Warsaw, continued

When I came to Warsaw in the winter, I spent many hours seemingly accomplishing not a whole lot. The wheels of agencies and bureaucracies moved slowly. My apartment search was at first futile and then frustrated by my inability to fix the mess that I found until the students moved out. I seemed to be moving forward so incrementally that I may as well have been standing still.

This time, practically speaking, I'm in Warsaw for two days only and yet I furnish an apartment, get to know the neighborhood that is now my own, pick up the final papers establishing my Polish identity and registering my place of residence here (an antiquated requirement that would not be enforceable in a mobile country such as the U.S.). Add to this valuable time with my sister and today with my friends here, and endless walks up and down the streets of Warsaw, and you can tell that I would be feeling rather flush with satisfaction: I not only moved forward, I nearly reached the conclusion of a process that began a handful of years ago.

Some photos from my day (though again, photography has not been a primary focus on this trip. A lot of it is rather incidental):

Breakfast, cooked by my sister.







A walk to some government office or other causes me to pick up the pace, as the sprinkles and the gusts of wind really feel unseasonably cool for July. (They had had a heat wave last week but on my two days here, there truly is a lull to summer.)

(The ubiquitous fruit and veggie stand.)






I actually go inside a small but pleasant mall that abuts the street, both to get coffee (oh! It may as well be Madison! Everyone has a computer/smart phone out) and to keep out of the passing showers.






I pick up a puzzle for Snowdrop at a toy shop where the very chatty clerk tells me what toys her toddler has mastered. I'm not phased. I select something that I know Snowdrop will like for the penguin in it.






There is a stand selling "Polish foods" right in the middle of the mall and I study with some curiosity the honeys on display here. Pani Ela (and her husband, but he's not here) is the beekeeper and she is engaging and also easy to engage. Poles love honey and consume great amounts of it. I am, in that way, very very Polish.

(All honeys, all produced from "ecological" environments, each with a different taste and color to it.)






I'm curious and a tiny bit skeptical about the honey that is made from raspberry flowers.  How do you know the bees collected the pollen from raspberry flowers? -- I ask.
We place the hives in the forest when the wild raspberries are blooming there.

The honey is a bit more expensive and I can see why. There can't be that many opportunities for this kind of harvest.
You don't know the least of it! Pani Ela tells me. She understands the challenges but she has a satisfied-with-life air about her that is admirable. I do so like learning from people who are not easily discouraged. The bees, you know, are dying off and to make matters worse, we have a constant threat of theft. 
Theft?
Of our bees. Apparently some people think that taking ours is much more economical than paying for their own colony. You should try the raspberry honey. It's probably the sweetest of them. Great over muesli.

I don't want to carry a large jar of honey back to Madison -- it would require sending my suitcase through -- but I realize that I can buy it for my new home here! I ask my sister to hold it for me until the apartment is ready.


And then, at her home, I borrow a backpack, stick all edible and drinkable gifts for friends inside and set out on a circuitous ramble to explore several key neighborhoods in Warsaw.

(I take the metro, always full of the bounce and charm of young people. Walk in pairs! Hold hands!)





















I get off at Powisle -- the up and coming neighborhood that borders the Vistula River.

(My apartment is just up a small hill from it. This hill.)







But as long as I am by the river, I should walk over to look at the mermaid here. She is the symbol of Warsaw. She stands by the river in solitude -- there is almost no one here (almost: these two little sisters are enjoying a moment of rest on a nearby bench)...







... even as this monument is known to every child who grew up here. The mermaid is Warsaw to us and I get this catch in my throat when I see it because she looks so proud and sure and yet her history is in a sense quite sad: the monument was erected in April, 1939 and we all know that Warsaw was bombed on September 1 of that year. She survived the hell that followed -- a witness to unexpected cruelty.







You'll see to the right of the photo the contours of the National Stadium. This is where the NATO summit is beginning today. I see the presence of police and the military here and there, but Poland isn't nearly as preoccupied with terrorism as western Europe and so by the markers of the west, the presence of armed forces isn't nearly as obvious. (My friends reassure me later that huge barricades have been constructed around the stadium itself. Where is Obama staying? -- I ask. At the Marriot. As always. One forgets that he's been to Warsaw before. But of course, this isn't a state visit. You could say that it's a multi-state visit.

