In 1969 I emigrated with my wife and kids to Australia where I spent 20 years, leaving in 1989 to go travelling with my new Polish wife. We sold all we had and took off on a great adventure. We lived for 2 years in a campervan touring Russia, Central & Eastern Europe, Turkey and parts of the Middle East. During this time we didn’t work much and our main income was from my playing harmonica in hotels and clubs with the locals.I never could get my head around any Turkish or Arabic music but everybody I met wanted to play Western stuff. We lived in Bodrum, a resort town on the Aegean Sea, for a couple of years and I played in a cocktail bar called Beyaz Evi (White House) three nights a week for something like a year. Chromatic harmonica was a sound the locals hadn’t heard before and I found myself in demand for weddings and functions there.
Later we left Bodrum for Eceabat – a town on she shores of the Dardanelles - where we opened an Australian restaurant which did well for a while but we were just itching to get moving again – get more new experiences in.
We took a 4 month drive ending up in Warsaw where we had bought an apartment a few years previously. My mother-in-law had been living in it and the government offered to sell it to her at a ridiculously low price so we bough it for her. She had since died and the place was empty so we moved in and set up a life. There we met a Polish couple we’d known in Australia. The husband had been given a large golden handshake from his work in Australia and so they’d moved back to live like Kings. Their problem though, was that they were bored and they asked us to think of a business we could go into together.
We opened a greetings card business using stock foil prints of Catholic saints from the UK and made a killing with them. That was back in the early 90s but the firm “Mc
Laren and Partners” is now the largest greetings card company in Poland. Life got to be a little too hectic. We were working long hours and I was playing twice a week in a Jazz club in the city so we sold up and moved to the north east of the country where we bought a farm and turned the farmhouse into a guest house. The area was in what used to be East Prussia and we lived in a tiny village there of only 30 dwellings on the edge of a huge forest inhabited by, among other creatures, raccoon dogs, European beavers and bison. It was good fun living there and in the winter I used to play in the pub in Gizycko. It was one of those places that was no great shakes as far as décor went but the atmosphere was great. Just about all Polish musicians like to be able to say they’ve played there and many of them would just drop in anytime and jam. It was just the coolest place I’ve played.Email Pete: wapenshaw@hotmail.com
Phone Pete:
Australia: 0435 600 429
Thailand: 0855 721 452
