Breakfast on the Move – The Wonders of the WARS

In the United Kingdom, a long train journey is normally preceeded by an unpleasant dash around the station cafés and sandwich shops, all of which charge somewhere near double the prices of their High Street equivalents for exactly the same products, simply because they are providing sustenance for travellers. While this seems deeply unfair – even inhumane – it only takes one journey where you forget and end up paying £6 for a Virgin Trains “sandwich” to realise that they are still offering the lesser of many evils. A Virgin Trains sandwich will normally have arrived in the fridge having spent more time in a freezer than the average murderer will have spent behind bars. The bread will have the consistency of mdf and the filling will have long abandoned anything resembling flavour. That and your £6 can of Fosters (imitation beer, so bad that even Australians are ashamed of it!) of £3 lame coffee is enough to make the most spritely optimist borderline suicidal.

Look how sad I am! How do I cost soooo much money?!

Armed with a lifetime of such experiences, I approached the Polish Train companies WARS restaurant for the first time with no small amount of fear and trepidation. It was last November, unseasonably cold and I was on the way to Wrocław with a few of my colleagues. I had taken supplies but, being as I am a dangerously obese man trapped inside a skinny bloke’s body, these had ran out with more than half the journey to go and action was needed. So I walked the length of the train to the WARS and ordered the day’s special – Baked Silesian sausages with white cheese, toast and pickles. It was cheap and bloody marvellous. Not only that, but the café manager/chef was incredibly friendly and had the kind of moustache you could hide all sortss of contraband in. From this moment on, I was an avid fan of the WARS.

Fast forward then, to last weekend, and my first opportunity to try the famous WARS breakfast. I was travelling to Gdańsk from Bydgoszcz, to meet a friend and, due to the awkwardness of train times, I was more or less forced to take the 9am train. Eating breakfast – especially at the weekend – before 9am puts the kind of fear into me that most people reserve for people with axes, so I had no choice but to eat on board. I climbed up into the nearest cabin, as the train pulled in to the station and made my way towards the back of the train, where the WARS was situated. The first thing you notice here is that there is a general service person – this time a lady, with no moustache – and a chef. Not a person who takes food from the last ice age out of a fridge, but a real, live chef. I ordered a freshly ground cup of coffee and a “country scrambled eggs”. I was swiftly presented with my coffee and told to take a seat while my breakfast was cooked. While I waited, I was able to read this quite funny place mat thing, featuring Sherlock Holmes talking about the importance of food in a typically witty fashion. 

 

After a few minutes, breakfast arrived and what a super breakfast it was. Two types of bread, with butter. A huge pile of scrambled eggs, complete with sliced sausages and bacon within and a salad of tomatoes, red onion, lettuce and red peppers on the side. 

After that and finishing off my coffee, I had easily enough energy to keep me going through the day. 

Such situations make me wonder why, if it’s possible in relatively poor countries, to make such great food on the move, why on the UK we put up with paying so much for such unbearable crap, but I guess it’s a reference to food culture in general, where in the UK people are so much more accustomed to eating frozen rubbish from a packet, where as here it’s so much more of a rarity. Anyway, if you’re ever in Poland on a long distance train (TLK or E-IC only, I’m afraid) look for the WARS and smacznego!

All Saints’ Day

As many of you will know, Poland is a country with a huge emphasis on its Catholic heritage. I enjoy looking at the church buildings, many of which are historic and extraordinarily beautiful but, as a dirty heathen, I have difficulty listening to the church and their general hypocrisy about so much, not to mention their vast hoarding of wealth while many of their parishioners are relatively poor. But the 1st of November is a church occasion which, since living here, I have always been fascinated by and have a lot of time for.

All Saints’ day, in the church calendar is the day dedicated to all the lesser saints who don’t have their own saint’s day, as well as all the major saints, but in Poland, this public holiday is used by the people to visit the graves of their family – and even ancestors and to light candles, lay flowers and  dedicate a small amount of their time to giving some thought to lost loved ones.

