After the last night, it was very difficult to get out of bed in the morning. And I still had to organize all my things, help tidy up, shower, and do everything else. Christina was so kind and made me a great hangover breakfast that the cats only looked at jealously from the side.
I said goodbye to Christina and Alvero, thanked them, and left a little something hidden for Easter.
Half an hour later than agreed, we finally set off and Sergey picked me up and we headed to the mountains. It felt a bit strange to be going somewhere with someone I hardly knew in a country where I was a stranger. But some friends knew about it, and you can rely on the references from Couchsurfing. And I have no regrets about my decision. After nearly two hours drive, we saw the first mountains and stopped briefly to enjoy the view. I had never heard of the mountain range between Poland and Slovakia before, and it was somehow more compact than I knew from the Alps. We continued driving and parked on a well-developed road. There were even some carriages that could have taken us up and back down, but we wanted to hike. The hike actually went the whole time along this well-developed road, which I initially found a bit disappointing, but at the latest when we trudged through the first snow with old trekking shoes, I was grateful that we didn't have to take narrower paths. Suddenly being in the mountains felt so unreal to me. On my trip, I had mainly visited cities, and just a few hours ago, I was in one of the cities with the highest air pollution in Europe. I didn't even have to research that, my lungs had already signaled to me multiple times that the air wasn't the best, and the next day Sergey sent me a message that the city had been ranked 4th in the list of most polluted cities in the world in recent days. I can be truly grateful to live in Germany. Living in Krakow permanently would not be good for my lungs. In general, it feels strange to me that in Germany we try so hard to reduce our ecological footprint just a little bit more, and in Poland they still burn coal endlessly and don't even separate their trash. I enjoyed breathing fresh mountain air all the more, and even though we hiked up pretty quickly, I had no problems. After about 2 hours, we reached our destination, a cute cottage by a frozen lake. With warm tea, we enjoyed the view and wandered around on the lake.
To go further, we or rather I would have needed better equipment. So we briefly returned to the cottage for a snack. I had a regional grilled cheese (Oscypek), which squeaked quite a bit between my teeth. And then we had to go downhill again. On the way back, we had some really good conversations.
I was a bit annoyed that I didn't speak English better, I think with more language skills, the conversations would have been even deeper. But I must also say that English with a Russian accent is really difficult to understand... we learned a lot about life in Belarus and how people there are simply put in prison for all sorts of things. The country was definitely not a democracy. Our conversations became more and more personal, and when he told me that he had already been married twice and had a child in his home country, I felt very young. He was already 35 years old, but when he smiled, he looked young again. Age is just a number after all. And when we realized that we were at a similar point in our personal development, I felt even more confirmed. The question of what makes one happy and what one actually wants in life will probably accompany me for some time. When we arrived back at the car, it was already dark, and we drove back tired. We exchanged some music and when we arrived at his place, he made me freshly cooked pancakes with salty cream (the Belarusian version of pancakes), and I collapsed onto the couch with sore feet and fell asleep. The next morning, we were really going to Budapest. *
PS: How do you recognize that you are in a Polish household?
