Letter 25

Dear Masochists

Well, you're still reading it aren't you?

The local post office closes over the Bayram holidays so you'll have received this letter along with letter No 24. Yes we're still in Istanbul and loving it although we are anxious to get moving. Yesterday was "kill a sheep day" for the Muslims which means just about the whole population of this country. If you can afford to buy a sheep or two, the Koran tells you that you should take it home and kill it and give the meat to the poor people. I don't like it at all although as a meat eater I have no grounds to complain, it's just that I like to think of meat as being manufactured on an assembly line in a factory somewhere because that falls in line with the appearance of it when it's displayed in the supermarket in its polystyrene tray covered with a piece of cling wrap.

It's easy for westerners to look upon this custom as barbaric but it isn't like that at all, it's just that Muslims are a lot closer to the basics of their religion than most Christians are to theirs. They haven't modified their religion very much at all compared with us and they still adhere to most of the practices which are fundamental to their beliefs. When they buy a sheep for sacrificial slaughter like this they treat it with a very real reverence and consider the animal lucky to have been chosen to give up its life in this way. Members of the family like to touch it before it dies in the hope that some of this luck will rub off onto them. Think of all those guys in Eceabat and other small villages like it. To them, Bayram is an even bigger sacrifice. Some of them had to slit the throats of their sexual partners!

When in Rome do as the Romans do - buy a ticket to the World Cup I say. Of course we would have bought a sheep ourselves but a quick look in Fatih's cutlery box was enough to see that slaughtering a sheep with any of the implements in there would be a messy business and anyway the fitted carpet up here is the wrong colour. Then there's the problem of drainage - sheep have a lot of liquid in them. We thought about it for a long time and the only way I could see being able to do it was to bring the victim up in the lift, put it in the bath and beat it over the head with the microwave then slit its throat with the Ronson electric carving knife. We had it all worked out but at the last minute it came to mind that in this district, there aren't any poor people to give the meat to and we don't like lamb. For breakfast the next morning I went down to the local Muslim butchers and sheepishly asked if they had any bacon. He knew I wanted a pig out, said he didn't have any. Yeah' religion's a funny thing. The night before the great sheep massacre there were sheep all over Istanbul being loaded into the boots of cars and the day after, there were sheepskins hanging on fences all over the place. We were walking along the pavement that day when we nearly trod on a half open suitcase under one of those little rubbish bins which hang on bus stop poles. It was full of sheep entrails.

Istanbul is of course is a modern city in most respects, the girls dress well and the fashions don't lag behind Europe at all. But there are also the traditional closer to God women who wear headscarves all the time and for some reason unknown to me, wear gaberdine raincoats no matter how hot it is. You can see them all over the place queuing for the bus, walking around the shops, everywhere, while their husbands wear normal clothing like short sleeved shirts. Their husbands are sometimes quite trendy but these poor women must be perspiring terribly underneath all that weight of clothes during the summer.

I can't understand Orthodox Jews either. We used to live in a Jewish suburb in Melbourne and practically all the Orthodox men wore 1930's business clothing. They all had trilby hats and wore dark blue pin striped suits with waistcoats and ties, and that was in absolutely sweltering heat some days. But in their case the women all dressed quite normally. There was a synagogue at the end of our street and on religious days we would see them all pile out of their cars, the women dressed up to the nines and the men all looking like Al Capone clones with beards. Now I'm not one to knock other people’s religions but why does God want all these people to be so bloody uncomfortable, and how come it's the Jewish women but the Muslim men that are allowed to get away with it? There must have been a misprint somewhere along the line mustn't there? I could maybe go part of the way to understanding it if these traditional styles of dress were a couple of thousand years old but gaberdine raincoats and pin striped suits - I ask you. At what point did the Lord actually indicate that he wanted his flock to wear this garb? I put it at around 1933.

And The Lord Spake Unto Them Saying

"I have cast down upon the earth the material that shall be called gaberdine and the technology to make more thereof.

Makest though not sexy undergarments out of this material nor shalt thou make of it thy socks or the socks of thy husbands or thy husbands sisters husbands.

Maketh only that which is called the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat and wearest thou this garment in the sight of the Lord.

For I the Lord thy God findeth the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat to be a real turn on.

