Poland 3: Gniazdowo

Gniazdowo. The village that was home to me for the first three years of my life and nearly all the summers after, all the way into adulthood. It's where my grandparents and then just my grandmother lived. It's where I taught myself to ride a scooter and then a bike. It's where I lay down on a shallow sandy bend in the river and felt the water trickle past me on both sides. It's where bees from local bee hives swooped down and sometimes got tangled in my hair sending me screaming for help to my grandma. It's where my sister and I picked mushrooms after a rainfall and forget-me-nots and buttercups along the river's edge on better weather days.

The last time I visited Gniazdowo was in 2017. And before that? Passing through, in the winter, with Ed. And before that? When I was a mother of two young girls. And before that? When I myself was still a teenager, just starting college. Glancing at Ocean's sidebar, I can see that in the last two decades, I have spent well over a hundred days in Poland. Only two or three have been in Gniazdowo. Why is that? If you have read Like A Swallow, you'll know all about the place. I loved my time there and, being raised in the style of "go play, dont bother me, come back in time for dinner," it's where I learned to be very independent and self-reliant. My grandma and grandpa have been gone for quite a while now (my grandpa's birthday was in 1885, my grandma's -- in 1901), but not too long ago, my sister purchased the house and garden that had once been their home, and she has been slowly restoring it so that it could soon be habitable even in the colder seasons. She spends most of the warm season days in Gniazdowo. So why have I resisted going there more often?

The fact is that I rarely go back in time. Not never, but rarely. I don't look to rekindle some past emotion or attachment. Gniazdowo was monumentally important to me when I was young. But it's not the same now. My grandparents aren't there, running the ship. I'm not a child, finding ways to amuse myself on a bike or in the river on a hot day. There aren't freshly baked snacking cakes on the verandah nor vats of syrups steeping with sugared pine tree tips for our cups of tea. The forest hasn't the mushrooms we once hunted down, the meadow by the river's edge isn't vast and naked anymore, the fields aren't planted with wheat with the occasional volunteer red poppies in their midst, nor with the red berry rowan trees separating the narrow strips of cultivated fields. Indeed, there's not much farming taking place around Gniazdowo any more. The place has changed, and more importantly, I have moved on.

And yet...

There is that pull to go back. Every half dozen years, maybe after some vivid dream, maybe after I let myself drift around my childhood images again. So on this trip I told my sister -- you needn't come into town to see me, I'll come to Gniazdowo.

I wake up early.

(Good morning, Warsaw!)

 

 

After the horribly healthy breakfast. Sigh...

 

... I walk along the Nowy Swiat street (which looks a heck of a lot better today in the sunlight!)...

 

... all the way to the metro station, so that I can catch the metro to the Wilenski train station. A small place. It has trains heading to the northeast of Poland. Not anywhere else.

I meet my nephew there. In all my more recent visits to Poland, he was still in Sweden, but like my sister, he has moved back now and so I have the utter pleasure of seeing him here. He offered to come with me to Gniazdowo.

 

 

 

We travel along the same train line I would take all those years I went to Gniazdowo -- first, accompanied by my mother, eventually by myself. We pass the same familiar train stations, I see the sandy soil that seems so hospitable to the tall red pines that grow densely here.

 

 

And an hour after leaving Warsaw, we cross the River Liwiec, the train stops, and we get off. (It's a new added stop and it shortens for us the walk to Gniazdowo. Used to be 60 minutes from the station, now it's just about 35.)

My sister meets us at the station...

 

 

 

Hello, house of childhood worries and dreams! (When I moved to my grandmother's care here as an infant, the house had only the two rooms -- those that are set behind the red brick wall. My grandfather eventually added the green verandah, and much later -- the upstairs attic rooms.)

The verandah has never been heated and so we ate there only in the summer months and yet it remains such a fixture in my heart and soul. Where you ate your childhood meals is important!

The three of us take a walk. This is what you do in the country. So many walks, taken over so many years!

Through the forest of red pines, to the river's edge. And yes, we wade in it. It's irresistible and very warm!

 

In the forest itself, there stands a building that was once acquired by the composer, Ignacy Paderewski and his wife. The house is called Julin. They didn't own it for long. The wife had the idea that it should be a place where girls were schooled in the art of raising chickens. Or something. The Paderewskis were very social-minded. But they sold it in 1933 so that it could house orphan boys instead. It remained a boy's orphanage for all the years and summers I spent in Gniazdowo.

