May 2022
The story goes - long ago I was traveling by train either from Hungary or Slovakia, and the train stopped in the town of Český Těšín.
It looked nice through the window, I remembered Jaromír Nohavica's song "Těšínská". Not even five years passed before I finally got here.
Very briefly, this is a "double" town - its territory is located both in Czechia and Poland.
This article is specifically about the Czech part, which is called "Český Těšín". The Polish part is simply called "Cieszyn".
Street signs in both languages, unique for Czechia
The Czech part is noisy and a bit shitty
For future generations
There's beauty, but not much
One of the most surprising things in the Czech part - typography on the local bus (which doesn't really go to the Polish part, as I understand)
In general, in a couple of days it never became clear how social services work: in the Polish part there was also a children's day celebration, firefighters and police were hanging out, as I understand all Poles
Design
About 5 minutes walk from the Czech station you can reach the bridge
River "Olše"
Beyond the bridge is already Poland
By train it's 4.5 hours from Prague, but with delays that happen regularly - about 5
a moment of cringe linguistic stories: when I was traveling by train from Prague here, in front of me sat a Ukrainian couple. Apparently the guys weren't completely local, the man heard that we were speaking Russian and decided to ask something like "Pane, and further is the border?", in Ukrainian, of course.
I was like - well yes, here's the town Český Těšín, border with Poland, blah-blah. I started explaining, in short, with the same enthusiasm as in this article. Then the man got off at the town "Hranice-na-Moravě". It turned out he was asking if the next stop is "Hranice". And then I googled, and "hranice" in Ukrainian is "border". Live and learn.
Through the town, naturally, lots of freight trains pass
Conclusion: the Czech part of town isn't particularly interesting, why this happened, everyone will draw their own conclusion :)
But the Polish one..
PS as a matter of ordinary observations and reasoning, in 2 days it never became clear how, actually, 2 nations get along. Surprisingly, Czechs in the Polish part and vice versa were almost never seen, even in shops. And it would seem obvious to me to shop in Poland.
Also it wasn't clear to me how Poles reacted to me when I communicated with them in Czech at the checkout. Is this disrespect for them or normal? In 2 days it's unclear, but the fact remains: in Poland you won't perish with Czech.