Letter 4

Through shortage of materials progress on the campervan was slow. There were lots of small items we didn’t think we’d have difficulty in finding in Poland but not being able to find them has held us up. Even little things like screws were in short supply.

One day I tried on someone else's glasses and I found that reading was much easier so off we went to the opticians to order a pair. The eye test was rather primitive, or at least I think it was, bearing in mind that I've never been tested for spectacles before. They put these glasses on me with frames which were open at the top and then inserted different glass eyepieces and asked me if I could read a piece of paper which they thrust into my hand. I failed miserably but then they realized that I couldn’t speak Polish and they had me sit in a chair and do an eye test in baby language. I needed plus one ones, glasses, that is, and I picked them up two days later. They cost two dollars and seem perfectly all right to me.

Knowing that we’d need visas for the other communist countries we'll be traveling through, we took ourselves off to the city one morning and spent time knocking on the doors of the consulates. Jugoslavia was pretty good apart from the fact that the door was locked and there wasn't a sign to tell you how to communicate with the people inside. Eventually though, someone came along who had a key to the door and we followed him in. We only had to wait an hour (we were the only people in there) and we walked out with our visas.

Czechoslovakia was a little long-winded. The first time we applied, they said that they couldn't give us a visa unless we presented our car papers, so we had to go away and come back again. The application forms were in Czech, German, Russian and English only. So, Poles who don't speak any of these foreign languages have a bit of a job applying. I thought it was utterly stupid not to have forms in Polish given that 90% of the people who would be applying for a visa in Warsaw would be Polish. There was not even an office at which people could apply for Czech visas. It was all done on the outside stairs of the consulate building with the odd Czech office worker putting in an appearance now and again. You filled out your form and just waited. It took 6 hours.

At the Hungarian consulate which was crappy, but by Polish standards quite nice, it was a different story altogether. They had a room, with a roof and windows and everything. There were two coffee tables, eight seats, two pairs of scissors and two bottles of glue. There was a window with the curtain closed and a sign pinned to the curtain in three languages. The English version said "PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK, IT IS VERY DISTURBING". I looked all around the room for the concealed video camera, which enabled the staff to see the people in the waiting room but to no avail. No one way mirrors, no paintings on the wall with moving eyes, no trained barking animals etc. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. No means of communication with the people on the other side of the window was possible. The lazy good for nothing sods just opened the curtain when they felt like it. What were the scissors and glue for? So that you could cut up and stick your own photographs on your application form. They required three photographs. The Yugoslavians didn’t require any!

The Bulgarian Consulate probably won the prize. The application form wanted you to name every person you knew in Bulgaria and all sorts of totally irrelevant rubbish. When we arrived, the place was open but nobody was in. At least, nobody was sitting at the window and some people had been waiting there for two hours. I banged on the window with my car keys, flicked coins up in the air so that they landed with a resounding ding on the table inside the window and I also whistled God Save the Queen but nothing worked. We waited about an hour until a Russian guy came along and read a little notice for us. It was a tiny notice measuring about 3 inches square and it was taped to the door. It said that it was some sort of Bulgarian national holiday (a very rare event a Bulgarian national holiday believe you me) and that they wouldn't be working. Only thing was, this notice was in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Now, the Cyrillic alphabet is not the alphabet of Poland any more than it is that of Australia so why? I just couldn’t understand why. Anyway, to cut a long story short, this guy arrived wearing the poorest quality wig you've ever seen (looked like Armadillo fur) and after a lot of arguing with the locals and a few of his fellow office workers he took care of us. He said that it would take at least a fortnight to get a tourist visa. I said that we were going to travel around his country and spend some money there so couldn’t the visa issuing process be speeded up because we would have to spend two extra weeks in Poland just waiting to set off for Bulgaria. He asked if we would be spending American dollars in Bulgaria. “Yes” I said “just like these” and handed him a US $10 note. He called out to someone who took our passports and came back in around five minutes with visas stamped in them.