And unto the Jews, my chosen people, I give to you the blue, pin stripe, pure wool suit material and an abundance thereof

That you may make that which is called the double breasted business suit

And for the trilby hats which covereth thy heads in the sight of the Lord

Felt, I give to you and an abundance thereof

And seekest though not to get felt in any other place".

This afternoon we were sitting having a meal outside when this Arab woman walked past. I usually refer to them as letter boxes because they are covered from head to foot in black except for a white slot for their eyes. This one was different because as I saw her coming down the road, she had no slot and when she came closer we could see that it was because she was wearing a pair of dark, wrap around sun glasses. This thing just seemed to glide along the pavement with no visible means of propulsion at all because the feet were completely hidden as well. It didn't look human at all and we started giggling and couldn't stop. The waiter was laughing as well only he didn't know what he was laughing about.

There's a new wave of traders arriving in Istanbul, it's the Romanians and as far as Turkey is concerned they are replacing the Poles. They are arriving in droves and are to be found each day at the immigrants market in front of Istanbul University where they sell all sorts of cheap shoddily manufactured goods. Of course they are all poor and they've come here for a holiday but are financing their holiday by trading and their aim is to take home more money than they came with or to take home Turkish goods which are unobtainable back home to sell. The privileged few have the most basic Muskvitch cars packed to the gunwales with cut glass but to own a car in Romania you have to have a very high position or have a really good fiddle of some sort going on. The majority arrive in the most ramshackle old buses stacked with goods to sell and the buses also double as their sleeping accommodation. You see them wandering around the outside of all the places of interest, too poor to afford the entrance fee to anywhere.

This is the first time I've seen Romanians en masse and you can pick them as being from the Eastern block straight away. Firstly they are dressed in typical communist 1950s style clothes and secondly they are all grossly overweight, something we have observed in all the communist (now for the most part supposedly ex communist) countries we've visited. We see the occasional Russian tourists now too and their appearance is exactly the same. The diet, I presume is partly responsible for it but also the cult of the body hasn't hit them yet as it has with us in the west. Once the advertising industry gets into those countries, their body shapes will gradually change as they see it more desirable to be slim. Another "you heard it first" from Peter McLaren.

It was such hassle getting visas for the ex communist countries that it would put a lot of people off visiting them. They are supposed to be desperate for foreign currency from tourists but they seem to put every obstacle they can think of in the way. Jugoslavia was OK, they are never any problem but Poland took three days, Bulgaria took two four hour periods of queuing and Hungary took three days (unless we wanted to pay some exorbitant fee for same day service). We didn't bother with Czechoslovakia because we were told by their consulate that we could get visas on the border - if they'd only said which borders we could have saved ourselves an extra day but more of that later. One last problem we experienced before leaving Turkey was the purchase of a green card (international car insurance) without which, theoretically, no country will let a car cross the border. The silly sods wouldn't sell us one. "What if my car hits one of your Turkish cars" we said. What if we have an accident in Bulgaria and write some other car off, who will pay. Turkey insists that we have a green card to enter the country so why won't you sell us one to get out". They wouldn't sell us a green card under any circumstances so we had to leave with no insurance, suspect Zambian registration and British plates.

We left Istanbul early in the morning for the drive to Poland. It felt good and we realised that we are at our happiest when traveling in Raelene, we have missed this way of life recently, it suits us and if we had the money we would never do anything else. We crossed the Bulgarian border at Kapikule near Edirne where a Turk with a German registered new Mercedes drove into the back of a little Bulgarian registered Fiat and a fight started. The customs officials all turned out to separate the two drivers and all stood around for twenty minutes arguing. By this time the queue was up to around two kilometres long and everybody was blowing their horns and shouting and when the customs guys finally got back to their business they just waved everybody through without looking at them. One border safely crossed without being asked to produce any paper work - terrific.

