A little too late

Today, I was supposed to have gone to a textile industry exhibition in Frankfurt, along with most of the rest of my institute. I say should have, because I didn’t. The reason for that was a series of mishaps and bad luck that led to me being five minutes too late, so I missed the common bus.

Here’s what happened: I wanted to get up at 5:45, but somehow I managed to sleep on despite my alarm clock’s ringing. Ergo, I ought to get a new alarm clock if the current one cannot be depended upon. I woke up on my own at 6:34, with the meeting time at the institute 7:00 sharp. Got some stuff together, ran out of the house, looked for the car – and remembered my brother took it yesterday to go to the hardware store.

I ran to my brother’s workplace in the hope that he’d parked it there – but no luck. Ran over to the university clinic looking for a cab, but couldn’t find one. Back to the bus stop and tried to hitchhike. At last, the next bus to city center came – but it would be at least ten minutes too late at the speed buses go in Aachen. At the next stop, I saw an empty cab, jumped out, to the cab and sped off towards downtown. The cab driver was understanding and took the _very_ short route, featuring a few traffic violations, but nothing remotely dangerous in early morning traffic.

So, I managed to make it by 7:06 – to find nobody there at all. Conclusion: They might have left 7:03 at the latest. That’s a sharp schedule if I’ve ever seen one. I went home in a sour mood, but brightened up when I considered the alternatives. My university is coincidentally holding the students’ introductory day today, which means a large assortment of lectures on popular topics and a lot of booths featuring the pride of the various institutes trying to woo the students.

I went together with a friend, and heard lectures about the big bang theory, predator-prey models and effectiveness of advertising. In between we hit the booths, particular the metallurgists’, who have a few interesting showpieces. Tomorrow I’ll have to explain to my supervisor how I managed to miss the exhibition (nothing drastic, but missing appointments always looks bad).

Warsaw and all the rest

After the tour onto Kasprowy Wierch, we had half of the next day left in Zakopane, and used it for a smaller tour to one of the secondary peaks in front of the Tatra. For an ascent of 500 meters, we got a terrific view, a sense of accomplishment, and a collection of tired legs and sores on our feet. The train ride back to Warsaw lasted into the evening, and the last bit of the night was wasted away at the same discothek we’d been to a week earlier.

The next day had a rather lush program that somehow still managed to take up all free time: We hit the largest park of Warsaw, one of the old royal pleasure haunts, then checked out the holiday procession (though the english name of the holiday escapes me). We had a beer in possibly the worst and slowest beergarden in all of Warsaw, then chilled out a little bit back at the hostel with ice cream and cocoa. The student dorm had a barbecue evening which we partook in voraciously. Eventually, we demonstrated superior navigational skills by getting home via a shorter route involving much less walking time than the normal one.

The last day dawned to rather unrefreshed faces; somehow, everybody managed to be tired despite almost eight hours of sleep. The fact that most of us had been dragging around a light diarrhea, cold, flu or stomach ache for the past week (and routinely swapping them) didn’t improve the general feeling. We first visited a so-called “technical object”, which is apparently slang for a combined generator-heating power plant. This particular one supplies about half of Warsaw’s electricity (it normally delivers 500 KW) and hot water (2500 MW equivalent at full load). We found out a few interesting numbers, and that people in control rooms are really bored. E.g., the remote heat system needs 70 tons of water replenished per hour, meaning they get lost from the supposiedly “closed system”. That sounds like an awful lot, until you realize how big the network will have to be, and that the plant pushes 5000 tons per hour into the pipes in summer, and up to 23000 tons in winter. I also heard some interesting views from our companions concerning nuclear power (namely, that we need lots more of it, soon, and that Germany is an idiot to abandon it now). No comment.

Lunch was pizza taxi, leading to a really full stomach and even some groans. After-lunch was a museum of industrial technology, with some old motorbikes, cars, tool machines and so forth. I can’t really call it captivating. After that we struck out on our own, and by virtue of some planing, landed in the cultural palace in the exhibition “World Press Photo 07”. If the exhibition is ever in your vicinity… go there. It proffers the most effective, truthful, artistic and emotional pictures that were published over the last year. We had a few tremendous ones, like the Israeli settler being pushed by what looks like 80 policement in riot gear, the boxing gym under a bridge in Sao Paulo (boxing = ticket to better life?). We were pretty much on our last zlotys and still had to buy something to drink for the last party; this drove us to new heights of creativity and we made a bid for the reduced group price by waiting outside the door for people willing to supply us with the missing three members for the minimum number. The security guard had a blast watching us.

