First frost

How do I remember these things? The first frost when I lived in Czechoslovakia (as it was then) was on 3rd October, not November! We went Krakow, in Poland, for a weekend. The air in Poland smelled of brown coal. In Zlin, where I lived, it mainly smelled of the Bat'a shoe factory. The town's houses and flats were heated and supplied with hot water by underground pipes that utilised the excess heat from the production areas of the shoe factory.

I think that's amazing.

I suppose I've come over all Central/Eastern European again because of the Ukrainian concert yesterday, and I've bought a picture book called the first 1000 words in Polish, to help me and my little Polish charges communicate. Only thing is, it doesn't have the words in English!