After yesterdays unsuccessful effort to find a campground in Warsaw, this morning we were determiend to give the city another go. At least to the extent of finding some place to park so that we could spend a little time exploring the old city.

So we were up at 5:00 am and on our way. Again road closures and bridge work made the exercise a bit frustrating but with next to no traffic at this time on a Sunday we managed to find ourselves a parking lot within reasonable distance of our target area. We spent about 3 hours walking around the old part of the city, and like other old parts of other European cities the area has been turned into a tourist mecca with cafes, bars, restaurants and souvenir shops in abundance. Warsaws old city has an additional claim to fame over those other "old cities" however. It is not really all that old. The buildings of the old city were destroyed by the Germans in the second world war and what one sees today is a full reconstruction. Still pretty impressive though.

After our brief visit to the city we got back on the road. Most of remainder of the day was 2 lane blacktop of mixed quality, traveling through a mix of farm land and dense forest. The really noticeable feature of the days travel however was the density of truck traffic. It was like one long caravan of semi-trailers.

Late afternoon we found a small grassy glade just off the road surrounded by forest and decided this would be a good place for the night.

For the past few days we have been looking at signs in Polish and trying to make something (indeed anything) of the language, but it has been difficult. Let me give you a couple of examples.

One sees the letter combinations "sz", "cz" in many signs. Pronunciation guides tell us that these are sounded as the English "sh" in sheep and "ch" chalk respectively.

However just in case you think thats not too bad, one also sees the letter combination "szcz". Now the pronunciation guides tell us that this is like the the English sound "shch" as found in the word chair. This implies of course that the "ch" sound in the words chalk and chair are sufficiently different that they warrant different letters. Not only do we English speakers seem to manage without making this distinctions apparent, but this English speaker does not really hear the difference. But maybe I speak Australian not English. What do you think?

A final (or at least another) trick that really confuses us is that the Polish letter ł, that looks like the Latin L is pronounced like a W. So the town name Białystock is pronounced Be-a-w-e-stock.