Bulgaria on the transit route is pretty uninspiring unlike the pretty country we saw when we were last there and all we wanted to do was get through it as soon as possible. We had filled up with fuel at the Turkish border so that we wouldn't have to join one of the fuel queues which can take anything up to four hours out of your day. At six in the evening we started to look for accommodation for the night because sleeping in Raelene was out of the question. We had two tables, eight chairs and a load of other household items in the back plus all our clothes and the odds & ends we had bought for the house but as this was the holiday season and being on the transit route, there wasn't a room anywhere. We eventually pulled up at an enormous hotel/motel complex with duty free shops, restaurants and a filling station and went to the reception desk to ask for a room. Lots of people went by on the other side of the counter but not one of them so much as looked at us. I still find it amazing in these countries that customers are treated as nuisances to be avoided at all costs if at all possible. It wasn't possible and I accosted a girl on the other side of the counter as she came out of the back room. She didn't say a word to me and she sat down at the desk and started going through the books. I moved along until I was dead opposite her and said rather loudly "I repeat, have you got a room for two". She didn't look up but shouted at me "Wait".

We watched her go through these three manuals and we realised that she was trying to locate an empty room for us. It was a hell of a system she had there, she cross referenced these three massive, leather bound ledgers over and over again, making slashes in pencil and then rubbing them out again. I had forgotten about communist systems in the past year and it actually took her over 15 minutes to find out that she didn't have an empty room. She wasn't being slow or inefficient either, it was just the way some stupid twit had designed the system. You can walk into any hotel in Turkey or pretty well anywhere in the west and they can tell you whether or not they have a room in twenty seconds.

We drove on to the next hotel, exactly the same as the last, all built to the same plan. We went through exactly the same procedure at the desk too and with the same result. All the communist countries need hard currency so much that they erect these edifices along the busiest transit routes and put duty free signs up all over the place to entice the western tourists. So here we were in a country where you can be fined heavily for not staying in an authorised camping ground and the hotels were all full. We'd had enough of all the silliness and we decided to stay the night right where we were, in their car park. The trouble was that we had so much stuff in the back that we couldn't get to the bed and we set about moving it all outside so that we could have a go at re locating it in the driving compartment and on the roof. Out came the two tables and eight chairs, two poster size framed photographs, our pee bucket containing a dinner set, two suitcases, coffee table, two Turkish carpets and a whole heap of other stuff.

All the local hustlers collect at these transit stops where they try to buy hard currency from the tourists and sell stolen goods and so forth. I was in the van handing out all these things to Alicja when I heard her call for help. I emerged from the door to see a crowd of about twenty Bulgarians all gathered around Alicja and more still running across the car park towards us. They must have taken us for Poles because they all thought we were selling the stuff. It was all we could do to fend them off, they were pointing to things and saying how much they wanted to pay for them, one guy even wanted to buy the pee bucket. We tried to tell them that we didn't have anything for sale but they just wouldn't give up and so we started throwing stuff back in the van. If you're Bulgarian and you are lucky enough to have any spare money, there's nothing in the shops to buy with it and anything western is considered highly desirable.

It was at this point that the police arrived and pissed them all off and then turned their attention to us. They told us that it was illegal to sell things in the people’s paradise of Bulgaria and we were in deep trouble. Where was our customs declaration which said we had bought these things into the country? and under no circumstances could we sleep anywhere but in a designated campsite or hotel. It was no use trying to explain that there wasn't any accommodation to be had. After ten minutes of this I finally gave them a carton of Turkish cigarettes between them and they offered to keep an eye on the things which we were putting on the roof rack. They were just after a bribe, that's cool, it's the way things are done there. They also hung around while we re positioned all our stuff so that the crowd didn't return.

This was at around eight thirty at night and we decided to make a cup of tea (now that we could get to the cooker) and turn in for the night. We sat in the doorway drinking our tea and watching the crowds go by when this Bulgarian registered car pulled up and out of it, got three girls in the shortest of short black mini skirts each with a white, low cut blouse. The driver was a guy and I couldn't help but think what a lucky bugger he was. That is, until I saw a repeat performance three times with three other cars. At first I thought that they were all from a dancing troup but this impression didn't last long because I went into the hotel to use their toilet before turning in and was offered one of these ladies at a very reasonable hourly rate. I don't know why they all had the same uniforms on but probably because the factory was turning out black mini skirts at the time.

