from Krakow

We have a leisurely walk from our Krakow hotel to the train station. Even with suitcases (yes, both!) it’s not a struggle. Twenty minutes along the pretty streets of the old town, down the passageway, up again and we’re at the station. With twenty-five minutes to spare. In train travel there’s such a thing as too much time. Without a place to sit and stay warm, you can easily regret an early arrival.

And so, with time and nothing else to occupy me,  I get into a line. It’s easy in Poland. Lines were part of my past – I’m used to them. This time I want to ask if there’s a chance they’re selling reserved seats. The German ticket agent had said (back when I bought these particular tickets from Krakow to Warsaw in Berlin) -- no. The Internet also said no. And being Polish, I distrust both. So I may as well ask the agent here.

I wait. And now it’s only fifteen minutes until the scheduled departure. I notice the man before me is holding tickets to Warsaw as well.
For the 16:05? – I ask.
No no, the 15:55.

But the schedule said 16:05.

That was yesterday. They changed the schedule. Don’t worry – we have six minutes. Just go to track five after this.

But he has a change of ticketing and I have my question about seats (“Yes of course we reserve seats. You want two?”) and now we are just two minutes before departure. Run, daughter, run! I shout. But it’s not on track five after all – they changed that as well in the last five minutes. Track four. No escalator. Up the stairs, with suitcases clumsily bouncing after us.

We get on, panting, and the door slams shut behind us.

We have a jovial young crowd in our compartment. They complain about the heat in the car, about the sudden standstill, about the winter. They, like so many Poles that I know, find comfort in making fun of systemic shortcomings that are beyond their control. We laugh until tears roll down my face. My daughter looks at us and I want to remind her:  Polish is an impossible language. Don’t worry about not understanding. In three days, the disquiet that comes from not knowing what those around you are saying will disappear. But I say nothing.

Even though every time she and I pause at places where I switch from English with her, to Polish with the sales clerks, they ask me – your daughter? Yes... Why didn’t you teach her Polish? Ah, born there, dad doesn’t speak it, sure, that’s understandable. Still, did you teach her any of it?



We had arrived in Krakow the previous day to a delicate snow and a still and cold night. We hauled our bags up to the center of the city, avoiding, but just barely, the slip and slide of the inclines.





It is a gorgeous way to reenter the city.





Krakow is beautiful. Really. True, I see it these years in, I think, its best seasons – spring and winter. In the weeks just before Christmas, the Main Square opens up to a holiday market and my daughter tells me that it is a far far more authentic experience than the Berlin market we visited just a day ago.





On the night of our arrival, it’s quite late and we are quite hungry. We pick a place that serves Polish food (Miod Malina) and we study the menu. Pierogi. Yes, there must be those. But also something to start the meal. Something to nibble on with the first Polish beer. Maybe a small portion of potato pancakes with mushrooms and grilled smoked sheep’s milk cheese, with cranberries.

So, the starters and then one shared order of pierogi. The cheese ones (always called Russian, for no reason that I can think of) and the sauerkraut and mushroom ones.

Then we’ll go to the main course – short ribs for her, and a meat with chanterelles for me. Because I love chanterelles so very much (yes, that’s right: fond memories, this time of hunting for them each summer in the forest at the edge of the village where my grandparents lived; after a good solid rain they were easy to find – in clusters at the base of trees).

All this with good Polish beer.

But wait – what’s with the plates of starters? Nibble food indeed! It’s a meal onto itself!





And the pierogi – good thing we ordered only one portion. The full one has ten of them.





By the time we have the main courses placed before us...


 


...we’re swimming in butter dribbled dishes and heavy cream sauces. I tell the waitress that the portions are huge! She beams. I know! You go to some restaurants and you finish your meal and you’re hungry. We don’t do that here!


We stagger back to the hotel. It’s good to walk after such a meal. Perhaps this explains a Pole’s love of a spacer – a promenade – to help process the food that seems not to have lightened over the years.







I stay up late, attending to emails, to my photos from the day. When I look up, I notice the snow. It’s very delicate – nonthreatening. Even though I know that in a few days, Poland’ weather will turn bitter cold. Gentle one day, harsh the next. It’s the way December progresses here.