 

About a half dozen years ago, the orphanage, now accepting girls as well, moved to a new space that was more modern and appropriate -- right in the village itself. Julin, the building above, has been turned into a mini museum about the Paderewskis, and a big chunk of the forest is now a park and learning center focusing on environmental concerns.

 

My grandfather, who was very much a community activist and on good terms with the director of the orphanage, took us to Julin to show as the very fist television ever (Julin had electricity, the rest of the village, our house included, did not).

And in leafing through the visitors' book today, we came across this, from a recent visitor here:

 

Loosely translated it reads -- In the years 1959-1961, I was cared for in the Children's House of Julin. I think fondly of my time spent here. Currently, I am retired and am 77 years old. Signed: Jan Zdzislaw Ch. 

So... if this guy was there watching the Mickey Mouse Club along with the other boys in 1959, and we were there watching the same TV show in that year at Julin, we would have shared the TV room with him then, no? Weird! In a good way.

We continue our walk.

Into the fields, behind the forest. This is the kind of road that crisscrossed the villages here when I was young. (Now, the main road is paved but the side roads are still sandy wheel tracks.)

We are dazzled by a fragrant meadow of white flowers to the side of the road! What are they, anyway??

(My plant identifier later tells me that it's Galium boreale... Northern bedstraw.)

And I love seeing so many rowan trees to the side of the road!

Luck would have it that our old playmate from those summers in Gniazdowo is in her now summer home here. She asks us to come over, feeds us berries and coffee and of course, we reminisce.

Our old friend is my sister's age and her childhood home was not in Warsaw so we only saw her in the summers, except that things have an odd way of pivoting and changing directions. She eventually married a Swede and moved to Stockholm (where she still lives) and my sister moved to Stockholm too, but even so, they continued to all come to Gniazdowo, with their own kids, and so the connection remained significant for all of them. I'm the outlier. I stopped coming back.

At my sister's place, we eat lunch prepared by her. Cold beet soup ("chlodnik"), a veggie pancake, salad, cakes with the mirabelle tiny plums massively falling down from trees now. 

 

 

And then we look at the clock and we realize that even if we rushed we would not be in Warsaw before 8. The day just flew by so quickly!

Too quickly.

My sister travels back with us to the city. We walk to the train station along a road that is barely recognizable now. We pass the rare remaining farmstead (most farmers appear to have sold their land to those wanting to build vacation homes).  A farmer's work was too hard, paid too little, and the soil, climate -- all were too unpromising.

The train ride is a sweet one hour:  comfortable, and without the loud black locomotive that used to pull passenger cars along this route.

 

In Warsaw, I turn toward the hotel, and I sift through the day's events, feelings, thoughts, recollections.

So happy to have made the trip back -- to Warsaw, and today -- to Gniazdowo.

(I pick up a babeczka for an evening munch.)

 

Such a good day it was. Exceptional!

with love...

Poland 2: Warsaw

I wake up to a day that is sliced into two halves. There is the morning and early afternoon, and there is the late afternoon and evening. The first half I spend with my friend Bee. In the second -- I am a guest of Karolina and her family.

But first, breakfast at the hotel. Alone still. Collecting my thoughts and weighing my eating options.

The thing is, the Polish breakfast, and especially as presented in hotels, is too... healthy! Dark bread with white farmers' cheese. Tomatoes, cucumbers, eggs. Herring. Poles love meats so they'd add ham to that. Fruits are an afterthought. (Here, they have a tropical mix, straight out of a can.) And there you have it. A hotel will elaborate on all that, going in directions that I personally would not take. Here, they have loads of sauteed zucchini. Sausages. More cheeses, more breads. Yes, there's a platter of something resembling croissants, pandering to those who regard this as an essential morning thing, but my feeling is that if you aren't going to do croissants well you should skip them, because a limp croissant is no way to start your day.

So it takes me a long time to put together a plate that acknowledges the "do as the Romans do" in me: I do take dark bread, and put the white cheese on that, and drizzle it with honey. There, I'm Polish!

I add the zucchini because I eat a ton of veggies back home and have never enough when I travel. And yogurt. And then I see some person in the know has ordered a few blueberries on the side. They must hide them. I do the same! Okay. Breakfast -- check.

I take a brief stroll just around the blocks of my hotel...

(oh, my favorite selfie: in an elevator!)

(outside my hotel to the left: the old, across the street, with the new)

(the old and new theme continues for me...)