We were up at six the next morning and already there was a queue well over half a kilometre long at the petrol pump and I was glad that we'd tanked up before leaving Turkey because we could get through the country without a refill. One thing which made us laugh were the shopping bags that some of the Bulgars were carrying around. They were made of white woven plastic material with rope handles and just as we would carry bags back from the supermarket with Safeway slogans printed on them, these had the words "Superphosphate" and "Nitrogenous Fertilizer" emblazoned on them. They seem to be the in bag to be seen with in Bulgaria and there must be an opening there somewhere for a western business entrepreneur with access to a country rubbish tip.

We reached the border with Jugoslavia at nine in the morning and we thought that with such an early start we'd be able to put a good few miles down before dark but as the border came into view we could see one hell of a queue and it was three and a half hours before we got through. Queues, as I have said before, can be social things and we met and talked to a lot of people while we were waiting and made heaps of coffee which we shared around as we talked. I've thought before that we could make money selling tea & coffee in border queues. In the line next to us was a new Volvo with USA plates and a kid of thirteen or so struck up a conversation with me from the window.

"Hey mister, you from England?".
"No, Australia".
"How come you got an English car with a left hand steering wheel?".
"It's not English, it's Zambian".
"It's what?"
"Zambian - from Zambia"

This was a sure fire conversation starter of course and we got talking to the two other occupants, his mother and her sister who was lying in the back of the car with a broken leg. The whole leg was in plaster. They had come on a four month tour of what they intended to be Eastern Europe and they had had the Volvo shipped over with them. The sister had broken her leg in the first week, luckily in England where they had received some decent medical treatment for her. They then set off across the Channel for Eastern Europe where they ran into a problem which had managed to ruin their entire holiday. The silly woman was so badly informed that she had bought with her a car which ran only on unleaded petrol and trying to find that stuff in Eastern Europe is like looking for needles in haystacks. Furthermore, the petrol pump nozzles in Eastern Europe wouldn't fit into the car's filler hole and someone in East Germany had had to modify it for them at the side of the road when they had run out of petrol.

They had given away more than half of their clothes in Poland so that they had enough room in the boot to fit in the canisters they had bought in order to carry more unleaded petrol with them. I asked how they had got on in Bulgaria because I couldn't imagine that there was a hell of a lot of unleaded petrol to be found there. She said that there were in fact two unleaded pumps in Bulgaria and they had spent three weeks in close proximity to these two pumps going out for days and some times queuing up all night to get the next fill. She was telling us about the different places they had visited during the three months and I said "didn't you see this place or that" but it was obvious that they hadn't seen anything because they only went to places which were within striking distance of these two unleaded petrol pumps.

She said that they were now heading home but they were disappointed in not having seen Romania - because of the fuel situation she thought that Romania wouldn't have any unleaded. I told her that it was just as well anyway because they beat a lot of tourists up, smash car windows and steal things. Only five minutes after talking to her, four Romanians came up and started talking to me, all in perfect English. The American woman heard me talking to them and came over. "Say, are you Romanian" she asked as if they were from another planet. They said that yes they were Romanian and proceeded to tell her what a wonderful place it was. Then pointing to me she told them that I had said that they beat people up etc. I winced and braced myself for a hail of insults but one of them said that what I had said was perfectly true because there were a lot of Gypsies in the country but added that there were "a lot of respected people in Romania like engineers for example". She asked if there was any unleaded petrol in Romania and he said that yes there was plenty of petrol, "all kinds of petrol".

I could tell that this bloke had never even heard of unleaded petrol and she must have had her doubts because she went on to tell him that it was a very special kind of petrol which was used in the USA. He told her that she could stay at his house and not to worry about petrol because he had contacts who could get anything. The woman was overjoyed and after some consultation with her sister & son said that they had decided to take him up on his offer. I tried to dissuade her but she was adamant and was going to meet up with these Romanians when they came back from selling their goods in Jugoslavia.

The lady went back to her car and we carried on talking. During the conversation it transpired that one of them, a girl, was a chemical engineer and as I used to work in a refinery on a plant which manufactured petrol I set about explaining what unleaded petrol was. "Oh no she said, Romania doesn't produce it". It was too late, by that time the Volvo had gone through the border. I gave the American woman an A for pluck - most people would have given up the holiday when her sister broke her leg. I also gave her an A Plus for outright ignorance. Fancy having a car shipped all the way out from the States without first checking to see if unleaded petrol was available. It was interesting talking to the Romanians, they were traveling in a five year old BMW and I know in Romania that to have a car is extremely unusual to say the least, let alone a BMW. They told me that they had started trading across borders only five months ago - as soon as they could get passports and already they had bought the car and were doing very well for themselves. One illegal selling trip to Jugoslavia, they said, earned them six months Romanian wages. They said that the Poles had had it all to themselves for a long long time and now it was the turn of the Romanians and the Russians. Their stuff is cheaper than Polish goods, in fact so cheap that they are even able to sell in Poland.