The next day we walk the city. We have maybe six hours and we use them well. In and around the old city center...





...and the Christmas market, too, with the foods and stalls of regional products, some solidly dusted with snow...











Indeed, there is snow everywhere.





You can't stop it. Who would want to stop it...





We walk the cobbled ways on,  down to the Wawel Castle....


 



...and finally on to Kazimierz – the old Jewish blocks, where we pause for a cup of warm soup.





The temperatures are starting to drop. The snow is pretty, but a constant cloud cover means that you never have a chance to take in the sun’s warmth. We head back to the Main Square and pause at a café for a warm beverage and a shared szarlotka – apple cake. Yes, with cream. Whipped cream this time.





And now we are speeding to Warsaw. The Krakow – Warsaw train is nearly always very fast and the compartments are full.  But my mind is on Krakow still. What can I say... the city leaves an afterglow.


 


Three hours later, we are in Warsaw.

Berlin -> Krakow

It is as one would imagine it to be: a forested land made gray by winter, then white by snow and now, after a two day thaw – some combination of earthy colors in a Dalmatian-like mosaic. It’s not that in these two days the snow has melted, but it looks hardened and miserable. All that, on display through a window splattered with dirt.

And yet, I can’t take my eyes off of it. Occasionally, we pass a small village, but not very often. Once, a solitary church appeared fleetingly behind the glare from the window.





Another time an abandoned brick factory. Just seconds ago, I saw a small deer with her back to me. Mostly though, it’s pine and birch, growing out of banks of snow.

We are speeding through south eastern Germany, on the way to Krakow in Poland. Though speeding is a relative word. Surely this isn’t the high speed rail of western Europe. But it’s a pleasant, rhythmical movement and though the total trip will last ten hours, I find myself thinking it could go longer and I would not be disappointed. Our train compartment – old fashioned, to be sure – is warm, the window to the world is large.

I note another wee village coming up. The sign tells me it’s Synowa Zarska, Just like that, I know we’re in Poland.



Our second day in Berlin (Saturday) had been far tamer than the first. Europe experienced a partial (and temporary) warming. Two degrees above freezing and continued precipitation meant that there were bouts of rain and gusts of a warmer wind. My daughter needed downtime and I wasn’t in a rush either.

Just after noon, we put aside our various preoccupations and set out for the Alexanderplatz. I think of it as the center of the former East Berlin – the tower defines this part of the city and I remember it vividly from my past visits here.






Now, it is also the place of Berlin’s major Christmas market.

It’s tough to photograph the market. We’re in a crowd of wet, dark winter coats. We put up our umbrella, we take it down. Up, down, raining, not raining. And still it hardly matters: the place is charming and most everyone is in a spirited mood. Aided by spirits.











I’m game. I ask for a hot mulled wine. Ours is special! -- the vendor tells me. We add rum for an extra punch! Oh dear.

There are many, many families here now. Of course. For the merry-go-rounds. For the Santa. For the festiveness of the place, the weather notwithstanding.
























Up one alley, down the next. Like strollers on a warm summer day, but without the warmth or the sunshine.



We spend the late afternoon and evening in our own neighborhood – where Mitte turns into Prenzlauer Berg. And whereas the previous day’s neighborhood walk took place in the former West Berlin, this one’s in the Eastern sector. Not that you could tell. In Poland, the change to a market economy seemed to erase fewer of the distinctly Eastern block retail venues. Even now, as I walk away from the center of Warsaw, I come across shops that may have been there in my childhood – they’re not gaudy, nor pricey. Perhaps the shelves are better stocked, but they’re in their own dated league of another era.  But in (East) Berlin, except in the architecture, I see no signs of that past. In the short time we’ve been here, it looks to me as if the stores, the cafes, the restaurants are all now at the level of the West. Not necessarily posh, but of a certain kind. Not the kind that I have memorized from postwar Poland.











And still, there are the common elements – the familiar forms found, it seems, only in central Europe. Take the small issue of mushrooms. Poland and Germany seem to share a fondness of depicting with great affection the poisonous red mushroom in any number of decorative settings.











And speaking of mushrooms, there is the matter of food. We go for dinner to a café/bar – a place that also serves simple, rib-sticking food – Altes Europa (Old Europe).






