PKIN

Suddenly the weather is mean and cold and I’ve remembered why I couldn’t wait to get out of Europe when I lived here years ago. The temperature hasn’t risen above 12’, it rains non-stop and… it could be Adelaide! (sorry darl). One of my neighbours is clearly suffering from cabin fever. She flings her door ajar and comes onto our shared landing every time I step outside, her hair standing aloft like Don King ‘s on a good hair day.

Yesterday I went to the Centrum Informacji Turystycznej (Tourist Information Centre – see how easy it is when you know what it means?), located in the gigantic Palace of Culture and Science (Palac Kultury I Nauk). I spotted this gift of Soviet friendship from my kitchen window when I arrived and without knowing its provenance, saw that it was a relative of Stalin’s ‘Palaces’ in Moscow. It has the same crenellated battlements and balconies, and the same over-reaching spire. In Moscow Stalin planted ‘Seven Sisters’; Warsaw has just the one. From memory the Empire State Building in NY was the model, but ‘his’ buildings had to be better, and by better, Stalin meant higher (higher, higher, harder, harder). It does make one wonder just how tiny do you have to be to join the exclusive club of genocidal tyrants. This may seem strange but apparently the Polish people don’t really care for the PKIN. They joke that it’s the best vantage point for photographing Warsaw, because when you’re in it you’re not getting another unwanted picture of it.

Anyway there was a point to my visit to the PKIN, and it wasn’t just to crack an ill-received joke about mazurkas being on high rotation in Warsaw. My visit was to buy a three day travel and museum pass. It’s cheap at 65 zlotys (about A$23.00) and removes the misery of trying to buy the right kind of ticket from a bilety. It also enables one to get lost on a truly grand scale, something I’m quite good at, and began doing straight away. At one point yesterday afternoon I fell into despair thinking I would have to surrender and get a cab back to Hoza, to my apartment.

But eventually I found my way to Warsaw Central, and plunged into its fusty depths to dry out only to get lost in the labyrinthine tunnels there. How many times do you have to pass a plastic apron with inflatable breasts to realise it isn’t déjà vu, you’ve actually been in this tunnel three times before? It was at that point I came to understand the beauty of the paid WC (2 zlotys a visit). They’re kept clean. Usually there’s a comfy old babushka type who runs the franchise and does a bit of a cursory scrub down. She entertains friends, eats pastries with her coffee and generally runs the WC in good order. In fact I can see it would be possible to live quite well down the tunnels. The coffee shops are excellent, the fruit and vegetables fresh, and there’s the eternal passing parade to ruminate upon. I don’t think I’d even get bored.

Only one day to go, so this is probably my last post from .pl. Today I’ve been museuming, sloshing around the Old Town with maps wrapped in plastic, and shoes full of water. Ugh. The trams are so fogged up that even tootling around in those isn’t much fun. What I REALLY want to do is curl up indoors with a good book and sit the awful weather out. But no such luck. I think Amsterdam is cloudy and about 18’. When I was there a week ago it was the same. Again I sloshed around, sight-seeing the canals in pouring rain. Think I’m ready for summer in Ipswich.

Lubliners

It didn’t seem possible to come to Poland and not go to one of the death camps. For a number of reasons I went to Lublin, which has an existing camp (Majdanek) still randomly visible in what seems like a kind of back paddock of the city. I took a cab there from the 'Old Town' of Lublin, also the Jewish quarter I think. The Old Town is watched over by the benign looking Castle, a place with quite a sinister history as one would expect. The Nazis liked it a lot.

Normal methods of transport to Majdanek are a couple of commuter buses which pass alongside it (probably making it as routine a sight to Lubliners as the Dinmore cattle-yards are to us on the Ipswich line). But passing alongside is to put it loosely. In fact the buildings of the camp are a long walk from the bus route, there is little sign-posting and really the whole place looks miniaturised, and deflated of meaning. I didn’t photograph anything there, it all seemed so rundown it lacked 'content'. If the truth be told the death camp looks like a feedlot, but not a very prosperous one. There's quite a lot about it online - http://www.cympm.com/majdanek.html . It may have been the camp used in Spielberg's Schindler film. I imagined Speilberg turning a good book into his usual over-blown melodrama so avoided seeing it. Sorree for wanting something so important to have at least some sense of truth to it (not).



In Majdanek most of the huge population of Lublin’s Jews (about one third of the city) were vaporised. Among my pantheon of literary heroes is the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer who although not a native of Lublin wrote about it (‘The magician of Lublin’). Hence my particular interest in what happened there.

Singer left Poland in good time, knowing what was to come. He wrote a description of his departure journey across Europe by train, but I can’t remember what this was part of, so anyone who does can you tell me? I recall a kind of rumination on the natural artistry of the French people, that even their villages were designed around the disposition of trees and rivers, to give them maximum effect.

