Poland

last trip, lublin

[I had trouble posting this so I emailed it to myself, and only just now got back to it.]

Dateline, Lublin.

I really wanted to take one last train trip here before going home to the Land Of The Car, I also wanted to try one trip without the wifeandkid, just because.

So yesterday morning I was on the 6:30 to Lublin, expecting about a five-hour trip. First class cabin all to myself. Both my cellphone and my Kindle had given up the ghost the night before. The cellphone was bad because it's also my alarm clock, so even though I'd grabbed the clock from the kitchen, I was freaking out about waking up in time for my train, so I ended up getting up about 4:00am. The Kindle was bad because I was looking forward to that long train ride to catch up on my reading, so I used the extra time I'd gained by getting up early in loading books onto the iPad.

I also brought along like four dead-tree books. Didn't have room for a jacket or a clean t-shirt, but I have as many books as I can carry.

So I get onto the train heading east, I have a first-class compartment all to myself, the sun is shining in, I read for a while, look out the window for a while, nap for a while, sooooo relaxing.

In Lublin on Monday everything is closed. From what I could tell from our guidebook that was the case, but I went to the tourist office anyway, and asked him, "so, everything is closed today, is that right?" and proceeded to listen to him go through all the options one by one, "...or you could do the castle, oh, no, that's closed today." You'd think it would have come up before for him. Maybe it was the first time he'd worked on a Monday.

So after a long beer-and-pizza fueled nap at the hotel, I rambled along the narrow winding cobblestone streets of the Medieval old town, peeking into alleys and courtyards, admiring crazy combinations of uneven rooftops. For dinner a place called Maggie looked alluring and mysterious from the outside. I didn't do the research deeply enough though, it turned out they specialize in steak tartar. What the heck, I thought, Anne likes it, I might as well try it. So I ate raw beef and raw egg while reading my book of Wisława Szymborska's poetry "Tutaj/Here".

Followed that up with a Guiness at a table on the street watching the people walk past and reading "High Performance Postgresql" on the iPad.

Follwed that up with a trip to Między Słówami, "Between the Words", a sweet little bookstore, where I put on headphones and listened to the recording of Pani Szymborska read her own poetry while I sipped hot chocolate. Sooooo pleasant.

powerful anti-war newsreel, siege of warsaw, 1939

 

 

Julien Bryan posthumously awarded ‘Custodian of National Memory’

Like sex? Don't like condoms?

"Like sex?  Don't like condoms?  Try Skyn!"  Damn, it's good to be away from the Christian right in the US.

 

the price of heat

Just got the bill from PGNiG for the gas for January and February, when we had that cold snap.  1,357 PLN or about $425.  So that's $200/mo for a three-room apartment, in a country where a grocery clerk might bring home $650/mo. 

I was told that the price of natural gas here is six times what we pay in the US.  The bill says we used 679 cubic meters, net value (wartość netto) 760.96 so it's about 1.12 PLN per cubic meter (not to mention the 23% VAT added on top of that).  It looks like PG&E is charging customers about $1 per 100 cubic feet, which is about 3 PLN per 100 cubic feet, which is about 1 PLN per cubic meter.  That doesn't look like six times to me.  Hmmm. I'll have to look at our gas bills when I get home.

But it adds context to today's headline Coal-reliant Poland increasingly out of step with Europe on climate change. The article actually says out loud something I'd deduced a while back:

Poland relies on coal for 93 percent of its electricity and that adopting the 2050 roadmap would cause Poland’s economy 1 percent of GDP growth per year through 2030, if not longer.

Poland otherwise depends heavily on imported gas and oil for other energy needs. Most comes from Russia, a dependence that Poland resents and is trying to free itself of with plans to build nuclear power plants in several years and with an ongoing search for shale gas.

If you know anything about history, you can definitely appreciate the "resents" part.  It seems to me they're totally justified in their position to the EU

Here's a local take on it from Gazeta Wyborska with even more context (though the editorial is a little wandery).

getting out there

Thursday

This place seems to be the home of a bazillion film buffs, and Krakow has more micro-cinemas than the Bay Area could ever dream of.  Kino Mikro, Kino pod Baranami, Ars Sztuka are some of the ones I've found so far, and on Thursday I went to the Pauza Kino 18 to see a screen of Sexmisja, which was some combination of a ripoff of THX-1138, a cheesy 80's sex comedy, and/or a brave allegory about the communist regime.  Special showing with English subtitles.  Poles consider it one of their most important films.  Starring the ubiquitous Jerzy Stuhr. A trailer on polish movies.com.

