today we had a hiking day to szyndzielnia mountain. there's a cable car[01-04] going up that mountain. the weather was perfect and we were not alone - a lot of people[06,08-09] had the same idea. near the cable car station there's a wonderful meadow where we enjoyed the wonderful view and the nice weather. there's also a restaurant where we had lunch. i accidentally ordered a caramel "karmi" beer[13] (it's actually more a root beer). pretty interesting in taste, yet definitely not my favourite. i also had dumplings[14], which were delicious. later we got back to bielsko biala again. what a wonderful day

second day in bielsko biala, we first had breakfast at the hotel, then went to the nearby river to see some recently flooded areas[01-03]. the pavement was washed away, and the water level of the river was still pretty high. we took a long stroll through the city, seeing shops[04,09-14, 22,36], old houses[05,13,15-20,28,31,33-41,44-45] and fronts[06-07,26-27,32,42-43] with graffiti or art decorations of all kind. amongst the houses was a famous one, namely the frog house[15-19], which is an old art nouveau house in the centre of bielsko biala with frogs and bugs on the front. next stop was the cemetery[49-52]. at the hotel we had a fantastic view over a firework[56-69] nearby (we don't know why there was one, but we enjoyed it).

it was short after my russia trip that olga and i decided to visit our friend lukasz in poland. he lives in bielsko-biala. so we met today today at the railway-station in vienna to leave for poland at around 07:00 in the morning. the train ride[01-09] took us more than seven hours. unfortunately we got off at the wrong station, so we ended up on an abandoned railway station, namely bielsko-biala north[09-18]. since i like abandoned stuff, i enjoyed the station. yet, we had an appointment with lukasz at the main station, so we tried to get there somewhere else, since there was no timetable or any other information about the next train to the right station on the platform. so we found a nearby bus station[10] where we called lukasz. he told us the next train will be in 20mins. so we got back to the station again. olga's phone was broken as soon as she landed in vienna, which gave us troubles. we changed phones from time to time, so she could text her people at home and i could still be available for calls or text messages. this solution worked quite well. so, later than we had planned we finally met with lukasz and his girlfriend at the main station. we then drove to the hotel by bus, checked in, and left our luggage there, got back to the city again (the ride took us about 30 minutes to get to the centre of the town). on the main square we went to a restaurant to have some typical polish dish, named "zurek"[19] (aka sour rye soup), an edible bowl made of bread filled with boiled potatoes and sausage inside. quite tasty. lukasz then showed us around a bit. we came by a pissing boy[20-21] (like the manneken pis in bruxelles). for the rest of the evening we were strolling around the streets[22-27] of bielsko-biala.