All Along the Watchtowers

I got a call from Jen Saturday afternoon. She is the sort of person I habitually refer to as "a fingernail on the chalkboard of life" and her phone always has the volume cranked way up, so it spears your eardrum and your primal instinct is to tell her to fuck off and never call you again, but she was offering a free trip to Helsinki, so I gritted my teeth and agreed.

We were supposed to be going with Three Bottle Josh and Bergin, but they pulled out at the last minute and left me alone with Jen. She's a very short, round-faced, pudgy girl who talks only about how excellent her Swedish is (not very), how Filipino she is (even less), and her ex-boyfriend who lives in "StockHOLM". Always the dramatic emphasis on the last syllable: one of those lazy linguistic habits I cannot resist mocking. She is oblivious to absolutely everyone else and has an odd manner of walking, so upon meeting her, you are left immediately with the impression of a small, pugnacious dirigible with no one at the steering controls.

Anyway. It was one of those "overnight there, eight hours in the city, overnight back" arrangements, like the time I went to Tallinn. I did my best to ditch Jen the instant I got on the boat and quickly and accidentally made friends with the drummer of the band, who happened to be from Hollywood, Florida. He also turned out to have played bass with Marilyn Manson and told stories about back when they were "Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids" and their gimmick was that they all carried plastic lunchboxes.

Most of that evening was pretty quiet. I went up to the pub rather early, since there was nothing else to do, and sat in the quiet gloom, enjoying myself. There is nothing quiet like the gently vibrating promise of the first drink in a quiet, empty bar. I love the high tactile sound of spotless glasses being dried with a fresh towel, the cascade of ice into the bin, the hollow squeak of shoes on a still-dry floor. You can see the bartenders, knowing what is coming, battening down their mental hatches in preparation. Steeling themselves, and appreciating the quiet dignity with which you consume your whiskey.
There is something about the rows on rows of upside-down glasses suspended from the ceiling, the light filtering through them against the flat black paint behind. It reminds me somehow of cold space and M. John Harrison; it evokes an image of the Atalanta in Calydon screaming down from perihelion to the low cemetary orbit, running below the lines of the long reaction guns, then suddenly cartwheeling twenty thousand miles, spraying the bright precious liquid of her life out into the vacuum. At once my mind is a collision of Coleridge and Keats, and it becomes increasingly clear that we of the twilight period of our college lives, faced with the growing horror of what I refer to as the Quarter-Life Crisis are simply waiting for an albatross that isn't coming. We are instead the heirs of a globalized Othrys, making our little nests in the hopes and achievements of those giants who came before us.
Oh, Swinburne, I always think. Pity everyone insists on reading Byron instead.
So I had a drink for those who go down to the sea and up to the stars in ships. I had another in honor of great, unknown writers everywhere. Concerned the first hadn't reached its destination on time, I sent another down as a search party, then another to head them both off at the pass.

The band played remarkably well for three dudes who are all named Rich.

There isn't much to Helsinki. There is the big Senate Square, which you will recognize if you've seen Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (and you certainly should have). The Lutheran Cathedral looms rather glumly above the square, as though depressed that it is not nearly of the caliber of cathedrals you see in Prague, Krakow, Vienna, Saltzburg, or any of a couple dozen cities in Europe. The square is also the site of the city and national government buildings, the university, the city library, several tourist shops, and a monument to Tsar Alexander II.

You have now seen pretty much all of Helsinki.

Of course, there is almost unlimited fun to be had with Finns and the Finnish language. It is of immense interest to me that the Swedes have exactly the same stereotype of Finns as we have of Swedes: that they're all blonde, their women are easy, are rather bland, drink a lot, and they speak a silly language. I highly recommend hiring a Swede to do an impression of a Finn for your next party.
For your reading hilarity, the following are actual Finnish words I saw in Helsinki:

Kuusikymmentäviisi
Krapularyyppy
Myyntineuvottelija
Päälliköitä
Ympärileikattu

I think I speak for everyone everywhere when I say, "Man, what?"

