Trip to Poland
6th December 1996, Friday
Jani’s birthday. Jani, 12 years old.
Independence Day. Finland, 79 years old.
President Ahtisaari, 59 years old.
Let’s celebrate. Let’s leave after cockcrow.
7th December, Saturday
A rooster crowed at 4:30 a.m. We left at 5 a.m. A mileometer read 751116 km as a starting readout. Load was from a factory in Luoma-Aho. A destination was a factory in Czestochowa (Poland).
The west-northwest wind 7 m/s. The temperature 0 celsius degrees. At Uusikaupunki at 10 o’clock. Refueling 560 litres. TIR-carnet was opened in customs. Via Baltic Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania would have been cheaper, but the value of the load was over 4 million and there would have been a wide range of problems at the Baltic borders.
I read a magazine called Dynamo before the departure of the ship. The magazine was part of the Bonk trend and told extensively about absolutely senseless things in an earnest manner. For example how to produce enough electricity for an entire city by the power of sardines. It had been tried already in the Turku archipelago in 1899, so they didn’t need to wire there. It worked brilliantly and residents were pleased, but odor nuisances were terrible and the environmental movement opposed sardine power plants loudly. In the end fox girls of the time scorched the sardine power plant.
Maybe it didn’t go exactly like that, but that’s how I remember it and the end of the story.
The ship departed at 12 p.m. and after eating and sauna we went to sleep. Then we ate breakfast in the evening and drove ashore in Hargshamn at 7:15 p.m. in Kaisu’s time. Roads were little icy and Ismo seemed to regret a little bit that he let me to be one behind the wheel. Well, of course children were better. Fog disappeared before Uppsala and the road wasn’t icy anymore. Stockholm was nowadays a nice city to drive even to more mediocre driver and we were at Norrköping at 9 p.m. when I switched with Ismo. I almost dozed in the seat until we arrived to Rök and I went to sleep behind.
8th December, Sunday
At 5 a.m. I asked Ismo if it was my turn to drive or was he still able to. Ismo told me just to sleep and indeed I slept. It’s weird how as an old man you feel like sleeping all the time. You would think that you have learned how to stay up if you’ve had your whole life time to practice. Kaisu says that I have by now so-so learned how to sleep in bed, but I have always slept quite well in a truck.
At 6:30 a.m. we’re in Ystad. We went to get tickets and to customs. We drove to a parking lot next to a ship. Name of the ship was Kopernikus. A field man measured trucks in footsteps and changed their length if it had been reported to be shorter than in actuality. We had to move the drawbar in but pulled it right back in the ship so corners wouldn’t hit.
It was Sunday and there were only a few trucks. Food was served to tables. There was a picture of an old thin man on the wall. If he wasn’t a captain he was that Kopernikus man. Not that I knew personally either of them. We went to sleep in bed and ate again breakfast in the evening.
We were in Swinoujscie at 6 p.m. The carne was stamped in customs and we paid small fee: 35 zloty, about 80 fim. I had exchanged 430 fim for thousand zlotys. I had to go exchange for smaller coins twice because customs didn’t have any change. It had to be the exact amount.
We got through the gates fast and were soon out the docks. A man sold maps but we didn’t buy one because they were too expensive. You couldn’t turn there but left and right and we went left because this country has been a leftist country before. Left was here right and so it was this time too. A police car measured speed right around the corner. We weren’t even getting up to speed there.
9th December, Monday
You couldn’t see landscapes in dark. An asphalt road was black and a line in the middle was white, if it had been painted as white. We were in Oborniki at 2 a.m. We should go to customs there and then continue to Czestochowa.
We went to a office when people came to work in the morning. A liaison officer was called Ewa Wröblewska or something like that. We asked for her at help desk. When foolish us didn’t immediately understand, a girl led us by the hand to attic where Ewa was. Ewa asked how things were in Finland and we lied that fine, but she probably would have lied to us too if we would have asked something like that. Ewa told us to drive second road left. We drove, not to first but to second, but it happened to be the first road that second. We gave files to an agent and he told us to wait in the truck. We waited. Cooked food. Waited.
I looked a little bit around. When we came in night it was dark and colorful christmas lights illuminated beautifully spruces outside. Advertising lights were on like in sophisticated countries should be. But in daylight the place was like everywhere in Russia. An ugly apartment house alongside and garbage heap there where would have been a children’s sandbox in Finland. A chain-link fence was around it and two barbed wires on top of it.
