Tuesday in Warsaw

[Warning: this will be the longest post of the trip. I cannot write it with few words and I apologize for that.]

Sometime in the middle of that first night, I skyped Ed and proclaimed -- I can't sleep. It's not the jet lag. It's the being in Warsaw thing. When I am here, I slowly forget all those adaptive mechanisms that have allowed me to feel, in Madison, more American than Polish. I can't do that for long when I'm back home (in Poland). The tug is strong to slip back into Polishness and it leaves me confused and, at night, restless.

But at some point the tension eased and sleep came (this is a reality that the tossers and turners forget sometimes -- eventually we all do sleep). Maybe it's the lesson of yoga: I focus on the stretching and twisting in class, but I do know that it teaches me to let go of anxiety.

Morning. I look out the window at a Warsaw courtyard.





Lovely and cold, all at the same time. I put on something warm: orange pants, matching the color accents in the room (the specs are in the mirror not in your eyes!)





The breakfast at my B&B is downstairs in the cafe bar. And it is a lovely meal of egg, muesli, yogurts, fruits. I am forever, back home (I mean now back at the farmhouse), photographing breakfast. So here's breakfast.





Outside, the snow is again coming down lightly, prettily. It's in the low twenties. I put on an extra sweater, tie up my scarf and head out.

Right away I can tell that it's going to be a splendid walk. I can feel it in the bounce I bring to the enterprise. Again and again I tell myself -- this is beautiful! You could say that it is because I chose to do the gloriously regal walk up Krakowskie Przedmiescie -- the grand avenue that links the old new town with the old old town (at the foundation level anyway, since I must remind you, Warsaw was 90% rubble after World War II). But it isn't just that. The snow is delicate, gentle. My memories are that too today.



the gates to the University of Warsaw where I studied for 2.5 years




a snow covered cardinal and St Joseph's church





I could spot a Pole a mile away




in winter, it can appear to be almost always lightly snowing; streets aren't shoveled, they're swept




one of the many Christmas markets: note the highlander sheeps milk cheeses -- eaten warm, and at the forefront, a slice of bread with smalec (pig fat) with pickles




the Royal Castle Square


I'm switching to Polish now, in stores and elsewhere. But I find that I have that American softness to my speech. The Polish melodic inflection is gone too. I hear its absence, but I do nothing to force it back. I'm kind of enjoying the reaction. At several points, people think that I am an American who has learned Polish very very well. Nearly perfectly! The accent isn't perfect, but so what!

Which brings me to this question that I come back to again and again: why do so many Poles love America so much? Even as that love is not at all reciprocated. I mean, America let them down. Again and again. Thinking back to the war (and I do, every time that I am here), I tick off the numerous ways the United States looked the other way when Hitler attacked Poland. And after? This country of mine, which was the first in Europe to stand up to Hitler, only to find itself invaded from the east as well -- this country was then handed over to the Soviets as a spoil of war: you take this we'll take that. We were part of the package that became Eastern Europe, meaning the Europe that Stalin could call his own. And no one even raised a word of regret. Not then, not for all the years that the Soviet Union exerted its control over what happened within the boundaries of my homeland. Indifference: we (I speak as an American now) are good at demonstrating our indifference to this poor battered nation.

Poles are not too keen on their neighbors to the east. But they love Americans! (Even as they do not really understand them and in that, we are all tied, because Americans don't understand Poles either.) The same Americans that are to this day refusing entry to my countrymen unless they apply for a visa -- a prolonged, odious process that requires a physical standing in line at the American Embassy, a process we (I speak as an American now) force onto every Pole who wishes to travel overseas.

You don't believe me that Poles are forgiving toward America? Among the statutes that line the boulevards of Warsaw, I come across this one (forgive the dimness -- I took it later in the day):



Ronald Reagan: the only US sitting president in the last fifty years who did not visit Poland; Nixon was first to come here, George W. Bush came three times and Obama was here in 2011, though happy thoughts of that were probably erased a year later, when Poles were stunned to hear that in honoring a Resistance fighter, he referred in his speech to Polish death camps. How could he! (Poland was the rare country on the continent where Hitler could not find collaborators, nor did my country at any point surrender and the camps were run entirely by Germans.)



Monument to the Heroes who died fighting for Poland between 1939 and 1945




Monument to those who died in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944


I push thoughts of Polish - American relations aside for a while. Let me indulge my Polishness thoroughly now. Did I mention how glorious this day is? I don't even notice the cold. I walk endlessly, for miles and miles. Through the old old town…





















On and on until I notice on my watch that I'm late for a tea date with a friend. In Poland, I do as I have always done, all my life here -- drink tea with lemon.





And then I walk some more. I am away from the old town now -- closer to the hub, the center, and as it turns out, close tot he route I sometimes took on my walks home from high school. So often I stopped here, to buy bread (exactly like these rolls!)  for home.