So I spent eight hours wandering around Helsinki. Saw the weird monument to Sibelius, the mildly-famous Finnish composer:


Yeah, and when the wind blows in from the Bay of Finland just right, the monument makes this weird low moaning noise. I can only hope when I'm quite dead, some lunatic makes a similarly bizarre and alarming monument to me. You can't see it in this picture, but over on the right, there's a giant metal carving of Sibelius's face, with empty eyes, and it stares out at you, surrounded by weird bits of scrap metal.
All of this, of course, has led me to the highly accurate conclusion that Finns are actually from the moon. Think about it! They speak a crazy moon-language. They have crazy moon-monuments to their crazy moon-people. They eat moon-food. My notes from that afternoon increasingly began to look like this:

MOON JOURNAL, DAY 1: I have taken refuge in some sort of MOON-PIZZA JOINT. I can see the MOON-PEOPLE all around me now, some of them wearing outlandish MOON-HATS. I have ordered a pizza with ham on it, and the MOON-MAN here has attempted to communicate. I fear the worst.

At any rate, I spent a couple hours riding the 3T tram around the city, since it makes a figure-8 through the whole place, and there really isn't anything else to do. I saw the waterfront and a strange store which apparently sells medieval Japanese assassins:




Then I gathered up Jen and headed back to the boat to buy some cheap, tax-free whiskey. We headed up to the bar early again, and it was full of Finns watching a Manchester United game. The band was skidding along, and a guy who looked exactly like Junichiro Koizumi bought the band beers, as he smiled and sang along to Creedence. I began to suspect it was, in fact, Junichiro Koizumi, since, let's face it, that's the sort of thing he'd do.
I found myself sitting next to a fat, bald Finnish man who was telling me about his Russian wife in more detail than I cared to receive. I told him I'd heard that Finnish people couldn't drink.
He was incensed and there was nothing for it but to prove that he could outdrink me. I said that was all well and good, but I'd also heard Finnish people didn't even know good liquor when they tasted it, since all they drink is cheap rotgut stuff. He turned apoplectic colors. His eyebrows did push-ups, his jaw attempted to cartwheel, and over my locquatious protests, he insisted on buying round after round of Chivas Regal 18-year old.
He was snoring on the table shortly thereafter. I sat in the back corner while Jen yammered away, and turned to the German next to me exactly as the band hit the right part of the right song at the right time:
"There must be some kinda way outa here," I said. "There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief."
"I just want to be an investment banker," he said.
"Christ."

The band got into some sort of fight thereafter, and I found myself left alone in the now-empty bar with Rich the six-foot-seven lead guitarist, who loved Bukowski and honestly believed that aliens had seeded life on Earth and were now watching, much to their amusement.
"This has been a night on the weird scale," he kept saying.
"Man," I told him. "This is a pretty regular Tuesday for me."
He spent some time reminiscing, some time being bitter and angry at Rich the drummer, and then resolved to go back to school and get his masters in theology.
"This is a bit of a surprising turn of events," I said.

I don't remember much after that. I'm pretty sure the night just sort of fizzled out. Jen apparently made out with some Finnish guy and came back to the cabin and took a shower, then got into bed without bothering to put on clothes--I know this because I woke up with remarkably little hangover, only to be gobsmacked with the objectionable sight of an ass I can only describe as elephantine.

Not much else to report about that trip. Helsinki isn't much worth seeing, to be quite honest, and while drinking with the band was entertaining, and the liquor on the boat was cheap, it was only about worth the zero dollars I paid to go. And now I'm all nicely stocked up for the big Valborg celebrations this weekend, which I expect to blog about at some length next week.

What I'm Reading
Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy
Karl Polanyi, Origins of Our Time

Land of the World's Greatest Profanity

As you are already quite aware, it is my habit to provide a lengthy and stirring account of my adventures in the strange parts of the world which I visit, but this latest sojourn to Poland has been a bit unusual in that nothing particularly surreal or extraordinary took place. My life is certainly peculiar enough that I have no need to invent stories when none took place, and the simple fact that I didn’t take any notes while traveling (I usually do, but had no cause to) somewhat limits the scope of this account. I will instead give you my impressions of the places I visited and the people I met, though even this will tend towards brevity, as the “r” key on my keyboard keeps popping off.

