Hello all from Sunny Poland! It's beautiful here - apart from some of the architecture, and the people are lovely (though Wroclaw is the home of Radio Rodina, pretty much the Catholic Radio Mille Collines.
I'll post some pictures when I take some, probably each evening. The competition's called Challenge Wratislavia, by the way.
The journey here was, well, eventful: seven hours on a late coach to Stansted, almost missing my connection. Sleep was prohibited. Instead, I experienced life in the raw. The coach was packed with the desperate, poor and mentally ill. That includes me. As I boarded, a nasty racial dispute blew up. The three Donegal women (all wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns) objected to an African gent wanting to sit next to the male in their party - he wanted to sleep across both seats. Before long, they were proclaiming that they'd 'catch AIDS' if he had the 'cheer' next to them, and when he responded fairly rudely, they threatened him but told the driver that he'd tried to punch them in the face… this hostility continued for 200 miles.
Meanwhile, I was surrounded by cockneys who a) compared criminal records, b) used a variety of racist terms for every ethnic group while reassuring each other that they weren't racist and c) compared experience with 'brass', which is slang for prostitute (see Helen Walsh's excellent novel, Brass).
As you can probably imagine, I didn't greet the hordes of cheery young fencers with entirely the appropriate degree of joy when I stepped off the coach at Stansted. Still, all uphill from here, eh?
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