22nd September

Shems:
Decision making is becoming a little arbitrary now, with us imposing false and meaningless conditions for taking a particular course of action. For example, this morning we randomly decided that if we were asked to move to yet another room in the hostel we would pack our bags and leave, if not we would stay another night. And so it was we found ourselves hurridly checking out without a plan for what to do next. I did a last-minute email download and found Adam had replied to my message from last night, saying he did not know of anyone else we could meet but we were welcome to start with him today. Adam and his wife Kathryn run a language school in North Poland. We found out that it would take seven hours to reach Lembork, and the train would leave Torun in 30 minutes, so we stuffed the computer in the bag and ran!

We shared our cabin for much of the journey with a man who would not smile, speak nor otherwise acknowledge our existence. This is one aspect of Poland I have found very hard to understand, and I have encountered it a lot. No matter, I lost myself in my new Murukami novel for the whole trip. After a couple of changes of train we arrived at Lembork, where it appeared the only exit was to run over all the tracks as everyone else appeared to be doing. Adam spotted us in our endeavour and when he met us said "so you're quite adventurous aren't you?" It turned out that most people use the staircase which we hadn't spotted. Adam then drove us to his home, where we met his mother and three of his children: Filip, Patrick and Anya. It turned out that Kathryn was on her way back from visiting her family in Switzerland and would arrive shortly - to find out that we were there! Upon Kathryn's return we met Dominic, the baby, and were warmly welcomed into the family home. It turned out that Adam and Kathryn met whilst there were volunteering in Moss-Side and Toxteth several years ago. Adam has also hitch-hiked all the way to England whih we both found pretty amazing.

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