I cross the river because the views from the bridge are so lovely! Warsaw the new...







And Warsaw the (reconstructed) old...







The street of my Warsaw home flows into this bridge and I return now to the blocks closer to my apartment.

There is a very pleasant, very spacious coffee shop here and I pause for another swig of espresso and a cookie.

(Oh, a mirror!)






(I see chairs that Snowdrop would have liked!)






It's a lovely and calm space and I am sure I'll return to it again and again.

I pass my building -- nice to see people enjoying an ice cream or a coffee right under my windows...






And then it's evening and I turn my attention to my friends. We congregate over dinner at the home of one couple. She cooks for us all frequently when I come to Poland and I really hope to reciprocate more when I move into my own place.

(A first course of traditional fish pate, with shaved raw veggies.)






I catch us in the mirror (I'm in the pink sweater): how many conversations have we had like this in the last forty-five years? Weighty topics, light banter -- we go through it all tonight until the hour is so late that the metros have stopped running.






Well, our get-togethers are not a rare event anymore. I travel here often enough. We make plans for my next arrival in late fall.

(A plate of Polish doughnuts called paczki: don't compare them to the American doughnut. The taste is completely different.)





Again I mostly put away my camera. The visual takes a back seat tonight.



And now I am on my last night at my sister's place. Tomorrow, I leave for a brief overnight in Paris, to return home on Saturday.

Warsaw

Though you could argue that Warsaw has greatly transformed itself since I moved away now more than forty years ago, still, I hold firm to my claim that much more of her essence has stayed the same.

I felt it at the airport as I waited for the bus to take me to my sister's home. I heard it in the conversation on the bus between three student types - they were like the conversations I had here long ago with my student friends and that I never had once I moved to the US (topics, intonations, speed of articulation -- it all would shift radically when I'd talk with American friends).

And this morning, I recognize that Warsaw quintessence in the foods my sister and I see in the stalls that line streets and append themselves to popular walkways (for example by the metro stop) and where people still buy their fresh produce daily. Close to their home. Mostly seasonal fruits and vegetables.






My sister and I step out to pick up some more fruits for breakfast  (I devoured much of her supply last night when I arrived). How can you resist the late season strawberries, the plump raspberries, the black currants, the wild blueberries, gooseberries and sour cherries?  She asks -- do you have wild blueberries in the States? Not in Wisconsin, ever. Just in the freezer section of our grocery store.






Staples of the season. A short growing season, but when it's here, everyone buys, stews, eats...






... and yes, include in that pickles. Virtually every stand has large containers of pickling cucumbers and just to make things easier for you -- packaged salt and spices and bunches of garlic right along side. All you need is the jar and the water.






(We stop at a bakery as well. Again, it's so obviously Polish: perhaps you didn't notice the dense dark  grainy bricks of bread toward the top, but you'll surely note that we really like small rolls of every incarnation.)






Breakfast is at home, back to my standard and much beloved oatmeal, which she readies for me...







Oh, but the taste of the fruit is unforgettable. You could blind taste your way to your homeland just by following the trail of familiar flavors. (With kefir and honey of course. Acacia or buckwheat.)






My sister is having some repair work done in her own apartment, so I leave her to her chores and I set out to meet with Pani Karolina, my brilliant and exquisitely discriminating architect decorator. As you know, I have now a wee apartment in Warsaw. For the past two weeks it has been disassembled, so to speak. Ripped to shreds. Gutted. I will be seeing it in its raw state and more importantly, I will be going over some of the details of the remodeling with her.

I take the metro to my new neighborhood. Ah, there are flags alright! Polish, NATO, and of Warsaw.






