http://www.pdsnoki.org/
Fundraising Goal: $9,000, or $9 per kilometer!!!
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Ah, beautiful Białystok. In all seriousness, there was more to this town than initially met the eye. The first mistake was getting a hotel way on the outskirts of town. The Hotel Turkus was both relatively expensive and not that appealing, so I searched around online and found another place, the Hotel MOSiR, much closer to the center and about 40% cheaper.
The next task was to find a place to wash my clothes for the last two days of cycling. I asked the front desk at the Hotel Turkus and their search of the yellow pages yielded one result -- the Auchan complex at the far edge of town. Auchan is a huge French grocery/bulk store, kind of like Sam's Club, so I was skeptical that I would be able to find a place to wash clothes there -- I suspected that maybe the clerk misunderstood that I wanted to buy a washing machine. Anyway, I had to give it a try. I checked out of the hotel and rode the 7 miles or so to Auchan (they were rebuilding the road, so there was a lot of traversing through dirt). I passed the massive new Orthodox cathedral they're still building here which was interesting to see.
The Auchan was an enormous complex with a mall attached. Seems this is the pattern of development here as it is in the US; the city centers die and all the new development is on the outskirts of town. Anyway, it was like a little French installation in the middle of Poland -- I recognized a lot of the stores from French mall complexes. This reminded me of what I had heard from a client in Paris when I was working on an offering for a French grocery store chain. He said that he had worked a lot in Poland for another chain (Carrefour, I think) and that all the exciting development was happening here. He said he'd rather live in Poland than France. Hm.
Well, the "laundry" here was in fact a dry cleaner -- "5 a Sec", the French chain. But they were very nice and agreed to wash my clothes in 2 hours. So I had lunch, read my book and wandered around the mall with my bike. More than one person asked if I was participating in the Tour de Pologne, which just passed through here a few days ago. Needless to say, this was the most expensive cleaning so far, but for a cleaners, it was still really reasonable -- I'm still not sure whether they laundered or dry-cleaned my biking clothes, but whatever they did, it is nice to have clean clothes. I headed back to find my new hotel, which turned out to be about 7 miles back into town. And, of course, it started to rain again...more rain, and I had just scrubbed the bike and the chain again.
The hotel was fine -- very basic and in another concrete block that reminded me again of Moscow days. But nice people and a clean, corner room with lots of light. I wandered town to look at a few interesting sights: the balcony of the local palace (now a medical school) is where Felix Dzerzhinsky declared the first Polish Communist state in 1920. There is also a monument to Ludwick Zahmenhof, from Białystok, who invented Esperanto. Then, in the rain as it began to get
dark, I was able to find a small obelisk hidden in a park behind some concrete block apartments which commemorated the uprising in Białystok's Jewish ghetto in 1943. The writing was in both Polish and Hebrew and stood on what was once the center of the city's Jewish ghetto.Today, I've looked around a little more and found "General Washington Steet", as well as another commemoration of the synagogue in the old ghetto where 1000 people were burned alive when the Nazis burned it down. Again, a tiny little tablet that commemorates this. I'm now about to head over to the "army museum" to see a few more interesting exhibits on Białystok in World War II. If I have time before I head out, I may also see it they'll let me in to the Orthodox church to see the service and hear the choir. I also came across a statue of Pope John-Paul II, which brought back the Parkinson's connections.
Then this afternoon, I have my second-to-last ride towards Warsaw. I am now about 110 miles away and, if I can find accommodation, I plan to stay in the small town of Małkinia, which is the jumping-off point for visiting Treblinka. I'll need to ride about 50 km to another small town and then take the train the rest of the way.
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