We order a potato soup (served with prunes), a mushroom vegetable soup and a plate of meatballs and potatoes. German food, yes, but if you hadn’t told me, I may have guessed Polish. (Though the carafe of delicious Reisling is unmistakably not Polish.)


 



Maybe I’m just getting my mind fixed on the days ahead. Getting ready for the very short, but still significant visit home.




And now it is Sunday afternoon. My daughter’s suitcase caught up with us just hours before we left Berlin and even though we’ve been traveling since Tuesday, in many ways it feels like we’re just starting.  We board the train in Berlin...


 


...and somewhere in that vast forest of birch and pine, we cross a river and with it -- the border between Germany  and Poland. Yes, the villages that appear now are, to me at least, quite obviously Polish.






The train is moving very, very slowly. Stopping at even seemingly empty stations.





And sometimes, for example while sitting at the Wegliniec station (wegel means coal, and we are indeed moving through Silesia – the southwestern coal mining region of Poland), it feels as if we’re really not going to move at all.  A station worker comes up to our car with a big mallet like tool. He tweaks something at the base of our car and steps back. He jots down a word or two, watches...





The train lurches forward.



My daughter is leafing through some Polish writings. Przepraszam, dzisiaj wyjezdzamy... ("I’m sorry, we’re leaving today..."). Vowels! – she asks. Where are the vowels?! What can I say, we’re a generous people, but we’re stingy with the vowels.


It’s dark now. We still have a way to go. We’ve been visited by one German conductor, one Polish one, a vendor with candies (who is indignant that I hadn’t taught my daughter Polish) and now we have yet another conductor checking our tickets.

How late are we? I ask.
Oh, some 35 minutes now.
Is this train typically this late? I ask, because I deliberately avoided the connection through Warsaw where we would have had to make a quick change for the Krakow train. I never felt that Polish trains can be trusted to run on time.
Oh no! Not at all!
And now I feel guilty for my past assumptions...
We’ve pulled in to Krakow many hours behind schedule! Three just last week! This is fantastic!
I no longer feel guilty for harboring those assumptions.

So long as we get in on time for one Krakow supper. Just one.

layers

The wind turns pale faces beet red. If your eyes tear, will they freeze at the corners? The snow is well trampled by now, but it looks like shoveling is not a habit here. Most sidewalks have a decent layer of packed snow. If you’re lucky, there’ll be sand to get you over the bad spots.

We only have two full days in Berlin. And it’s best to front load the sights you would not want to miss. Because what if tomorrow is even harsher?

In the hours of daylight and well into the evening, we walk from one place to the next, stopping to read occasionally, maybe to take a photo, processing it all as best we can.





In most any city, the harsher side of history is well out of view. We’re taught to admire the sublime – the picturesque medieval streets, the grand architecture of the Belle Epoque – on and on. But in Berlin, how can you forget a history that has influenced every piece of stone, every street, every bridge and empty expanse before you?

I say to everyone who asks that you cannot understand Warsaw unless you understand her recent history. And I truly believe that. Every time I shepherd friends who visit, we start the tour with a short movie on the destruction and reconstruction of Warsaw in the previous century. It’s a movie about bravery, resilience, oppression, defiance – and ultimately of a spirit that one can be proud of.

That’s not Berlin’s history. And so you walk past monuments and you reflect about their use, misuse, disuse and except perhaps in your review of the last two decades, it’s all so painful!

Take the Reichstag. The Prussian building, where the Parliament now sits.





Created during the German Empire, destroyed by fire, ignored by Hitler, abandoned by the West, neglected by the East – only now, following reunification, has it been made great again.

A walk through the historic center of city on this bitter cold day is like a walk through a confusion of magnificent monuments and nothingness. Why such vast, empty spaces?





When Warsaw rebuilt herself after a near total destruction, it chose to painstakingly imitate a proud past. When Berlin rose from rubble, it did so with less pride, more politics, inattention to the past and, really, toward any coherent future. They say that if there are hills and inclines in this town, they’re made of war debris, buried underneath where we stand now. Hidden. Best forgotten.

The toll of the twentieth century is hard to stomach in a city that was not made better or finer for it.