The apartment building with my unit is one of the very few in Warsaw that was salvaged after the War's destruction. Pani Karolina says that someday perhaps it will be governed by strict guidelines as to how restoration should proceed, but right now, people live pretty much by their own rules. One reason for this absence of directives is that many (most?) residents in the building are, by their own description, quite poor ("poor as a church mouse!" one neighbor had said). The building is humble, but I like it. Its inhabitants here appear to lead simple, straightforward lives. (You'd see this in the stairwell which is fresh and clean, even as the entrance doors to apartments are all different and in various states of disrepair.) I am, of course, an anomaly. I understand that. Sure, I'm retired, but fact is, I've been on a different boat ever since I left for the U.S. and started to earn an income abroad.

Here's the building. I don't have a balcony, which is a good thing because windows onto the main street would bring in the noise of the traffic. (And by the way, this is the same street that is likely to be used by limousines carrying dignitaries in the the next two days across the river to their NATO meeting place.)






On the ground floor there is a coffee shop and I arrive early to have a cup of caffeine before my meeting with Pani Karolina. I see that there is a new trend in the city: bring your dog to the cafe.






This next lap pooch is yapping madly at everyone out on the street. I'm amused because of course I've just been in a country where there are many dogs in cafes and restaurants, but French dogs are used to the rules of the game: they're quiet and unless you trip over one, you hardly know they're there. Polish dogs are still learning.






Ah, here comes my wonderful and talented Pani Karolina. (She is at the counter.)






She takes out her folders, her computer with links to things that need my thumb up or down, her samples of laminate, stone, fabric and more importantly, she brings to the table her ideas. Even when I initially do not agree with her (which is rare), I usually come around to her way of seeing things. Pani Karolina thinks deeply and carefully about everything. She has been not only my right hand but my entire everything in this project. That I am enjoying immensely its execution is entirely because I find her spirit and calm, cheerful demeanor so completely disarming that I honestly cannot believe my luck in having found her (or having had my sister find her for me).

We make a thousand decisions in those few hours in the coffee shop. Much has been already decided via email, but we clear up such details as bedroom finish, furnishings, lighting fixtures. Plates even. Nearly everything you would need to move into apartment (which I intend to reside in this coming October).

And then we go up to my unit, which I had only seen once and if you recall -- I hated the way it looked then, which was fine because the goal was to buy cheap and ugly and turn it into a thing of great beauty.

Gutted, I tell you. (Here's the leader of the construction team and he, too, is a gem: an honest, calm, wise man who has worked with Pani Karolina on a number of jobs and I can see why she likes him. I like him immediately as well.)






One thing that I had been warned about many times, as Pani Karolina drew and redrew the plans for the apartment, is that it really is tiny. It has a wee bedroom and then a salon which also has to serve as a kitchen. And an entrance hall and a bathroom. All this fits into less than 420 square feet. She figured out early that once you put a double bed into the bedroom, there isn't a great deal of space left.

(Pacing, measuring, thinking through some issues...)






But what helps it immensely is that the apartment has three voluminous windows on two opposing sides and it has very high (prewar) ceilings. And so it is luminous in its tinyness. I was sold on that and I don't think I made a mistake. (And just so you readers across the ocean get some perspective on things in Poland, on the floor below me, in the same space, an older gentleman lives with his grown son. They divided the salon into two rooms. Why? Well, because it worked better that way when they had not two, but seven family members living there in earlier years.)

Last minute decisions...






And then we leave the workmen to their job and we retreat down the block to the ice cream store (which calls itself a traditional ice cream store, which is sort of amusing because I can't really figure out which traditions it wants to identify with).

Pani Karolina orders a sorbet, but I take the creamy melon ice cream because creamy ice cream in Poland is not at all like in America: it's lighter and more delicate and altogether wonderful.






And we're done. The rest of the decisions will be made via email.

I walk around the neighborhood -- my neighborhood -- stopping at another cafe for another cup of coffee. (The place also sells cakes by the slice. The bottom shelf is a nod to other places, but the top shelf has Poland written all over it -- from the meringue tortes to the cheesecake with fruits and jelly.






There are so many of these cafes now and they all seems to be popular and this is the other Warsaw -- the one that isn't necessarily as poor as a church mouse. It has an outward looking younger cohort of people. They're often conferring with others who speak other languages. They seem confident and hopeful.