What I find particularly interesting about this is the increasing number of atheists I know in Poland who will still go to the graveyards on this day and participate in this ritual. And that’s where it is something that I can get on board with. Naturally, in the graveyards themselves there is a huge amount of Catholic paraphernalia, such as crosses, images of the Holy Mother, of JC and so on. But the focus here is very much on remembering the people who have left their lives, rather than on faith as such. It’s something that, growing up in the UK, I never really thought that much about. I’ve lost older relatives – indeed 2 great great aunts who were really instrumental in my childhood died when I was quite young and, while I often think about these people, it strikes me that it might be a nice thing to have a day set aside when you can really give over a small amount of time to remember them.

Quite apart from the sentiment, the sight of hundreds – even thousands – of candles burning throughout great necropolises as night falls is a beautiful sight. If you’re ever in Poland on the 1st November, it’s something that’s really worth seeing.

The Quandary of Being a Football Fan in Bydgoszcz

Living in the city of Bydgoszcz, I have a stadium, 10 minutes up the road, where I can watch Polish top flight football for the kind of money that might just about get you into a non-league fixture in the UK. As an extremely keen football fan, this is a very tempting prospect. I’m aware that the standards of play in the Polish league are nowhere near as high as the “big 5” European leagues, or even the next 4 or 5 below them. Nonetheless, the prospect of a sell out against once-mighty squads like Wisła Kraków or Legia Warszawa is one that makes me pretty excited. Helpfully, Zawisza are having a great run this year, considering they operate on a far smaller budget than many of their peers and promote a lot of players from their outstanding academy, giving the team a genuinely local feel to it. The highlights this season have seen a 3:2 victory over Wisła, after going in at half time one down and, this week, a 3:1 mauling of the feted Legia – a contest which bore the same score line before the 60 minute mark. All this should fill me with local pride and a burning desire to attend some games and soak up the famous atmosphere of the Zawisza stadium.

Sadly, this is not the case. It’s well documented around Europe that the leagues of the Eastern nations: Poland, Russia, Ukraine, etc, have huge problems with ultras, racism and anti-semitism. Indeed, in these culture generally, the acceptance of such things in daily life is much more prevalent than in the culture I originate from in the UK, where it really is a tiny minority who view abusing people on their ethnicity or sexual orientation as OK. In 2012, when the Euros came to Poland in a wave of fanfare and football related cheer, I castigated the BBC for their heavily biased views on the Polish nation as one which would see an eruption of violence and quoted Sol Campbell – excellent defender, not terribly bright or well-informed man – as saying that “if you go to Poland, you’ll come back in a coffin!” It was, and is nonsense. As a nation, Poland is a friendly place, particularly to other Europeans.

However, Zawisza stadium is, I’m told, a terrifying place to be if you are not a fan of Zawisza, FROM Bydgoszcz. Students in my classes who support the club have openly told me that, should I attend a match, I should fear, if not for my life, then certainly for my immediate safety. Indeed, on the evening of the victory against Wisła, some weeks ago, while walking into town, I witnessed 4 Zawisza fans doling out a beating to a man behind a kiosk. He didn’t seem to be wearing any Wisła colours, so I imagine he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I helped a Polish friend translate an article last week, in which football fans from various clubs tried to point out that, as a group, they do a huge amount of work for charities, nationwide and indeed were an integral part of the ultimately-successful fight against communism which allowed Poland to be the free country it is today. This, of course, should be celebrated, and commended. However, what the fans interviewed in the article absolutely failed to tackle was that, as a social group, Polish football fans – “Ultras” especially – have an unhealthy obsession with violence. 

