Visit to Poland

I have just returned from 9 days in Warsaw and surrounds, so you can expect a flurry of postings in the next few days. The trip was a great success, with the conference being well organised by the Polish Academy of Sciences. There was a four day field trip across the northeast of the country close to the borders with the Kaliningrad Enclave (Russia), Lithuania, Bielorus (white Russia), and the Ukraine. We actually sailed up to the Bielorus border in our bus and discovered that it was a really fraught crossing with armed guards rather than customs officers. Still, the native Poles were friendly, though some of the sites as we shall see were not.