I didn’t expect Gdansk to be so beautiful. I envisioned a dirty industrial port city: the toothless corpse of communism, coated in grime. The airport and the surrounding countryside present essentially the same rather ugly rural view as you see on your way into town from any Eastern European airport: lots of run-down buildings, dirt, broken vehicles, power lines, garbage clustered like little pools in the brown weeds that grow around billboards and along rusted train tracks. There was a lot of construction going on in the city (as indeed there seemed to be everywhere in Poland—one of the joys of recent entry into the EU) so there was a great deal of traffic of the sort that I grew annoyingly accustomed to during my long years in Sacramento.

Most Poles live in the old communist high-rises: the seven or eleven-story concrete blocks with small elevators, naked concrete in the halls, and dirty windows. Polish apartments seem to lack living rooms: instead there tend to be three bedrooms and a small kitchen, connected by a hallway with a bathroom at one end. This seems ideal for students, and I was surprised at how nice the interiors of the apartments turned out to be.

Polish cuisine borders on the nonexistent. There are pierogi, of course, and bigos (though you cannot get the latter in a restaurant, even if you wished to, since the various cabbages in it take days to boil properly) and rough coarse bread which you use to shovel things into your mouth with. Polish beer is surprisingly decent—Zyweic, Tyskie, and Lech all come recommended as stalwart, acceptable pilsners. They have the same sort of pizza (with, oddly enough, the exact same names) as everywhere else in Europe, as well as the usual multitude of little kebab joints and execrable Chinese places.

Poland seems quite crowded, and I got the sense that if only it had about a quarter less population than it currently does, it would be a center of prosperity and development. I was led to believe that Poland is an ugly, downtrodden, poverty-stricken country, but the only things I saw that would have looked out of place in the US were the old towns: the cathedrals, cobbled streets, castles, statues, and so forth.

Anyway, Gdansk is in fact three cities which have grown to become contiguous: Sopot, Gdynia, and Gdansk proper. We went to Sopot first. It’s a quaint, quiet little place on the Baltic, with a large hotel, a long pier, beaches, and lots of old women selling things they’ve made from pieces of amber that wash up on the sand. Piotr tells me it has recently become trendy among Poles, and it shows in the comfort, affluence, and relaxation on the faces of the people in the streets.

The long pier that stretches out into the Baltic, the weather and the seagulls all were quite reminiscent of San Francisco. There is a bit of an old town on the water, with an impressive church, a little park, and a couple of pedestrian streets with outdoor cafes, overpriced trendy bars, and weird architecture.

We got back to Gdansk proper after sunset and wandered around the impressive old city there. There are a number of extremely impressive cathedrals (all of which Mohammad insisted we go inside) and a number of large, ornate buildings covered in gold. There is a large square (called the Long Market) which is quite reminiscent of a darker version of Split, and at dusk with the globes of the streetlights floating in front of the be-statued buildings, it was a remarkable sight. We strolled for a while along the waterfront, where medieval cranes still stand, and where the buildings are honeycombed with tiny restaurants with only two or three tiny tables each. I'll try to get pictures of this from someone else, since it was too dark for my feeble camera to work properly.

We had only that evening in Gdansk, and I regret it, since the city seemed to be worth at least a couple of days. We had dinner in the basement of some Turkish-themed place, sitting on cushions around a gilded metal table, surrounded by wall hangings and gauzy drapes and fringe. Mohammad promptly managed to drag a handful of napkins through a candle and set himself on fire, and there was much hilarity while Piotr and I sprung into action to smother the flames. I tend to think of this as the high point, as by then Mohammad had done more than his part in assuring me that Iranian-born Swedes are the most disagreeable group of people on earth.

We departed by third-class train to Warsaw at midnight. If you have never ridden such a conveyance through Eastern Europe, I can only say that you have never lived…and also that you don’t want to live.

If Gdansk is the San Francisco of Poland, then Warsaw is most definitely the Los Angeles. It is not, however, nearly as ugly as I had been led to believe. Yes, it is a huge, sprawling city, consisting primarily of the ubiquitous gray communist housing blocks, and yes, it does lack any of the remarkable, distinguishing architecture which is so characteristic of so much of Europe. It is comprised mainly of big, broad, busy streets and tall bland buildings—so I can see how Europeans who are used to Prague or Paris or Vienna could view it with appalled horror, but to a seasoned veteran of south Sacramento, Bakersfield, and Utah, it wasn’t so bad. The harshest insult I can level at it is that it would fit right in as an average, unremarkable city in America.