(yeah, old: the Palace of Culture, gift from Stalin, too expensive to demolish, too reminiscent of our neighbor to the east to have any fondness for it, and the newer skyscrapers that crept up all around it.)

(Speaking of older... a morning conversation)

And now here comes Bee. 

I gave her an assignment (actually, I gave her many assignments for my visit here! Too many!): find an interesting place where you and I can have a cup of coffee. We will be surrounded by people for the better part of my remaining days in Warsaw. This morning belongs to just her.

It's not easy having your close friend live across the ocean. Without the internet, I'm sure we would have faltered. You just cant keep up with details of daily life (which form the basis for your best friendships) through hand written correspondence or even phone calls. Emails, Zoom and Ocean are at the core of who we are for each other for just about all days of the year. Supported and sustained by the rare (recently -- once a year) meetups. And of course, the older we get, the more precious is this time together. And so you can call it just your normal easy peasy coffee date, but it is, by virtue of this great ocean separating us, monumentally important.

I wanted to walk around a part of Warsaw that I don't normally see when I am here. She proposed Saska Kempa. For those unfamiliar with the city -- it's on the "other side" of the river, and I put quotes around those words deliberately, because for a long time, the left bank, otherwise referred to as Praga, was a poorer working class section of Warsaw, rarely frequented by those living on the "right bank." Except for Saska Kempa. A little to the south, it has always had a reputation for being more artsy, well heeled, intimate. The Polish song and poem writer Agnieszka Osiecka lived and wrote her fantastic lyrics here.

(her monument)

And in the postwar years, many foreigners who were in the diplomatic core, had their residences here. When I was little and we were about to set out for New York (because of my father's U.N. appointment), we got invited to a birthday party for one of the daughters of an American diplomat living in Saska Kempa. Even then, at the ripe age of barely seven, I felt the gulf between their home and homes of Polish people. Night and day.

Today, Saska Kempa isn't ostentatious, it's just plain pretty. We catch the tram (public transportation is free for everyone over 70) and cross the river, getting off at the stadium where Taylor Swift just wrapped up three days' worth of music to a sold-out crowd.

Saska Kempa. Lots of greenery, lots of cafes and restaurants with tables spilling out onto the wide sidewalks. The main drag, Ulica Francuska is where Bee and I walk.

 

(there are flags all over Warsaw because a few days ago, the city celebrated an anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II; the war and its consequences are still very much in the minds of those who live here)

(colorful)

(is there a Pole who does not love ice cream?)

We stop at a cafe-restaurant called Chalka  -- which roughly translates into Challah. You may think of it as a Jewish sweet bread, but Poles have long mixed the culinary boundaries between its people and Chalka is as much Polish now as it is Jewish.

 

 

 

Chalka (the restaurant) likes to add trimmings and make dishes out of its namesake bread and Bee goes with the salty one and I go with the sweet one. Mine has mascarpone cream and forest fruits (currants, blueberries, raspberries). Delicious!

We sit and talk, we walk and talk and of course, I couldn't help but think -- why doesn't she live in Madison, damn it?!

*     *     *

In the afternoon, Karolina and her husband and two kids take me over to their neighborhood. It's not unfamiliar to me, as I went to high school just at the edge of their set of blocks and my school crush lived right there, along the main street that cuts through their part of town, and so I would always walk this area slightly light headed, wondering if, oh horror! oh joy! -- I would run into him. All that belongs to then. Karolina and Pawel, her husband, are now. They are, in fact, my most modern friends -- of another generation. Meaning way younger than me. 

You may recall that I had hired Karolina to design and decorate my Warsaw apartment. From this a friendship was born and I treasure time spent with her and her family, and not only because it gives me a real feel for a new Poland, one that I did not know in the time I lived here.

We eat dinner a ta place called Gardens by Fort. Yes, an English name. Not uncommon in modern Poland. It's in a beautiful space, built right into old fortifications that were once used by Tsarist forces occupying Poland to protect Warsaw from other foreign invaders. The restaurant is that brilliant combination of old structure and modern interpretation. And the food is fabulous.

And their special spritz drink which three of us chose (it's based on gin, apple mousse, lilac flower syrup, lime juice, fig sugar, and prosecco)? Out of this world. And potent!

And then we walk over to their house -- an unusual Warsaw home, in that it's on a very quiet, very green street... 

 

 

... and it occupies an older, but completely renovated by the two of them (Pawel is also an architect) building.

