Viva Polania

The poor machine had been crying out for a run. She’d yelp and moan every time I took her down to the shops or the video rental. She longed for the open road and the slow as a bicycle bullshit in the city centre was driving her nuts. There was nothing to be done about it but go on another road trip. The beginning of Poland is about an hour and a half from Berlin geographically, and about150 years psychologically. The Polish border town of Sulpice, from what we could see, was basically established to provide Germans with the four things they can’t get on their own side of the border: cheap smokes, cheap flowers, cheap haircuts and cheap hookers. Presumably German couples weekend there. The lady will get her hair done and buy a bouquet, while the man will get his balls licked in the woods. Afterwards they reconvene and smoke lots of cheap cigarettes, before driving home glad that in the EU there’s always some other fucker lower down the ladder than you.

Now the problem with living in Berlin and not having regular employment per say, is that you can never remember what date it is. The insurance on my car ran out a week ago, but sure I thought it was still the middle of July and didn’t we take off and not realise that we were driving an uninsured vehicle until we hit the border. The security was tiny, and why wouldn’t it be? The Polish government have no beef with the Germans just homosexuals and women. But the problem with arriving in Poland is that you’re immediately met with a very confusing roundabout. Get it wrong and you’re back in Germany. Get it wrong three times, pass through the border three times and eventually the border control will put down the porn and come out of their booth and start giving you shit. We swallowed the old insurance disc and pretended the NCT disc was the insurance instead. Border control asked us where we were going. We said Sulpice. He said, “Go and don’t come back.” So we did.

Did you know the Polish don’t take the Euro yet? Neither did we. So after we had a lovely plate of schnitzel and coleslaw in this roadside joint that looked like a chicken coop, we had to drink enough to bring our bill up to €20. (Otherwise we’d have got change back in pigs feet, or gold teeth or whatever currency they use in Poland.) That’s a lot of booze in Poland. Lucily, Sergei and Sasha, Linus and Pavel were on hand to help us. They were bus and truck drivers from the Ukraine. They tried to get me to pimp Bridie out. I was missing out on a fortune they told me. We were low on gas money and car insurance isn’t cheap but in the end Bridie decided against it. She had a headache. Still it’s good to know that if the whole making-it-in-Berlin thing blows up in our faces, that just an hour and a half away is the answer to all our cash flow problems.