And now a word about Polish manufactured products. SHIT

Fitting out our campervan in Poland was a frustrating exercise. Polish metal drill bits are no match for the German steel, which the van is made of, and even when they’re brand new they go blunt before the hole is drilled. Right-angled brackets vary from 85 degrees to about 100. An average packet of fifty screws contains the following: 4 with no threads, 9 with no screw slots, 10 with so little thread that you might as well use them as nails, 6 which twist in half as you use them, 8 with the slot off center and 10 with the slots barely visible. As you paint with Polish paintbrushes (assuming that you are lucky enough to have found paint) the hairs just fall out wholesale. I thought I’d chosen a particularly bad combination of brushes and paint and I mentioned it whilst in friends place one night. He showed me around his apartment and everything he’d painted had hairs all through it.

Rivets are of such poor quality that they simply don't work, some of them fit in the riveter and some don't and the pins pull through the majority of them. Rivets are in fact, so bad that I just can't see the point in continuing to manufacture them.

I bought two battery terminals for the van and asked an electrician to install them but he said that their life expectancy is only six months and I should hunt around for some Western ones. We bought a glass teapot that lasted one day before the hot water got the better of it and it cracked. The teaspoons burn your fingers if you leave them in the hot tea because they are made of some highly conductive cheap alloy material. The best Polish product we've seen so far is the glue used to fasten the price stickers onto things. You don't have to break your fingernails to remove the labels because they just fall off. I could go on and on, in fact I have a bit haven't I ? Anyway to generalize, one buys a product and repairs it prior to using it.

By far the biggest problem is finding things in shops, anything. Two or three visits to a hardware store in Australia would have fixed us up with everything we needed to convert the van into a camper but here we have had to visit at least fifty shops and then make do with what we could get. The van looks like the inside of a Russian tank. The cupboards are built out of that brown, fibrous electrical insulation material that printed circuits are printed on and you find on the inside of transistor radios. Spartan and industrial are the two words that spring to mind every time I walk into it. I can imagine spies sitting in a space like this listening to secret radio broadcasts. The only suitable plastic containers we could find for carrying odds and ends like scissors were thermos flasks with the insides removed and we have a row of them lined up behind the sink looking like artillery shells.

Last week we were introduced to a couple who got divorced three years ago so that they could go on living together in the same flat. They’d had an interrogatory visit from the housing authority who found that the flat that they were occupying was too large for a married couple without kids. Two single people with two beds and two televisions etc. however, are entitled to more room so they got divorced in order to continue their married existence in the same apartment. And today I met an American at a bus stop and one of the first things he said to me was "listen man, I been comin' here for the last five years and I can tell yah that as soon as yah start appplyin' any logic to any of this shit you'll go nuts. Yah just let it happen around yah". How profound these American chaps are I thought.

Listen, did you ever think about Pigeons? I mean… whether it hurts them when they take off? See, we were walking around this castle place the other day and I heard this flapping noise and I knew what it was straight away, it was a pigeon taking off. They always make this flapping noise. We needed a cup of coffee and I thought we may as well disappoint ourselves right there and then so we sat down and ordered at the castle above ground dungeon style coffee shop. We chose a rickety table near a window because the holes in the table-cloths looked fresher than the rest and the window was a little less dirty in that spot. Outside there was a rusting balustrade with half a dozen pigeons lined up on it. Have you ever noticed that before they take off, pigeons sort of take a little dip, defecate, raise themselves up again and then launch themselves? Well, they do.
Anyway, I studied them quite closely as they took off. They all beat their wings together under their breasts which caused the flapping noise I wrote about around eight lines ago. It must hurt I should think, and it might have something to do with how pigeon breasts are so nice and tender when you eat them. But other birds don't do it do they? Swans make that kind of whippy-whistly-swishy noise as they take off but no other bird beats the shit out of itself every time it gets airborne. I reckon it's another one of Gods little cock ups like Platypuses which have to shut their eyes when they go under water to look for food.

I saw a great opportunity for a photograph the other day but I didn't have the camera with me. We were in a market place here in Warsaw and in the middle was this great big shed and when I looked into it there were these three big fat ladies. They had wrinkles on their faces like satellite photographs of the Grand Canyon and they were plucking chickens. In the foreground was this great pyramid of dead undernourished chickens with their necks lolling about like limp penises and the three ladies had feathers nearly up to their knees. There was a hole in the wall through which the sun illuminated the down flying around in the shed’s atmosphere and it looked just great.