As we came to within a distance of a couple of hundred metres of the customs post Alicja went for a walk to try to find something to buy with the money which we had been forced to change when we entered Bulgaria (ten dollars each) but came back empty handed. The shops at the customs post had closed for lunch. She said however that they were checking everybody. I went for a walk up to the front of the queue to check it out and it was astounding that they were confiscating so much stuff. There were two sheds full of it on the Bulgarian side and another shed where they take in one car at a time and completely strip it.

There was a little Bulgarian registered Trabant two stroke car in the line to the left of us and they made the driver take off the inside door panels. They were full of small electrical transformers, probably forty of them. The couple directly in front of us took the prize though - they were Turks and had fifteen or twenty tortoises on board. Of course it must have been hot in the boot of the car and the tortoises were highly active. Each time the customs man pulled out a tortoise, he put it down on the ground as though it was a piece of wood and each time he found another one he seemed surprised that the tortoises on the ground had moved but by the time he was up to six or seven of them, they started to get away from him and walk off under other cars. He called for help and another customs officer came over but couldn't reach some of them and he went away and came back with a broom.

All the traffic had to be stopped while they ran around after these tortoises and the guy with the broom used long sweeping motions under cars to shift them and tortoises came skidding out from under cars, bumping off of other car tyres and then walking back underneath again. If the customs men had only got themselves a box to corral them in instead of trying to round them all up all the time it would have saved them a lot of work. What struck us was that there wasn't a smile on anybody's face - we were creased up with laughing. So after the great tortoise round up they just waved us past without looking at us - our luck was holding up very well. As soon as we were through, we needed diesel and what with the queue for changing money and then the queue for the diesel, it took another one and a half hours. It was now two in the afternoon and it had taken us five hours to travel a distance of one and a half kilometres - I was annoyed.

Jugoslavia on the transit route from Bulgaria to Hungary has some pretty spots but generally it's boring. What I don't like about it though is the rip offs they have with their toll roads, it cost us a little under $100 in tolls to get through the place. Since last year they have introduced new bank notes but the trouble is that they are running concurrent with the old ones and it's difficult to know where you are with them. The inflation is running at such a rate that they have printed new banknotes and taken four zero's off of the denomination and when you change money they give you a mix of old and new. You have to determine which is the old money and put your thumb over four of the zero's to see how much you have really got.

I saw tourists in shops, completely unable to work it out, presenting handfuls of money to shop assistants and asking them to take what they needed. A great way to get ripped off. We don't care too much for Jugoslavia and have found that a lot of fellow travellers share our opinion. The good thing about the place was that we were able to but some excellent sausage and cold meats and the bread is generally superb. We had to spend one night in Jugoslavia in a small pension and we were glad to cross into Hungary - again without having our papers looked at.

Getting out of Jugoslavia is always easy with a minimum of queuing but the line on the way in from Hungary was getting on for a kilometre long. The Hungarian border guards are always polite, courteous and friendly and it makes you feel better about the country. Traveling through this country is great, it's a delight to the eye as far as I'm concerned and has some of the best rural scenery to be seen in Europe, even better than Austria. Everything seems to grow so well and the fields are a lush green, the farmhouses always nicely painted, the food leaves little to be desired and Budapest has a great collection of good looking women. It's one country where we've both said that it would be nice to live. here are still queues for fuel of course but not as bad as the rest of the eastern bloc and Raelene being a diesel beast, we never have to wait as long as the folks with petrol powered cars.

When we reached the Czech border at somewhere I’ve forgotten the name of we were thrilled to see that there was no queue and we presented our passports to the Hungarian official and I kept the engine running ready to attack Czechoslovakia at speed. He looked at the passports and asked if we had Czechoslovakian visas. I told him that we didn't need visas these days because the Czech consulate in Istanbul had told us that we could obtain them at the border. "That might be so" he said "but I think you'll find that they don't know about it here". He offered to walk over to the Czech office with me to ask.

