from Warsaw: correspondence

A return to Warsaw for me, has three essential parts to it: seeing family, spending time with friends whom I have known for some forty years, and getting a pulse on my Polishness again. It’s very basic, really – this need of ours to come to terms with our adult life by poking around in places where we spent our formative years. For me, everything happens to be concentrated in Warsaw.

And today was most certainly a day for family matters.

[Our arrival in Warsaw the previous day was not without adventure, but it seems now so long ago that I’ll gloss over it – especially since I had inadvertently drained my camera battery and so I have no props to help you along. I’ll say this – there are parts to it that are best forgotten – like the search for a taxi after leaving the train station, and there are parts that stand out as quite memorable in a good way – like the chaotic but delicious supper at U Kucharzy, or the settling in and unpacking (finally) at the wonderful art deco hotel, the Rialto.]

Family. Most anyone can come up with stories about quirky family members and the kind, benevolent ones, and those who are both quirky and benevolent. But family stories are not good blog material, even for a story blogger like me. I can say this much about my own extended family. First of all, it’s not really very extended even as it is also extremely dispersed. I have one sister, two nephews and then some cousins whom I never see. And a mother on the western tail end of the United States and a father on the eastern tail end of Europe. And one more notable thing: since I was a very little kid, my family has suffered many necessary and unnecessary separations. We have become quite used to living in this way. Call it adaptation, call it what you will. We live too far to easily manage crossing each others paths. But we managed this time. And so this trip stands out as bringing together three of my father’s four grandchildren, and both of his two daughters, all at one time, under one roof. Very remarkable, considering that none of us (besides my dad) lives in Poland anymore.



A subset of us had breakfast together at a café that I like, even as it is principally a bakery of extravagant sweets. We stayed with the yeasty cheese roll and the poppyseed cake.





Fortified, my daughter and I took off on a day long hike through Warsaw. We walked a little through my childhood park (Ujazdowski) even though it was the absolutely hands down coldest day of the year (if not decade)...





...and we walked past the Square of the Three Crosses, and onto Nowy Swiat and Krakowkie Przedmiescie – to those who know Warsaw, you’ll know the circuit. To others – oh, just follow along (with the help pf photos)...















Some hours later (and chilled to the bone) we are in the Old Town.



 







Here, too, we find a Christmas Market. Stands with familiar folk art. And with Polish foods. We settle for grilled smoked cheese with cranberries thinking that any warm food would have to feel remedial on a bitter cold day like this. That there are others who choose to stroll here today says much about the hearty Polish stock. Or about the need to ignore the elements when they act up in this way. Or about the use of shawls, hats and furs to keep warm.












Which reminds me of one more food stop we made. To buy doughnuts -- with orange rind glaze and rose petal jam inside. Very popular here and expertly made at Blikle.










Throughout the day, we poke around stores with crafts and foods and all things that I would label as being very Polish. Sometimes in conventional, sometimes in unconventional presentations.





In one store of artisanal, regional, seasonal, natural (or some subset of the above) I found something I hadn’t seen since my childhood: syrup made of young pine buds and sugar. My grandmother made this concoction each spring and I could never forget the taste – even as my daughter now asks – what do you do with it? In tea, I drank it in tea. On cold, cold winter days.





The snow continues to fall. Lightly, yes, that, but without interruption. My girl wants to stop for lunch at a "milk bar." She’s read about them and she’s curious. I’m only half into this plan. As I tell her – sometimes we like to move beyond certain markers of our youth and for me, moving away from milk bars would count as a good thing.

In the post war years, these places were packed with people who needed a cheap and filling meal. You chose your dishes, paid for them, retrieved them from the ladies who plated your order and found a place to quickly eat. Milk bars were (and are) alcohol free and for the most part vegetarian. Meat was a scarse commodity in the post war years. Milk bars made you feel okay about the meatless food you were eating – pierogi, blintzes, soups – all with plenty of salt, or sugar and starch and of course, cream. Cream felt rich and decadent in lean times.





The food was (and continues to be) very very cheap. A filling dinner will cost you maybe a few small coins (the municipalities subsidize these places and indeed, milk bars are often frequented by the aged or the down and out, as well as by students, and really, most anyone who can’t worry about spending more for a midday meal). In years where my mother was too preoccupied to attend to cooking, she would tell us to pick up dinner at the local milk bar.





But, my girl’s enthusiastic and so we head for one of the few remaining milk bars in Warsaw. We buy the usual – the soup that is as Polish as they come – sorrel soup, with a hard boiled egg for good measure. The pierogi are the old standby – sauerkraut and mushroom. The other pierogi are a tad sweet, but still, not unusual – cheese and blueberries.





She says  -- delicious! I say bleh... In theory only. It's heavy food that I grew to resist in my teen years. It became clear then that if I were to stay within a fresh and honest framework (I have loved the fresh and honest from obscenely early ages) I would need to learn to cook. Or leave the country. In the end I did both.


In the evening, my sister, her sons, my daughter and I came to my father’s apartment which was also our home for all those tumultuous adolescent years. My father likes to recall stories from his political past and this time he had a captive and often captivated audience.









... We then went out to a supper at a neighborhood place that has become my father’s favorite – for the food to a small extent. For the music and the liveliness of the place even more. The roving musicians played Polish songs and it doesn’t take much to get a Pole to join in.

So you could say it was a very jovial evening. Even if later, as we moved ever so slowly to escort my dad home, I thought the sadder thoughts that one has when one thinks of distant family separated by an ocean and by decades of living apart.

The snow keeps falling, slowly, shyly almost, my nephews and sister go off to catch the subway home, and my daughter and I retreated to the hotel. There, I read a letter my father gave me. I was the author of it and I had written it to my mother. She was then in Warsaw and I had, at the age of 21, just moved to go to grad school in Chicago. The letter was long – I was a solid letter writer – and it struck me that it had certain similarities to my story telling here, on Ocean.

It’s good to find continuity in this way – whether real or imagined. You can lean back and say to yourself – yep, it all makes sense. Because for a fleeting second, it does.

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.