Reflections of My Travel

click for pix
First thing this morning, we crossed the border into Poland. Now this was a border crossing. They had a toll-like station where they stopped each car, looked at our passports, and STAMPED them! I got a stamp for leaving Germany and a stamp for entering Poland. Yes, I do get excited over the simplest things. One of the first things that we did was to stop and top off with gas. This was our first non-Euro currency exchange. Turns out that polish money is kind of like the Chinese yen, it takes a lot of them to make a little. We topped off with gas for right around 65 zloty, which was roughly 16 Euro, which was roughly 20 dollars. We began our quest for a postcard at a very nice supercenter-type store. It was actually a surprise to find such a nice shopping center where we were as the surrounding neighborhoods were very poor looking. We were unable to find any postcards, even after grabbing a polish-English dictionary in order to make an attempt at questioning an employee on the matter. We did grab a small bottle of milk to have with our breakfast. Of course, since we couldn’t read any of the bottles, we basically crossed our fingers and grabbed one – a strategy that proved unsuccessful when we opened it a short while later and discovered it was buttermilk (at least I hope it was buttermilk and not just horribly rancid milk for sale!). We stopped in a couple of other places looking for a simple Poland postcard. Finally, I settled on a postcard that for all practical purposes had nothing to do with Poland – a close-up pic of a dog – but it did at least have some polish writing on it, “cze??, daj pyska!” (which I’ve translated to either “worship, it give muzzle” or “hello, give mouth”). After finally finding some sort of postcard, we crossed into Czech Republic, another true border crossing. I received another stamp from Poland, marking my departure, but I was perturbed to find that Czech had not bothered to stamp me in. Big meanies. Both Poland and the Czech Republic had pretty countryside but poor housing until we got to Prague. At the border between the two countries, we had children rush our car with windshield cleaning supplies and though we repeatedly said no and shook our heads, they insisted on cleaning our windshields. Looking around at the poor surroundings, and because they did do a good job, we gave them what polish change we had. I had heard raving reviews about Prague, and for all I know they might be true, but we didn’t care to stick around to find out. It was huge. It was a city. It was a huge city. And we just don’t much like cities. Randal certainly did not like trying to drive around in it. The architecture was very pretty, but not any prettier than we had seen everywhere else. It did not seem worth sticking around so we hightailed it out of there. If it hadn’t been so big and crowded, it probably would have been a good place to stop and find a postcard. But it was very big and crowded so we just went on, figuring that we’d stop at the next town. We stopped in Plezne at a large and modern mall. We walked around the whole mall and never found the first postcard. And before we knew it, we were back in Germany. So much for my simple postcard collection. Such is life. We got to the town of Regensburg, on the Danube river, and decided it looked like a good place to spend the night. I’m very pleased that we made that decision. We took a nap in the hotel room and when it was dark we woke up and went for a walk around the town. It was a terrific little European town! It was everything that comes to mind when you think of Europe. Small paved street-alleyways, lots of shops, cafes with people sitting outside socializing, massive and ancient cathedrals… it had it all. I thoroughly enjoyed our lengthy walk around town and across the river and such. It was a nice, relaxing, and yes, romantic evening. When we got back to the hotel, we attempted to watch a bit of TV. Only CNN in English. But the commercials on television at that hour of the night were far more lascivious than ours. We ended up watching a snooker tournament. After all, who needs to understand the words when there’s so much strange billiard action going on? It’s been a good night, indeed.