"No" was the reply. I told them what had been said by their people in Istanbul but they said that it was impossible to give us a visa, they didn't even have any forms or a system in place for issuing visas. I asked what to do and the manager got involved and said that we would have to go to the consulate in Budapest and apply. This was on a Saturday and we would have to wait until Monday to apply for a visa and even then I could imagine them telling us to come back on Wednesday. We drove into the car park to talk about what we were going to do and we thought that perhaps they were looking for a bribe so I went back and spoke to the Hungarian official who said that he didn't think that the Czechs were looking for a bribe but he offered to once more walk across to the other side with me and find out.

They weren't very helpful but after a discussion they said that all we had to do was to drive to the crossing near Bratislava (110 kilometres out of the way, most of it over ground we had already covered) and there they would issue visas on the spot. I asked if they were absolutely sure of this and was assured that what they had told me was correct and we turned back towards Bratislava. I was cursing the staff of the Czech consulate in Istanbul and wondering why the officials at the border crossing didn't tell me about Bratislava when we first arrived. If it hadn't been for the fact that I'd gone back and asked, we would have been stuck for at least two days in Budapest waiting for the consulate to deal with us.

We arrived at the Bratislava crossing three hours later only to be told that they didn't issue visas either. In fact they told us that we could get them at the crossing we had just come from. I told them that I'd just come from there and they said "you'll just have to go back to the consulate in Budapest". I wasn't feeling to good about Czechoslovakia at the time and I started to walk back to the car when a Hungarian official came up to me and apologised on behalf of his Czech counterpart. "I don't know why they are so unhelpful over there" he said, and told me what to do. He gave me a map of Czechoslovakia (remember - this wasn't even his own country) and showed me a small border post just across the border in Austria. Here, he assured me, we could get visas on the Austrian/Czech border between 9am and 5pm. "It's only a four or five hour drive" he said," you'll be able to sleep at the side of the road in Austria and get to the border at nine in the morning".

So off to Austria we went and found a place to park at two in the morning, unloaded all those tables and chairs etc again and slept until seven in the morning. The Hungarian was absolutely right and by nine o'clock we were waiting at the counter for our visas. It wasn't a fast process - it never is - but we were clear of the place within two hours and on our way again albeit feeling a little dirty and dishevelled. I witnessed a strange occurrence at the border though. We were waiting to pay for the visas behind a Czech couple bearing Swiss passports and he presented a $100 note. Now, there were a lot of forged American $100 notes floating around the Eastern block when we were here last year, coming it is theorised from East Germany. Well it must still be going on because the girl felt the note with her fingers and said that she couldn't accept it. The guy protested and she called the manager who also felt the note and pronounced it a forgery.

This couple between them then proceeded to pull, out approximately three thousand dollars worth of these notes and none of them were any good. I asked if I could have a look at one of them and the guy handed me one. I looked all over the thing and compared it with my own $100 note but I couldn't tell the difference. I thought for a minute that my note too was a forgery but the girl took one look at it and said that it was OK. Apparently the difference between them is that you can feel the impression of the numbering on the forgeries whereas the real notes are smooth. I tried again and again to feel it but for me it was impossible to tell the difference.

What got me was that this couple didn't seem at all perturbed by the fact that all this money they were carrying was fake and nobody else cared either. I was expecting the police to arrive at any moment to ask them where they got it all but nothing happened and when I saw them outside in the car park I asked what they were going to do because they hadn't managed to come up with enough legitimate money to buy visa's. The husband said that it was no big problem and that he would go to the nearest Austrian shop and change one of the notes and return. When a few days later we went to change money in Warsaw, they put the notes in a machine which somehow detects the fakes.

I'd like to be able to tell you that the Czech countryside was beautiful but we weren't in the mood for it and apart from that it was in fact lousy with the exception of the mountains and they had been messed for the most part up by factories. There were all these nice little mountain villages with streams running through them like something out of a Hansel and Gretel fairy story but almost every one of them had a factory spewing out black smoke. These factories were all located right on the banks of the rivers and streams and they were also discharging foul looking waste water.

