There's nothing wrong with the Old Town, Elfs; it can get a little boisterous during the evening, but it's all good-natured. Krakow is an ultra-safe city. You'll get a super meal for about £25. Check out the dumplings. Auschwitz will be tricky if you're only going to Poland for a few days. I've been to Auschwitz four times, and I always stay at the excellent Olecki Hotel just across the road from the camp. To do Auschwitz and Birkenau properly you'll need a day for each. The tour guides rush the visitors around in about 2-3 hours, which is utter madness. There are so many exhibits to see, I just can't see how anyone benefits from a whistlestop tour. The train from Krakow to Auschwitz is extremely slow because it stops at so many small towns on the way. But if you do go, be sure to book your passes from the official website - otherwise, you may be turned away if it's particularly busy. It is definitely worth visiting the camps, though, as you'll feel spiritually enriched by the experience. It is bizarre how a place of utter woe can make you feel so alive. I'd be happy to send you my Krakow guidebook in the post.
I used to enjoy driving to remote parts of the UK when I had a motorhome. Around the coast of Scotland, the Western Isles, Ireland. I like coastal scenery, the more remote and quiet the better, and I don't mind what the weather is like. If I could afford to live without working for a year or two I wouldn't mind trying to walk right around the coast of the UK. But that's never actually going to happen unless some unknown relative leaves me a shed load of money. I see a million strange and wonderful places around the world on TV travel shows, but for me the wild landscape of this country has always been beautiful enough to satisfy my need to get away from city life and the working routine. ~ I saw on the news the other day some climate conference had concluded that the global mean temperature was going to rise 3 or 4 degrees in the next 50 years if we carry on behaving the way we are now; burning coal and oil, using vast amounts of farm land and resources to raise beef cattle rather than growing crops to feed people directly, and living lifestyles which produce millions of tons of carbon waste (mostly carbon dioxide). A four degree temperature rise will mean no polar ice cap. A massive alteration of the world's weather patterns. Hurricanes and flooding the likes of which have never been witnessed before. Billions of people will die, either from the flooding and climate chaos directly, or from starvation because most of the world's rice growing regions (and eventually wheat growing regions) will be destroyed. Coral reefs will disappear from the oceans - the marine equivalent of all the world's forests being cut to the ground. Places like the Low Countries in Europe, East Anglia, vast areas of South East Asia, will disappear under the sea. The only people who will be able to maintain their current lifestyle will be the richest 1% of the world's population (the wealthiest minorities of Europe and the US mostly, plus a handful of others). For everybody else the next Century or so will mean political upheaval, unemployment, hunger, poverty, disease and premature death in a wasted, ruined environment. If giving up driving my car and becoming vegetarian is what it will take to avoid that future, then I'm up for that - as long as everybody else is. But saving billions of lives and saving the poor people of this world from untold suffering will mean more than giving up beef, bacon and burning a little petrol. Leisure orientated air travel and the huge fleets of container ships and oil tankers which encircle the Globe will have to stop. Countries will have to learn to support themselves, and international trade must be restricted to only that which is carbon neutral (as local as possible - effectively pre-industrial). We cannot continue to have the mindset that it is our right as consumers to pay our money and be able to board a plane to anywhere in the world, purely for our own gratification. Unlimited tourist travel and cheap clothes, exotic food and electrical goods from the Far East are not enough justification for destroying the world. Once the paddy fields are poisoned by salt water from rising sea levels and the wheat growing regions are baked into deserts, there won't be anywhere worth getting on a plane to go and see. If this is crap, and it makes me a narrow-minded Little Englander, then so be it. Once again I must apologise for spoiling the atmos (figuratively at least, if not literally).
Sorry, Lardi, but it is too late. The scientists have been trying to tell us for 35 years, and the percentage of energy produced by fossil fuel has remained at 81% glob The worst fish and chips I've ever tasted was about 15 years ago when I took the kids to Kilmarnock. I told them about this wonderful chippy I used to go to, but it was under new owners, and was like a piece of old cardboard
Sadly I think you are right FHB. The freak weather disasters and floods will continue to get worse, crops will be devastated, food prices will rise ever higher. Here in the West we'll be shielded from the worst of it for a few decades, but in the end we will go under as well. None of us will be around to see it, which is some consolation I suppose.
I went to a chippy (unnamed) in the Isle of Wight and ordered four bags of chips. While waiting for the chips, I noticed a used plaster floating in the tray of saveloys. I promptly told the master fryer to forget my order because I now doubted the hygienic standards of the establishment. His response: 'What's the problem, pal? You ain't even ordered a sav.' True story.
I used to deliver to a Tottenham baker whose cat slept on the nice warm Danish pastries when they came out of the oven.. I can tell you a really disgusting story about the bakery supply firm if you like.
On my second day working for this firm (I worked there 7 years) I collected a 1cwt keg of mincemeat which a baker had sent back because the inner plastic bag was split. On the way back some of it spilt on the dirty back of my lorry. When the forklift driver was lifting it off he dropped it on a drain cover. He then took two bits of filthy cardboard from the warehouse floor, scooped the mincemeat off the drain cover into a clean plastic bag, put it into the keg and sent it back to the same baker, who accepted it.
My father-in-law often regales us with a tale about when he worked in an abattoir near Milton Keynes. A stray cat would regularly come in and hang about near the mincing machine, looking for the odd-tidbit that would fall to the floor. Said moggy would occasionally climb up onto the rim of the machine in an attempt to scoop up meat from the blades. Of course, the cat went missing one day, never to be seen again. Because this particular mincer produced meat for the lower end of the sausage market, no investigation or deep clean ever took place.
The one with the cat was the Clyde Bakery in Clyde road. Can't remember the mincemeat one, North London somewhere.
