leaving Warsaw

At some point I have to shut down this feeling of having returned,  of being back in Poland and push it off to the side. And, I have to admit it, I relax then. I sleep better. Warsaw is behind me. I can return to a gentler beat.


The last morning in Warsaw. Bags packed, downstairs, waiting for the preset hour of departure. I have a few minutes for a stroll, just around the residential blocks by the hotel. There’s a café, I go inside. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. An espresso would be good. I look around...










...it reminds me a little of something I’d find in an artsy district of an American city. With a Polish twist, sure. The napkins are tucked into holders on each table, the cookies are different, all that. Still, I order my coffee thinking that it’s right for this place -- more fitting than having tea with lemon.





One foot into the door of an impending return.

We’re in a cab, on our way to the airport. I’ve stopped speaking Polish for good. What for. I’m chatting with my friends about being on the early side. Our driver chimes in, in English and tells how bad the traffic was just a half hour ago. Be glad you’re early. You never know.

He talks about his own recent travels – delays due to the volcanic issues in Iceland last spring. His English is rocky and for a minute I’m sorry I’m making it harder for him but I don’t want to end the camouflage so late into the ride. But he is bold and happy to keep going.
We were traveling back from a trip my wife and I took and just before our flight took off for Warsaw, they shut down the airport and all of Europe! We had to stay an extra week, my mother had to take time off from work to come over and walk our dog, it was a mess!

I smile at his stories. Then I ask -- So, where did you learn English? It's always interesting to find out where someone's language skills come from.   It tells you a lot about a person’s life. Indeed:
Ha! In London!

You lived there?

Well yes, for eight years! I go there to visit a friend for four days. Four days! Then, my friend breaks his foot and asks me to stay and help him for a few months with his job, you know, until his foot heals. I said ok. I call my family and tell them – four more months. And that turned into eight years!

But he returned. My own adult trip to the US began with a summer in Connecticut and eventually turned into a lifetime away. I became an immigrant without at least initially intending to be that, even as I could not imagine returning to Poland again once I’d settled into a life on the American side of the ocean.










I leave Poland. Good bye Poland. I’ll think about you again when I write my book this summer. Probably not a whole lot before. Not intensely anyway. I’m leaving that intensity behind, sort of like leaving a spare set of clothing behind so that you don’t have to pack new stuff for your future returns.

parks

Parks are for friends and lovers. For solo contemplative strolls. For families on Sundays just before or after the big meal. For groups of school children taking their Phy Ed class there, walking hand in hand in some loose formation. For grandmas with strollers. Everyone knows that.

When I lived in Warsaw not many days would pass before I'd make my way to Lazienki – the most beautiful park of them all. It’s what you do. Sort of like pouring yourself coffee in the morning. A routine, a habit. (In the west -- say in Central Park or the Parisian Luxembourg Gardens, you must add to this list of park habitués the jogger. In Poland we know better. You shouldn't rush the moment. Contemplation and good conversation require a slower pace.)


Morning in Warsaw. I pull open the familiar heavy Polish window and look out. Another nice day -- gray clouds are floating in, but it's not too cold.





After breakfast, Diane and I set out for the parks. We pick up the Royal Way where we left off yesterday and we enter Ujazdowski -- the first in a string of green spaces. I call this one the lesser park because, nice as it is, it pales in size and presentation compared to Lazienki. But, as a kid I loved this one exactly because of its compact size. It has a pond, a small playground and gorgeous chestnut trees just along its border. You could pick up fallen chestnuts in autumn and make stick animals from them with toothpicks.

Today things look rather bare in a pretty sort of way. Just a handful of people strolling, feeding birds.










Ujazdowski Park checked off. Now onto Lazienki.





We begin with a nod to Chopin. In warm months, many people come to sit on the benches here, liking to conduct a quite conversation in the presence of this great Polish hero. Or they’ll bring the newspaper and read it in the calm of the rose garden, covered now for the winter with boughs of balsam fir.









But the grandest section of the park is down the hill toward the lake and summer palace.

Here’s where our red squirrels play...





And they come to you if you extend your hand and hold out a hazelnut. I brought some rolls of bread from breakfast. The squirrel came up, scampered up my leg (the bold ones do this) thinking he may be in luck, then, finding only bread, ran away pouting, like a kid who was promised an ice cream and is given a bagel instead. Thanks but no thanks.

