ZAKOPANE, POLANDSKI

I feel so at home in this country. I end up spending a glorious week in Krakow, eating and drinking like a queen, singing from 5 p.m. onwards on Florianska ulca, watching Anita and Claudia try to get people to eat at their bosses restaurant. They are two girls I met early on in the piece, I see them every day and they request songs from me in between talking Deutsch, Polish and English to various tourists, and life is good, it really is... I don't feel like a visitor here at all and it proves pretty hard to leave.

However, as time is passing I decide to make for the mountains with two cool girls from our hostel Momotown; Jannah (from Leeds) and Scooter (Boston). We bus to the slopes of Zakopane, and as our coach winds past the Tatra mountains outside the windows I fall more and more in love with this beautiful country - it's A-framed houses all quaint in the beautiful countryside, Tatra's towering behind like gods...

The market place in Zakopane is just as beautiful, a long cobbled / paved street dotted with restaurants, local sheeps' cheese stalls and small booths selling bread. Although being a kind of a ski resort, with a high season that comes at a much colder time, it's still busy here in a nicely manageable kind of way. I take Stella out to play straight away; it's 5 p.m on a Sunday afternoon / evening but business is good nevertheless. People pass by much more slowly here than in Krakow, and seem to have much more time to stop and talk. I meet Alan first, he's Polish but has lived in Melbourne for 25 years and is overjoyed to be back in the land he will always call home, so close to these beautiful mountains... He becomes my angel for the day when he presents me with some eucalyptus lozenges from Australia; a good thing as my throat has been a bit rough of late, I think due to the colder weather.

Then there's Jan, tall, blue eyed and Polish... shaggy hair falls in his artists eyes as he lopes across to say hi. He searches through his bag for something other than money to give to me, and comes across his sketch book, out of which he tears his latest drawing. It's kind of a Dali-esque, ballpoint-penned piece, very surreal anyways, and he tucks it into my case after I insist he signs it -which he does by lighting a match and simply printing 'J A N' on the back with the burned out stick.

One woman comes across wielding a ten Zloty note and, rather than throwing it into my case, she actually posts it through the soundhole in my guitar! It's one way to ensure I remember what the Polish currency looks like I suppose, as there's no way I can retrieve it without a complete string change. Ha ha! It reminds me of the time this happened in Christchurch, New Zealand years ago, where a child posted a coin in my guitar and I felt like quite the jukebox. A Polish girl in our room tells us later that minimum wage in Poland is about 3 1/2 Zloty an hour - less than one Euro! So after I hear this it puts my earnings into perspective and I am amazed and even a little bit concerned whenever I get a coin larger than 2 Zloty.

Back in the marketplace, Jannah and Scooter pass by... they are such cool ladies... we go for an amazing meal (pizza and pierogi's) where a Polish quartet sing and fiddle away on their violins / viola's and little children throw coins in the wishing well running through the restaurant. We're joined by Edoardo, the friendliest Italian I've ever met, and we make a plan to cook together the following night. It turns into quite the hostel event, with pasta, salad, peaches and cream and wine for about 7 people all of different nationalities; I suppose we are one of the only youth hostels in town. Smaller towns like this always seem to bring out a different kind of solidarity between travellers and I like it. It reminds me of Clifden (Ireland) in a way, where a bunch of people from our hostel sat around and sang acapella songs before going out to see a band. Here in this hostel in Zakopane I bring out the guitar and we all sing together for a while as well. It's so nice.

However, when our bus pulls back into Krakow two days later all three of us ladies are happy to be back to the place that feels most like home at the moment. Although I'm off to Prague the following day, the others have a couple of days left to further explore the museums, synagogues, and vodka distilleries of this great city.