Last weekend, I was watching as fans of Zawisza walked down the street after the latest triumph (this time against a relatively mediocre mid-table opponent) and actively, aggressively pursued members of the public, screaming into their ears Zawisza chants and generally terrorising them. I appreciate, as a passionate supporter of my team in England, who has attended a huge number of matches over the years, that when you win – especially when you are an underdog in almost every game – the elation you feel and the will to celebrate. But, inevitably, in Polish football culture, this is done in a drunken, aggressive manner. I’ve been told by Poles who live in an around the Leśna district of the city, which borders the stadium, that they simply don’t go outside on match days. It’s not worth the potential violence and trouble that might ensue.

As a football fan, I deeply want to go and get behind my local team and experience a different football culture to the ones I have taken in in England, Germany and other countries. But the violence, the intolerance, the excuse-for-a-fight nature of the game here means that this is off limits to me, unless I want to be involved in a scrap. In a country that is trying to embrace Western ways and understandings while – quite rightly – hanging on to its cultural identity, football is a huge hole.

Scary Bydgoszcz – Hallowe’en Sights in North-West Poland

Due to that dreadful thing called work taking up all of my time in the last week (the outrage!) I have had no time to finish cataloguing the spooky sights of Bydgoszcz before, or even during, the celebration of hallowe’en. Most disappointing.

Anyway, here, belatedly, are a few scary places to see or avoid, should you ever find yourself in my city:

First, we have the spooky stadium or something or other. I don’t really know what it used to be, but it has what looks like some tiered seating and a surrounding outer wall of metre-thick communist-era concrete. It sits beside the bus station and acts almost like a border line between the part of the city in the centre, which has been extensively renovated (and continues to be today) and the part leading out towards Fordonek where, Słoneczny Młynn Hotel aside, is still a bit of a ruinous place. I certainly wouldn’t want to go in at night!

Next up we have the flats in the middle of the deserted park on the way to Szwederowo. Last Sunday, I went to a colleague’s flat in Szwederowo to watch some football and hang out, generally. On the way back with a couple of the lads, we walked through the park, as it was far quicker than walking all the way around on the pavement. At this time, the city was well and truly under the cover of darkness (thank you very much daylight saving time). In the middle of the park, some way away from the nearest…. anything at all, is a block of flats. Just one, red brick building, with no road, as such linking it to the main road. In front, stands a huge oak tree, blocking off the lights of the city. I imagine it’s a great place from which to look at the stars but also in which to feel bloody scared every time you here a noise. Who would live here?!

Finally, we have the statue of the weird moustachioed man in my street. I live on a fairly central residential street, not far from the main north-south thoroughfare, Ulica Gdanska. It’s a pleasant road, with some nice flats, decent enough neighbours and a friendly street cat. So one has to wonder what the hell this is doing here:

I mean, what even is it?! It’s a man, obviously. But why would anyone want this outside their block of flats? And who – not me, I can tell you – wants to walk past this monstrosity on their way home of an evening? Bizarre!

Thus concludes the tour of scary Bydgoszcz. If I’ve missed off any creepy places, do post about them in the comments and I’ll go take a peek with my camera.

Hallowe’en Week in Bydgoszcz or Live Action Scooby Doo

Until the 1990s, Bydgoszcz was one of the industrial centres of Poland. Unfortunately, as it didn’t keep up with booms in the new industrial power houses of Wrocław and Poznan (amongst others) it began to fall into decline. In the last 10 years though, the city has seen something of a resurgence and, as I have alluded to in these pages before, a lot of redevelopment has been and continues to be carried out, beautifying the city and this is paying dividends, in terms of new life being breathed into the place. But as with all cities that undergo redevelopment, not every dilapidated building can be reconditioned into a thing of beauty. This leaves a number of eyesores around the city, or to look at it in another way during this, the week leading up to hallowe’en, a number of sites where you could easily imagine some sort of true to live Scooby Doo adventure occurring. This week, I’ll be posting some images and info about these scary locales.