After the exhibition, we had another round of drinks shopping and mall browsing. Globalization once again showed its might by offering us all the stores we already knew anyway. The chief electronic and entertainment store in that mall was Saturn, which actually featured prices above the german level – going by memory, that is. As it was getting later, we caught the tram back to the dormitory and joined in the party. The dorm has a dedicated party room on the uppermost floor, with a table football and a pool billiard. A good time was had by all (or so I’d think). We had some very interesting discussion, we finalized the distribution of poles to germans for the return stay and – important – we totally spanked the poles at table football. They somewhat returned the favor in pool, though. I also had a great game of team pool with a partner who spoke ukrainian, polish and russian. Now, I speak german, english and norwegian, so we had no means of communication but gestures and translators. We nevertheless managed to have fun, although we did lose.

Even the best parties have to end some time, and at 3 o’ clock in the morning, it was time for this one to finish. We packed up and were ferried to the airport, where a long check-in queue awaited us. The flight home was uneventful and mostly passed asleep. Currently, I’m on the train closing in on Aachen, and I’ll be home in about an hour. We’ll see what comes next, but I’d definitely like to keep contact with these guys. Monday will definitely have a lot of work.

Only the summit counts!

After spending yesterday on a lax hiking tour (16 km total, little height difference), we decided that today would be the day to hit the mountains. Hard. Our polish companions picked out a route and informed us about it. Unfortunately, among the people who had spoken with them, you could hear several different versions, ranging from two to seven hours round trip. The end result was that when we left rather late at 9:30 today, nobody really knew what was going to happen. We shopped some food and drink, and walked through town. About a kilometer away from Zakopane lies the base station of a ski lift that is currently in summer maintenance break. But that is where we started our hike. After some discussion, the “I want to go the a mountain top” faction prevailed over the “let’s have a nice walk” faction. Signs told us that our destination was three hours away, maps told us it was 900 m above current elevation. In fact, our hostel is at 830 m, the base station is at roughly 1000 m, and the top of Kasprowy Wierch is at 1985 m.

We set off at a good pace, and soon the theme of the hike become obvious: Our group contained hikers of very different speed. A few (including me, very proud!) were at the front, setting a good speed, but still able to talk. The rest came scattered behind us, and somewhere in the back was an unnamed person who’d already started complaining on the way to the base station, and was wearing sneakers onto a mountain hike. Kind of silly, but we were normally too far ahead to hear the complaints. On the way up, scattering wasn’t yet so bad. We took a short break after 1:15 (time from start at base station), and got our first look at the peak – cloathed in clouds. Hrm. We set off again and soon hit the tree line. After half an hour, we were entering the clouds. There, the group started to scatter really badly. I took the rest of the hike to the top with a girl who was able to keep up a reasonable speed. The other two out in front with us wanted to hurry to the top, and I was finding the steep climb quite enough. At maybe 2:00 we hit the foot of the peak (if that makes sense), and started climbing the step-like path made out of large stones. This took a long time, and because of the clouds, we could rarely see anything except ourself, the other two in front of us and a bit of the mountain side. There were a few other climbers on the path, but not many.

At 3:00 we hit the top. There was a meteorological station there, a few rocks and a few fellow hikers. We were lucky enough to get a few cloudbreaks that gave a few seconds of vision of the Tatras. Naturally, we took picture. At 3:30, the last people arrived and were a little pissed that we didn’t wait for them (at half an hour difference? Fat chance). Everybody had sausage, bread roll and something to drink, and some strength was regained. We stayed up there quite a way, and maybe at 4:30, we left again because it was getting later in the day (at that point, it was 4 pm). We took a different path that sent us down a steep staircase for a long time, but got us back below the bush line quickly. After a stop at a rest hut, the tree line soon saw us again, and we went further and further down into the valley, only to lose the clouds as well at maybe 6:30. At 7:00, we returned to base station and set off on the final leg of the tour, back to the hostel. We made it there at 7:30, which corresponded closely to 7 pm, the time our dinner got served. We dug in and began to relax. In total, our tour took us nine and a half hours, which is one of my longest mountain tours in recent history. We got to the summit of 1985 m from a starting height of 830 m, and I think that even those who complained very often (please shut up) accomplished something today.

