went suprisingly smoothly. We were prepared for yet another nightmare the sort we had when crossing from India to Nepal. Nothing like that materialized. Though we had to take a night bus and change twice, everything went smoothly and by early afternoon we arrived to the capital of Laos - Vientiane. We read that it is a very laid back place and indeed it is. It does not feel even like a capital - there are not too many cars on the streets and generally there is no rush whatsoever. The best thing though about the place is the French legacy - with it the possibility to eat baguettes and all sorts of nice cakes - I might not be a person that especially needs bread or sweets but after 4 months of basically not eating anything except rice and occassionally bad toasts, real bread tasted awesome. You do not even need to go to a fancy restaurant to buy it - it is sold everywhere on the streets. For me it is definitely the highlight of the place :)

Otherwise, the center of Vientiane can be criss-crossed within one hour by foot. It is really cosy in that sense. It is clean and with very few cars it has this unique communist feel - empty streets and from outside everything looking good. Anyway it is a very light version of communism as private enterprises are everywhere and doing well.

We have rented bicycles and went outside the center to look for additional adventures but honestly we have not found them. Somehow everything seems to work - we could even get information about buses in English at a remote bus station...

One other very nice thing about the Vientiane is the stretch of "restaurants" that are being set up every evening along Mekong. We had some local specialties there but failed to order (to Rita's despair) a soup which you cook on your own table in a little clay pot. We will still try though.

As to the phenomena of white guys having local girlfriends - it seems that it is as big as in Thailand. Honestly, it is amazing as it seems that half of the guys coming here end up with local girls. Somehow it does not work the other way round...

Our next stop is in a middle of nowhere - no road leads there and you need to take a 3 hour local boat to get there :)

Sukhothai

2008-05-02T13:43:00.003+02:00

Before saying so long to Thailand we stopped for an overnight in Sukhothai to visit the Historical Park. With another straining, long and hot bus ride we arrived on the 23rd of April and just had time for an evening stroll in the so called New Sukhothai, where we took a room. The highlight of the evening was a questionnaire we were asked to answer on the street by a local English teacher about tourists opinion of Thailand. As usual Poland was understood as Holland and as Eastern Europeans - probably a statistically underrepresented proportion of tourists - we shocked the interviewer by describing Thailand as modern and developed... The other highlight was two very promising herbal licquores we tasted in a lovely restaurant with the power to enhance respective manly and womenly qualities, but it was so strong and bitter that it made us forget to follow up if the effect worked or not.

The Sukhothai Historical Park is a good half an hour drive from the new city, which we covered with a local bus, more precisely a half motorbike which has been transformed into a pickup in the rear with seats on benches for the passengers. Some less advanced forms have the driver behind the passengers, but something had to be done with the rear parts of the motorbikes I guess :)
Anyway, it serves the purpose and we made it to the park, where we rented two bicycles and rode around the park. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, covering a wast land scattered with over 40 ruins from the 13th to the 15th century, when it was the capital of the Sukhothai kingdom, part of the Khmer empire. We were riding so much that I mastered my long desired dream to be able to let the steering go with both hands - which is a hilarious feeling and I am very happy for myself - but it did not serve us as much to cover roughly half the ruins. Though we saw all sorts of Buddha representations from calling the rain, meditating to laying, my favorite was the one on the photo with a hand bigger than twice my height, golden fingernails and sealed in a tiny temple with an opening to the sky.

We killed time till our night bus finally arrived at 1 o'clock at night and darted to Laos.

Book review - Q1/2008

2008-04-24T13:21:00.006+02:00

In addition to traveling our trip gives us an opportunity to read a bit more than when we were working for the sake of shareholders of our previous employer (and the sake of our trip of course :)) I am not exactly sure how it happens because both activities are almost equally time consuming.

Anyway - below you can find a short review of books we have read (this list could have consisted of only books by Haruki Murakami if it wasn't for the fact that we had read all of them before our trip).

1. Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth - was the first book we read. Somehow to get in the mood of India as it was our first destination. Initially we had mixed feelings about his views and deeds especially what concerned his family (and medical issues) but overall with time our reverence for him grew. His non-violence philosophy might seem totally out of place in todays world but yet he managed to unite such a big and diverse nation as India. Very interesting read - also about history of Indians in South Africa and their role in the British Empire.

2. Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton - an interesting book for anyone feeling that they need to change their house or car for a bigger model to match his neighbor. In fact the book goes through history and is thought provoking. The carving for more, fear of losing out is being treated in a philosophical way but in the end not telling you to retreat to an ashram for the rest of your life :)

3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - an entertaining book but somehow had too many reoccurring themes from the book I read before which I really liked - The World According to Garp. If I were to choose between the two I would recommend the latter one. I do not want to be judgmental but the former book was kind of too religious for me and I got an impression that Irving suffers from kind of similar syndrome as Milan Kundera. Once you have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being it seemed to me all the rest of his books hit the same tone. This is not what I like.

4. Mr.Nice by Howard Marks - quick reading written by a guy who smuggled tons of marijuana around the world and enjoyed it since his time at Oxford University. I read the book in Nepal during our trekking and it was just the book I needed. It seems everything is possible in this world.

5. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh - the novel I liked the most so far. It is great for better understanding the local perspective. As far as it is possible since the author has also now been living in the western countries for some time. Nevertheless, it is a great novel about Burma and about Indian's and their quest for independence. A complementary book to Gandhi's autobiography as it expands on the Indian's role in British conquest. Burma as described in the book fascinated as so much that after all we decided to buy ourselves plane tickets to fly in there. We missed Tibet but we will be in what is called in Myanmar for two weeks in June (we have the tickets but no visa - we hope in won't be a problem though).

The last book I have just finished is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - the book read a bit like Lonely Planet but for space travelling. A bit confusing but overall full of fresh ideas. I liked it much more that the movie I have seen some time ago. I sincerely hope that I can buy the next edition of the guide and our next travelling will take us to some other planets instead of only continents on the same planet.

Rita read some additional books which I have read before our trip.

7. We the Living by Ayn Rand - my favorite book by this author treating about Russia and the October revolution there. The way it has been written somehow is close to the way I feel about the whole thing...feel free to guess. The best part of the book is that all characters have their weak and strong points and it is impossible to pass a judgement on anyone. Somehow I really like this book - for Rita the book was very depressing...she liked the ones listed below much more. I think they are not comparable. Good read not so old times in Russia.

8. The Fountainhead by Any Rand - the author of the book did not especially have warm feelings about communism. "We the Living" was partially autobiographical and I guess served as the basis for her own philosophy of objectivism. Without knowing her past I guess it is difficult to understand how did she end up with developing such philosophical direction. I enjoyed the very long book, the characters and her way of mixing philosophy in a novel. I also like the fact that it dealt with architecture.

9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - hits the same tone as "The fountainhead" just the industry and the main characters are different. Good read though again - I do not like when authors fall into the trap of certain way of writing and cannot come up with anything refreshing. On the other hand one can say that they develop a style which otherwise they would lack.

Rita loved both books in the end and I think I did too. It is just that I had to point out what bothered me.

Ok - that would be about it - I am on my way to find a new book - we are waiting for recommendations, please! Something about South East Asia by local authors would be great but any other suggestions for a good read will be appreciated.