The birds, on the other hand, do love the bread. Not the peacocks. They nibble it almost reluctantly. In an “oh, alright, if I must” kind of way.





But the ducks and gulls! They squawk and fight aggressively for every last crumb. I typically take this serene photo of the summer palace across the pond, but this time, as I throw pieces of bread toward the pond, suddenly I am left with a photo of the great bird migration.










And there you have it – a stroll through the park. A last breath of city air in a stately environment of trees and crisscrossing paths.










Outside, on Marszalkowska Street, we find a café and Diane sips espresso and I sip tea with lemon. How quickly I fall into that habit here! Paul at the café back home would be shocked that a milky espresso has been so quickly forgotten, replaced by a brew that is weakened by the presence of lemon. Fickle hearts.

I walk Diane back to the hotel, then come right out again for a whirlwind of last minutes. Cross Plac Konstytucji (Constitution Square)  and their small Christmas market (with kielbasy, of course)...



 



...to see my father. A quick look at the familiar view outside his apartment window.


 


...then onto a nearby café to meet up with a friend (tea with lemon!),  with a stop to pick up a duffel bag, to run this way and that so that by the time Diane, Ernest and I sit down to dinner at a lovely place just up the street from our hotel...


 



... I am spent. As I have said many times, after Warsaw, I’m always in need of a vacation.

from Warsaw: same old same old

When, some five years ago, I began writing a book about growing up in postwar Poland, I understood that my story would flip between three focal points: the village where my grandparents lived and where I, too, lived for the first three years of my life, the tiny two room apartment on Nowowjeska Street where I moved to once I left the village, and the significantly larger three room apartment on Aleja Roz, where my dad now lives and where I spent all my adolescent years.

It often surprises people from the States when I tell them that my two Warsaw homes are within a ten minute walk of each other. In effect, daily life for me, you know – the stuff that consists of buying bread and picking up a newspaper or an ice cream cone – spun around a very small set of blocks. And it continues to do so.

The hotel where I always stay now, the exquisitely lovely and extremely well priced Rialto, is, too, maybe a ten minute walk to the Nowowjeska Street apartment and, separately, a ten minute walk to Aleja Roz.

What does it say about this pulsating city – which is now so congested that you can sit in traffic for a long time at rush hour (and we did), and so western-looking that you can easily forget about its postwar years of a more somber existence – that it should keep you so locked and bound to a neighborhood? That each time you come back, you retrace the same old routes and routines, varying almost nothing at all, exploring nothing new, nothing unfamiliar?


Let me run you through our first full day in Warsaw. Long time Ocean readers with good memories will find it a (refreshingly?) familiar set of hours and images. And here’s the other thing – I’ve noticed that the people of the older generation (now my generation) don’t look a whole lot different than they did decades ago. Same style of dress – the wool coats, the hats – still there. Very Polish looking. As I fly through the day in my cords and puffy jacket, with no hat, no leather gloves, no nice purse held tightly in front of me, I think – why do I feel so at home and yet look so out of place?






Plac Konstytucji. The large square with the towering lamps that will remind anyone of the Soviet style architecture.






And if you’re not convinced, look just down the block at these archades.






Just around the corner is our Nowowiejska Street apartment. These were humble times. It is a far cry from the bright yellow farmhouse that I now live in and not only because I decided to keep this first set of photos in a black and white mode.






Okay, let’s refresh ourselves. Onto one of my favorite bakeries. It opened its doors after I already left Poland to live in the States and so when I go there, I feel I should speak English. On this day I faltered – starting in English and finishing in Polish, feeling somewhat embarrassed at the confusion of identities, vowing that I should keep that confusion to myself in the days ahead and thereafter.











You like this world of color? Okay, come down to the metro now and zip underneath Warsaw's blocks with me. The metro, too, is fairly new. And really, when you look around and see the faces of the younger generation (that of my own daughters), you see that it has moved away from where we are in life. Here’s a photo of a mother and daughter. The mother surely is my age. But I am not like her! And most assuredly, I am not even remotely like her quite striking daughter.