The market was one of the most interesting places in Warsaw. I saw a brand new Russian microwave oven selling for thirty five dollars, still in the unopened box. I also saw a sub machine gun which the seller said was Russian but when he told me the make and model I’d never heard of it. All I know is that it didn’t sound like Kalashnikov. I’ve no idea why the guy showed it to me but I was looking at his stall which had painted pencil cases and ornamental, pearl handled penknives on it. I inclined my head towards the knives and he looked at me and, still looking me in the eye, pulled back a piece of rag and the gun was under it. I thanked him very much, nodded knowingly and turned to look at the heroically proportioned ladies bras on the stall next door. The market was the only place where you could get fresh vegetables that didn’t look as though they’d been stored for ages; these were grown by individuals who had gardens. Apart from the stallholders, there was a line of sad faced individuals, I suppose around eighty of them, just selling one object each, maybe a Western leather jacket or a car radio, a tire or an electric carving knife.

Poles have become somewhat unpopular with neighboring, Eastern Bloc, countries over the years because of the amount of independent trading and smuggling which they engage in. Some countries claim they’re becoming inundated with screaming hordes of Poles every weekend with cars full of goods to sell and so the authorities in those countries are trying to make things difficult for them. A friend told us that on the way back from a trip to Czechoslovakia last week, the Czech customs officers kept her for 4 hours while they went through her single suitcase. They were very unpleasant about her having two tubes of Czech toothpaste in her possession and she ended up having to leave them behind. I’ve been trying to imagine the length of the queues at the borders if they are spending that amount of time with some people. I can see we’re going to need some sort of in-van entertainment so we can while away the hours at border posts in comfort. I might get myself another inflatable woman. The last one went down on me. Inflatable women are safe you see, not like the locals. I went to bed with a Pole last night – I got terrible splinters!

Over the last couple of weeks Poland has been in the grip of election fever - if you can call a few badly printed posters election fever. This election could be the biggest thing ever to have hit the communist world and the eyes of the world are upon the outcome. Not having had a democratic election in modern history the Poles are learning electioneering for the first time and although you have to start somewhere, I'm beginning to wonder if they'll ever get the hang of it. Solidarity's effort seems to be concentrated on small posters picturing Lech Walensa with each Solidarity candidate. They were all taken in the same room with Lech baby sitting in exactly the same position and with the same, inane half smile on his shiny little peasant-like face. It must either have been a marathon photo session for him or the pictures are all photographs of a photograph of him with each candidate. Either way any old ladies cake stand in Australia could out-advertise Solidarity.

The government effort from a Western point of view is abysmal too with just the odd incredibly boring poster often with no photograph at all! They aren't yet used to the concept that image is what sells and when you see the opponents on TV they look quite shabby. The Solidarity candidates don't seem to possess a suit between them and look uncomfortable in ties. One of them I saw giving a speech this morning. He had a jacket that looked like his missus had woven it from homespun and his shirt collar was too small causing the lapels to stick out like little wings. It looked for all the world like his Adam’s apple was about to take flight and his blood red tie made it look as though his throat had been cut. Sometimes in the city you see a van with speakers on top with the occupants announcing their election promises. Trouble is, that the quality of the sound is so bad that nobody can make any sense of it all. You can see shoppers asking each other “what’s he saying”. As for the state of the vans, well, I've seen far better ones on Australian building sites covered in concrete.

You know the smell of garbage? It's that smell you get in your rubbish bin no matter what you put in it. Funny isn't it? no matter what you put in, the same smell always comes out. It’s like when I was a teenager and I used to get drunk every Saturday night. I noticed that every time I threw up there was always carrot in it even when I was sure I hadn’t even eaten carrots. I finally came to the conclusion that I’d been throwing up all over the spots where someone else, who’d eaten carrots, had already thrown up before me. That reminds me. I had this mate called Malcolm Lovell and he used to drink more than he could handle of a Saturday night and then go and eat in Chinese restaurants. As regular as clockwork he’d throw up between the restaurant and the bus stop on the way home. One Saturday night we were sitting in the bus stop barely able to make intelligible conversation and he said