There is one pieces of distinguished architecture, the Palace of Culture and Science—called “Stalin’s Retaliation” and situated between the central train station and the giant, oddly-build downtown shopping mall. There is an old city, though it consists of about two or three streets of reconstructed buildings (after all, Warsaw was decimated down to the last building during the Second World War) and a nice square which would not be out of place in Prague. Further south is a nice little section called Royal Road, where the University of Warsaw and the Presidential Palace rub shoulders, and the long ranks of rowhouses look like London.

We went to a party that first night, and if you ask me about it, I may tell you, but my sense of discretion limits me. The police showed up around 3, but I’m reasonably certain that it wasn’t my fault.

Most of the next day was spent being hungover in the light, breezy apartment of Piotr’s girlfriend, then at the new Polish Uprising Museum. Even for someone acquainted with the history of the Uprising, the museum was an impressive affair, and it was genuinely moving to see the affect it had on the Polish visitors. Far different from the vague, slightly morbid interest you see at war museums in the States.

From there we mostly just babysat Mohammad, who proved to have far too much energy and far too many questions for the rest of us. He insisted on going back to the downtown mall for shoe shopping, so I spent a couple hours watching Poles shop—they proved to do it exactly in the manner of everyone else. A valuable cultural experience.

Mohammad mercifully departed the next morning and the rest of us caught a comfortable noon train to Krakow.

Everyone in Poland agrees that Krakow is the most beautiful city in the country, and they are quite right. In my opinion, what makes it work (especially in the springtime) is that the old city is surrounded by a nice park which forms sort of a peaceful green moat between it and the rest of the city. Most of the old city wall still stand, and painters sell their works in its shade. There is a great brick barbican standing in the park, surrounded by people in traditional Polish garb, playing accordions. The streets were quite crowded, though they were clean and quaint in nature, and we followed the main cobblestone thoroughfare to the enormous Market Square—once the site of the largest medieval marketplace in Europe.

The Market Square is packed with bits of history. Most obvious is the massive St. Mary’s Basilica, with an inside so ornate and complex that I cannot begin to describe it to you—suffice to say, the five-hundred-year-old central altar has twelve life-size figures and is surmounted by soaring angels and golden rays from heaven up to a height of some forty feet, is flanked by fifteen-foot panels showing six scenes from the Assumption of the Madonna, and is dappled by the sun coming in through the tiny stained-glass windows that soar a hundred or so feet up behind it, depicting the deaths of saints. And that, mind you, is just the altar.

Otherwise, the Market Square is full of mysterious statues like this:

And the immense Merchant’s Hall, which is still packed full of a strange sort of flea market. We spent several pleasant hours sitting in the sun at an outside café, drinking Tyskies and watching a troupe of small children engage in a rather impressive display of breakdancing.

The old Wawel Castle is on a high hill overlooking the Vistula, and is quite peaceful inside. Apparently, there is one corner which has been determined to regenerate the body's chakras at an alarming rate, though I cannot testify as to the accuracy of this. Instead we drifted around the grounds of the castle for a while, then headed out to eat. We ate at a strange trendy little basement pizzeria somewhere in the winding depths of the city, where they have pizzas with names like “Tigers Chasing the Cayman” and “Dracula’s Dread.” Then we spent several hours at a bar somewhere called La Habana—and Keith, you would love this place beyond all reason. It’s covered in memorabilia and posters from the Cuban Revolution, and it’s full of people smoking and talking about socialism. I couldn’t resist a Cuban cigar and a double of Havana Club to go with the mandatory Zyweics.

Then it was to an ugly little hostel in a distant section of Krakow where apparently a lot of students live in dorms which look sort of like the projects in West Baltimore. It was a bit of an arduous affair to get a taxi out of there the next morning, but we managed and our guide Łodzia took us to Płaszów, where she once worked in landscaping or something. Płaszów, you see, was a medieval Jewish graveyard and was built over as a work camp during the war—in fact, it is the very work camp depicted in Schindler’s List. Today it’s overgrown, unmarked, filled with the detrius of the homeless people who live there sometimes. It’s on a high hill in the south of Krakow, and has a panoramic view of the city.