First up is Ulica Chodkiewicza’s haunted school. It may not, in fact be haunted, but it looks bloody terrifying! Above the entrance, are two supporting pillars. On one there is the face of a little girl and on the other side, a little boy. Naturally, time and the abandonment of the building has led to their eyes no longer being in the sockets. This is most unsettling. Other than that, it’s simply an abandoned school but, standing as it does on the junction of two main roads, it’s definitely the kind of place where ghoulish happenings might occur.

Stay tuned this week for more scary crap!

A Polish Birthday Celebration – and the Aftermath

Being a Brit in Poland inevitably results in a lot of fun being poked about your inability to take your alcohol, relative to the locals. This is pretty reasonable, and I’m happy to admit that I’ve been drunk under the table by fairly small women on more than one occasion. They just have different livers to the rest of the world. Well, I actually think this is an Eastern European thing in general. But anyway, I digress. 

Yesterday, I was invited to a birthday party by one of my Polish friends. It was a Saturday night, at the end of a difficult week and the party was for a good friend, so of course, I decided to go. I arrived with 3 of my mates, to find a flat full of nice people from various different places, platters of very tasty open sandwiches and a table/fridge combo with the amount of alcohol you might need to kill a dinosaur. I put my two measly cans of beer on the table (we were going out after an hour – I’m not THAT lame!) and got stuck in to my first one. I began to get acquainted with the guests, some whom I’d met before and others completely new to me. There was a lovely atmosphere, and the birthday girl was having a great time. 

Then, after half an hour, a friend of hers who does a lot of work in the former Soviet states East of Poland arrived with some interesting looking herbal vodka from Ukraine. It might have been a balsam, or something like that. Shots were immediately poured and I took mine and dutifully downed it. It was really rather tasty. So later, when a second shot was poured, I took it and sipped it, between my second and third beers. While it tasted strong, I didn’t really feel any particularly potent effect and soon the time came to hit the town.

So, we all bundled into taxis and headed to Bydgoszcz’s shisha bar, Ramses. Here we joined with another birthday party for a colleague of mine, so there was a veritable legion of us. We overtook pretty much the entire bar and everyone began chatting enthusiastically and generally having a great time. After an hour or so here, the sound that every ex-pat to have lived in Bydgoszcz in the last 10 years or so will know very well: Tomek – the local ex pat tour guide (provided you really like drinking alcohol) calling out “Kubryk time!”

So on we went to Pub Kubryk, where more drink flowed. But, as we arrived there, the sensation of the herbal vodka finally began to wash over me and my brain switched to half speed and twisted to an entirely incorrect angle. After a couple of hours, I was feeding myself an entirely necessary kebab at Bosfor and briskly walking up Gdańska street to my home. It had been a great night and I’d met some great new people.

Waking up this morning, I felt entirely dessicated. Like someone had come to me in the night and removed all the moisture from my body and left me there, like one of those butterflies in a display case, in a museum, only infinitely less decorative. The day after took the shape of a series of recovery efforts led by friends, starting with an offer of a fry up, followed up by cake/ice cream/cookie-based sugar overdose and finished up with pierogi.

 

During the zombie-like suffering that me and and my British brethren suffered, the Polish cohorts were doubtless whistling as life went on as though nothing had ever happened. Still, if I ever did reach Polish levels of alcohol tolerance, I should probably start worrying! 

Beyrouth Café & Real Arabian Coffee

One of the things you can never take for granted in Bydgoszcz is the city’s ability to surprise you. From the Prussian majesty of the water tower in Szwederowo (more on that some other time) to the utterly bizarre array of music you can witness at Mózg, it is a very interesting place, for an declining industrial city, struggling to create a new identity for itself.

