The Economist Magazine's Big Mac Index (http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/about.cfm) uses a common consumer product in a semi-serious way to yield economically relevant information -- measuring the purchasing power parity between currencies. It's been our observation that another common consumer product, toilet paper, yields a different type of economic information: a gauge of a country's prosperity. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, when each of us travelled in Western Europe (mainly France, Germany, & England), we were struck by how rough and unabsorbent (sandpaper-like) the toilet paper was in comparison to that in our native Canada & US. Many other items, such as cars, buildings, and roads, also indicated a prosperity level below that of our home countries. Now, as Western European countries have caught up to North America in apparent standard of living, our bottoms get the same pampering in these countries as they do at home. In Poland, on the other hand, the current state of cars, buildings, roads, etc. feels reminiscent of what Western Europe was like ~40 years ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, almost all the toilet paper we've used in Poland is the same crappy stuff (forgive the pun) that we found in Western Europe ~40 years ago. Maybe someone will write an economics PhD dissertation on the correlation between toilet paper quality and GDP per capita.
Five miles into our 68 mile ride today, we passed through the town of Potulice. This Polish town was the site of an unusual Nazi concentration camp during WWII. Based on the bizarre Nazi racial theories, the Germans kidnapped many thousands of Polish children who were determined to have "Aryan" characteristics, and sent them to the Potulice Camp to undergo a Nazi experiment in forced "Germanization". The conditions in the camp, however, were so brutal that most of the children died. [As an aside, while it's not difficult to speculate on what genetic or other causes might lead to psychosis in an individual, it's quite amazing that an entire nation can become temporarily psychotic. Nazi Germany was hardly the first such example in history of temporary national psychosis, and almost certainly won't be the last].
The towns and countryside in Poland are quite strikingly different from those of Western Europe, so we have put a link on the right side of this blog to an album of pictures from our ride through Poland so far. This contains a few pictures that have already appeared on the blog, but also has many more.
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A bike accident that happened shortly before we got there. It indicates why we have to be vigilant about watching cars approaching us from behind and in front of us |
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Carol taking advantage of free wireless internet on the walking street in the middle of Chelmno, Poland |
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A lunch stop you can bank on |
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