Trip to the spring

Last night Emily, Melissa, Lauren and I went on a bike ride to find the grotto that is near by.  Tom had mentioned it before, and we had nothing else to do, so we set out with a vague idea of directions which entailed “taking a left then a right and there’s a dirt road and it’s at the end.”  Awesome.  Whatever, we were up for another adventure so off we went.  

We turned left at the appropriate time since it was pointed out to us on the bus.  Incidentally, the infrastructure of roadways was not top priority under the Russians (and they must not have had money to fix them up post communism) so we traveled by bike potentially faster than our bus carries us.  At any rate, we were on our way to the water source and that’s all that really mattered.  We were unsure as to the “right” that we were directed to take, so we tried the first one.  At the top of the hill, there was a dirt pathway off to the right, and we were directed to go on a dirt pathway, but I thought it came in at the very end of the paved road.  SO... we stopped at a woman’s house to ask directions again.  She was outside gardening and came right to the gate as soon as she saw me approach.  I greeted here again with a “good day” in Polish and she returned the greeting.  I went on to say, “I don’t speak Polish... water?”  and I shrugged my shoulders.  We were close to the water source and I figured she’d know what I was referencing.  She began to talk in rapid fire Polish... fail.  I managed to eek out a “1 kilometer” and some gestures in a particular direction, but then she stopped to ask me a question.  What?!  There are NO questions to someone who doesn’t speak the language.  That’s like a given isn’t it?  She became frustrated that I wasn’t understanding me, put up her index finger at me and said, “moment.”  A minute or two later, an elderly lady in a babushka type head covering and a purple duster came out and began to wheel a bicycle our way.  The first woman, who is probably almost 60, shut the front door, took the bicycle from her mother and motioned for use to ride with her to the water source.  Yes, you read that correctly, she mounted up and rode us to the source.  It was a beautiful ride through the woods, with us Americans chattering with each other wondering what she was saying.  Emily joked that she was our new “pilot” for this trip.  Side note: we are not allowed to travel in the bus anywhere without a “pilot.”  Our Polish interpreter is not enough, we need an ADDITIONAL Pole to accompany us on any bus ride to serve as a navigator of sorts I guess.  I personally think it’s a job security thing, BUT the one we have is a wealth of local knowledge so that is nice.  So - Emily was the “pilot” handling the translation and navigation :)

Emily and our friend

the spring

the pond near the spring

holy $%&^!

We rode through the woods and down a bit of a hill to the entrance to the water source area.  I wasn’t too sure about cycling down the hill as it was a sandy path that had washed out a bit with the recent rain.  BUT, if she could do it, so could I.  We parked our bikes and she walked us to the right, where the spring was.  She talked at us there, and then brought us to the left, where there was a newly erected (2008) outdoor chapel.  She said some words about the third of May (when mass is celebrated there) and then she bid us farewell and off she went.  We thanked her as much as possible in our broken Polish.  What a nice lady! I don’t know that I would have taken the time from my day to stop what I was doing to help others like that. 

It was a beautiful sight in the middle of the woods.  The part that really made it seem magical was the presence of some Polish nuns.  They were praying near the water source and sitting in the benches of the chapel.  I suppose it made it seem a bit more real as a sacred Catholic place rather than us just schlepping into some campground or rest area in the woods.  

We sat for a bit and said some prayers, looked at the various rosaries hanging in the altar area, took in the atmosphere of the scene.  At the spring, we filled bottles with the water, it was surprisingly cool water, and delightfully clean in terms of taste.  It has been tested in the past and is okay for human consumption and remains at 6 degrees celsius year round, never freezing.  After about 30 minutes of taking it in and walking around we returned to our bicycles and started walking them back up the small hill.  As we were walking, the sun was setting, and some of the nuns were emerging from the forest.  I had a chance to snap a picture of one among the large trees and I think it’s simply a magical picture - iPhonetography at  its best.  

As we were emerging from the forest on our bicycles, we came across the same woman who led us to the water source.  She was talking with a friend of hers who had just come from blueberry picking in the woods, and it appeared as if she had waited for us.  WOW!  Well, crap.  Now what do we say?  I had exhausted the appropriate Polish I knew already in our first encounter.  I only had the emergency go-to’s left, “where is the bathroom?” and “how much does it cost?”  Neither of those was going to work.  Welp... when in doubt, there’s an app for that right?  Right.  I had a “Polish Phrases” app on my iphone so I whipped it out in the hopes of finding some phrases to be able to communicate.  I started with “it’s nice to meet you” and it was down hill from there.  She started talking about numbers and holding up fingers - turns out that she can hold up five fingers and I can hold up five fingers.  I don’t know why I did, but I was mirroring what she was doing.  Fail.  I think she was asking us to come back, but I still don’t really know.  Melissa was videotaping us in the hope of getting some things we could translate back at the camp, but the whole thing was just a comedy of errors.  I tried to show her the word for “return” and “Tuesday” indicating that we would come back the next day, but that didn’t go over.  SO, she busts out her phone (not a smart phone) and typed out a text message.  Well, it was in Polish, and had no possibility for translation because we had no way of popping these words into google translate in the middle of the Polish woods.  Emily wrote it down on the back of our card from the camp, and we found out later that it asked us how many days we would still be in the area.  Of course at the time we had no answer, but what could we do?  

After some muddling through awkward language barriers we decided we’d better head back because it was getting dark.  We said our goodbyes and returned to the camp with a new Polish friend.