And so you look at something like the seventeenth century Brandenburg Gate and you think – oh my, how splendid. Until you think about who passed through its gates and why. And you can’t help but recall all things having to do with military strength and conquest. And how are you supposed to process it? Are you supposed to smile for the camera? Pose, and with a person making a Euro by imitating a German soldier? On this cold day there are several such “soldiers” for you to choose from: from the wars of the past century, from the post war Soviet presence here – pick your poison. In the alternative you can stand next to a bear.





And then you come to the memorial to the Holocaust. A recent addition to the Berlin landscape.





Covered with snow now, looking like tombstones, but beautiful in the most heartbreaking way (you can't tell from where I'm standing, but some are twice the height of you and me) and though we did not intend to pause in museums today, we could not help ourselves now. Silently, through underground rooms of human stories of suffering at the hands of something so evil! There are photos and texts, in German and English and we read them, moving from one to the next: the story of German Jews, then of Polish Jews, and finally all European and Soviet Jews, leading the pack, with Roma, with the disabled, with those who dared challenge or merely just stand in the way, leading on to a certain death.

I know the story. I learned it at a very young age. It ended only eight years before I was born, but honestly, it never really had an ending at all for me, because once you know of it, once you meet the few who managed to survive, with most everyone they cared about lost to them, you don’t see it as ever ending. Not in your generation anyway.





Outside, I watch one, then another high school group. I see them at the Memorial, then at the spot where Hitler’s bunker once stood. But they’re not German kids. The first group is French, the second English. Where are the German kids?

Maybe they come to these markers of history in better weather.


We move now to the last sad chapter of Berlin’s past – the part about the wall. This one is more of a grim tale that ends well. Here, I should feel that surge of hope for a city that went through a lot at the hands of those who cared little about the people who merely wanted to get on with their days.

Again we read – about the quick construction, then reinforcement of a wall that was to keep people in, even as just a short time ago, some people were forced to leave.





But Berlin is all about moving on now. The preserved fragments of the wall are in a square that has perhaps the city’s most brazenly modern and tall structures. Raised over the ground where the Gestapo headquarters once stood. So that you find your self saying – yes, but all that was then, and now the city is something altogether different. The German spirit, whatever that is and however suppressed and repressed it was in the past, now moves forward.





It is so cold outside that perhaps it is not a surprise that most of these monuments have very few visitors. As we continue on our Berlin walk, feeling numbed by the wind, or by the monuments to the past, or both, we look around us to understand, after all is said and done, what has become of the city now.

A Christmas market! Just a few feet from the fragments of a wall, we have before us a cheerful place of holiday color. We join the Berliners (and visitors?) in a warming slug of hot spiced wine and we walk from stall to stall, admiring the sweets and the sausages and the Christmas trinkets.









And now we want more of it – of the daily life of a twenty-first century Berliner. I want to know – what is an everyday like for, say, someone who can barely remember a wall, who has by now no more relatives who may have been soldiers at war?

And I want to know – how are Berliners toward the outside world? I hear all the time how young people love this city! It’s time I tried to understand why.


The guide books tell you that you should stay close to historical Mitte – that’s where all the museums and monuments are clustered. I say you should stay anywhere but there. Try, instead, to place yourself in a less formidable environment. Find a neighborhood that is filled with small shops and cafés. Find quickly the places of a Berlin you can love, or else you may have a hard time remembering that there is this other side to life here.

And in these neighborhoods of a vibrant, younger life, I discover things that make me smile.

At Curry 36 – a place where lines form to buy Berlin’s favorite snack food – sausage sprinkled with curry, doused with ketchup and served with hot fries – we pick up a couple of platefuls and we stand around outside tables and savor the taste of this delicious Berlin street food. A woman watches me eat, take a photo, eat some more. She smiles. I smile. A brief encounter over a piece of sausage. It’s a good beginning to our neighborhood stroll.











And it continues in this quietly pleasant way. We pause for a cup of coffee in one of the numerous cafés – I am almost convinced that Berlin has even more cafés than Paris, and this could hardly seem possible, but when you walk, say, along the Bergmannstrasse, you really believe that it may be so.

