Warsaw, again

So I'm in Warsaw now at the apartment of my wonderful friends Michal and Paulina. After almost fourteen hours on the train, I'm more or less glad to be stationary, but the train journey felt surprisingly short for all that. I brought a bunch of cheese, bread, and candy with me to while away the hours, which I confess bears all the earmarks of total genius. The only problem is that I chose three cheeses more or less at random and one of the happened to be so pungent that I could not even open it on the train for fear of unleashing lederhosen-clad rage the likes of which the world has never seen, so it just sat in my backpack the whole time, quietly exuding cheese funk into all of my books and clothes. I spent most of the trip alternating between happily champing down gummy candies like a five-year-old and sleeping as if in the grip of a violent beast of oblivion. That is actually a pretty enjoyable set of options to vacillate between.

The morning will see me off on the train again, this time to some random villages in the east of Poland that Michal knows. Or maybe he doesn't know them? It's hard to tell sometimes. In any case, we will head to the middle of (or the eastern edge of) Nowhere, Poland, and tramp around there for a few days. I'll be back on Monday or Tuesday to Warsaw, but I highly doubt I will be able to post anything before then - something tells me these random little villages are not exactly crawling with cheap internet cafes.

I guess that's about it. I chatted a little with two girls who were sharing my hostel dorm room last night, and spent most of the time trying to convince them that their second cousin's German fiancee was a Soviet spy bent on spreading Communist propaganda through manipulation of the matrimonial bond. I think they were pretty convinced, which is understandable because the case was pretty iron-clad. I just finished reading The Bourne Identity two days ago, and now my head is all full of spies and kung-fu kicks, one of which I have learned is usually aimed at the other (the latter at the former, although sometimes the other way around). Robert Ludlum is a pretty trashy writer, but the book is still a lot of fun. His love scenes, which probably total up to no more than ten pages out of the book's 500-some pages, reek so horribly that they almost kill the whole work. The tend to work like this:

BOURNE: I have to leave you, because I don't remember who I am, and I don't want to get you killed.

BOURNE'S FINE LADY: But I love you.

BOURNE: But... I love you, too.

BFN: Then you have to stay. Because we love each other.

BOURNE: Touche (proceeds to kill a bus full of spies with his bare hands because he is so cool).

The worst part is that I'm not kidding about or exaggerating the italics. Ludlum should be legally prevented from writing with italics until the end of time. In fact, so should everybody.