They say that when you walk the streets of Krakow, where the literary set, the older generation, the older buildings, habits and styles should make you feel like you've entered a stubbornly stogy and entrenched tableau, that doesn't happen because there is a world famous university in the city that is home to some 40,000 students and this adds a youthful defiance that nicely balances the other, older face of the town.

Here, in Warsaw, in the neighborhood of my apartment, I feel the same youthful vibe. The university is just a few blocks away. I think it transforms the area. It mixes it up and what spills out is refreshingly bright and honest.






I walk some more.

Warsaw is not only one thing of course. Let's move away from the university streets that lead up to the Old Town. Once more, the flags, cheerfully fluttering on a day that has had sunshine, downpours and gusts of strong wind.







Not uncommon: a monument to the fallen heroes of The War.






And across the street, two buildings almost collide: the former Communist Party headquarters (to the left) and a new structure that has some commercial aspect to it (to the right).






This leads me right to the Place of Three Crosses. This is the church where I'm told my father's parents were married.






Past an extravagant bakery with an extravagant very Polish meringue cake.






And a very Polish child, eating an ice cream cone on a summer day. Bundled and with a cap. Very Polish!






I end on the Square which often appears on Ocean pages. I lived my childhood half a block away and my adolescence three blocks away. I never felt this was a particularly attractive intersection of city streets, but honestly, everything looks just fine under a blue sky.






And then I ride the metro again to my sister's. We do set out again in the evening, just to run some errands, but I'll end the photo run with those blue skies. You can't improve on that. Well, perhaps I should have taken photos of the foods we eat tonight -- the borscht my sister made for me, the pickles, the fresh fava beans that are only in season for a couple of weeks, the walk we took in the evening, the store we visited with Swedish children's clothes. But in fact, sometimes I am able to put away the camera. I did that on this evening.

Until tomorrow then!

getting there

An early post for you! Right on the tail of the previous one!

I really wasn't sure I was going to get anywhere tonight. A call for airport strikes usually affects the short haul flights within France and I was to travel from Biarritz after all (it's far cheaper to buy a ticket from Biarritz to Warsaw than from Paris to Warsaw and connect to Paris by train). I counseled myself to be patient and to take things in stride.

The day began with cloudy skies and cool temperatures. Ah, this is what I was expecting all along from the Atlantic side. I had been lucky to have had two summery, mostly sunny days. Still, the innkeepers close the doors to the patio and so I take my last Biarritz breakfast indoors. Which is a shame, but the excellent bread product more than makes up for it.






I have to make a dash to the post box to mail back my WiFi hot spot device (I had only rented it for France) and in doing this, I have a chance to take one last fond look at Biarritz...






... and the ocean.






I see that the number of surfers seems to have multiplied ten fold. Are there to be waves? It looks pretty calm right now...






And then I wave a fond farewell to my wonderful little hotel...






... and I'm off to the airport, where I learn there are no cancellations so far. What good luck! I travel without incident to Paris (I would say, coming in to the airport, it looks almost like Wisconsin. Almost. The clusters of houses rather than the isolated farmsteads I think gives it away)...


 



At the airport I grab this insignificant lunch...






... and then I get ready to board the late afternoon flight to Warsaw.

That's it for photos for today. I'll be staying with my sister -- probably for the last time ever, as my next trip here should be to my own old but soon to be freshly new apartment.

I really will have only two full days in Poland. The first is going to be spent on matters pertaining to the apartment and the second -- well, it will be nicely relaxed and I will eventually amble over to my friend's home to meet up with the usual gang for an evening of joviality.

I've already been teased that I chose to travel to Poland at the same time that Obama is coming here (actually he's arriving on Wednesday, but still, we overlap). There is sort of an ironic coincidence -- the president (whom I like so much, by the way) from my adopted country, passing through this way while I'm here. Maybe I should stand on the street and wave a little flag? No, I've never been a flag waving type. Still, I'll let you know if Warsaw is topsy turvy for the momentous arrival of all NATO heads of state.

Until tomorrow then!