Getting to Lublin and back again were moments of triumph for me. My plan was to catch the train. I spent about an hour at Warszava Centralna reading the huge train movements board with all its numerals (both Roman and Other), trying to decipher these necessary things: destination, class, time, train, platform. This is information one must provide to the ticket seller, who of course doesn't speak English. The more I tried to make this exercise into something I felt capable of doing the more alarming it all seemed. So I did what any sensible 21st century tourist should do – I googled, and found there’s a much simpler alternative: the minibus. These little buses are cheaper, and faster, and phew… much easier to understand. You just go to the appropriate place buy a ticket from the driver and when the bus has its 16 passengers it takes off. By the time I got back to Warsaw I was ready to leap from a moving van to escape such confinement. Nevertheless, I went to Lublin and back and walked 'home' through the rain to my warm dry rooms feeling rather pleased.

PS I finally have a work-around for the image uploading problem, it's a bit messy for me at this end, but worry not, only I notice the pain.

PPS Relief is in sight dear reader ; although I have lots of time for blogging at the moment that will change once I am in Amsterdam/The Hague.

Il Parada Labradorów

I love the random nature of travel. Today, having hopped a tram (no biletys open for ticket purchasing) I jumped off randomly at the only street which had a name I could pronounce – Swietokryzska. But how lucky to disembark in the midst of Il Parada Labradorów ustanawiamy Rekord Guinnessa which I guessed, surrounded as I was by more than a thousand black or gold Labradors, to be an attempt at a world record – of something. The Labradors were (mostly) well-behaved, although there was a bit of unnecessary wallowing in mud puddles and the occasional excitable sicking up of breakfast (dog biscuits).

[I'm not sure how I came to get this picture but it's SO vulgar I had to include it]

The dogs created such a carnival atmosphere that lots of passersby, like me, wanted to join them on their journey to world fame.

The Polish Labrador (Labradorów) is a different beast from the ones I’ve known and loved in Australia. It’s heavier, quite stocky in fact, with a face which is more snubbed, and much broader. Perhaps they eat a lot of potatoes, like their human counterparts. Anyway I thought they were most charming. And with their special powers they guided me, amazingly, to a military commemoration of August 29 1939, the day WWII really began in Poland, although the invasion of German troops is officially September 1.

There were many young soldiers there dressed in the uniform of the time, alongside a military car and a primitive looking anti-aircraft gun which clearly had little impact on the bombing campaigns that followed. Looking at these bits of memorabilia was just sad, knowing the awful outcome. PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski, ill-mannered enough to ‘mention the War’ in 2007, claimed that Poland without the invasion of Nazi Germany would by now have a population of 66 million, rather than 38 million.

There was also some fascinating film footage taken in Warsaw before everything changed. Middle-class families perambulated with their children in the squares; prosperous shop-keepers stood in their doorways; a highly ceremonial funeral with ornate horse-drawn carriage passed by. And all around were the beautiful Baroque buildings of the Square. By the end of the film the buildings were rubble and rather than due respect being paid to the dead, bodies lay openly on the ground, sometimes with a laundry basket covering the head in some effort to maintain a kind of decorum. I guess in the end even that small nicety went.

So it seems my traveller’s luck, having deserted me on Friday arvo, might have returned. Everything went pear-shaped on Friday from the moment I got to the agent’s address in Wilczie Street where there was no sign of them or their office. After a lot of highly stressful dragging of baggage from one corner of the street to another (and no I didn’t need to ask the ‘ou est mon baggage?’ question for it was all too surely with me) they were finally tracked down on the top floor of a locked building where none of the other inhabitants had heard of them. As I don’t speak Polish and the other tenants didn’t speak English that had to be conveyed in rueful gestures and unintelligible suggestions. There are no public phones in Warsaw. The whole episode unnerved me so much I took to my bed and have only today been brave enough to get on any form of public transport and risk getting lost.

In celebration I had an excellent lunch: Chłodnik litewski: cold yoghurt-and-beetroot soup served with a hard boiled egg. After that I ate a whole baked trout served with sprouts, lemon juice and half potatoes baked alongside the fish. After several days of extremely strange food it was good to eat something really delicious again. So now I’m not hungry and I have the perfect book to read (‘Beautiful shadow : a life of Patricia Highsmith’ – given to me by my lovely beau). All I have to do is pluck up enough courage to buy a train ticket and go to Lublin. I’m horribly afraid that once I embark on that venture my traveller’s luck will desert me again. Prue will remember the awful day we got to Auvers-sur-Oise and then couldn’t read the timetable for getting back to Paris. Eeeek.