“Pete?”
“Pete?”
“Pete, Pete…………pete pete peeeeete?”
“What?”
“Jew know fukin Peekin?”
“No… oose that then?”
“Sssth captil o fukin India innit eh?”
“Noissnott, Ssthcaptol of China?”
“Thas got fuckall to do wiv it, ‘as it eh?”
“Alright then, wot about it then?
“ Well….well….I got this theory”
“Oh yea wassat then?”
“I reckon on Saturday nites the pavements infukkin Pekin’re coverd in steak an kidney pies that pissed Indians ‘ave thrown up like”

“Do they have carrots on India
“Fuck knows”
Well, residential Warsaw smells of it – sorry, not steak and kidney pies thrown up by pissed Indians. No, I was sidetracked… I’m still talking about the smell of garbage being the same whatever you put in it. Actually, I don’t know whether I’ll leave that bit in the book when it’s finished so if it’s not there when you read it, don’t worry about it. On the other hand if it’s not in there..you won’t… know ….abou…….t ..it? Oh dear I think senility is slowly………

Yes, back to garbage.

I'm now working on the campervan at a lock up garage at a housing estate where they have blocks of flats and I can smell garbage all day. These blocks all have the same garbage dumping/collection point which was overflowing last week and now there is so much of the stuff that you can't even see the big bins for foul smelling food scraps and general rubbish. It's disgusting. As you walk into most blocks of flats you can smell that same smell in the entrance hall and up the stairs. The block that we're staying in has a big covered shaft with doors in it out in the hall on each floor and people empty their rubbish into it. It goes down the chute and ends up in a little room at ground level where some poor sod has to shovel it into rubbish bins. The shovelers don’t work at the same apartment block every day of the week and so it hangs around or a few days before it goes into the bins, which I might add, don’t have lids on them. It's then a further day or two before the truck comes to pick the stuff up so you can guess what the resultant stench is like. All this in twentieth century Europe!

Imagine being one of the people who has to shovel it all up. It would be like something out of a Charles Dickens novel "Oliverski A Week In The Life Of A Garbage Shoveler". I mean, what would you write in your diary each day?

Monday 6th: “Applied to the department for a crash helmet after being when struck on the head by cabbage stump from the chute while I was shoveling the potato peelings

Tuesday 7th: “I knew the people at number 37 weren’t going to keep that kitten.”

Wednesday 8th: "Number 10 have Americans staying with them, I saw the Hershey Bar wrappers"

Thursday 9th: “Thought I’d come across a stash of elastic bands but it turned out to be bacon rind”

Friday 10th: "Been on cabbage leaves all day, looking forward to the summer".

Saturday 11th "The woman at number 23 is not a natural blonde. I've seen the hair dye bottles and how come the people in number 14 can afford bananas, he's only a car mechanic"

My brother in law wants to move out of the city and live on a farm somewhere and so he advertised in the paper for one – one farm, that is…I don’t think he could afford a city. He received a number of replies. One of them was a 20-hectare place with crops and some natural forest about 70km from Warsaw. It had a house, some outbuildings, a tractor, a horse and a few other odds and ends and the price was US $5,000. Just as in other countries, people want to migrate to the cities, and farms here are cheap for this reason. I rather fancied a farm at this price and asked if it would be possible for a foreigner to buy one. Yes, was the reply but first you need to be a fully accredited, qualified farmer with papers to prove it. Oh' well, there goes another dream I thought. I was wrong, it can be arranged. I was introduced to a family friend who is a solicitor but he also wanted to be classified as a farmer so he could qualify to purchase a farm. He told me how to do it.

First he said he got himself introduced to the guy who runs the courses which people have to pass to become farmers. He paid the man a bribe of $25 and in return he received a certificate to say that he had completed the course. This, however, didn’t preclude him from having to take an oral examination about what time of year to plant cabbages, milk pigs or whatever it is that Polish farmers do when they’re not smashed out of their brains on moonshine vodka. He didn't have a clue, couldn't answer most of the questions, and he estimates that he got approximately 10% of the questions right. At the end of the examination he was told "OK we'll mail you your farming papers and from now on you can consider yourself qualified but don't try farming because you are not suited to it.”

