Bus Across Poland

After an extended late Sunday morning breakfast I arrive at the international bus station 15 minutes before the bus to Vilnius is supposed to leave. Unfortunately the bus is caught somewhere in Berlin traffic, so it’s more than one hour late, so I get to exchange impressions of and experiences in the Baltic countries with a German guy waiting for his Lithuanian wife returning from her home country.

 

After the conference with so much input and external structure the bus ride is utterly relaxing. It is completely booked, but only a few people got on in Berlin, I have a window seat on the first floor, there are only ten more people on the whole floor, it is very quiet. It’s quite nice to have absolutely nothing to do, no appointments to keep. I get to read a lot of magazines I took along and just look out of the window at the very flat German and Polish landscape, sometimes a stretch of forest, sometimes apple plantations with small trees overloaded with red fruit. One of the articles I read is on travelling and understanding between different parts of the world as well as changes in travelling due to technical developments. I think about this blog and how it’s often much easier and cheaper to buy tickets online these days and how the offline infrastructure is reduced in favor of the digital option until it’s not an option anymore. I decide that like it or not, some travel experiences just aren’t the same as 20 years ago just like our lives are very different from the way we lived in the 1990s…

Read on the bus: Free magazine to be found in the more expensive and presumably faster German trains, neofeminism, protestant magazine that sometimes comes with some big newspapers

 

Another article is about the author’s search for the maid her mother’s family had during the war, a young girl forcibly taken from a Ukrainian village. Though those who have their own memories of that time are dying out, this cruel injustice that wasn’t even recognized by the German side for a long time will remain an issue between my country and our neighbors to the east. Both the suffered and the caused pain are passed on through the generations and there is no way not to deal with them especially in a more and more closely intertwined macro-neighborhood such as the EU.

Somewhere in the middle of Poland

 

The bus feels like a space ship to me, probably a transit phenomenon as I won’t get off in Poland this time. I get the chance to start adjusting my language. The conductor speaks Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and (some) English. The announcements are made in Russian and (very shortened) in English with a heavy accent. Once we stop and I feel I should understand the announcement this time, so I ask the girl sitting near by, for some reason in English, she isn’t comfortable. I tell her in Latvian I understand that language, too, as I had heard her make a phone call in Latvian while reading a Russian magazine. She is surprised and happy and tells me that we stop for 15 minutes. Everyone leaves the bus at this small parking place in the middle of Poland. There is a vending machine and I find some Polish coins in the paper bag holding the remaining coins from my last trip to this region, but I don’t understand the instructions on the machine. I ask the guy waiting in line behind me, he understands enough Polish to help, as he sees the Latvian coins in my collection he switches from English to Latvian. It is a bit weird to speak Latvian in a third country and between other languages. When everyone returns to the bus a young guy politely offers to let me enter first. OK, now I know I’m back in Eastern Europe, it feels like home.

We arrive in Warsaw after 10pm. I’ve never been here, the tall buildings with huge advertisements in front of the dark sky are a sharp contrast to the dark forests and meadows we passed before. After the second stop every seat in the bus is occupied. I chat with two Lithuanian guys who spent the weekend partying in Warsaw and will be back in time for work on Monday as we will reach Vilnius at 7:30am. After a while the Russian, Polish and Lithuanian conversations die down and everyone tries to sleep in their seats.