We’re off the metro, walking toward the Old Town. Oh, wait. Let’s pause for a moment next to the monument commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Hundreds of thousands killed, the city destroyed, leaving nothing but rubble. And a defiant spirit in those who survived.






Old Town Square now. With a Christmas Market (and Grzaniec Galicyjski!)






And now the long walk. From the Old Town Square, down this cobbled street (and I do always take this cobbled street when I am here)...






...to the square with the (reconstructed) Royal Palace and the column with the 17th century statue of King Zygmunt – the king who moved the capital of Poland from Krakow to Warsaw.






We dallied so much at various points in our walk so far (admiring this stuff, for example)...


 


....that the sun is almost setting by the time we reach this edge of Old Town. The colors are always best now, when the light hits the ramparts in such warm tones that you really begin to forget it is the gray month of December.






Let me move the camera away from walls and structures for a bit. People. The older (my age?) women of Warsaw...










(So why does it not feel to me like they are my age?)

Alright. Continuing on the walk: down the Royal Way – Krakowkie Przedmiescie, the street that I associate not with these holiday lights, but with the university – the place where I studied for three years.






And now onto Nowy Swiat. Visitors may think -- oh! What a nice set of neoclassical (early 19th century) buildings! And then they may do a double take: wait, wasn’t Warsaw a mound of rubble after World War II? Indeed. The fact is, this lovely street had evolved (in the early 20th century) into something very non-neoclassical. More like Art Nouveau, they say. But it was, in fact bombed to rubble and when the time came to rebuild, it was decided that it would be easier, cheaper, faster to go back to the neoclassical look. So it’s as if the city took a swing back on the pendulum of architectural progress. But you have to know that Varsovians love Nowy Swiat. And so do I. Always have, always will.






Nowy Swiat has the famous Blikle bakery. It’s 140 years old and it still makes the best damn paczki on the planet (doughnuts filled with rose petal jam and glazed with bits of orange peel).






And now we’re almost at the hotel. Enough for one day. Diane and Ernest I think must be in a post marathon stupor. It was a long walk.

The evening’s not over though. Not by a long shot. We’re having a gathering of all my best Polish friends – some dating back to high school, some to my years at the university. It’s my school cohort and I find it funny, therefore, that everyone at the table is 60 years old (I was two years ahead in school and so I am the young one). Oh, wait, there are two grown daughters of one of my friends and now, for the first time, a grandchild! (I won't comment on Ernest and Diane’s age – that’s their story!)

It’s a wonderful evening of animated conversation, lots of hugs and kisses, reflections and recollections, good food, bottles of wine, endless banter about everything from the state of the economy to health care in America to what’s it like to live with Ed at the farmhouse.


So nothing changes from year to year, right? Right??

Not true. We all change just a tiny bit and, therefore, cumulatively, we change quite a lot. Even if I do seem to stay rooted in the same set of blocks. Year in, year out.

out one and into another

Warsaw is home -- it's where it all began.  It's not a choice, a preference, but the reality. Even if once, a long time ago, it was a very sweet reality.

First though, there is the morning in Krakow. A busy one: a dash to the station to pick up train tickets, a run to the Main Market Square to consider a few gift items, a pause to listen to the trumpeter blow his horn out St. Mary’s tower.






He’s not the only one blowing horns. Two musicians are collecting coins playing traditional stuff in their Krakovian dress.






There is so much that’s traditional and appealing about this city, even though you can’t help but notice the salute to tourism. English speaking tourism. (I had not known that there are those who would drink their beer “hot.”)






On the Main Square, I pass the stone lions at the entrance to the old Town Hall tower. Lions in Poland always remind me that my last name once had the letters "Lew" in it which, in Polish, means lion. I have associations here in Poland that I never once think of when I am in Madison.






Rays of sun hit the side-walk, but it’s a misty sunshine. Gentle and understated. It creates what I so regard as the trademark of a Polish winter – a constant thin, wet layer of mud on the streets and sidewalks, with patchy stretches of ice when the temps fall significantly below freezing. A Wisconsin person would find this odd: how could you have drenched sidewalks on a sunny day? Amazing, isn’t it.



Finally it’s time to leave. [Truly, I found the Unicus to be the perfect little hotel in Krakow. Oh, and did I mention that the only city where I’ve seen more nuns in habit is in Rome, and only on the side of the river that has the Vatican?]