Anyhoo, yesterday, when a friend demanded that we go somewhere more interesting than the regular chains for a coffee, I had to put my thinking cap on. After a short time, I realised that I had never been to Dworcowa street’s Beyrouth. This is a small, almost unnoticeable coffee shop where they profess to serve Arabian cardamon coffee. I adore this stuff, but I am wary of Polish misrepresentations of cultural phenomena from overseas. Surówka with your Chinese food always puts me off kilter, to some extent. But this was as good an idea as I could come up with, so I made the suggestion and off we went.

When we arrived, I was delighted to see that, not only did they do Arabian coffee, but also baklava, the famed sweet of the Arabian, Ottoman & Greek worlds. Once I had seen this, I discarded my menu, feeling no desire to search for anything else. I ordered and impatiently waited. My friend’s coffee came first and looked good, if unremarkable (she had gone for a regular cafe crema). Imagine then the joy and elation on my face when this showed up:

Best of all, was that it didn’t simply look the business, it tasted fabulous too. The subtlety of the cardamon blending with the strength of the concentrated coffee in the tiny cup. I sat there, grinning like a buffoon as a I destroyed my tasty baklava – firm, sweet and packed with the honey syrup and pistachios you would expect to find on a street corner in Istanbul. All this for only 13 Zloty (that’s £2.50 to you British folk). The service was attentive when required and totally absent when it wasn’t, which made it ideal. Complimentary monkey nuts and an intimate ambience sealed the deal. If you’re in Bydgoszcz and you haven’t been before, get yourself down there and give it a go.

The Polish Gym – A Homoerotic Conundrum

One of the problems that left leaning people are trying to work on in Poland is the abuse doled out to minorities. This is particularly prevalent in terms of racism and homophobia. I can see, from the conversations I have with my teenage students, that it is getting better and, with race in particular, there is less and less stigma attached to foreigners. This is encouraging. Homophobia though, is still pretty rife and the use of gay as an insult is still pretty common. As you may well correctly imagine, the social group who are the slowest in ridding themselves of abuses of this kind are the no-necks. These generally underwashed, tracksuit-sporting “gentlemen” are often followers of football and their ideal Saturday afternoon begins with racist, antisemitic and homophobic chanting at opposing fans and leads on to a free for all scrap, where they punch each other in the head repeatedly (or sometimes use sticks) to ensure that any brain cells that might tip them over the edge of the “moron” category in the IQ test are abruptly snuffed out.

When I joined my gym, I had anticipated that a lot of these men would be the staple clientele, and so it came to pass that they are. When I started, I still had long hair, so I was slightly worried that they would give me a hard time about it but, quite the opposite, they were very friendly, helpful when I was confused about how to use machines and so forth. Thoroughly confused by this situation, I decided to observe the population of the gym folk. These were the general groups into which Polish gym users fall into:

Bitchy women

Yes, there are lots of women in very good shape at my gym. They come along and do classes, low weights and oodles of cardiological business. Good for them. However, they seem, almost exclusively, to come in groups of 2 or more. Their means of distracting themselves from the pain of the work out, rather than simply listening to the booming music, is to say horrid things about the fatness of other women who are working out. Of course, these target women are also at the gym and are, generally speaking, not fat. But they will pick on anything. I’ve even heard girls saying that another girl has a fat neck. Give it a rest ladies.

 

Regular Joes (and Joannas)

There are, in fact, a number of people who, like myself, just go to the gym, do a little workout and then go home, with little attention paid to others. These come in both genders and are normally around my sort of age – the sort of age where your body impolitely lets you know that this is the last chance you’re ever going to get to get into good shape and fitness and to try to undo some of the damage that a lifetime of night befores have done to your organs. I’d say we make up about 10% of gym goers.