Cars and vans pulled trailers in which were cars probably from Germany. Axles and wheels had been removed from them. I got personally an impression that it was because of some customs thing. Apparently a car without axles wasn’t a car and then you didn’t need to pay customs duties. There were as weird rules in Finland.
At 3 p.m. customs came with their agent and a lead seal was cut open. Customs checked inside. Files were ok 15 minutes after. Goods from trailer were left there and we headed towards Czestochowa at 5 p.m.
First to Poznan and then through Kalisz to Lask. There we got fines because of weight limit of 8 tons. A little bit of detouring and then we were at road number 1 Warsaw – Brno. At 11 p.m. we had arrived and at 1 a.m. load had been unloaded. Men (ten of them) had waited us. Fortunately we didn’t go to sleep on the way.
We called in gas station to home and told that we were now empty and were going to head towards Germany.
10th December, Tuesday
At 3 a.m. we stopped near Opole for a statutory 8 hour sleep. We slept. We ate sausages and sandwiches. The sun shone beautifully for good as well for bad. It was probably warmer for bad people because they had better clothes.
A shelter was tilted to the left. Had it been designed so or did it just happen to be like that? If we were in Finland, it would of course be a design choice. Here, I didn’t know.
We continued to drive towards west. All Finnish crows were here. Or maybe here were just so much of them. Thousand crows in field and guards on trees. The guards were big and fat; probably others fed them. I wondered why the guards only looked to east. As if any threads couldn’t come from west. Lipponen teaches.
At 2 p.m. we bought souvenirs and and ate soup. At 4 p.m we were at the German border. At 5 p.m in Dresden. GSM worked there. We got return load near Halle from Jörgen. Sometime tomorrow. We stopped between Leipzig and Halle and slept there.
11th December, Wednesday
At 11 a.m we got exact address and went to check if we could load today. The place was near Halle and was called Leuna. A factory was an old industrial complex, over 3 km long area. There were many gates. We drove to the first of them. From there we were told to go to the gate 6. It was on the other side of the factory. I had already started to suspect that we were lost, but then it was in front of us. We had to fill a form in which were asked what truck, what men, what was going to be picked up. We got a file in which read building number 3602. The file was stamped at the gate. And then we started to seek the building number 3602. There probably were at least 3602 buildings, because even smallest of them had been numbered. The building was found and there was a window from where a girl wrote loading papers and directed us where to find a loading dock. The dock was found. The load and files were with us at 3:30 p.m. We started to drove away.
I had opened canned meat and my hand. The hand and all tachograph charts were in blood. What a bungler.
We drove to Berliner Ring and from there to west towards Hamburg and Lübeck. There was no space through Sweden because a FinnLink ship had ran aground. There was a sure place in a direct ship tomorrow. We went to sleep at 10 p.m.
12th December, Thursday
We drove around in the morning and went to shop at a city market, now that Christmas was coming. Even Veli-Matti came to shop with Jaakko Pyhälahti’s truck and there was TL trans truck, too. We visited a video section where were lots of videos and televisions. One showed me that my zipper was open. Of course, probably been like that the whole day, but there haven’t been any televisions from where to check. There were samples at every turn in the food department; wine, cheese and sausage. There even was a purser of that ship which would take us home. He told us that he shopped here because staff had limitations for own purchases.
We drove to the direction of the Nordland quay sign and collected tickets. We drove near Railship. We had 2 hours time and we went to watch videos in ship. A girl offered coffee and hot water.
The ship had a Finnish crew. It’s a container ship and there weren’t but 7 trucks and 4 Russians with german Mercedes. We went to a sauna at 5 p.m. It’s good sauna. We ate. Watched television. Went to sleep.
13th December, Friday
We ate. Had a sauna. Ate. Watched videos. Ate. It was quite windy in the evening. A calendar on the wall swang like a clock pendulum. We had to get sleep before the cross sea of North Sea.
14th December, Saturnday
I woke up when the girl knocked the door with a spoon to call us to breakfast. We were at the port of Turku. We got our passports at 7 a.m. We got out of the ship; it was -15 degrees. Hello, Finland.
TAISTO ALEKSI
Taisto Penttilä Oy 