In this particular café, run by a ma and pa , we are greeted in what I begin to see is the German way – politely, not effusively, without a warm smile, but with a subtle yet definite gesture of welcome. Here, our cappuccinos are served with a smiley face.





Elsewhere, a door is held open, a chocolate gingerbread cookie is carefully packaged and handed over with a bitte – small gestures, but there are many. One guide book says that Berliners are helpful if not exactly friendly. I’ll amplify that – maybe there’s hidden warmth there. Maybe it needs a little nurturing.





There are Christmas trees in front of shops that line the streets. Because the snow remains stubbornly in place on the sidewalks, parents and grandparents do errands with young children perched on sleds -- the kind that you rarely see anymore back home: with two runners and wooden slats.




I was pulled around in this way too, more than fifty years ago!

Is this why it all looks so familiar to me now? That, even as I walk in a city that I avoided for thirty five years, it feels not that distant from the Warsaw, where, too, you can eat a slice of cheesecake in a café or buy a chocolate covered gingerbread cookie to take back home?






In the late evening we go to dinner in a building that stands right at the spot where a rail line once linked Berlin with Paris to the west and Moscow to the east. My first trip ever to the countries of the west took place exactly fifty years ago when I boarded that train with my family in Warsaw, and got off in Paris, so that we could travel by ocean liner to New York.

Now, on this night, we eat at the restaurant called Paris-Moskau and it is such a fine mix of foods with layers of Frenchness, and nods to Russia (imagine splashing a drop of vodka into a white wine and cassis aperitif) and elements of Germany and Poland thrown in.

I eat a (cinnamon spiced) beet broth with duck livers on the side, followed by wild boar with poppy seed dumplings and I drink a German wine and I think – maybe you can mix tastes and people in a friendly fashion and emerge with something new, without disturbing whatever was once richly beautiful.





The staff at the restaurant is young and dynamic and I’m thinking – let’s hand over our old cities to the young people. Let them have a go of it. Seems they’re doing a fine job of reinventing Berlin. And that’s a good thing.

from Berlin

With more delays and more apologies, the flight for Berlin takes off. We are a packed plane, holding scatterings of passengers from so many cancelled Berlin flights! After two nights of minimal sleep, my daughter and I alternate between throwing out options on how to rework of our itinerary and drifting through states of half sleep and fuzzy awareness.

And finally we are in Berlin. And perhaps it is to be expected: one suitcase makes it, the other, hers, does not. I am poised for the quick run to the lost and found even as the last bags roll out. Hers is one of many missing and I know there will be a line.

When it is our turn, we face the realities of travel – ours is a chopped up schedule with, at this point, some uncertainty thrown in as to dates. We’re about to add a day to Berlin, but we don’t know if I can make the needed adjustments. I take a wild stab at giving the agents our schedule with addresses and phone numbers, but here’s the thing: the agent, an extremely sweet and empathetic woman, hired perhaps for exuding all these good qualities hundreds of times each day for distressed travelers, tells us that we cannot hope for recovery for a while.

It appears that even as we speak, the Berlin airport is filled with suitcases that need to be reunited with weary travelers. And each flight brings the next set of passengers with misplaced luggage. They are working round the clock, but the airport has been forced to find additional space – it is overwhelmed with people’s possessions.

So we do the best we can in giving them information and they do the best they can in offering some meager reassurance that eventually it will all come together – somewhere, someday.

It is past 11 at night by the time we are in the Hotel Camper. Techy, bold, new, set in the midst of Mitte – the former East Berlin and the hub of where we will want to walk.

Berlin. Even as it is a city that eats and parties like there’s not tomorrow (they say), the desk clerks tell us that by now, the food scene is closing down for the night. No matter. We don’t want a fine meal. We want a Berlin supper of this time, this moment – we want to go to Schlemmerbuffet.

Unlike Warsaw, Berlin is a city of many ethnicities and diverse peoples. The community of Turkish immigrants, for example, is quite substantial. And on this night we are determined to eat what is a uniquely Turkish-German creation – the doner kebab.





It’s bread stuffed with slivers of roasted chicken smothered in garlic sauce, heaped with raw onions, cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes. With a Berlin beer, it has to be the best fast food on the planet.

