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Our landlady, Pani Janikowska, replaced some of our parquet floors for us, the coal-burning stoves that had been in here and been removed had left gaps and also burn marks on the wood. So we got to see the building construction first-hand. There is an eighteen-inch gap between floors filled with special "dust", basically light granules of dirt. Maybe for insulation, not sure. Then joists, then planks, then the parquet. This style of parquet floor is really common here. The walls tend to be extremely thick, and brick all the way through.
They apparently don't use nails here hardly at all. Well, though Władek did show me how he nails in the parquet pieces. They use this quick-hardening cement foam almost everywhere. Must make for quiet construction sites. All the windows they're replacing one-by-one all over the country are set in with this cement foam, pianka montazowa or "mounting foam". Władek, putting in the patch for the place where the stove used to be, used it. I gotta find some of this stuff when I get back.
This sign is everywhere:
Absolutely no idea.
W. drove us out to his place at Mszana Dolna on Saturday, dropping us off down the road a bit, and the three of us hiked over a neighboring mountain. The sky was just impossibly blue, maybe because there are no airplanes here. Or maybe because already in September the sun is low in the sky and your shadow is seven feet long. And the woods were thick and lush and green and just the gentle hush of the wind in the trees and the few birds that didn't want to sleep through the afternoon.
A brutally steep trail, though, I think the reason it looked so easy on the topo map was that I wasn't taking into account that the numbers were meters, not feet. We were exhausted on Sunday, but not so much we couldn't go to the charity concert W. had gotten us tickets for, a student orchestra, but a really good one. In a tiny 19th-century hall that looked like the good stuff we saw in Vienna, 50-foot ceilings and mirrors and chandeliers everywhere and acoustics that were just spot-on. Ending with dinner with his cousin the nuclear physicst. Ah, such a weekend.
And on bad days Anne wonders why we came. Sheesh.
Ok, yeah, we know that a meter is supposed to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, and nice factors of ten, whatever, blah, blah, but this is so very, very wrong. They're eggs, not hot-dogs, dammit
Crazy shit. But they screwed themselves. The half-size carton contains six eggs, 'cause five would make a lopsided carton.
On the other hand, another sign that I'm living in paradise here. They have regularly have two flavors of ketchup. Take that Heinz "57 Varieties"
Łagodny is sweet, like barbecue sauce. Pikantny is slightly spicier than ours ("piquant").