From there we toured what remains of the old Krakow ghetto (scene of much of Schindler’s List) and spend a bit of time feeling oppressed and miserable. As Piotr pointed out, though, the war is everywhere in Poland, even in Krakow, which was spared with the intention of repopulating it with Germans to serve as a cultural nexus for the Reich. You can still see the ghosts in the eyes of the tired, wrinkled old people in the streets and on the trams. For Americans, the Second World War seems to have become something of a big adventure, and it is quite possible for families to have been entirely unaffected by it. Not so in Poland. Everyone lost someone and something—and often everyone and everything. The same is true of communism, which is still raw and bleeding under the surface, and the suffering endured by the older generations of Poland is still there quite plainly.

That was it for our tour of Krakow. We killed the rest of the evening at a lovely outdoor café overgrown with trees, then caught the 10PM train to Katowice, Warsaw, and finally Gdansk.

My review: far better than I'd expected, especially Krakow, and to a lesser extent, Gdansk. If you end up in Warsaw for some reason, don't mourn your misfortune, since there's a solid day or two worth of valuable stuff to see, but it's a place to pass through on the way to somewhere more interesting. I'd strongly recommend adding Krakow to any trip around the Vienna, Budapest, and Prague area. Poland's not as cheap as I'd expected, though, so don't expect your money to last nearly as long as in Budapest.

What I'm Reading

J.F. Bernard, Talleyrand

Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: A Study of Language and Languages, Especially English.

I'd Rather Be Fishing

Naturally, no sooner did I blog about the spectacular weather than did it immediately take a turn for the absurd. Incredible winds kicked up and blew constantly for three or four days straight: I would hear it moaning outside at night, picking up bicycles and tossing them contemptuously into trees. Then it died down abruptly at about 3:47 yesterday afternoon, and I sat in a cafe by the river and watched, incredulous, as hail the size of Skittles fell out of a clear, sunny sky. My weather desktop widget is ominiously suggesting snow flurries Monday and Tuesday.

I am not amused.

Fortunately, I'm going to Poland on Thursday with my excellent Polish friend Piotr, Sarah (I know, but she's Piotr's friend too, so what can I do?), and Piotr's irritating friend Mohammed. Doubtless there will be hilarity, surreal experiences, pictures, wry observations, and the like when I return. Perhaps I'll get drunk on cheap zubrovka, get into a bar fight with dock workers in Gdansk, and wake up sometime later in Bratislava with an elaborate tattoo.
Speaking of zubrovka! There is no excuse to ever drink any other kind of vodka. As proof of this, I urge you to read W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which features a character renowned for his impeccable taste in all things and who loves zubrovka most of all. Verily, there is no vodka but Polish vodka, and zubrovka is its prophet.

Anyway, it's good that I'm getting out of here for a while. Perhaps due to the unnatural enforcement of the school system's rhythm on my life, I tend to conceive of seasons rather backwards. Autumn for me has always been the time for falling in love, for conceiving of great ventures, for hard work and brilliant intellectual construction. It is the time when all of the necessary arrangements for the year have been made, and there is nothing left but to reap the rewards. As it gets colder, I tend to get increasingly cerebral and esoteric, feeling downright Bolshevik as I stump around through crunching snow, my breath streaming out behind me, wearing a large coat and thinking heavy thoughts--at least until I get fed up with the monotony and vanish suddenly to parts unknown. Spring, however, feels like death to me. It is the time of things coming to an end, of loss and departure, of stress and broken promises. It is the herald of the long, grinding, oppressive summer months (thank you, unspeakable climate of Sacramento!) which I tend to associate with hard work on the one hand, languishing boredom on the other, and the looming worry of making arrangements for the next year.