It's stunning! Really ambitiously put together with a sophistication that is impressive!

We sit in their garden (that, too, is unusual for a central Warsaw residence) and eat dessert... 

 

 

 

(all that and ice cream too!)

 

... and we could go on like this for a long time, except that I have an early morning escape tomorrow and so I need to be realistic about bedtime.

 

 

 

With total gratitude to those who made this day so incredibly special for me...

... and so much love.

arriving in Warsaw

Up early. Packed, showered and out of my room by 7. I go for a walk.

Just up to Stockholm's pretty waterfront...

... and back again. To watch a city wake up is a privilege. You see more in those few morning minutes than you might witness in a whole bunch of daytime hours. The pace of the stride as people walk from ferry stop to the tram, or directly to their workplace. Do they stop for a coffee, or is that a French thing? Bakeries seem to open at 7:30. Do they pick up a pastry for a later fiska? I wonder.

By 7:30, I'm in the little courtyard of my own hotel for breakfast.

Same: yogurt, granola, berries, sweet treats and coffee. And apple juice.

Yesterday it took me an hour to eat all that. Today? Twenty minutes and I am by the front desk, checking out, adjusting the bill and finally -- leaving Stockholm.

*     *     *

I fly Polish Airlines today. Initially, I booked with miles on a KLM connection, but in the end I did not want to waste the day flying first to Amsterdam and from there to Warsaw. The Polish Airline flight is cheap and direct.

I land in a cloudy, rainy Warsaw.

Cab to my hotel -- it's called Hotel Puro. Needless to say, it took me forever to find a hotel that would be a good bet for my nine night stay. Karolina, my architect friend helped me and so I booked a room here. 

There is a benefit and a drawback to being in such a totally central location. (And most would agree that being just a short block away from the intersection of Marszalkowska and Jerozolimskie puts me right in the epicenter of the city.) On the one hand, it's very easy to get to anywhere I would want to go to in Warsaw (and beyond, as I am close to the Central Station). On the other hand, I wouldn't call it the quietest neighborhood in town! Still, my room, on the seventh floor, looks out onto this (the photo is taken later, in the evening):

And yes, there are flowers.

(My room is large; here's a photo of some part of it)

It's altogether lovely. 

I unpack, glancing out the window as I put away clothes. I have the unmistakable feeling of being in the city of my childhood.

And at the risk of digressing too much into the topic of feelings, let me just say that it feels very strange to be back. It's a new rhythm for me. For the last half dozen visits, I'd developed a pattern: get to my apartment, shop, take a walk to my favorite spots, cook dinner for the gang, clean up, leave. In there would be some extra time with Bee, and certainly with my sister, maybe with Karolina. But basically, the pattern held. Then came the Big Pause. And now I'm trying out something new: a new hotel, a new social schedule, a new approach to this city that was for so long my home. 

So it feels strange. But why? I know Warsaw inside out! I know what people here eat, how they curse, where they shop. I know the parks, I know the streets, the buildings, the bakeries of my childhood. Why is it suddenly so disconcerting to be here?

I suppose one reason might be that I am so totally cut off from Poland when I am home, with Ed, at the farmette, in south-central Wisconsin. I think most people maintain some contact with others from their old country who have settled in the U.S., but I have never done any of that. My daily life is 100% without any markers, foods, references to Poland. Talk about assimilation! I went overboard on that one! 

And now, suddenly, here I am, in Warsaw.

Because it's drizzling a little still, I give myself permission to take it easy. To not do anything much. A quick trip to a nearby wine store to stock up on gifts. 

And then the rain stops and I go for a longer walk, to my old home blocks.

(just outside my hotel...)

(one block further)

I was a teenager here and so I find images of young people in that age group especially mind boggling: the faces are the same, the attire, mannerisms -- so different! The market economy brought a modicum of prosperity especially to the well traveled urban set. With it comes confidence. A certain stride...

 

It's 4 p.m. and I haven't had food for too long. I pause at a bakery that is one block away from my family home. I order a blueberry tartlet and then, not yet satiated -- a jagodowka. That's a yeasty blueberry bun and in the summer, they are sold all over Poland, in every small town and big city. Here, it has a crumble topping and I choose to eat it with a cup of tea. On a table with carnations. A Polish person would smile at seeing them -- carnations were the flower of choice year-round.

And now I am literally three blocks from our tiny apartment of my childhood, and one block away from our more spacious three room place, where I lived out my teen angst and dramas.

