Burrito West Blog

Warning: rambly blog post.

Peter left yesterday to visit the family a few hours away. I skipped this visit because I think it's easier on everyone not to make Peter translate everything for me when everyone wants to talk to him - it's a distraction and it's awkward and I tend not to say much because I don't want to make Peter translate. I'll go on the next trip.

So, I'm on my own for a few days! I stayed in yesterday because we're having a windstorm here. I watched the poor guys on the roof of the building next door working in the cold (without safety lines), having to brush snow aside to lay roofing tiles - that's hard work. I will try to picture that next time I feel like my job is hard (uh, I mean when I am back at my job, since my current daily activities are definitely not hard).

Peter and I went to a nearby town a few days ago - Kłodzko. Peter's family has some distant relatives there (the exact relation still hasn't been explained to me) so we went to visit them. We did a bit of sightseeing first - touring some crazy underground tunnels, then the fortress. It was 2degC out, and windy and despite wearing all my warm clothes (including leggings under my jeans) I was still cold; this doesn't bode well for when winter really hits here. Anyway, Kłodzko is a neat little town. We had lunch in an empty restaurant (options were limited) and were told that it would be 40 min before anything was ready - except goulash, we could have goulash right away. I'm not making this up. So we had goulash. It wasn't bad. I've had a surprising amount of goulash since moving here.

A view over Klodzko from the fortress.

 Unrelated Polish experience. We went to the post office to mail some packages - mailing anything here is always an interesting experience. One package - which I had taped up very securely (I assume all postal systems are going to attempt to destroy my envelopes) - had to be put inside another envelope because their stamps won't stick to tape, there has to be paper for the stamp glue to stick to. (I found all this out later, during the transaction Peter is having lengthy conversations with the postal clerk and is inexplicably buying envelopes and it's all very confusing to me.)  The other quirk here is that if you add additional tape - like a stripe of packing tape on a bubble envelope to make sure it stays shut, they will make you write on the envelope next to the tape (in Polish, obviously) that the package was sealed by the sender. This really confused me the first time until Peter explained that they used to have a problem with postal workers opening envelopes, taking things, and taping them back up. It's always quite amusing getting the run down from Peter afterwards about wtf just happened at the post office.

Another Polish fun fact:
This is the word for 'entrance': Wejście
This is the word for 'exit': Wyjście
Yup. And they sound virtually identical. Have I mentioned I've kind of given up on learning Polish?