So, what with this fitful advent of spring to the Frozen North, do you know what I desperately want to do? I'll tell you.
I want to take out an enormous college loan and instead of using it to write silly research papers (which I and my instructors will immediately--and rightly-- forget) use it to fake my own death, change my name, and buy a lavishly appointed Westsail 32--a fine craft, built like a tank and seaworthy as all hell, fairly slow but a strong runner with a good wind, and the most comfortable interior of any ship her size. Plenty of room for a formidable library. And instead of reading Barry Buzan's Security: A New Framework for Analysis (the point of this book: if people think valuable things are threatened, they will try to protect them...goddamn genius, this chap), I would rather run before the trade winds from San Francisco to Hawaii to the Federated States of Micronesia, and there to sit on a calm, quiet, crystal-clear lagoon, drinking ice cold beer and fishing. Every now and then, I'd venture into a small, ramshackle town to purchase more beer and munchies, using the stone currency they have there.

I'm in that sort of mood. I want to just disappear off the face of the world for a while, to spend a lot of time getting a permanent tan and learning some bizarre language from South Pacific natives. I want to go fishing. I want to turn up ten years later at a high school reunion, covered in strange tribal tattoos, perhaps having been made their chief, and to explain quite honestly that I'd spent the last decade as a pirate.

Considering, though, that I have no idea how to sail, know nothing about sailing laws, don't know where to buy a sailboat, have no money, and would probably fall overboard and die immediately, it's probably a good thing all around that I'm going to Poland instead. Catch y'all when I get back.

What I'm Reading
Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East.

Trevor of Montmartre

The weather is stunning. I've had the windows open all week, and the sun streams in almost in liquid form, drenching my room with a perpetual state of that lazy, stretching morning sense of endless possibilities. Most of the Swedes have gone on their Easter Break (oddly, their Easter is like our Halloween: they dress up and go door to door to get candy...I swear) so Flogsta is empty and quiet, but for a multitude of birds and a handful of lazy Europeans sunbathing on blankets on the grass.

Three weeks ago, Flogsta looked like this:



But now, the sun goes on forever. The nights are comfortable and mild and good for taking walks by the river. I've been strolling downtown every afternoon to sit by the Fyris or in the shade of the cathedral to watch young lovers and read Nabokov and W. Somerset Maugham.

I've never read Nabokov before. It's a terrible pity he's mostly known as the author of Lolita and therefore is regarded with a bit of creepy distaste. I've read Lolita now, and it certainly is quite creepy (and, in my opinion, suffers from serious structural problems) but my God...the language. The man's language is simply gorgeous, and Pnin and Pale Fire have proven him to be a novelist of the first rank. Highly recommended.
Maugham, of course, is as excellent as ever. I've been reading The Razor's Edge, and it makes me want desperately to move to Paris.

I mean, what better life could there be than to be a character in one of those great novels of the first half of the twentieth century? What could be better than to live in one of those little apartments with a balcony and curly iron furniture, perhaps on a colourful, narrow street full of expatriates and starving artists. To take all your meals at the same crowded, rambling little restaurant where you know all the waiters and cooks and bartenders by name, to drink red wine with different tired crowds on warm summer evenings, to walk in the Luxembourg gardens and read by the Seine? It is imperative that I learn French immediately, that I may read Baudelaire and Balzac and lapse romantically into French when having passionate intellectual conversations with ladies. I want to walk through the rain in Montmartre to the seventh-story flat where I am having a fling with an artist's model in a little room full of slender books and candles. I want to know cafes full of anarchists and exiled Burmese.

But of course I have gotten enough of what I want in my life to realize that it never turns out to be the way you imagined. The apartment would be wretched and there would be expensive legal trouble with the landlord, assuming I could even get a place to stay, which is unlikely. Rent would be crippling. A job would be next to impossible, particularly with my lack of French. And so on.

So instead I satsify myself with my own currently sunny corner of Europe, in which I do relax in a high apartment with the windows open and through which I wander, reading lots of books. It's a very good existence, for the moment.

There is little else to report right now. I'm off for a month: my final class doesn't start till May. Going to do a bit of travelling, but I'll write on that when it happens. Life for now is comfortable, sunny lassitude, and I am perfectly fine with that. This is as cheerful as this blog is ever going to get, so enjoy it while it lasts.

What I'm Reading (a rare foray into fiction!)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
John Milton, Paradise Lost