- Starts at very-early-o'clock in the morning: lots of students standing outside school eating pretend croissants by 7 Days. Several people nearly get left behind.
- Although our teacher instructs us very emphatically to stay awake and look out of the window, we all fall asleep almost as soon as the coach starts moving.
- There is approximately one public toilet in the whole of Małopolska.
- Someone spills orange juice on the coach and the driver goes ballistic, almost abandoning us in Biecz (wherever that is).
- It is fun to climb up bell-towers in wooden churches!
- It is not fun to eat only ice-cream all day and pee in a bush.
- Polish people who do guided tours of churches speak veryfastindeed.
- Predictably, when you visit a historic church, the caretaker will try to encourage you to get married there.
- Trying to find a place to eat in a group of eleven will take forever. Add an extra half-hour to forever for each additional person.
Fotki:
A Big Polish house, like what they build in the country. Looks as though it only has three levels instead of the customary four.
Inside the synagogue at Bobowa, former centre of Hassidic Jewish life, now a place of pilgrimage.
Wooden church of St Michael the Archangel in Binarowa, dating from about 1500. Gosh that's old.
The paintings inside date from the 16th century
Vestry painting
Painted interior of the church
Cerkiew (Orthodox church) in Kwiaton, former settlement of the Lemkos or Rusyns (cue lots of angry comments from Real Łemkowie because I got it wrong again). Slavic cultural history is cool.
Inside the church - which smelt strongly of Ronseal wood preservative. Now re-consecrated as a Catholic church, since the original Eastern Orthodox congregations have long since moved on.
An Orthodox lapidarium - no actual graves, just the tombstones, which were rescued and restored. The Łemkowie and their families are long gone and the gravestones were rescued from various centres of Łemko or Rusyn culture and are currently undergoing restoration. The inscriptions are in Cyrillic and the language is apparently a cross between Ukrainian and Polish. It's fascinating. I wonder who they were, where they went, and where their descendants are now...
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