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.
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