One of the cooks sits down at our table to eat his supper and we ask him about his work here. He’s a fairly recent immigrant. His uncle, the guy in the fancy duds, owns the place.





The cook's ambitious and friendly and has a smile that is engaging and optimisitic.





This is our introduction to Berlin.

We walk back along the snow covered sidewalks of this very complicated city. The ground feels cold from the bottom up. I have no doubt as to where I am. Berlin. East Berlin – with shops and edgy bars now everywhere, updating, but not changing this hard place with a harsh history.





I wake up and pull back the curtains. Yep, Berlin.

not to Berlin, continued

It’s midnight in Paris: Wednesday is quickly becoming Thursday. I'm struggling to stay awake to put up a post. Alarms are set for some horrifically early hour, but I know I wont need them. I am on automatic pilot. I never fail to wake up when I have to.

We leave our Parisian hotel shortly after 6. Every surface is iced over from a night freeze. We walk very very slowly to the RER train for the airport. Goodbye Paris.





At the airport, we step over sleeping people, tired people, waiting in line people. We did the waiting last night. We’re holding onto precious boarding passes for a late morning flight to Berlin.

And then, just before scheduled boarding, the red sign flashes: canceled.

Oh, you can ask the whys and whereofs, and you can pretend to understand, but really it is all a mess out there in central Europe. Berlin, too, has the snow, and now it doesn’t, but it’s still recovering and who knows for how long.

We are told to retrieve our suitcases from some secret passageway and indeed, one shows up, but the other does not.

I mention this not because it is particularly novel – flights get canceled, suitcases get lost or delayed, sure, all that. But the attention we received from the Air France suitcase people is beyond lovely. Monsieur explains to me what steps have been taken and what happens in case my daughter’s suitcase does not appear with her in Berlin tonight. He asks us to check back in a couple of hours on the status of things and I wince slightly because the day is still young and our flight is way later and I would love very much not to spend the entire day at the airport. Part of it – yes, to pay our dues, but not the whole day.

Madam le manager steps in and tells Monsieur that he is a fool because she of course will attend to our suitcase issues and we should go into Paris and have fun. Monsieur turns to us and translates what needs no translation – she said I am stupid, he tells us. He does not appear to be diminished by her comment.

Monsieur asks us how we’re getting into Paris, the assumption being that this is our first venture there. Oh, if he only knew! Just this morning...

I say we will catch the RER train and he winces. So déclassé! That will give you a bad impression of us! Take the bus!

We thank him profusely for all his help, shaking hands all around, and head toward the déclassé RER.

And some forty minutes later, just after noon, we alight (again) in Paris. Hello Paris.

We’re at the tip of the Luxembourg Gardens and we walk along the icy snow-covered paths and it’s all so bright and lovely! Yes, sure, the flowers are suffering and Parisians seem rather dazed by this record snowfall (4.33 inches), but for us, it is supremely pretty and the air is only modestly cold (maybe 28 F?).





And now it’s time for lunch.

There is this great little place just a short few blocks from our hotel, from our Gardens, from where we are right now – Le Comptoir. I have never been able to get a table there – it’s extraordinarily popular and I can’t get myself to book a dinner more than a week or two in advance. But for lunch, they will find us a table, if we agree to wait a wee bit.

And soon a table opens up. Outdoors okay? Madame asks. Well, it is below freezing and I can see my breath, but madame assures us that we can have blankets and there will be heat lamps.





We sit at a wee table – me in the bright and warm sun, she under the heat lamp and it is so glorious and decadent to be eating lunch in Paris in this way! We laugh at our travels and I eat a lamb confit, and she eats a grilled oyster, and Madame brings a demi carafe of wine and it just doesn’t get any better than this.





And now we are back on the train, and now at the airport, watching the screen for that moment when the sign will change from “on time” to either “now boarding” or “canceled.” Which one?

no, not to Berlin

One person’s chaos is another’s yawn. That’s the punch line.

Oh! Finally! A photo from this side of the ocean:




Not Berlin, is it? You’re right. Not Berlin.

After a six hour wait for the second Berlin-bound flight (the first one was canceled), all the while watching the wet, cold, misty skies turn wetter and mistier, we finally board the plane. Departing on time. What a relief.

