Fish Bar

Over the River, the Woods, the North Sea, Greenland, Part of Canada,...

Sat, 2 Aug 2008 17:03:05 -0500

We are en route to Grandma’s house right now, in the final quarter of our nine-and-a-half-hour flight from Kraków to Chicago. The plane is loaded with families just like ours, kids and parents taking advantage of the summer break from school to visit grandparents. Some of them are on their outward leg, going to see Grandpa Wojciech in Chicago, and some of them are on their way back from a disorienting stay in the Old Country, the place that Mom and Dad are always droning on about.

We were nice and nervous about taking a six-month-old on such a long flight. He’s been cranky and sleepless lately, and have been convinced that teeth are coming in soon. As it turns out, this has been the by far the funnest flight I can remember taking. We skipped the thousand-person long line at the check-in counter at the airport thank to F, then once we were on the plane we got a bassinet from the airline when we got on the plane, and got to play with a surprisingly compliant baby all the way across, except for when he slept like an angel for four hours. This stands in sharp contrast to my bitter struggle for armrest supremacy with some prick last time I crossed the ocean.

Now we just have to get the whole family through immigration in the States without losing anybody.

The bassinet is the best part though. It put Franio right at our eye level and let us share the trip in a really cool way.

Some fun photos of Franio sitting with us follow.

Fine Weekend Evening.

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:14:36 -0500

It is now seven and a half years since I crossed the Slovakian border in the wee hours, half asleep across the seats of the Cracovia night train, listening to the eerie and alien train whistle through windows curtained with thin red fabric, all full of cigarette holes. Workmen flung open the door to our compartment in the dark winter morning and, after we sat up to make room, jammed in shoulder to shoulder to us and gloomily rode along with us, the silence only interrupted by their coughing from deep in their lungs, their oyster-like eyes aswim in the hopeless hangover of a life without reward.

This was my introduction to a country despairing in the harsh irony of economic and political crises after a decade-long battle for economic and political freedom. Tough, unbowed, but disillusioned. men were clearing the streets of snow with plywood shovels. The ancient city -- its trees, stone buildings, churches, cars, children -- was covered by a thick grime of coal soot.

Much has changed.

The bright spectacle of a sumer afternoon on the immense old main square today is nothing like the one I saw at the beginning of the millennium. Huge stages and massive advertisements tower over a festival atmosphere-- last weekend a giant three-on-three basketball tournament dominated the western half of the marketplace, crowding the army of street musicians and breakdancers and mimes onto the eastern half, with their cheering and laughing admirers in tow. Mały Rynek, the adjacent “Small Marketplace,” which had once been a parking lot presided over by middle-ages stone houses, was now the site of a temporary skate park with a hundred or so teenagers grinding their rails an flip-kicking locally-made decks.

Nowhere, however, are the changes evident as in Kazimierz, the romantic, once-abandoned Jewish settlement, where the gradual but visible return of the Jews is overshadowed by the mobs of arty types from all over the world who quaff beers and sip flavored teas in the multitude of new, but timeless-looking cafes. And this in a place where I once felt a little thrill of danger from the recidivist criminal types that lurked everywhere, even in broad daylight.

Of course, some of that flavor, and some of that sadness-- that of a lost world, forgotten by history-- is still here and lives in the unkempt corners where people who have the old ways written into their souls so deeply that they may take their long-accustomed torment to the heaven they believe in so faithfully.

On Saturday, Ania and I strolled around my old new stomping ground and took a few pictures of the bars. There are a few of them here.

The Death of a Statesman.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:14:01 -0500

Poland has been through several periods of national mourning since I’ve been here, the most dramatic of which was, of course, the week-long funer-a-thon following the death of His Holiness, the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, Primate of the Holy See, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and almost-Cracovian-native-son, the Pope. I mean the real Pope, Karol Wojtyla-- not the German guy that wears his hat around now. More recently there was a three-day period of mourning for a group of Polish Air force officers who died when their plane crashed into a tree.

