Europe Trip
It's been a week since I returned from a three week trip to Europe with my brother and father. We flew direct to London, then spent a few days there until the RyanAir flight which took us to my grandparents' city in Poland, and then we did the same thing in reverse on the way back. No need for a detailed summary, I'll just mention some highlights.

First and foremost is the fact that when I returned from London in early winter 2001, I claimed that it was one of the few cities I could live in. I based that on my winter impressions of transportation, population density, and so on. I don't like taking things back, but I have changed my mind. This time, the trip was in the summer, there were millions of people everywhere, with long lines, and while the transportation was still very good, the temperature in the tube was about 10 degrees warmer than comfortable.

Aside from the mentioned nuisances, something that drove me nuts is that two-thirds of the time if someone opened their mouth on the street it was either Polish or Arabic. This really irked me. I expected English in England.

In contrast, on the trip out to Stonehenge, we took the train to Salisbury. Salisbury was a nice small city and proved to have all the things I would expect in an English town. It was like the archetypal sort of English town one expects. Strange as it may be, I don't think London fits its stereotype any longer. It has lost much of that uniqueness.

Enough about England. It really wasn't that exciting, aside from the various methods of transportation. While time in Poland was very limited, we packed the days full of activities. Outside of the usual family obligations, we took a larger trip up North to the Baltic, at Gdańsk. On the way, we stopped at Malbork; that castle the Teutonic Knights built is amongst the largest in Europe. A truly amazing place, and getting better, as can be said for everything in Poland as time grows since communist regime.

It is interesting that every time I go to Poland someone ends up asking how I find it compared to life over here. Everytime I go, I am forced to answer less and less, as the gap is shrinking exponentially. I could live there, go to the grocery store in the same car I have here, buy the same brands of food, and use the same credit card to pay for them. There really is a lot less contrast than there used to be. It almost takes the fun out of travelling.

The new lens proved to be a very good thing during this trip. At 17mm, it was wide enough to capture even the largest buildings, and in at 85mm it got the closest details.

The photo here is of me standing in an archway in Toruń, where Copernicus was born and where he lived. It was on the way during our trip to the Baltic. Through the archway is the Vistula and the bridge we used to get into the city.