I suggest we walk to the train station. Sometimes I think I put my friends through too much. But I’m doing it for no other reason than wanting to not fake dress Poland in any way. I want her to be seen the way most Poles would see her – with their feet.

The train is on time and our compartment is empty. Monday noon. Who travels this time of day besides tourists? And what tourists are there in Poland in the middle of December? Odd how I’ve grown accustomed to traveling then.


And now we are in Warsaw. And the very first item on the agenda is for me to see my sister and for Diane and Ernest to meet my father.










As we get ready to leave the apartment where my father now lives, where I once lived, where so much that once seemed important transpired and eventually expired, Ernest and my father exchanged glances as if to marvel at it all -- at the absurdity of having gone through so much and being in this place now.






... a theme that Diane, Ernest and I continue over dinner at the Jazz Bistro. Over a glass of Grzaniec Galicyjski.





After, I spend a long time on Skype calming one person on the other side of the ocean and jovially giving a hard time to another (Really? You haven't checked the mailbox in four days? Really? Ed!)

Rynias revisited

Every year, when I return to Poland and, too, to Krakow, I consider it: should I go back to Rynias?

It’s a tiny hamlet, nestled in a clearing, just at the foot of Poland’s high Tatra Mountains. There is a brook at the southern edge of the hamlet. If you cross it, you’re in Slovakia.

I wont repeat the story of how I’ve come to know and love the place – it’s all about youthful exuberance: those years when you relish your emergent independence and take excursions with university friends in search of adventure, friendship, courtship. For my friends and myself, the place we found and returned to again and again was Rynias.


In this last decade, when I’ve had the time, I’ve gone back to it. It’s not an easy trip. If you use public transportation from Krakow, you can’t turn around and be back within one day. Brzegi is the nearest village that has a paved road. From Brzegi, you still have to hike on foot to Rynias for an hour each way.

So my Rynias trips have been infrequent. And I never wanted to schedule any Rynias visit in advance. You don’t want to schlep out there if it’s raining or sleeting or snowing. And if it’s overcast or foggy, you can go, but you wont see the Tatra mountains that frame the place so beautifully.

The last time I went, in 2006, I took Ed with me. The highlanders welcomed us into their tiny kitchen hut and as we sat, drank tea and reminisced, I understood that these visits mattered to me. A lot.

But I haven’t gone back since. Isn’t that just so typical – we figure out what’s important and then we proceed to ignore it.

Not this year though. I knew early on that Rynias was on the table for me. And when Diane and Ernest voted a resounding “let’s go!” I called Pani Anna from Madison and told her we were coming.

Pani Anna. She’s alone now. Since my last visit, her husband, Pan Stas, has passed away. More milestones: her nephew, who has helped them farm the land and mind the livestock has married, has had kids and has taken over most of the farming operations.


We hired a car for the trip to Rynias. (It's a two hour drive from Krakow.) And not just a simple rental. We took one with a driver – a fresh graduate from the university who does this now for a living while trying to figure out where his life is really heading. He, too is from the mountains, though he lives in Krakow now because the dancing’s good here. (And he is, at his telling, quite the modern theater dancer.) I am still running on way too little sleep and I did not want to drive with droping eye lids, along curving icy roads.

So, after a hearty breakfast (which ended with another Polish favorite – a doughnut with rose petal jam)...





...we set out.

Ah, the drive south to the mountains!





Wait, before I say another word, understand this: the chance of getting good weather for the Rynias hike in December is pretty small. Indeed, all week long I’ve been staring at the forecast and seeing sleet/wintry mix plastered across the Sunday page.

But in fact, we had the most glorious weather you could imagine.

They had their first snow just a few days ago. True, the path to Rynias became a snow-covered sheet of hard ice, but who could mind – the sun is out, fully, completely, boisterously and everything feels crisp and, well, joyful.

I have trouble in Brzegi finding the path that veers away from the paved road,  up the hill toward the forest and eventually down toward Rynias. I knock on doors and disturb a highlander grandma putting a grandson to sleep to ask why it is so beastly impossible to pick out the trail. I'm glad to find her; all other Brzegi residents appeared to be at church, here:






But this is an insignificant issue. Everyone in Brzegi knows where Rynias is. The grandma type reminded me to count the houses. After the third one up, you’ll see it to your left.