This week the newspapers printed their front pages in black and white again (most of them) on Monday to honor the passing of Bronisław Geremek. No official period of mourning was announced, the movie theaters didn’t close, and there were no all-night masses, but people from every camp on the rancorous Polish public stage were saddened.

Geremek was not known in the west the west the way Lech Wałesa is, but he was one of the most important figures to take part in the transformation of Eastern European society during the difficult eighties and the euphoric early nineties.

A dissident intellectual, historian, and author in the People’s Republic, he was frequently censored and censured. He once wrote a book about medieval France which went unpublished because, he said, the censors objected to one single word. When asked what word it was, he replied, “Geremek”

While Wałesa, an electrician and labor activist, galvanized the spirit of working people by climbing the fence at the Gdańsk shipyard to join the striking workers inside, Geremek played a central role in organizing the round table discussions where the Communist Party leadership and the Solidarity unionists (and church officials and other people) would hammer out the compromises that led to peaceful transition and open elections in 1990.

Geremek went on to form a political party, and served as the foreign minister, and later as a deputy in the European Parliament. He was one of the leaders who negotiated Poland’s entry to NATO and the EU, both major achievements in Polish foreign policy.

Geremek was also one of only a few prominent Jews in Polish public life, and was a conscientious and moderate voice in sometimes acrimonious discussion about issues relating to the status of Jewish property before the war, and other, frequently explosive and irrational arguments between two groups of civilian wartime victims to which he belonged: citizens of Poland and holocaust survivors and their heirs.

A modest man of great intellectual vigor, and a talented mediator, Geremek was a guy who brought class to everything he touched.

He died in a car crash on Sunday the 13th of July, 2008.

The Media is No Longer the Messnger

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:22:11 -0500

In a fascinating political kamikaze maneuver, the Law and Justice party, headed by demented twin gnomes President Lech Kaczyński and Former Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, the Law and Justice Party, has decided to boycott the one of the two Polish television news networks and the most popular private TV station, TVN24 and TVN.

Law and Justice holds the second largest number of seats in the Polish parliament, and became the main opposition party last October when they were unceremoniously unseated from their leadership in the government by the electorate. The other TV news network is the public one, which features a lot of cooking shows, motorcycle mud racing, and my favorite: Agrobiznes at noon every day.

This is the latest episode of bizarre and erratic political behavior and childish pettiness from the twins, including arranging the publication of a book designed to pillory their former friend, Lech Wałęsa.

Law and Justice explained their decision to other media outlets at a press conference which TVN24 attended anyway, of course. They felt that TVN and TVN24 were treating them as if they were a “second-class political party,” explained a representative of the second-place political organization.

The author confesses that he is not altogether objective, having portrayed a remarkably handsome bartender in an episode of TVN’s hard-hitting crime series, W-11, Wydział Śledczy, and basks in the admittedly meager glory of extra-dom to this day.

The Działka

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:28:58 -0500

Years ago, when Poland was still under communist rule, the leadership of the proletariat came to the conclusion that in order to build a brighter future and make the resources of the nation available to the workers, it was time to set up some urban gardens. These took the form of działki, or allotments set up on the outskirts of cities and towns. They are typically hidden away in the woods, with little shacks in them where people store their gardening tools, wait for rain to pass, or just make coffee, sit and hang out on weekends.

These were much-coveted when they were introduced, and people wanted them more than cars. Like cars, and for that matter everything else, they were not distributed equally, and there were not enough to go around.

Ania’s mother was among the fortunate and got one of these plots, where she spends her weekends and even some evenings after work, tending her flower gardens and nurturing the trees. It is not just a place to garden though. It is the hub of her social life, and her neighbors’. The guys who have the działka next door grill out kiełbasa when the weather is good and the ladies all gossip and drink tea.

For people who grew up in a system where sharing everything meant never having a place of their own, the działka was and is the place where you can relax, where you could find some peace, and where you could escape from the soulless architecture of communist housing developments, the brutal politcs of communist society, or the rat race of post-communist consumer culture.

Franio spent the day on Krystyna’s działka today because he has been to her apartment, but she never had a chance to show him off to her fellow gardeners, the people who share her little slice of Eden.

For more pictures of Franio’s adventure, click here.