To the Lake (and YAY for the American Women's Soccer Team - Winners of the World Cup!!)

Monday, July 6, 2015

First, a disclaimer!  I had a large beer with dinner and another, courtesy of one of our charming new friends and it’s nearly eleven as I start this.  If it’s a bit incoherent, please remember that forgiven is a virtue!  Now, back up to this morning!

It is lovely to sleep in! The sun comes up at 4:41 but I can put my duvet over my head and go back to sleep! We can leave whenever we want to as long as we’re downstairs in time for breakfast!

Our hostel is adorable and filled with only young folk!  We wander down for breakfast around nine and meet two young men from Belgium, Peter/Pieter and Wayne/Wannes and Michael/Misha/Michail who is Polish.  And there’s Johnny/Vardalas from Greece!  We get to know each other over breakfast and laugh and giggle and have a blast!  Peter makes sure that I spell his name correctly and tells me that I can put “hash tag Peter” in my blog!  Wayne makes sure I get the double “n”!  All the guys have Anglicized their names for simplicity.  Misha, especially, doesn’t use his nickname because in America it is a girl’s name.

Breakfast is breads with choices of spreads including Nutella and cereals and coffee or tea or hot chocolate.  The conversation is so much fun that the food is inconsequential.

Eventually everyone needs to get their days underway.  The guys are going for a bike ride and we are going to Morskie Oko, a big lake that appears to be a cirque, but may just be a glacial depression.  There is a way to take the busses but we are taking our car to the closest parking lot.  There we take a carriage drawn by two horses for an hour-long ride.  There is a sign that says the carriage can only take twelve people so as not to overload the horses.

Traffic jam!

Half way there the carriage stops and the driver gets down.  He fills a bucket and gives each horse water.  He inspects them both and decides that the one on the left needs to be cooled off, so he tosses water on his check and flanks and uses a plastic instrument like a curves squeegee to dry him off.

When we get to the end, the horses get fed and we watch them toss their feed bags around to get everything out of the bottom!

 After you get off the carriage, there is a walk to the lake that is supposed to take thirty minutes.  Of course, we don’t go at the normal pace, so we take about an hour! Again, remember that it is uphill and in the mountains!

Most people seem walk the entire way, even little bitty kids, although we do see a fair number of parents acting as beasts of burden! We’re very grateful to have a ride. 

 We arrive at the lake, along with everyone else.  The shore is lined with people sitting on rocks and dangling their feet in the water.  Others are taking the two and a half mile hike around the lake.  There is barely a reflection of the mountains in the water but we’re hoping that the clouds may break up and give us one of those glorious picture-postcard views.  We’re willing to wait for Mother Nature to do her thing.

 Eventually even the most dogged photographer has to give up and call it quits.  So, too, with us.  We hike back to where the carriages are awaiting their fares.  First there’s an ice-cream stand with chocolate/vanilla twistee cones.  We definitely deserve this!  And it’s delicious!

We don’t have to wait at all for a carriage and are careful to ride on the same side as before so as to see a different view on the way back.  The fare to the lake was fifty zloty; but the fare back is only thirty!  I think I’d charge it the other way, although the return trip is downhill and much easier.  It is still just a long, though!!

The horses trot all the way!  They must know what there’s a break coming! We get back in half the time!  It is so interesting to watch the attendants unhitch the teams and replace them with fresh horses.

Back to our car we find that it’s not as difficult to get out at we feared it would be.  The parking lanes are very close together but a lot of people have left by the time we get back and there is more room to maneuver.  We’re on our way to Zakopane to see what the down town has to offer.  Our little map doesn’t have names or numbers so it’s kind of a crapshoot to see if we make it! 

Well, here’s a downtown!  I guess it’s the right one!  Amazingly we find a parking place and decide to stroll up one side and down the other.  There are lots of tacky tourist traps and nearly everything says Made in China.  It doesn’t take long to decide this isn’t where we want to shop.  We do hear a band, though, and step in the Zyk Zak Restaurant.  There is a four-piece combo, bass, guitar, violin and accordion, and they are lots of fun.  The restaurant is kind of a buffet where you can order meats at one station, soups and salads at an another and drinks when you pay.  We have a kielbasa and kebab with onions and pork to split and we each have a bowl of zurek, that fabulous soup!  I have my first Polish beer, Warka, which is quite fine.

The only "real" shop!

After dinner we wander on and encounter a ventriloquist whose dummy is a piano player doing songs from the ‘60s.  He drew quite a crowd with lots of little ones in the front.  He could bug out his eyes, wiggle his ears, flap his fingers on the keys and stick out his tongue.  The kids loved him!  Kids put money on his piano and he’d stop and shake their hands.  Marilyn gave a little girl some money for the piano and she loved it.  I found a little guy to be my messenger, too.

There were other buskers, too.  One played violin and the other was a medieval trio.

We made it back to the car, and even more amazing, found our way back to Good-Bye Lenin!  When we approach the front door, Johnny is holding the resident cat, Krupka, which means Dot, and I get in some more loving.  

We drop our stuff in our room and take our computers down to the living room to blog.  We put our feet up on the coffee table (shoes aren’t allowed inside) and have just started when Wayne sticks his head in the door and says, “Hello, American friends!  I can tell you’ve been hiking!  I see your feet are up!”

He has a small camera in his hand and asks if he can have a picture of the three of us.  Of course we agree, especially since we’d been planning on trying to get pictures anyway.  I ask him to use my camera, too, and we wind up with several combinations of people.  I get everyone’s email addresses and download and send them right away!

Johnny and Pieter

Wannes and Pieter

 From then on it is one long free-ranging conversation.  There are some “ugly Americans” staying tonight but we choose to stay in the living room with the kids.  There are now more of them, two sisters from England, a Chinese-American girl who sounds American, our original friend who checked us in and is from the UK and another young lady who is working at finding herself.  They are all as much fun as possible and at one point Pieter says he’d rather stay inside with the grannies than go outside with the others!  We cover such diverse topics as how people met (Pieter and Wannes met in university and are both P.E. teachers);  who are you traveling with (the sisters can’t think of a better traveling companion!  So unusual!); slang in different languages ( knock you up, tossed salad, carpool) and the difficulty of having different languages spoken in the same country (French, Dutch and German in Belgium, English and Spanish in the U.S.);  and the difference between a diary which is totally personal and hand-written and a blog which is for more general consumption.  There are also some language lessons!

During all of this a bar-b-que is being cooked and various plates of food keep appearing.  The kids are all sharing everything and we are invited to join in.  Too bad we’ve already eaten because everything looks and smells grand! I do succumb to the offer of another beer, however!  They’re warm and Johnny says he’ll get it later when they are cold.  I don’t give it another thought, but sure enough he remembers and brings it to me.

It’s getting late for the older generation and we begin to gather our things. Pieter asks if we are going to the party in the city center!  I think not!  As we pass Wannes, Marilyn mentions that we are going to the Salt Mine tomorrow and he says he’s been and it’s great.  She asks about the elevator and he assures us that it only takes less than a minute and there is even a fan.  Yay!

 We’ll leave in the morning but we’ll sure miss these guys!!