At noon, we set out.





The “road” is traversable if you have an ATV or something that can handle roots, rocks and ice.. Man, it's slippery! But even more important is this – it's a fantastic time to be out in the mountains. This hidden corner of the highlands isn’t just beautiful. It’s stunning.






Truly sublime.





And finally, Rynias.

Pani Anna is in her kitchen hut. The dog barks ferociously at us. That’s what he’s there for – too bark ferociously at visitors. You gotta have a dog with a strong voice.






I knock on the kitchen hut door. The cats scamper at the sight of me.






Pani Anna throws open the door, excited, eyes darting from one to the other and she gives me, gives us, the greeting of a lifetime.






She speak in a mountain dialect, but for me it’s not tough to follow. I think of it as singularly beautiful.

We sit down in her tiny kitchen. Her stove is going strong. She’s boiling stuff and the gurgles and hisses remind you that no matter what the weather out there, this little space will always be warm and welcoming.






We talk. She spends a long time describing how Pan Stas died. It’s been almost four years now, but she is still suffering the loss.

And then she shows Diane and Ernest the big house.






The thick chords provide insulation between the heavy timber. It's an old house -- Pan Stas was born in in it. But she has kept it well and it feels fresh and clean.






To me, the place is a work of superb folk art. There are decorative carvings that are of a time when someone would go to the trouble of giving their own beautiful imprint to a home.






Her nephew uses the rooms upstairs. She sleeps on the first floor. There, among photos of her husband, religious pictures and mementos and bags of kerchiefs and wools.

Pani Anna used to tend sheep with Pan Stas. They made ewe's milk cheeses and this brought some income for them. But she's too old for that now. She keeps a half dozen cows (and there's a wee calf to prove it!)...






...and a few chickens. In the past, too, she used to take in the occasional holiday renter (us!) but her nephew’s wife doesn’t like strangers in the house. So now Pani Anna has this small entrepreneurial thing going: friends of relatives (sometimes from the States!) send her wool kerchiefs – the peasant kind with the large flowers on them – and ask her to do the embroidery for the trim at the edges.






She is nearly eighty, but her eyes must be strong because this is delicate work.

Pani Anna is the kind of person who will never let a friend leave empty handed. Both Diane and I are handed kerchiefs to take home. And she insists on pouring us jars of homemade wild raspberry syrup.





But we cannot leave without eating first. She has been boiling a chicken in anticipation of our visit and now she deftly mashes potatoes...






...and serves us bowls of hot chicken noodle soup, followed by pieces of chicken along with the potatoes and grated beetroot.





The meal ends with sour cherry tea. As we sip, she brings out the few photos that she has of her Rynias life with Pan Stas.






We can't stay long. Already the shadows are stretching across the snow covered hillside. We make use of the outhouse (probably a first for my Minnesota friends), give kisses and hugs and wave to her as we leave.






One last look at the hamlet...








...with a good look at her homestead...





...and we retrace our steps. We take the shortcut from the back of Pani Anna's house, where the sheds are...


 







...then we rejoin the path that'll lead us back to Brzegi and the waiting car.











Diane and Ernest rest, but I want to walk up Brzegi. The village winds sparsely all the way up the hill and at this dusky time of the day it is mellow and quiet. You can see bits of yesterday in homes here.











The walk gives me time to adjust my senses. To give one last nod to a place and time that grow more and more remote, for me, for Poland too.






It's really cold now, but I keep going. The wood burning chimneys are sending up puffs of smoke. Occasionally a dog barks. It is a good walk.










It's nearly dark when we get on the Krakow road again. That moon! It's there tonight as well. I know it can't be full three nights running, but it surely looks round. Orange haloed. Beautiful, even here, on the road leading out of the highlands.






We eat supper in Krakow. We pass the Main Square where street theater gives me pause. How is she doing this? Suspended, with only an impossible connection to the ground? I should know about being suspended between one place and another...





We eat dinner at the Marmolada Restaurant. Polish foods. Herring, perch with mushrooms for me, pierogi and ribs for my friends. Followed the best hot drink on this wintry country day -- the mulled wine. Grzaniec Galicyjski.