Travelling Again
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2005
1
11
14
Trip End
Ongoing
Olsztyn,
Poland
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
The next day we met our neighbour at the pension "Pan Grzegorz" (Mister Gregory), a translator from Warsaw with excellent English. He gave us a ride into the centre of town, which was very nice of him. We're getting used to Polish drivers and aren't as easily frightened on the road as before, but this was a new extreme
Astronomical table
. I was fairly certain we were going to die. He drove over 120 km/h in a 70 zone, weaving among the many cars, on a stretch where there were construction crews digging up the middle of the road. We went to Olsztyn mainly because of the gothic castle from the 14th century, where Copernicus lived and worked as the administrator of the region for several years, and where he developed his ideas on planetary bodies, but we discovered that the city itself was really nice. It isn't as big as any of the other cities we've visited so touring the old town took very little time, but there were lots of little cafes where we could've sat and just enjoyed the city. The old town is surrounded by a river (which somehow functioned as a moat centuries ago, despite being only a foot deep and a couple metres wide. I don't know, if I was an army maybe I'd turn back at the prospect of wet feet) and a park, so it was the perfect place to sit and read.
The castle, built by the Teutonic Knights before they founded the town, was nothing like Malbork. It took about an hour to see all of it, including the exhibition of regional folk art. We probably weren't up for another 3 hour tour anyway, and the castle was quite charming.