Friday

In an attempt to get out and meet locals, I've been going to this Mosaic thing on Friday evenings, a get-together for English-language conversation and mixing run by a pair of really swell couples from Texas and the Carolinas.  They do a variety of things to draw people and get the conversations going.  I convinced them to let me try teaching English Country dancing.  We had more people than could dance in the space, and I got them to do Corelli's Maggot. My iPod went missing in Gdańsk, but fortunately Anne had some Bare Necessities on hers.  People had fun, so I think I can say it was a success.

Saturday

Met Frank W. a German Ph. D. student from our Polish class at the Manggha Museum so he could teach me to play Go. The Manggha Museum is a modern architectural icon, and the cafe has a stunning view of the river and Wawel Castle.

That evening went to a singing party put together by Anne's choir. Way out in the funky parts of town, but hugely fun, you can't imagine a nicer bunch of people.  We spent the evening doing home-made karaoke to pop songs they remember from their childhood in the Fifties, and some songs from the golden age of the Second Republic in the Twenties/Thirties. 

Still mourning the loss of my iPod. Wish I would just get over it.  It was my source of music while we're here, so now it's going to be kind of quiet for me for the next four months.  Sigh.

 

Ferie, last day, some language notes

Skansen is a period village right in Stockholm.  In the summer I bet it's pretty neat, if it's not too crowded.  In the winter it's a lot of doors with padlocks and empty frozen animal enclosures.  Though we got to see a Żubr finally, which was cool, and we saw feeding time for the Great Grey Owls ("Love to eat them mousies, mousies what I love to eat. Bite they little heads off, nibble on they tiny feet").

In the afternoon took a long walk through the city, unsuccessfully seeking the cafe that looks like a medieval dungeon, and spent some time in the national history museum, taking care of some of Frank's quests for history class.  A nicely done museum, sadly though they couldn't quite get away from "we have glass cases of tiny objects which we dug out of the ground and have carefully cataloged and wish you to look at." 

In Poland, when you say "hi" you say "dzień dobry". After a while I started craving some variety, so I started saying just "hey". In Sweden, when you say "hi", you say "hej", so here I was sounding just like a Swede. Therefore I switched to "howdy". That had the added benefit of them not trying to talk to me in Swedish and forcing me to reply with a blank stare ("jag pratar inte svenska" being beyond my limited capabilities in one weekend).  I like "howdy."

Regarding the t-v distinction in Swedish, I found this interesting:

The use of herr ("Mr" or "Sir"), fru ("Mrs" or "Ma'am") or fröken ("Miss") was considered the only acceptable mode of initiating conversation with strangers of unknown occupation, academic title or military rank. The fact that the listener should preferably be referred to in the third person tended to further complicate spoken communication between members of society. In the early 20th century, an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni (the standard second person plural pronoun)... With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, these previously significant distinctions of class became less important and du became the standard. Though the reform was not an act of any centralized political decrees, but rather a sweeping change in social attitudes, it was completed in just a few years from the late 1960s to early 1970s. 

(Wikipedia).

 

two quotes good enough to take home

Going through pictures on my camera, I'd taken pictures of these two quotes just so I'd have them later.   You have to step out of America to be reminded we don't have a monopoly on righteousness.

A token of everlasting remembrance of the slaughter victims.
A warning to rulers that no social conflict in our country
can be resolved by force
A sign of hope for fellow-citizens
that evil need not prevail.

Gdańsk, Memorial of the Fallen Shipyard Workers, 1970

Syria? Hello, Syria?

One should call a spade a spade.
What is happening now in Vietnam is a form of torture...
Therefore the air raids are a deed of infamy.
There are many such in modern history.

They are often associated with place names.
Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka.
Violence has triumphed.
But the judgement of posterity has fallen heavily on those responsible.
Now there is one more name to be added to the list:
Hanoi, Christmas 1972.

Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, December 23, 1972.

CIA black hotels?  Hello?