Nostalgia. Not everyone has it for their high school years, but I do. And wouldn't you know it, I am near my high school now. After moving back from the States (my dad worked for the UN and so we spent my elementary school years in New York) I attended this Lycée. I see that students leaving for the day.





So the classrooms must be empty. On the spur of the moment, I decide to go inside.

The door guard sits and monitors who comes and goes and I ask him for permission to enter. Go up and speak to the director, he ushers me in. After many conversations of the type-- I don't live here any more, I'm visiting, I used to go to school here, I am passed on from one office to the next, but with smiles from everyone, until finally someone with a key opens my classroom for me.





Nothing has changed! Even the desks are lined up exactly in the same way -- three rows, two students per desk. Same bare walls -- none of this American penchant for ornamentation -- same parquet floors… My God, could it be that time stands still inside the high school gates?

It does not. No one wears uniforms anymore (from the administrators: we tried to preserve that rule -- it was good for the kids to wear cloaks over their daily clothes -- but there was too much resistance, so we gave up). But they do shed their street shoes. Not for slippers -- that custom's gone too -- but for sneakers. And gone are the chain link fenced cloakrooms downstairs. These days, they have very American looking lockers!





One of the administrators asks me about my school days here and I tell him quite honestly that I loved my time in school. My home was my classroom (we stayed in the same room, with the same 36 kids for the duration of high school), my friends were my family. I was a young high schooler (I had skipped grades) and I wasn't especially studious, but this place was the epicenter of my life during what I still regard as the formative years.

I leave with a smile at the memory of it all.

And the smile continues as I turn the corner and follow the long block toward Belweder -- the palace that is now again the seat of government for our president. So you could say we have our own small White House!






I am near Lazienki -- the most beautiful park in the world.

I hadn't intended to go there: I love it, but I have to remind you -- it's really cold now, not exactly park strolling weather. It's almost dusk and I know the park closes at dusk. I step inside anyway. It's magical!





I walk the grand avenues, take the snow covered paths that crisscross this glorious place…










… and as I lose myself in the heart of this nearly empty place of winter loveliness, I begin to wonder if it's possible to get locked in. Dusk is certainly upon us…





I run into an old man who appears to be here for his daily stroll (you can tell in the way he walks the place, knowingly, without hurry) and I ask -- are they closing yet? Don't worry, he tells me. They push dusk a little in the winter time.

And so I persevere. To the summer palace…





and around again. Up the hill to the gate… Oh oh, closed. It is almost dark.





But I see people inside still, so I know that I am not to spend the night here after all. (A guard tells me that at the southernmost gate there is someone there round the clock, so for future reference -- you cannot trap yourself inside.)

And so I head toward the open gate, past a snow-covered Chopin…






Out onto the boulevard. Daylight here is replaced by night light. Beautiful, holiday night light.





And I just can't help grinning to myself.

Turning back in the direction of my B&B, I go through one more park (this one closes at 9). I call it the beautiful lesser park in Warsaw because it would be grand but it stands like a poor cousin a stone's throw from the grander Lazienki. It's also much, much smaller, but I know it well, because this is the place where (in the daytime) very young kids are brought for walks and a bit of playtime.









I turn back toward the old new town (you have to know Warsaw to understand that the new town isn't really new, well no, it's new in that it was reconstructed, but it's rebuilt in the neoclassical style so it's newer than the old town)… passing the old Communist Headquarters. Funny to see a restaurant now just exactly below the windows where, for a while, my father worked (it's a complicated story as to how and why he wound up there for a handful of years, but it's his story, so I'll let it go for now).





And now I'm just a block away from my B&B...


 


 ...where I quickly change (but staying with the orange pants!) and leave again, to spend an evening with a handful of my very best high school and university friends. It is joyous and wonderful to see them! By now, we have nothing in common except our past and that is one mighty fierce platform because it's as if we have a shared everything. We are intensely close even as we are not close at all. We do not track each others lives anymore when I am away, but when I am here, it's as if we are who we were back then.



the hosts and (in the center) the wife of a high school pal




the feast


The next day is a work day for them all and so at midnight, I force myself to get going. I'm spent, but not spent. I'm energized, but tired. I'm a whole bevy of feelings and thoughts. To be sorted out tomorrow, or the next day or the next, or the next...

Monday in Warsaw

I'm sitting at a hip (and therefore by definition young) cafe-bakery ("Charlotte") right smack on the austere Plac Zbawiciela ( a church square that is anything but hip or even particularly pretty). I'm wishing I had found a seat even further from the door because when it opens, a gust of cold air sneaks in and comes close enough to remind me what it's like out there. Beata, my B&B host, suggested I try the Charlotte for a light meal when I had asked where I should eat. I'm always curious where people are going to tell Americans to go for food. Beata thinks I'm American. Wait, I am American! Well no, not here. To people here, I'm Polish. So long as I talk Polish at them. (At the B&B, I wrote the first email in English and so that language just stuck).

