Photo: cc/Wikimedia Commons
As listeners and readers of my Letters may have realised by now, I like to travel by car, either as a passenger or as a driver, it really doesn’t make that much difference. As a youngster, we would go by car from London, where I was brought up, to visit my grandparents in Warsaw. Back in the 1980s, this journey would take the best part of three days, as a number of borders had to be crossed and it wasn’t worth the risk to try and do it all in one go. I think my dad realised that this really shouldn’t be attempted after he tried to do the drive from London to Warsaw in 1976 in a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle which was then promptly taken apart by East German border guards at the border crossing in Helmstedt.
After having moved to Poland’s southern city of Kraków over a decade ago, it didn’t take me long before I bought my first car. It was actually a prerequisite of me getting a rather lucrative job at a railway carriage factory in Świdnica, Lower Silesia, some 320 kilometres away. I spent the best part of a year commuting there for a few days a week, and it was during this time I wondered what on earth all these very long radio antennas were doing on people’s cars. It was only I asked a friend of mine that it became clear that these cars with these five-foot long antennas did not have trouble with FM reception, they were in fact CB antennas. During this time, I was also starting out slowly but surely at Polish Radio, so the thought of being able to broadcast from my car, even if it was to other drivers on the open road, seemed to be something rather romantic.
It wasn’t a few years later when my dreams finally came true and my Polish-American cousin from St. Louis, Missouri, bought me a CB Radio set from a very well-known radio guy in Warsaw’s Praga district. Once the kit was installed, we decided to check it out and went for a drive up the Wisłostrada Avenue, which follows the path of the Vistula by Warsaw’s Old Town. And to be honest, I’ve never heard so much swearing ever. Channel 19, the truckers’ channel, is full of it, but despite the foul language of many a Polish driver, I got to love the CB radio for a number of reasons.
First of all, before the days of GPS and sat-nav in Poland, which now tell you where the traffic jams are or even where the police are looking out for speeding drivers, CB radio was the only way you get this information. On the open road in Poland, you could be pretty certain that if you were following someone with a CB radio antenna installed, they’ll slow down in all the right places, and thus inadvertently help you out.
Secondly, Channel 19 is not all about foulmouthing bad drivers and swearing. In fact, the CB culture on air is very pleasant, everyone calls each other ‘kolega’, and there is some quirky slang which you have to get used to if you actually want to speak to someone on the road, not just listen in, which is what I did for about a month before I plucked up the courage to ask someone for the all-clear on a particularly heavily policed section of National Route 7 just outside the central city of Radom going down to Kraków. A common phrase to listen out for is: “Watch out, there are teddy bears with hairdryers on their scooters”, which means there are police on motorbikes with speed guns. So let me get this straight. Police are ‘miśki’, the scooter is a ‘hulajnoga’, and the hairdryer is the ‘suszarka’, for obvious reasons. You also get variations on a theme. You also get “teddy bears giving a blow dry” or especially for lorry drivers, you get the ‘crocodiles’. These aren’t of course real amphibious reptiles, but officers of the Road Transport Inspectorate, who are dressed in green and more often than not can be seen with their binoculars scouring the road for dodgy overloaded HGVs. They don’t seem to mind being called that though, as a quick look at their website and you’ll even see a cartoon croc on their kids’ education pages.
This is just a small selection of sayings you can hear while on the road, albeit usually interspersed with Polish swearwords beginning with K or P. Those who had the opportunity to learn any Polish will probably know where I’m going with this, so I’m going to stop now…
So while on the road, watch out for the ‘miśki’ and as you are expected to say when you finish a conversation ‘szerokości i przyczepności’, wishing you a good road ahead and a good grip.