Except that it isn’t a relief at all. In the minutes before departure, I note how a two degree dip in the temperature outside can transform drizzle into light snow and then into heavier snow. And now we have a further delay.  There is a backup of flights waiting to be de-iced. And waiting, too, for available runways. And then, in the end, there are no open runways at all because the airport suddenly closes. Except that we are still on that plane waiting to go somewhere, but really nowhere at all.

Snow arrives in Paris and the city, unused to such nonsense, gives up for the day.

We spend four hours on the plane, waiting, waiting, the pilot nicely updating, the attendants handing out sandwiches. My seatmate to my left tells me – that’s the French famous singer in the row in front of us (Mirelle Mathieau). She was going on a tour of Germany... Snow storms do not discriminate. They make everyone wait and then, just when you've decided you can wait no more, they have you get off and wait in long lines to figure out what's next.

I ask my kind seatmate to my left for his cell phone and I call my little hotel in Paris. Do you have a room for tonight? Last one! You are lucky. Paris is fully booked tonight, because of the storm.

Chaos at the airport. Chaos in the city. The snowstorm has wrecked havoc.

We retreat, taking the train to town (running at half the speed), no suitcases – who knows where they are and when we will see them again – but with flight reservations for tomorrow. Maybe. If all goes well.

An inconvenience. A huge, terrible, head-spinning inconvenience.

Except, after all, it’s Paris.





It’s late, but we have time to shower and set out for a dinner at the new and bright Ze Kitchen Gallerie bistro. It’s Fench, but it’s a bit Asian, but really French – a confusion of places, which is so right, because we are in the thick of a confusion of places.

All because four inches of snow fell, unexpectedly, over the city of Paris. Chaos. (Or, from the point of view of a Madison snow removal worker: yawn.)

to Berlin

December in central Europe is a dreary time of biting cold, wet air. I have such vivid memories of this -- dating back to my childhood years in Warsaw. Of hardened snow along the curb, forcing you to find a trampled path over banks of it, just to cross the street. Of dark afternoons. Of my mother taking me skating for the first time, on the patch of ice by the market. Double blades, fastened to a laced-up brown shoe. The feeling of night at midday, with people crowding streets, moving quickly to keep warm. Of thick drapes hanging by entrance doors in stores, to keep the cold air out. Dim street lights, wool coats, sometimes with fur collars. Hot tea with fruit compote to sweeten it.

But that’s Warsaw. What’s Berlin like?

My earliest visits to it where passing through ones.  In the 1960s, you could not fly from Warsaw to, say London or Amsterdam (to connect to New York, where my father worked for a half dozen years) without stopping in East Berlin. We would disembark and sit in the rather empty wait area. Tables with stained coverings, glasses of tea, German announcements over the loudspeaker. I was a postwar child and the German language sounded menacing, harsh.

Later, I passed through Berlin with longer pauses. Once, I vacationed with my family in East Germany and Berlin was our jump off point. We were allowed to spend an afternoon in West Berlin, even though at the time (1969), the wall separating the two parts to the city was at its most guarded moment. West Berlin was glitzy and commercial. East Berlin was an expanse of vast spaces and monochromatic buildings.

The last time I was in Berlin was in 1975. My sister and her then husband needed someone to drive a car for them from Paris to Warsaw and I volunteered. I was studying in the States, but I spent every free month in Europe – mostly Poland, and this offered a chance to take a slow poke through both West and East Germany.

I’ll long remember the corridor road that linked West Germany with West Berlin. If you can imagine it: a passageway, with an imposed hostility on both sides (relations between East and West Germany remained strained then). We stayed in West Berlin for a few days before crossing over to the East. And again I thought it offered little beyond the commercial avenues filled with the kind of stores you’d like to see in the East – cheap and plentiful stuff. Lots of stuff.

The road linking Berlin with Warsaw remained poorly maintained – even as it was, at the time, just about the only real highway in all of Poland.

So, what’s Berlin like now?

We’re spending many hours at the Paris airport (worse fates could befall us than sipping endless espressos and eating numerous pain au chocolat). The morning flight to Berlin is cancelled. The weather is to blame. You guessed it – freezing, wet, dreary. You expect it in Berlin, in Warsaw. This time it’s made its way to Paris too.