The young people around me (university age, some as young as high school) are children of postwar parents. For these kids, Poland isn't intensely trying to rebuild, it's trying to catch up to, say, Berlin or Vienna (other central European giants).

Everyone at the tables is very carefully dressed. That hasn't changed. Poles are all about appearance: how you present yourself inside and out matters. Everyone is animated. Loud talk and laughter come at me from all sides.





Earlier, my plane pierced the layers of haze and cloud and even though it was the lunch hour, it felt like dusk. It gets that way here in December. I took the new train to the city center. It just opened in June! (Making Madison perhaps the only capital without a decent public transport link to the airport. Good goin', Madison.)





In 25 minutes the little train spits me out right at the foot of the Palace of Culture (Stalin's gift, remember? I mention it now and then when I write from here).





From here I walk the fifteen minutes or so to my B&B. The Between Us B&B is sort of curious. On the ground level, there is an artsy cafe-club.





If you exit it in the back, you're out on the building stairwell and if you mount that, you'll find apartments and the occasional lawyer office. One apartment door on the third level opens up to a three guest room B&B. Of a fresh and modern type.





I dump all my travel packs and go out in search of food and, too, in search of my feelings for this great and complicated city and I do so quickly, before the light totally disappeared on me.





And now at the Charlotte, I have a chance to look around. At the table next to mine, a young thing is pouting and complaining to her dad (via smart phone) that she needs a new pair of shoes. He tells her  to ask mom, but the young pouting thing informs him she's not speaking to the mother. (For the record, she does not appear to need new shoes. Want and need are not the same thing.)

I eat a small slice of quiche. Good, but it neither fills me up nor warms me from the inside. And now, as I step outside again, it all catches up with me -- the tiredness from the sleepless night, from the weeks of work, from struggling to stay warm. So maybe I should go to the second place Beata recommended and get more substantial food? The kind that warms you to the core.

Curiously, Beata's two eating suggestions are right next to my childhood homes. Charlotte is just around the corner from our tiny apartment overlooking a tram stop (yes, it's windy and lightly snowing now)...


 


... and the second place -- Dyspensa -- is just a block away from where I lived in my teens and where my father still lives. I don't drop in on him. He doesn't like that. He prefers an announced, planned visit. That'll happen in a day or so.

The Dyspensa Restaurant is nice, if a tad formal. It has a bourgeois feel to it. Funny, I never use that word in the States. In Poland, it was a common way to distinguish moneyed people, even though none of us knew any moneyed people. Moneyed people were in places like the States. The bourgeois habits of the rich. We didn't aspire to those habits, even though we, none of us, would have minded being slightly more rich.

The staff is young and energetic and within minutes I am eating a delicious mushroom soup and a smoked trout salad and, though it's early, I'm done eating for the day. I walk back to the B&B where I fight falling asleep for a while, just long enough to put up this post.

still traveling

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, only not for me. I write this from Amsterdam, so you know I'm on the other side of the ocean. And I have a few minutes before my Warsaw flight takes off. But I had a plane load of unhappy people who were on the Saturday flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, except that after ten hours of waiting, it never took off. And now they're a day late. I know the feeling of plans disturbed, schedules disrupted...

So this plane…



… took us all, but there were quite a few unhappy campers among me.

And they were made more unhappy when we couldn't disembark because of some electrical failure causing something or other the stop working. Another hour. For me -- peanuts. I won't miss my flight to Warsaw. I am once more reminded that smooth travel depends mostly on luck and this time I have it and others do not and so I feel like the rich person who was handed fortunes while others just scraped by, if that.

I do have to say that weather-wise, I'm entering the gloom of northern Europe in December. So there's that. But, I'm saturated with the big skies of the Midwest. I can take a touch of the somber.

Alright. I'll continue, if luck holds -- from Warsaw.

traveling

Sometimes, our Midwest weather patterns are so predictable! Early in the week I saw the prognosis -- snow showers on Sunday. Now, that's vague. What are snow showers anyway? Wet flakes? Few flakes? Occasional flakes?

What we woke up to was a nice overnight dusting and continued, albeit lethargic, snow. The kind that causes airport delays. And so I was glad that, for reasons of price, I had booked my flight out from Chicago, where our snow showers translate into their rain showers.

It was a pretty way to say goodbye to the farmhouse.





… and to the farmette -- where our new orchard trees are now mostly protected, but the blueberries still need covers. They're just beyond these might leaning trees.





It was harder to say good bye to Ed. We'd not had our play time yet since I came off of my mad work weeks. He dutifully drove me to the Chicago-bound bus and I gave him ten thousand reminders about plants, about leftovers, about every irrelevant thing I could think of.

