Travel:In any Polish, Hungarian, Czech or Russian town in the 1990s you could find them - European or American graduates, trying (unsuccessfully) to explain uncountable nouns, scoring (more successfully) with local talent, drinking (very successfully), and story-topping: "Your bathroom's full of cockroaches? I have to share a communal loo."; "Your student said: 'Do you like the Warsaw?' Mine said: 'I get up in the morning, I get off with my wife . . .'"; "Your landlord doesn't understand the concept of renting? Mine walks into my bedroom at six in the morning".
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a godsend to certain type of Western graduate - the ones that fear careers and crave adversity. While their peers headed off to get rich and take designer drugs in New York and London, these romantic dilettantes made a virtue of joining bread queues and unravelling Orwellian bureaucracies out east.
Tom Galvin left Dublin for Poland in 1994 with APSO, a body for overseas aid which placed teachers in remote outposts. He ended up in Minsk Mazowiecki, a town with "a church, a few schools, the obligatory army barracks, and one or two shopping streets. It has a park where the grass does its best to grow . . . there is no entry in the Lonely Planet's guide". This masterly description strikes a chill to the heart - a town which boasts only a good pastry shop gets into the Lonely Planet. A town without an entry is not lonely but non-existent.
However Galvin was lucky relative to other APSO workers: he got a flat - in the school complex so he had to suffer the proximity of his students and the boarding-block 6am wake-up bell - but still a clean, spacious flat. One girl was "living in a classroom, with a curtain separating her bed. Every morning she would be woken by the kids peering in at her with that odd, endlessly curious stare". Another guy was in a hostel "you wouldn't put a dog in", infested with roaches that he tried to kill with vodka. The curtain girl went home; the roach boy took to the vodka. Galvin stayed five years. He'd fallen in love, which helped.
As reward he learnt the language - and now edits Polski Herald for the Evening Herald - and got his book published, which he mightn't have had he gone for the soft option of Warsaw or Krakow. (My own Grand Tour was spent in St Petersburg and Budapest, big, beautiful cities that didn't register on the hardship scale. Petersburg had the mafia and empty shelves, true, but also the Hermitage and caviar. In Budapest your hardest choice was between poppy seed or cherry cake, and thermal bath or massage).
Galvin's title - referring to the boiled egg in Zurek soup which floats up at you like an eyeball - is the cue-in for a book premised on the bizarre food and customs of a faraway land. Poland is now neither bizarre nor faraway but in shops off O'Connell St, but Galvin was there for the crazy times. Old women "sit on pieces of cardboard in the depths of winter, displaying items from their own homes - photos of their family, cracked cups, rosary beads, socks that don't match"; bars are called Beirut, stay open till six in the morning and don't have doors on toilets.
THIS IS A gentle, engaging read - perhaps too gentle. There's little drama and the observations sometimes meander. A chapter on the Holocaust is only a regurgitation of others' research. The style moves, slightly confusingly, between past and present; the descriptions can be sharp and witty, but also dilatory and didactic.
The book's selling point, for me, wasn't the funny food, but Galvin's asceticism. He has an ability to get by on nothing, remarkable in a young man. For five years he lived in an apartment with no TV, in a small, ugly town with a few bars that kept going bust and a makeshift cinema that showed one film a week; eating the most basic food and, unless he got to Warsaw at weekends, starved of contact with English speakers. He describes weekends and even weeks - when term is out - spent alone. I know these weekends alone in foreign cities. They drive you crazy. But Galvin describes his first year as "the toughest and loneliest year of my life, but also the most enjoyable and emotional". It's not the Grand Tour he reminds me of after all, it's monks rowing out to the Skelligs.
He rounds off nicely with a wedding, when family and friends finally arrive in his outpost, "clambering off the bus, staring about them in wonderment", and shouting about the soup with the boiled egg . . .
Bridget Hourican is a historian and freelance journalist
There's an Egg in my Soup . . . and Other Adventures of an Irishman in Poland By Tom Galvin The O'Brien Press, 271pp. €9.95