 

Homoerotic Hunks

The vast majority of lads in a Polish gym are, though, bodybuilders. These guys either come to the gym with their mates, or within a very short time of their arrival become mates with all the other bodybuilders anyway. I admire their immense strength as, often, I will sit at a machine and realise that the weight setting that the last person was lifting is something like one and a half of me. Scary. But this is not the remarkable thing about them. Nor, indeed, are the ridiculously tiny shorts that they wear to the gym. No. It’s the interaction between these guys. They walk up to each other and say things like “Your biceps are looking great,” or “have you been working on your hamstrings? They’re looking so much bigger.” And so on and so on. This is all well and good, but the irony, I’m sure, is lost on these “gentlemen” of the fact that their homophobic chants and their positively homoerotic gym behaviour really don’t fit together. 

While writing this post, I thought back to this quite hilarious video (Polish language). 

Grocery Shopping in Poland – a Puzzle Game for Ages 8 to Adult

Having lived in Poland for over 2 years now, you might think that I have settled into a pattern, with the places that I visit. In some cases, you’d be right. If I feel like a cheap and delicious meal, I’ll head for pancakes at Manekin. If I want to watch an English football match on a Saturday afternoon, it’s Kubryk. There are many such cases. But when I’m grocery shopping, it’s completely different. Like a game of top trumps, every grocery store in Poland has its strengths and weaknesses. Here’s my list:

 

Alma or Piotr i Pawel – the M&S Food & Waitrose of Poland have a reasonable range of stuff, but often charge astronomical prices quite unjustifiably. Possibly, this is to do with them knowing that soft stomached foreigners will go there, and part with their non-złoty salaries. 

 

Biedronka (Ladybird) – This is an odd one. A bargain basement supermarket which conspicuously & exclusively sells its own brands in almost all aisles besides alcohol, it’s a pretty safe bet for fresh produce, is cheap and has a good range of meat. Sadly, it has a woeful cheese selection and huge swathes of “essential” items missing from its catalogue.

 

Lidl – All you Brits thinking of this as a budget store need to know that this is in fact a mid range store in Poland. It has themed weeks where you can occasionally pick up such marvels as Mexicana cheddar(!), or Danish Seaberry jam(?). Unfortunately, it lets itself down on range. Their frozen foods read like a menu from the worst school dinners purveyors of England and, just as you get to the end of the “specialty aisle” expecting more food, there is a strange abundance of car products.

 

Real – I sometimes feel that describing a town as having a Real is a misnomer. Rather the Real has its own town. These places are invariably huge. The contents stacked in aisle after aisle, on shelf after shelf, each taller than a particularly well grown giraffe. Quality of their own products is revealed by ingredients panels with only two entry: “dust” and “despair”. The staff are suitably miserable, aggressive or lazy. On the plus side, they do set up paddling pools of live carp near Christmas, so that you can buy a great beast to bludgeon to death for the big day.

 

Tesco – in Poland, Tesco is a really quite cheap store. Sadly, it looks the part. Staff rarely bother to take stock out of its warehouse packing boxes, even on supposedly attractive promotional display stacks. They have a reputation for selling animal products well beyond their best before date and their fresh fruit and vegetables often look like they’ve simply been left in the road for a month before being piled back in to the store. They also have the most bizarre alcohol policy, since introducing automated tills, whereby you have to pay for everything but your alcohol first at the self service machine, and then go on to the shame alcohol sales point, so that you can be made to feel like a homeless drunken oaf. I am but 2 of those 3 things!

 

Twój Market – If you asked the owner of this chain what their unique selling point was, s/he wouldn’t know. I have eaten good cakes there. I have also seen many a tramp walk into the glass doors shortly before opening on a Sunday. Other than that it’s expensive, poorly stocked, not particularly friendly, garishly bright red and yellow in colour and always missing at least 50% of the things you need for literally any meal.

 

The result of all this is that you can never do a “big shop” at one market and be done with it. You have to go to each one for what they’re “good” at and then on to the next. Making a curry becomes like some sort of real time strategy game, where you must assemble your core components, and then purchase accessories, until you have a fully functioning meal. By this time, of course, it’s been hours, you’ve walked miles and you need another meal. So off you go again on another misadventure.