 

The buildings are as they were then, but the shops have all changed. Every last one. Where they once sold basic foods and canned goods, there is now a shop with Diptique candles from France. Where we picked up sour pickles from a barrel and loaded up on sauerkraut, there is a dress shop that has English words inviting you in. And where there was once a paper products store, there is yet another clothing store.

I'm not liking these new shops. Too much attention to clothing at inflated prices. Too much unnecessary stuff. But then, this is what progress is all about: to have that choice, so that you can decide if you want more stuff or not. Me, I miss the paper store, which I so loved!  Colored pencils, notebooks -- heaven. But of course, clothes were only marginally relevant to us kids growing up in postwar Poland. We wanted a pair of blue jeans.We wanted warm leather boots for winter. Our cravings pretty much stopped there. Now, Polish city kids look like American kids and French kids. I see make up on young faces. Progress?

Our second apartment had four windows: two to the south -- one was my mother's bedroom, one was from the room shared by my sister and me, and then two windows to the north -- one was the living room but really my father's bedroom, and one was the kitchen. By Polish standards it was an exquisite apartment because the rooms were not small and the building stairwell was clean. That apartment got passed on to my father's girlfriend of long duration when he died. She must be home, because I see one of the windows -- what would have been my mother's bedroom window -- is open. I toy with the idea of ringing the doorbell and surprising her -- she is a mere ten years older than me -- but I don't. I'm keeping this day to myself.

I'm half a block away from Park Ujazdowki, where I went so often as a kid and where I worked one summer on cleaning it up -- as part of a work requirement for all university freshmen. The park is pretty, though I see that the chestnuts have all succumbed to the disease that is weakening all the chestnuts in Europe.

You come out of the park and you face the American Embassy. Weird to read a sign on the gate informing you to vote if you are an American by casting an absentee ballot.

Two more blocks and I am at Alewino (which I suppose translates to "what a wine!" -- understandable, as it once was a wine bar. Now it's an eatery). It's well hidden: you pass into a courtyard and eventually come across this entryway.

I think it's fairly new. Very casual, but with really, really good food! (I found it on a quick online search yesterday.) I order chantarelles once again and I get the real deal! Many tiny orange mushrooms!

Fish and zucchini and a stuffed zucchini flower for a second...

 

And an exquisite dessert of blueberries, ice cream, cream and meringue.

 

I came early -- just as the place opened at 5 -- and so the dining room was still on the empty side, except for this one couple that came in. I hardly noticed. I was on the phone, first getting a report on my granddaughter's Shakespeare performance back home, then getting a worried report from Ed on a cat that's been missing for several days. So clearly I was speaking English. Which is why I was then engaged by the couple -- he's from Brooklyn, she's a Pole, living in New York for two decades now. They were curious how my own Polish-American story unfolded, so we talked. Even though this is not my favorite subject because I haven't pat answers that I can just put out there. If I did, I wouldn't have written a book about it! My relationship to Poland is complicated and unresolved. Even as I no longer feel Poland to be my home. I come here for the people and then I get sucked into my past. As I did this afternoon.

It's unavoidable. I walk past this building (below) and I am just so aware that this is where my father worked when he quit the Foreign Ministry. The building then housed the headquarters of the Communist Party and that story, too, is so complicated! Why did he work there, knowing what he did about the leadership of the party and who it was beholden to? What choices did he have in the end? To leave? He did leave, as soon as he could. Only to return. To  finish his life in Warsaw, surrounded by many bottles of alcohol and not a single friend from the past.

Neither of my parents ended their lives happily. (I write this as the phone rings and I let it go to voicemail... Yes, it's my mother.)

Across the street from the former Party headquarters, there used to be a store selling newspapers and records from around the world. I see that it stands empty now, but the exterior is still as it was in my childhood: with a slogan that's straight out of the country's postwar reputed commitment to collective socialism: CALY NAROD BUDUJE SWOJA STOLICE -- the whole nation is building our capital!

 

Indeed.

I look up the street of Nowy Swiat. Close to where my apartment was just six years ago. Here, too, some shops have closed, even in this brief period of my absence. There aren't flowers in hanging baskets. I hear languages all around me that are not Polish. Summer tourists? And where are the flowers?

How is Warsaw changing now? Is it for the better? I don't know...

Tomorrow, I begin my eight days of intense socializing. With all my friends, with my sister, nephew. Tonight, I do take it easy. And once again, catch up on sleep.

with love...