Chris: A quiet day today. We Wandered about Torun, without any particular plans in mind. Popped into the British School to see if they had any work, but they had not started term time yet - so no luck there. Two potential hosts replied, unfortunately both wanting us in a week's time. We ended up going to a rock/indie bar called The Lizard King to discuss our options over a few beers. We decided to email our preferred hosts, Adam and Kathryn, to ask if they knew anyone else we could work with in the meantime. [View Full Entry]

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Chris: We visited the Copernicus Museum today, as the town makes a big thing about being the home town of Nickolas Copernicus. Being a bit of an astronomy nut I found the museum pretty interesting, although I did feel sorry for Shems! Most of the artifacts they had on display were dusty old books, some in glass cabinets, and also rather randomly lots of cannon balls. Shems tried to force herself round the place, but I think she was hit with the same affliction I get when entering M&S (especially the clothes department). The boredom becomes so intense that you physically [View Full Entry]

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Chris: We heeded the advice of the guy on the front-desk in the hostel and took the train to Turon. We had been told that it would be an interesting and historic place to see (birth place of Nickolas Copernicus - inventor of the solar system), so without much more research we set off to the city. One handy tip we read was to ask someone to write down out the train ticket request so that we could show the ticketing staff in the station. We asked the girl on the hostel reception desk and she helped out, and thank goodness [View Full Entry]

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Torun, 24-07-2001. Torun surely has charm, a soul reaching touch of clasic admosphere that breaches the charactre of this ancient realm of the Teutonic Knights, small cobble-stoned streets overshadowed by mighty churches which ghotic appaerance makes me feel small and insignificant... A ring of powerfull looking walls surrounding the inner city is testomony of my first visit to this ancient place. A light rain drizzling down on my head while I push my overloaded iron lady through near-empty streets, my sweaty and rained upon head trying to make an owl's turning, trying hard to take [View Full Entry]

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Short facts: Participants: Me Destination: Torun, Poland Length of the trip: 3 days Distance: 183 km from Warsaw to Torun Music: Queen Adreena Reading: Lonely Planet "Eastern Europe", Ryszard Kapuscinski "Podroze z Herodotem" (cannot say that I really read this, but I bought this) March 27.16:30 Sitting in the train with Lonely Planet "Eastern Europe" in my hands. It is interesting and quite amusing to read this being Eastern European myself (especially all those "and you can see the leftovers of Sov [View Full Entry]

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Torun is a city in northern Poland, on the Vistula River. The medieval old town of Toruń is the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus. It was inscribed onto the World Heritage List of UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1997. Torun is one of the few Polish cities which were not destroyed in World War II. The buildings you see here are as old as they look. Everybody knows the story of the rat catcher of Hameln, where the man lured the rats from the city with his flute-music. In Torun there was a frog plague, and a fiddler. The story [View Full Entry]

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I wake up at about 6:30, probably due to the missing rain cover on the tent. Chances for rain are virtually zero at the moment, during the day temperatures of around 30 celsius make getting far very hard. It's the evenings when we get the most cycling done, even in the morning it's too hot to cycle comfortably. First, we reach Chelmno, a lovely small town, located on a hill (which makes getting there a bit of a pain). After yesterday's flat tyre, I need to get a proper spare tube, and we go looking for a bike shop. The one [View Full Entry]

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Torun is a very, very gorgeous town in central Poland that is famous for three things: 1) being stunningly quaint and beautiful 2) their famous pierniki, or gingerbread, and 3) birthplace of Kopernik, or Copernicus as he was known in Latin. Unfortunately, because of my poor judgement, we missed the first train and thus had less time than I would have liked here. Torun has 200,000 people, but it wasn't damaged much in WWII and it really seemed like the most authentic and fun Old Town we had been in, the town square was full of locals, not tourists, and there [View Full Entry]

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