2 sides of Częstochowa

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  Częstochowa, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland
Friday, June 11, 2010

Eating in Poland. It's a very good experience. Traditional Polish cuisine is heavy on the meat and light on the vegies but they've embraced other cuisines enthusiastically and there's plenty of mixing it up. When you order water with your meal, you can order "varter viz gaz" or "varter vizout gaz" (ie would you like it carbonated?). You can order your steak "medium, well done or bloody" which eliminates all that namby pamby squeamishness about ordering it "rare"...in Poland and from our experience, in France, Italy, Austria and Slovakia (not so much Spain) breakfast is a meal of opulent magnificence. Next time a hotel in Australia offers you a sorry excuse for a "continental" breakfast, call their bluff. None of your sad little packets of Kellogs, white toast and jam here. It seems a real continental breakfast involves the serious risk of a purple-faced hearty if you should actually take it on as a challenge. Vast arrays, of cheeses, meats, salads, various lovely breads, spicy boiled eggs, really what we would think of a dinner time smorgasboard, plus cereals, fruit salads, toast, yoghurt etc as well. You nearly have to go and have a lie down after brekky. Especially if you should choose to have a small vodka chaser with your cup of tea.

We're in Częstochowa because Di's, Stefan's and Bronia's father Zyg was born and raised in Rędziny 10 km from here. We'll be going there tomorrow.

Częstochowa has about 240,000 people. It turn out to be very significant in Polish history. Once again, with absolutely no research or planning, we've landed somewhere with a big story to tell.

It's the site of one of the biggest Christian pilgrimages, with about 4 million a year from around the world visiting The Black Madonna of Częstochowa  which is Poland's holiest relic and has been in this city since maybe 1382. This is news to me. I'd never heard of it. Di had. But then she is Polish.

There's also a very strong association with the Solidarność movement and trade union. We looked at a series of big displays on a park border detailing the city's involvement, with Lech Wałęsa and Jerzy Popiełuszko etc prominent. So there you go.

We also saw a very large display about a recent motorcycle ride from Częstochowa to Moscow commemorating the Katyn massacre which, we surmise, must have counted amongst the victims, people from this city and region. It looks from the pictures like the bikers might have been ex or current servicemen. How in-depth is our research, eh? Not very, actually.

We did spend an hour in the local museum (entry, 5 zloty each or about $2) looking for background on the area in the 30s and 40s but it was weird, with the exception of Katyn, the museum's history goes from several thousand years BC to about 1939 - then stops. We keep getting reminders that Poland has a very heavy history, not least in the last 70 years.

We had the bikes serviced at the local Triumph dealer. Setting this up involved several confusing phone calls conducted in two mutually exclusive languages. Dave had the excellent idea of reading phonetically from our Polish-English phrase book. This was met with complete silence on the other end of the phone, followed by "Errr...what you say?". This has happened often enough now to make it clear that once you get to Eastern Europe, bluffing your way through a conversation is a COMPLETE non-starter. It sounds like everyone's talking backwards. I've got a new strategy now. Just talk English but in a Borat accent. Eg - In Poland is many interesting things. Also Polish people make many funny joke. Polish police very nice, hardly kill anyone for many weeks now. Works an absolute charm. Di doesn't think this is a very good idea at all and would prefer to sit at a separate table while Dave is ordering from the menu.

The guy we ended up dealing with is Wojtek (pronounced Voitek) the workshop manager, a young guy with a great sense of humour. There's a photo of him on this page. He dropped us off in town, and picked us up later, in his own car. We were only hysterical with fear a couple of times during the ride. We were stoked with the service we got. The staff all liked Dave's bright green Speed Trip. That colour option has never made it to Poland and they didn't even know it existed.

Wojtek also spanners for a rider in the Polish national Supersports championship, on a Daytona 675. Apparently the championship also has riders from Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia etc and is pretty big. We've also put a couple of photos of his streetfighter project up. He's building it up to compete in custom shows.

Częstochowa has a very classy town centre with the usual inviting outdoor eateries and lots of greenery and relaxation space. Prosperous, groovy looking people in Ray-Bans everywhere. It also has some very serious looking housing-trust type tenements with lots of gang graffiti, rotten old cars, groups of skinny guys slouching around and very obvious neglect, poverty and apathy. We got a bit lost last night and wound up in one of these housing projects for about 15 minutes. We couldn't find our way out as it was completely fenced in. There were a couple of cops talking to a group of young guys next to their beaten-up hatchback in there - the conversation seemed to be along the line of, So, fellers, you're absolutely certain it wasn't you we just saw behaving like dicks just down the road? And of course, you have absolutely no objection to us taking a friendly look inside your car? Not to mention your own persons? Good, because we're going to anyway. We imagine a lot of people haven't yet benefited from the changes to Poland since democracy came in. We hope they will. Perhaps a load of the old state-owned enterprises hit the wall and took a lot of jobs with them.

We've never seen so many separate patrols of police as we did walking through this neighbourhood last night. Some (a few) Polish police wear light blue and drive comedy sized hatchbacks. But mostly they drive big dark blue vans, usually with heavy mesh over the glass, and they themselves wear black combat type gear and serious armour. Wojtek told us they're not so heavy, though.

And something else we've never seen so many of, too. Nuns. Poland has got to be the churchiest country in the world. Black, dark blue, light blue, grey, brown, beige (their habits not the nuns themselves). There's shrines everywhere. Pope John Paul II is deeply respected and venerated here. We asked Wojtek what the young people think. He told us in small towns it gets a bit full on. He doesn't like it much. But certainly, there's a lot of churches and shrines. And nuns. It reminds Dave of when he was about seven and he had to go to piano lessons with a terrifying midget called Sister Mary Carmelita. This repeated weekly nightmare returns with crystalline clarity whenever he smells musty old wooden buildings like old school halls, church halls, etc. Daylight and deep breathing is the only effective treatment. Even Pension Svorad in Trenčín, Slovakia was a little bit spooky by association. Di's childhood nun memories recall a daily nervous walk past a Catholic school on Pick Avenue in Mount Gambier.

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Jasna Góra again	Park Staszica	Park Staszica	Park Staszica
Park Staszica	Aleja Najswletszej Maryl Panny	Poet Halina Poswialowska   Comments!	Wojtek's streetfighter project
more of the streetfighter   Comments!	Yes this is pretty funny already, isn't it?   Comments!	Pedestrian access. OH&S not an obsession	This is from Kraków but it's typically Polish
Not in the tourist brochures. Close to our hotel	More Czestochowa	More Czestochowa	More Czestochowa
More Czestochowa	More Czestochowa	St Zygmunta's Church	More Czestochowa
More Czestochowa. Quite artistic this one	Di took most of the streetscapes. Pretty good	The bridge to nowhere.   Comments!	I wonder if they thought it would look like this

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