After getting home and trawling through emails and such, I've found some of the information I was looking for from my mate who spent a month in Poland. Most of this was already posted to one of the yahoo groups and it's not all about farming but I don't think most of you will mind the extra detail!
So, this is what he emailed me (I've cut out some extraneous crap but not all of it!): -
First email
1.When you get told Polish roads are either okay or bad, believe every word, in fact, just consider them bad all the time!
Some of them are friggen nightmares of potholes and half-arsed efforts at patching up the holes and they patch them with everything from tar to concrete slabs to cobblestones. Sometimes you'll see all three types in the space of ten or so metres. Tar is often "thinned out" so it'll spread further, so not enough is put onto the road to form a good solid base. During summer, these often go soft enough for the traffic to form shallow channels in the road that can be ankle deep! Rain is a nightmare for drivers as you cannot see the potholes in the road and any of them might be quite deep. We got a full load of muddy water sprayed onto the windscreen at one point in Krakow from a passing truck, it was so bad that we had to stop because we just could not see where we were going.
2. A lot of Polish farms that are not running livestock do not have fences and if they do have a few cows or goats, they chain them to a peg so they can graze. You can literally walk off the road right into a farmer's paddock, off his land and into the next farmer's paddocks. You're likely to find a fence around his house and outbuildings however (although this isn't always the case). Fruit orchards however, tend to be fence off.
3. Land for farming is rare as rocking horse shit now, everything that could be used has been used. They won't get more unless they cut down some forests and often the local roads pass right between two or more paddocks operated by the one farm. When this occurs, you can catch the farmer driving his tractor, harvester or truck on the road to the next paddock holding up traffic for some time - and it ain't no fun being stuck behind a tractor hauling a trailer full of potatoes for 10 klicks because he's taking them to market in the next town! Poland produces enough food for it's own use and doesn't appear to be able to produce much more. Food exports don't seem to be too important so there seems to be no impetus to increase agricultural output through the sort of highly mechanized farming we have back home.
4. Sheep don't seem to be part of the diet, it's mostly beef, pork and chicken. I've seen all of the above on farms and even ducks and some goats but I can't recall seeing any sheep. There's also a reasonable amount of fish and chicken eggs on the menu. Meals tend to be carbohydrate heavy, lots of wheat products and green vegetables tend to be cabbage,spinach and lettuce.
Other vegetables are typically potatoes, beets, onion, capsicum (known locally as papryka), cucumber and pickle. There's others but I just can't remember them at the moment. Apples, cherries and strawberries and I think oranges are also grown but all tropical fruit is imported (bananas are a recent novelty and come from any country you want to name in Central or South America).
People often go out of the villages and towns to pick berries and mushrooms in the proper forests and sell them by the roadside (something they'd likely do to supplement their food in T2k no doubt).
5. There's a hell of a lot of lightly forested land spread inbetween various towns even up to the point where one town may be quite spread out because there are anything up to six or seven (and sometimes more) forested "reserves". The towns feature lots of apartment blocks so there's lots of people concentrated in one area but the town planners don't seem to want to cut down the forested areas to provide more land for housing. The apartments are tiny (I'm staying in one at the moment) - kitchen, bathroom, toilet, lounge/living area that doubles as the parent's bedroom and the one bedroom is usually reserved for the kids.
Villages are spread out a bit more and typically feature much bigger houses and while some vacant land may be between various houses, they don't have forest plots like the towns do. They are surrounded by farmland and proper forests. There's a few places that are reserved because they are memorials to victims of WW2. One of the places I went to in Fordon is a really nice walk in the forest with a few pathways to explore between some low, wooded hills. It's called the "Forest of Death" because the Germans slaughtered a mass of Poles in the forest. Some of the walkways are lined with marker stones remembering the victims - there's a fucking lot of them :-(
6. Soviet era apartment blocks generally do not have any sort of elevator if the building is less than seven floors (I'm on the second floor, thank fuck I'm not on the sixth, with my dodgy ankle the constant climb up the stairs would floor me!) And they have very little in the way of alternate entry points, it's either the front door or get in through the balcony or the windows (apparently since the fall of communism there has been an increase in break-ins through the balconies because people would leave the balcony door open to let in the breeze - the hoods climb up from the balcony below then let themselves out through the front door)
7. They sell beer in the corner stores, supermarkets and fuel stations! Not only beer but spirits as well. And not half-strength beer either, it's all full-strength which is comparable to some Aussie beers. I've been in at least two petrol stations were beer was with the softdrinks & water while the spirits were behind the counter. This has been standard practice for decades. AND... they sell beer in 500ml cans and bottles. Now this isn't particularly important in the grand scheme of things but it could be an interesting situation for PCs to find bottles of spirits in the ruins of a petrol station.
8. The summer weather is deceptive, it seems relatively cool to me after Kalgoorlie summers of 47+ degrees C. Some days reach into the high 20s and early 30s. However... the humidity is brutal, often at 70-95% and you can get early morning fog. It rains every so often but it doesn't last for long, often just a few hours but it buckets down and overwhelms the drains. The rain stops, clears the air and the humidity and then the sun gets its chance to get brutal all over again. I'm drinking about 1-2 litres of water more and a few Cokes here and there, just walking around on the tourist trail than what I would back home for the same temperature.