 

Quite apart from that being all, you also have the bizarreness of some supermarket experiences in Poland. This past weekend I was in Biedronka in Szwederowo. I wanted to buy some chicken thighs (amongst other things). So I approached the fridge, where a bountiful pile awaited me. This side of the fridge had no handle. I tried to prise it open, to no avail and then tried to get at the chicken from the other side of the fridge. Nothing doing here, either. So I stopped a shop assistant and asked her how to open the fridge:

Shop Assistant: “You can’t open it, there’s no handle.”

Kev: “OK, so how do I get chicken thighs?”

S.A.: “You can’t.”

Kev: “Who buys them?”

S.A.: “Nobody.”

Kev: “So what happens?”

S.A.: “We throw them away when they are expired.”

This weekend, I’m trying Kaufland.

World War II Bunkers at Zielonczyn

One of the convenient things about living in Bydgoszcz is that it’s really quite close to the German border. Immediately before the outbreak of World War II of course, this was far from positive. In August 1939, the border was even closer, just 80km away, close to the city of Piła. So, after the initial attack by the German forces in Westerplatte, at Gdańsk, the Bydgoszcz area was marked as one of the next incursion points as the Germans sought to occupy Poland. Knowing this, the Polish army decided to build defensive bunkers, to help them defend against the attack. Sadly, after a couple of days of being deflected by Polish forces in the area, the German army then changed direction and simply attacked the city from a different angle and successfully took it. The result of this tragic end though, is a series of extraordinarily well preserved bunkers, located in and around the small village of Zielonczyn, half way along the rural road from Bydgoszcz to Nakło nad Notecia. Fortunately for me, one of my colleagues grew up and still lives today in the village. He offered to show me and some of my other colleagues around. So around lunch time, after an early bite to eat at the Family Milk Bar (Rodzinny Bar Mleczny) on Ulica Dworcowa, 5 of us jumped on the train for the short ride to the west.

From the station, such that it is, we had been directed to cross the tracks and walk along the track beside the meadows, to find the first bunker. After being attacked by errant frogs and harassed by stray butterflies in the afternoon sun, we arrived at the site of the first bunker. But, in spite of frantic searching on google maps and being quite certain we were in the right place, we were defeated. Somewhat disappointed, we decided to head towards the second bunker, across the railway line.

Danger of death signs are always the best places to cross the tracks.

As we reached the other side, we found our first bunker! Next to bunker number 2 was a huge plaque, installed by the government, so that people could learn more about the bunker system and the history of the site. Sadly, sunlight had bleached literally all of the writing off of the board. On the plus side though, there was still a map, showing us which direction to find more bunkers in. First a look inside.

The soldiers’ line of sight as they waited for the attack

The next bunker, just tens of metres away, was located in someone’s garden. Our guide, Piotr rang the doorbell and asked if we could take a look. The homeowner kindly allowed us to have a look around. ‘His’ bunker had now been turned into a storage outhouse, which was a novel idea. It was larger than the previous one and this time the gun sight was pointed in a different direction, towards the railway line. Evidently Polish forces had been expecting the Germans to attack on a number of fronts.

That’s one very secure place to keep your stuff – in a war bunker!

From here we continued on up in to the trees, where there was something even more remarkable – a further bunker and a fully restored trench. Piotr told us that he knew the archaeologist who had supervised the reconstruction around 6 years ago and that he had painstakingly ensured that the trenches were reconstructed along the same line and depth as the originals. There was also a plaque here – this one protected from the sun’s rays – telling us more about the trenches.

It was a fascinating experience. We also learned that, in the years leading up to war, Poles and Germans had lived side by side all over this area of the country. They had their own schools, churches and other public buildings. There were no serious problems to this point, but many of the German citizens here allegedly sabotaged the Polish defense effort as the war begun. It’s difficult to comprehend – as so much of what you learn of the war in Poland is. Regardless, it was a thoroughly interesting day out.