Down into the salt and up into the rain

Our trip yesterday led us to the largest saltmine in Poland, maybe even the world: Wieliczka. For over six hundred centuries, workers have brought salt to the surface there, from depths of several hundred meters. In fact, the mine is still operating even today, when salt is hardly the precious substance it once was. Far more business is happening with tourists, however. We got individual tickets instead of a group ticket, for some reason. I still had to get a photograph permit (for 10 zloty, not a problem), but the queue at the individual tourists counter was way too long. So I queued at the group counter, and pretended to be from a group that already had tickets but “just still needed a photograph permit, thank you”. Success.

Our tour started by going down a wooden staircase to a depth of roughly 70 meters. At the bottom, we cued in a tunnel with low ceiling, where I felt uncomfortable the only time in the mine. We started going from chamber to chamber, seeing along the way the cut-outs from the salt walls, holes for detonation charges and statues from salt and wood. Our guide said a lot of things in polish, but this time no one bothered to translate, and so I cannot tell anything that was not apparent to the eye.

The tour path is 2,5 km long, and goes down to a depth of 135 meters. Some of this in sloped tunnels, but a lot more in wooden staircases. In some of the chambers, there were salt lakes (normally with a lot of coins in them), or wooden staircases sloping off into the gloom – only a fraction of the tunnels is open to the public. Some of the most famous halls and chambers are filled with reliefs, chandeliers and decorations. The chapel is particularly well-known, and justly so. It’s the largest hall, with three chandeliers, a patterned floor, dozens of figures, and a full altar setting chiseled from the salt, including a pulpit.

I tried to take pictures of everything noteworthy, with varying results. The mine is very dark, and so there is the choice between flash (only works in small chambers) and setting the camera down somewhere to cope with over one second of shutter time. Quite often, there was no support to set it down on, and I had to flash, which changes the colors and contrasts a lot and drains the battery. Eventually, my camera (or rather, my mother’s) ran out of juice, and I borrowed the cameras of my fellow travellers. I tried out an Pentax Optio (full featured, with a rather weird tiltable LCD) and a Fujitsu FinePix (very light and quick, but auto mode limited to 1/4 s shutter time). Gathering the pictures will be interesting.

We eventually emerged to the light of day again, and began our trip to Zakopane, the prime tourist hole of the polish tatra. Our hotel here is quite nice actually, despite not having free WLAN. Attempts are under way to reestablish connectivity. We had a long party yesterday, with indoor dancing and lots of vodka mixes. Today we had planned to go hiking, but the strong rain makes this seem rather unappealing.

The absurdity of the final solution

Auschwitz and similar camps are the most sinister milestone of german history, and I am glad that our visit to Poland did not skip it. We got there by bus from Krakrow, and got a tour through Auschwitz proper and Birkenau. The tour was in polish, but one of our hosts translated to english quite well. We saw a lot of different things: The barracks the prisoners lived in, the mountains of hairs, shoes and other possessions taken from them upon arrival, a gallery of casualties along with dates of arrival and death. We also saw the punishment cells, where four people had to sleep standing up in 90×90 cm, then work again for eleven hours as was usual there. The food they received was totally insufficient, and starvation killed tens of thousands. We also saw the cell of Maximilian Kolbe, who offered to be starved to death to save a younger man’s life, and the wall where death penalties in Auschwitz 1 were executed.

Birkenau is less restored, and contains almost no explainations at all, but the sheer size of the area and the ruins of the crematories do carry a message. After a good four hours, we caught various busses back to Krakow, which in itself took three hours. Supper was the polish specialty pierogi, and the evening was a small room party. Still, a lot of the discussions centered on Auschwitz.

I had to write the travel report for the day, so I got an MP3 player with recorder on the bus and spoke a first draft. After typing it in and cleaning it up a little, I read it to the others and caught a lot of different opinions on what was mentionable about our day in the camp. That evening, I went around and one by one, asked people how the day affected them emotionally. The results were quite varied:
* some people got hard hit by the mountain of human hair, which they said gave it a personal dimension. I suspect that the hair of over thousand people in a pile gives it a human dimension, not a personal one

• some thought that the buildings themselves do not look so threatening (I’d agree), but combined with the pictures on exhibition, they could be connected to the events there

• some said that this was very terrible, but death never really got them down

• some were particularly saddened by the children’s barracks and the medical experiments

• some thought the tour very shallow and that they knew almost everything they were told already (so did I)

My personal impressions: Some of the letters exhibited showed amazing cynicism, and the viciousness of everyday life shows a very sophisticated system. On the other hand, the purpose of all that is totally intransparent to me. I cannot really understand the thinking that would make such a camp seem beneficial, and so it remains mostly a tragic absurdity to me.