When we bought the van in Germany it had a radio aerial on it which is made of some clever, metallic impregnated, rubber compound. I said that I didn't think that it was a very good aerial but the owner demonstrated how tough and flexible it was and challenged me to break it. It was tough too. You can bend it, stretch it, tie a knot in it, in fact do just about anything to it and it still works – it’s impossible to destroy it. Hadn't been in Poland three weeks when some rotten thief unscrewed it.

We have been seeing some Polish friends of ours who are here on vacation from Sydney and it has been great to get together in restaurants and speak English and have someone to have a moan with. Janusz, the husband, told me that he went down to the market here one morning and he saw a man in a small kiosk selling caviar. He asked the price of it and found that for what you pay in Sydney for 100 grams of caviar, you can get a whole kilogram of it here. It didn't take much thinking to work out that by taking one tin to Australia he could make $300 so he started asking a few questions about the quality and so on. The man said that if he was going to buy caviar then he should buy it from him because he knew the business. Janusz said he couldn’t see that there was much to know about the subject and that one can of caviar was the same as another if the brand was the same. He told the guy that he’d buy from whoever was the cheapest.

The guy invited Janusz into the shop and showed him two identical tins of the stuff. "Tell me the difference between the two cans" he said. Janusz swears that there was no difference whatsoever. Not only did they have the same printing on them but the same stamping in the metal lid of the can. "Right" said the caviar salesman. “We'll open the first one.” He did so and it was full of caviar. “So what” says Janusz. The guy handed Janusz the can opener and he opened the second can himself. It was full of sardines. "So", says the caviar Tzar, "you want caviar, you come to me". Can you imagine it? this guy runs his business by knowing which tin to open. I no longer continue to be surprised by these things, I hear or see them every day. The whole of the Eastern block runs on bribes, corruption, graft and just plain cheating.

In a few days time we’ll be leaving Poland to start on territory unknown to us and that’s what I’m really looking forward to. We have visas for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Jugoslavia Bulgaria and Turkey. If we go on to Syria, Jordan and the middle east we’ll have to get visas in Istanbul or trust to luck at the borders of those countries.

We read in the Polish press this week that the Romanian police stop travelers for no reason at all and take them to the police station where they ask them a load of questions for an hour or two and let them go. When the people get back to their cars, they find that all their belongings have been ripped of. Everybody knows that it’s the police who orchestrate these robberies but there’s not much anyone can do under Czeauczescu’s corrupt regime. I’m sure I’ve spelt dictator’s name incorrectly but I’ve asked everyone how to spell it and it’s a spelling by consensus.

John and Julia, some friends of ours from Melbourne, went through Bulgaria a while back and on returning to their car one day they found that the number plates were missing. There was a note in German (their car had German number plates) under the windscreen wipers to say that they were illegally parked and that they could collect their plates at the police station. To get them back they had to pay US$40 - about 3 months Bulgarian wages.

We’ve taken some of these stories on board and have taken a few extra security precautions because a Western car, and anything inside it, is a prime target for thieves in commie countries. Our friends in Poland though, think that it’s best not to turn the van into some impregnable fortress because it will annoy thieves and they’ll set fire to it. Who knows?

Anyway, anyone trying to remove our number plates is going to have to work at it because I took heed of John’s warning and went overboard with rivets bolts and screws. We now have Europe’s most secure number plates and an alarm system which drives you nuts if you try to tamper with the car. Inside is a small metal safe welded to the floor and to remove it requires an oxy acetylene torch. To get in the door they have to saw through the best quality Polish cattle tethering chain and to drive it away they first have to pick a massive Russian padlock.

Well, it’s end of chapter time now so I’m going to bed. I’m not really as happy with this chapter as I was the last one. I think it’s too disjointed but if you’re reading it I must already have your money. I don’t really know what I’m going to write about in the next chapter either. I may leave it until we’re across the border in Czechoslovakia. There are lots more stories to tell about Poland but if this book ever gets published I want to keep them for the next book. This would probably be a good point for you to turn out the bedside lamp, roll over and annoy the person next to you. See you in the next chapter.