Our hotel in Berlin.
We left Berlin this morning and I was very sad to be leaving. There is soooo much to see and Berlin and I will definitely need to return here someday to continue my explorations. We had ben warned that the level of highway systems were not the same in Poland as in Germany...translation there aren't many highways, lol. Today was also going to be our first border crossing and I had it in my head that I wanted it to be more than just a thank you and continue to drive through, well, evidently I jinxed us. We knew we were getting close to the border when we started to see the lorries lined up along the side of the road. I swear it was like 5 or 6 miles before we even got to the border and it was a total standstill for the trucks.
WELCOME TO POLAND.
Once again my big mouth "damn it would suck to be in one of those trucks" which I would regret saying when one of the trucks that I noticed lined up ended up getting through border patrol before we did :) Anyway, we got closer and there were several buses ahead of us I didn't really care I had the mp3 player and a book neither of which I would need due to the fact that a little drama was playing out right outside the bus. There was a guy in the next lane that was evidently known to the soldiers as they pulled the car to the side and proceeded to have him and the passenger take EVERYTHING out of it. It just looked like it was groceries but I mean tons of groceries. There had to be several hundred euros worth of detergent, food, beverages etc.
The border crossing.
The guy was throwing things, yelling at the soldiers, throwing more things we were all amazed by the site. The best was when the guy went over to his 12 packs of pepsi and took all the lids off every bottle that was in the garbage all the while staring at the soldiers. I guess he wanted to make sure that they couldn't drink it. I kinda felt bad for the guy, but then I figured he evidently did something to get into that situation, a little later (when we were standing around outside for 2 hours while they checked the passports) we had talked to some folks who said that he was evidently know to the patrol and either had drugs in the car or some other contraband or the car was stolen. They didn't detain him because he was milling around with the rest of us talking furiously on his cell phone, but the car did get taken away.
Waiting for our passports.
Well, like I said 2 hours later we got our passports back and were off again towards Warsaw, I guess this goes to prove careful what you wish for cause you just may get an adventureous border crossing, lol. It definitely made the day longer as we were on the bus from 7am to 730pm but I still think I would have been disappointed with a wave thru.
We stopped for lunch in a beautiful little Polish town, Poznan and I had wonderful mushroom soup with moldy..yes moldy bread. Really you just scrape the mold off right???? I also had NON gas water or niengazwada I'm sure that's not how you spell it but the most important thing was the nie NO GAS!!! Sweet. I also learned Dziekuje which is thank you, which I must have said 1,000 times after I learned NO GAS water, lol. Since we were in Poland for the next 4 days it was a great relief to know that I would be carbonated water free for 4 whole days. I know this may seem like a trivial matter, but I drink alot of water and alot of carbonation is not good in my system :)
We got into Warsaw around 7:30pm had dinner and headed to bed, it's amazing how exhausted one gets sitting on a bus for 12 1/2 hours lol.