Ferie penultimate day

Failure of management: In 1628 the Vasa, a brand new warship, the biggest in the world, set sail for the first time from Stockholm. A mile out, easily in views of the crowd watching it go, it tipped over and sank. The king, who was off fighting wars, had been heavily involved in the project in the form of sending letters demanding more and heavier guns on the top deck, and demanding that the ship be finished NOW. The original designer had died a year into the construction, and the assistant shipwrights had take over. A stability test, in the form of thirty sailors running in a bunch first to one side and then the other, had the be called off in the middle for fear it would capsize the ship. They added as much ballast as would fit, but nobody wanted to tell the off-site king that the boat wasn't going to work.

I once heard my late friend Doug say that there are no technical failures, only failures of management.
In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet it was supposed to orbit. One of the software modules was reporting data in pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds. Doug told me the team working on that software knew there was going to be a problem, but nobody wanted to tell the team lead because he was such an overbearing boor.

So there you go. But it's a really good museum.

I find it interesting that a couple of times now I've heard Swedish tour guides refer wistfully to the days when sweden had a huge European empire. Funny, in Poland and Lithuania the period is called the "Swedish Deluge" when the Commonwealth lost a third of its population. What a difference the change of a couple of miles makes.

Put frank to bed last night ( I thought) and went for a walk at around 11:00. Omg, on a saturday night the city of Stockholm is one gigantic party. It makes San Francisco look like a des Moines. The best part was this SMS I got from frank as I was heading back:

You're taking a worryingly long walk. Everything all right?

Classic!

Ferie, day 5

The Swedes have a new princess yesterda, Estelle Silvia Ewa Mary, grandchild to the king, second in line to the throne, kind of exciting. Some scandal about the name, it's non traditional. Started the day with a walking tour, then a pilgrimage to the offices of Mojang AB, creators of Minecraft. Didn't go past the front door, though, we would have had to buzz to get in.

Then we tried a harbor cruise. I learned that there is no private rental market in Sweden. If you want to rent an apartment (not buy) you queue for that city. The queue in Stockholm is thirty years long. They know it's a problem and are talking about possible fixes. I was talking to the tour guide about it and coukdn't resist teasing her about it, "You wacky socialists." she protested most strongly against that classification, they'd elected a conservative government in 2003 and had even lowered the income tax, they were the most conservative government in Europe! I didnt have the heart to tell her that the American right trots out "going to become just like Sweden" as their standard line whenever someone dares to suggest in their presence that the government should have any kind of a role in public life at all. Sigh.

"This Means War", unexpectedly ennjoyable movie.

Ferie, days 3,4

Having blown two out of three Gdańsk days at Malbork, I was determined to squeeze in as many museums as we could. We got up and I dragged frank to the post office museum, managing to get there shortly after it opened. Gdansk was a free city between 1919 and 1939. Poland got the right to extend its postal network into the city and had a post office and some mailboxes. These were the first targets when the German army showed up in 1939. The brave polish postmen managed to hold out for a whole day before being overwhelmed. Little details like that, you realize of how many small parts the very large war was composed of. Interesting was the German attack plan, six typewritten pages complete with intelligence about how the building was laid out and where the custodian's office was and how to take him out. There was a group of high school kids in there, slightly reverential, I could see why.

Then The Crane, 14th century wooden crane that could lift 2,000 kilos and was also used for masting ships. Powered by four giant hamster wheels where some poor schmuck would provide the power. I didn't realize until later that there must be a reduction gear in there, but I didn't see it.

Followed by the gdansk maritime museum, the history of seafaring in gdansk and Poland. Missed a lot of the details, but whatever. Saw a bunch of models of the submarine Orzel and only just now read the story. We're going to go to the Amber museum but Tuesday's it closes early. Just as well since we only just got to the ferry by 4:30 as it was, ninety minutes before it sailed.

Enjoyed sleeping on the ferry even more than I'd enjoyed sleeping on the train. A pretty good roll set in over nightm and the seas were roughy enough that she was an hour off her schedule. The color of the Baltic in winter is an enormous gray. Got up at 4am to see if there were any northern lights, but the sky was completely overcast. After undressing about to climb back into my bunk I looked out the window and saw stars, so I got dressed again and went back on deck, but still nothing. Ah, the life of a sailor!
an hour long train ride from Nynamshamn to Stockholm, ultra modern quiet election train, we're certainly not I Poland any more.

In Stockholm it turns out that the "Red Boat Hostel" is actually in a red boat! Who knew? Icebound in its moorings, we first saw it from about two hundred feet up on the hillside above it. Slid down on our buts on the frozen trail.