What a rotten thing to do to a country. Czechoslovakia has the reputation for being the most polluted country in Europe and from what we saw, the reputation is valid. I'm writing this in Poland now and there are constant complaints in the Polish media concerning the state of the rivers which enter Poland from Czechoslovakia, They say that they can't even consider spending a cent in trying to clean up these rivers because they arrive in Poland already pitch black.

By the time we crossed into Poland at Cieszyn in the South West, we had lost a full days traveling through waiting in queues at borders. Alicja had so confused the Poles with all sorts of paperwork concerning the importation of our household goods, residency permits and so on that they completely forgot to ask us about our car papers and insurance. The next week in Warsaw we went to get ourselves some car insurance and they demanded our present insurance papers and we told them we didn't have any. They thought we were lying and told us that it was absolutely impossible to enter Poland without insurance. The Czechs are now so thoroughly fed up with Poles crossing the border to sell their goods that they have effectively stopped them entering the country to carry on their business. Czechoslovakia was always the easiest place for Poles to get into - no visas required. Now they have to have a visa and they can't get one unless they have an invitation to visit from a Czech citizen or a pre booked and paid for holiday. The government owned shops in Czechoslovakia are also refusing to serve Poles. When the Rolling Stones recently performed in Prague, Poles needed to present a concert ticket at the border before they would allow them across.

The Russians have it even worse. At the time of writing they have to queue up for three days to cross the border point into Poland. It's not the Poles that are stopping them but the Russian customs officials who check every car with a fine tooth comb. Even so we see a lot of Russians at the markets in Warsaw selling their stuff. Mostly they sell electric drills, Russian dolls, Zenith cameras, Tento brand binoculars and rubbishy tinned food and curtain material.

So far we are enjoying Warsaw and I'm busy painting the flat and generally renovating the place and have only ventured out four or five times in three weeks but it will be finished soon and we can have a good look around. From the small amount of the city I've seen so far I'm very impressed with the changes and I can't imagine that any other country has changed so much in such a short space of time. The old system hasn't completely disappeared yet but it's not through lack of trying. Warsaw used to be so depressingly grey but now that private enterprise has come along there is colour on the streets and the shops are recognisable as shops. A year ago you couldn't tell a shop from an office if you didn't know but now private shop owners are putting signs up all over the place and some of them smile at you and give service - there's hope for Poland now and I've no doubt at all that left to their own devices for ten years they will make it.

It is however a land of thieves and it really hit us after being in Turkey where hardly any stealing takes place. Warsaw is full of adverts for home security systems and gas pistols. There are even two page spreads in magazines comparing the performance of these things. Lots of people buy a gas stun gun and it's funny because whoever invented them must have thought that criminals were slower on the uptake than honest people but they are not. What happens now is that the robbers are buying the gas guns and stunning their victims with them. I suppose that the next thing we'll hear is that they are knocking people over the head with them to save on gas cartridges. I must admit that I haven't seen one of these things in use but I'd love to stun someone with one just to see how they work. I guess they must release one hell of a cloud of gas in a big hurry. What about the wind direction though? If the wind is in the wrong direction it must be possible for the user to knock himself out. Just think. Someone comes up to you on the street, shoots at you and falls over unconscious!

Most homes here are locked up like fortresses. They have special metal doors fitted which literally require battering rams to knock them down and they have three or four enormous two stage locks on them plus chains and viewing holes. Everyone who can afford it has an alarm fitted to their car and it's so common to hear a car alarm go off in the street when someone has bumped into a car that nobody ever turns to see where the noise is coming from. Every single night we hear alarms going off.

Another thing quite common in Warsaw is AIDS sufferers sitting on the pavements with signs in three or four languages telling about their condition and a collection box in front of them. On the lighter side we went into a restaurant which had on the menu "duck out boneswith". The biggest change I've noticed so far is in the Russian television. Last year it was terribly depressing with endless political speeches and serious interviews. Now its undergone a radical change and is loaded with pop music, good pop music. The video clips are a refreshing change from MTV, much more original and there are comedians, western movies and sexy dancers. I've mentioned it to a few of our friends but they have been completely unaware of it - no self respecting Pole would watch Russian TV after all; they've had enough of Russia over the years.

That's all for the time being



All the best




Alicja & Pete.