9. Summer time in the thick forests found seperating towns from other towns, cities, farms and so on can be stifling when you walk through them. There's next to no breeze and the canopy traps the moisture so you feel like you're in a hothouse all the damned time. And then there's the gnats and mosquitoes (and they tell me it's NOT a tropical country!)
10. A number of town centres are of the "town square" type, this means a large square or rectangular area formed from local buildings with next to nothing except a few monuments, small buildings, kiosks or stalls around the sides or in the centre. No plants to speak of and all that concrete, brick and cobblestone reflects back the heat to make it feel 10 degrees hotter than it is.
11. I've found a few bridges around the country have fording points nearby. And not some shallow sandy driveway into the water, these are purpose made, permanent facilities with mooring points for pontoons. The one here in Fordon has a wide concrete roadway leading up to it that could easily
fit three trucks side by side. I also found some pontoons nearby, I'll send you some photos if you're interested.
12. The Vistula river has ducks, fish and also mussels in it. It appears to be pretty clean (certainly cleaner than the Swan back home haha) and I would say probably drinkable as long as you boiled it (although I really could not guess at anything like heavy metal content and such like). It does have a problem every now and then with floating debris. Much of the river has tree or shrubs and so on growning right down to the river even in some of the towns although where it passes through a built-up area the banks are usually shored up with stone, concrete or brick and so on. It's damned wide in many places and the current is quite strong from Krakow in the south to Bydgoszcz in the north (a distance of roughly 350 klicks from my rough estimate).
13. Some towns that I visited still have working water pumps in public areas, the hand-pump type and even though some cities have them and have the main handle removed they are still functional apparently and can easily be put back into service. Krakow had a few of these in the old districts.
14. Krakow also has a church that features an artesian bore of drinking quality. It permanently fills a small pool and is accessible to the public. It's known as The Church of St. Stanislaw AKA The Church of the Rock, it's a Paulite church and monastery situated just off the bank of the Vistula almost due south of the Wawel Castle in the Kazimierz. It's pretty much surrounded by a thick stone wall
During the events depicted in T2k I can imagine this church being a strong focal point for the locals, the first native Polish saint was a bishop of the church that stood on the site originally and there are also a number of Polish writers buried in the grounds of the newer church giving the place even more of a focus for the Polish people.
There are a few websites about the church such as
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/p...aws-church.htm
15. Something else that appears to have been unknown to GDW and something I haven't seen mentioned in relation to T2k, there are some small caverns beneath the Wawel castle. I didn't get to enter the caverns but Jay was saying they're smaller than what you would expect (according to the tourist blurb it's also limited access so you can't see them in their entirety). The current entrance is from a turret on the castle walls.
The caverns were apparently the lair of a dragon (although I've heard Polish people call it a basilisk rather than a dragon).
Here's even more links (hahaha)
http://www.cracow-life.com/poland/krakow-dragons-cave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Dragon
http://www.krakow-info.com/smocza.htm
The most important thing about these caverns is that 1. there are pools of fresh water in some of them and 2. there is an exit to be found on the embankment below the castle (it's not apparently accessible to the public and it's not easily recognized these days but it's near the dragon statue below the castle walls.
Unfortunately the crypts under the cathedral in Wawel castle are pay to view and you cannot take photos. Having to pay some attention to how much cash I had, I couldn't be arsed seeing them (the cathedral is also pay to view
and I didn't check that out either - Jay's fascinated by church architecture so I'd seen enough of the insides of churches by that stage!)
16. Krakow has had a tram system in operation since the late 1800s, it's all electric now but for the T2k world I can imagine that horse drawn trams or at least wagons using the tram line could be easily put into use. Even perhaps alcohol engined trams maybe? I couldn't tell you what specific lines would be in use but this site gives some good info on the history plus a map of the current system as of 2007 (yeah yeah, more websites!)
http://www.zyxist.com/en/archives/20/comment-page-1
http://www.krakowpost.com/article/49 This site gives a little more info on what lines would be available for the T2k period.
With the T2k rationing of electricity in Krakow, the electric trams aren't going to be much use but they may keep them for special occassions or emergencies. Imagine the shock on the face of the slave workers about to stage a riot when a tram turns up and disgorges dozens of militia troopers - or the look on the Player's faces when their plans go awry because they didn't believe the militia could get that many troops there that quickly!
Other towns that date from the earlier 1900s or earlier have tram systems as well. Lodz has one of the longest systems in Poland that goes from Lodz to a small town nearby. Tram rails in some towns might be ripped up for rebuilding though I suppose. I reckon most trams could be put back into use by the locals by converting them to horse-drawn versions so ripping up the rails might be a last resort in some places.
17. Storks are quite common in northern Poland with many of them nesting in the country villages right down into central Poland. There's also a large breed of hare and also small deer to be found in the countryside. The hares can be found right up next to some of the towns particularly where some people have planted veggie gardens on the outskirts of town.
Oh and also, there's a stack of castle ruins in southern Poland. There's a line of hills that stretches from the Czech border up to Krakow and further and medieval times they built castles on the best hilltops to control the region. I've been to a quite a few now and they bigger ones would serve well as a base for military forces (good field of view, thick walls, deep cellars etc. etc.) while some of the smaller ones would be easy for bandits to hide in (particularly as some of the hills are surrounded by forests).
I'm still trying to find one of the other emails but should post it soon-ish
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