And then I sank into my bus seat and read -- Applebaum's new book on postwar Poland (and Germany and Hungary). It's always interesting to me to see what others, especially Americans have to say about "what it was like" to live under Communist rule.

There should be quite a bit of reading time and thinking time on this trip. Perhaps I've said this? -- I've almost never traveled to Poland alone in recent times. My yearly returns have been with Ed, with friends, with my younger daughter -- always with someone, always, therefore, to Krakow first. This time I'm by myself (though not really alone once there -- family, friends fill the otherwise quiet hours) and I'll only be in Warsaw.

Since I am so close to finishing my great (summer, as it turns out) writing project, it's a good time to take stock: to see if what I wrote still feels right. I'll be looking for that.

…if I can get myself outdoors! During the four (just that) days I'm there, the temperatures will never once rise above freezing. I'm thinking Rosie made me hardy this year.

Okay. I see the jumbo jet puling in. So far, no delays. So far.

catching up

The to do list after a period of craziness is crazy in its own right. All that I could do at this point is plow through it.

After breakfast.


 


And after yoga. I felt sentimental at yoga class. If I scan the year since my last trip to the old country (last December), I recognize the big changes: one daughter moved, the other moved and married, Ed and I planting a fruit orchard, me plunging into yoga.


It's an insanely pretty day.


 


I ride Rosie in my yoga duds thinking it can't be too cold for the quick ten minute scoot.  It's a mistake. It is too cold. I walk into class with very frozen shins.

After? you don't want to hear it. The farmhouse goes from being severely neglected to being pampered and looked after. It's a beautiful transformation and I'm happy to have the day for it, but it's not exciting in the execution and certainly not exciting to describe in detail here. Take my word for it -- the house sparkles!


In the late afternoon, we drop the red donkey car at a mechanic for a more thorough inspection while I'm gone. That, too, in itself isn't interesting, but I tell you this because the drive to the mechanic takes us through our usual back roads, giving me a chance to pause, to look up and to think about the great Midwestern sky I'm leaving behind tomorrow.





There, that was a good moment.


And now it's late and the laundry cycles are nearing an end and the wee little case is packed and the leftovers are scraped together to make for a filling if weirdly mixed up supper.


Forgive me for the brief post. And, as always, I want to warn of an erratic posting pattern for the next two days. They're travel days. I'll write en route, or if I can't, then from Warsaw. I should be there at a decent Monday hour.

day five

 Here's a sad truth: I am clueless as to how one watches a DVD on our complicated system of computer/TV screen/remotes.

When I first moved to the farmhouse, Ed took time to introduce me to the mechanics of life on the cheap. Telling me how, instead of calling a repair person when the shower stops issuing warm water, you figure out yourself why the heater malfunction. You do this, check this, consider that. Again and again. How to shut off systems, restart systems -- step by step, I followed along. Then.

But the buck stopped with the TV. He wanted a cheap one, I wanted a cheap one, he wanted to catch TV shows on it, I wanted to catch TV shows on it and so he rigged up a system that basically makes me feel like the anti-geek that I am. Only he can run it. The ultimate punishment would be if he took off in pursuit of adventure and left me without operating instructions so that I'd have to spend my end years staring at a dark screen.

I write all this now because I am free. A night of work, then breakfast...





... more campus chores and then it's all done.

Tonight, I have no work to do -- for the first time since August, my slate is (temporarily but assuredly) clean. Ed and I don't dance jigs when this happens. We settle into our favorite routines, side by side and life moves on peacefully and comfortably. But today, after a trip to Paul's, after a supper of roasted veggies and eggs…





…Ed wanted to continue work on a design project and so I was left to put on a favorite seasonal DVD and I failed. Couldn't do it. So I called him back from the sheep shed and he flipped through movies we had, just this afternoon, picked up from the library across from Paul's. He put on one. Inside Hana's Suitcase. It's a (true) story about a brother and sister. The brother survived the Holocaust, she did not.

So the first night of my break I spent sobbing (with good reason) over the fate of Hana. Maybe this is something that needs to happen. Maybe this is a way for me to transition. Back to a different story, different set of pages.

As perhaps I indicated, I'm leaving on Sunday. It's back to Poland for me -- not for long and not just Poland, but certainly the focal point for me is that.

Had I never left Poland, I would easily have moved from her past to her future. I would not be locked into childhood memories of what it was like to live in that country in the decades after the war. But I did leave and for me, a visit there is always a step back. My Warsaw friends (who, almost all, to the last one, do not read Ocean) would probably not get why this must be so. But it is so.

I have a Saturday to clean the farmhouse, pay the bills, get the ship in order and then I'll be off. Without Ed. He and I will take a vacation trip after the holidays. For now it'll be Poland and just me. And my memories.