you can go for a weekend to Paris, sit by the Eiffel tower, eat cheese, baquette and dollop it all with cheap wine... but you'll never read Victor Hugo in french... otherwise? you'll travel to an obscure part of Poland... and you will not see anything culturally motivating... you will not see Warsaw's Palace of Culture... or you will not see the castle at Wawel... you'll take to a literary tourism... luckily... you''ll take to reading Kraszewski, saying: and on the same topic, Sienkiewicz also wrote, the coming nadir of the Polish (crown) and Lithuanian (duchy) commonwealth... the rzeczpospolita... and everything else you might consider being a tourist about suddenly disappears... or you'll travel to Edinburgh and forget the touristy-*******... instead downing a warm brew of amber and the tri-combo of: 'aggis neeps & tatties in a pub on the royal mile: spotty ****'s. 3 years of my life in Edinburgh, and here i am, in an Essex *******... but i feel nothing concerning this scenario, it's a Spartan clue: if you come from an even bigger *******, a ******* like Romford is a bit like: Larkin and Hull. i mean... who would take to visiting Ostrowiec Siwy Św. ? from a lineage of metalworks, the satanic turbines and molten iron... which is why you take to literary tourism... you read - by general consensus - the unbearable Kraszewski - because you've seen the film adaptation of the same story by Sienkiewicz... with fire & sword... potop (the swedish deluge) - and said: give me the alternative! it really is a tourism of a different kind, and if that be a case for a trilogy: king Piast... and Jan Sobieski... Vienna: winged hussars and the Turk canon... later a brand of *****... can this be a case of romance? i don't know... given the global isolation tactic of censoring certain regions, obliterating them as vaguely ''there''... you'll never really know. but then again i did read Kraszewski in order that i didn't have to read paweł Jasienica's history book... but primarily because i already seen the Sienkiewicz adaptation, concerning the monarchical experiment of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth... from the line of Sweden... the house of Wasa... and that famous ship in a museum in Stockholm, which sank after a voyage of a mile.. the brothel of kings and queens, that's what the p-l commonwealth was... a mere experiment... no wonder it was carved into three pieces at the end... if indeed it was as ****** as the english monarchy, it would have been the totalitarian chapter in that geographic region... but in reality, it was nothing more than a playground for monarchs... who spoke no Polish... or Lithuanian... and yet they ruled the land... and yes: Yan Casimir was a laughing stock... bethrothed to the widow of his brother: władysław IV - my stance with history? a persistent itchiness... human history is taken to bed, a bed festering with bed bugs, gnats and dandruff; tomorrow will not be any easier... teeth lodged into stone... yesterday: a skeleton dance, and a xylophone ribcage.