In the meantime on my way home, as I crossed one of the university squares to get back to Swietokryzska I came across this somewhat GC display:

And Copernicus looking on, probably with some enjoyment:

Welcome to Warsaw

It’s really hard to be somewhere like Warsaw and disentangle the patchwork of knowledge I have about the place from what I observe around me. For example all night long in some far flung building which makes up the giant court-yard behind me, there’s a low rumble of what sounds like the kind of music Stalin enjoyed: a baritone of unending marching songs (to the Volga and back?) But it’s probably nothing of the kind. Maybe it’s music to the Polish ear, the ear that doesn’t care for Chopin. Last night, in the middle of the ‘endless steppe’ a loudspeaker boomed incomprehensively. I think that was about 2 am. Did a giant black ZIL41047 pull up with all its doors flung wide and disgorge twelve men in Homburgs? It’s so hard to know what to think. About anything.

Then there are the buildings themselves. Huge walled slabs without any kind of character once you strip away the Cold War glamour of Richard Burton types going to seed. I have photographs but blogger seems to be playing up so I can’t post any of them yet. My apartment is on the top floor of one of these buildings. Luckily there’s a lift to level 4, a tiny lift which bounces when I step into it, and with two little saloon doors which are part of its activation. At any moment I expect it to expire with me inside it, and then as I slowly expire too my neighbours will continue minding their own business.

The bedroom doesn’t actually exist, but is a corner with a rice paper screen nicely tidying a little Goldilocks bed from view, while in the sitting room next to it a four-sofa looms like a stone fence. It does beg the question (Stuart will tell me I’m using this phrase incorrectly) – where are the four occupants of this sofa to be found when the sleeping arrangements preclude anyone else staying? Or is it for a visitor with too much vodka on board? I’ve seen a few of those lying around in the streets already.

I also have a kitchen with the kind of long-legged table Dr Phil probably eats at. When I stand next to it the table top is chest height, so chopping the potatoes for a dish of Pierogi won’t be happening on this Through the Looking-glass surface. And the bathroom has a large piece of equipment attached to the wall: aka the gas heater. Here are the instructions I received after an emailed plea for help (there aren’t many phones in Poland apparently, and in the absence of a mobile I use my internet access to engage with the agents):

Hello,

In bathroom there is an automatic system of hot water.

So what you should do, you should turn to the right or left side, where is hot water, in the bathroom sink.

Please then wait until the bathroom heater will on, and then only regulate how hot water would you like to have.


Then you can use the bathroom shower.


I hope I help you, it's not very difficult:)

But really, apart from the frightening break-neck buses, the incessant Marche Militaires in the court-yard, and the keys which jam in the locks (there are four separate keys) things could be SO much worse, as anyone of my age who grew up here could attest. I can watch ‘Border Security’ dubbed into Polish (I listen eagerly for the glimpse of a Sydney vowel) and I can play Scrabble online, and there’s a kind of supermarket around the corner which sells extremely good bread and ‘winter’ sprats (how do these differ from their summer cousins - coats? scarves?) And people, in spite of their unsmiling faces, turn out to be tremendously helpful when I cry whaaaaaa!!!!! (metaphorically). Apparently to smile at a stranger here is an indication of mental weakness. So I’m mastering a look of grim resignation, which doesn’t seem to need a lot of rehearsal.

PS This is the month of Chopin I Jego Europa (or Chopin in Europe, an international festival held every year). As Chopin, not gin, was mother’s milk to me I hope to get to at least one event in honour of Maman and her Steinway, and the wonderful etudes and polonaises we grew up listening to in various bank sitting-rooms in western Queensland. If I can find my way to Chopin’s house (reading all the consonants on street maps is so tiring) I’ll post some pix.

PPS There are lots of tall people in Poland.

Selamat tinggal KL

We schlepped out to Brisbane Airport at midnight on Monday, in pouring rain, and wearing both pullover and overcoat. It seemed like good preparation for winter in Poland (just a teensy nod to Mel Brooks there). But KL in August is Brisbane in November. Aside from the five starness of my hotel it's an awful lot like home: hot, and overgrown with fan palms. Weirdly my room even enjoys the same sound effects that I have at Chez Wilson Street, a kind of clattering noise which means my snake is in residence for the day. But I’m assuming level 19 of the Hotel Istana is free of serpents.




Anyway it’s gloriously wonderful to loaf around in a bed the size of ship’s cabin after hours and hours wedged into a tiny airline seat where my knees reach the person in front of me. My Gen Y neighbour at one point slept like a contortionist, with her legs tucked together on the opened tray table in front of her. She also engaged in some highly charged phone calls involving quite a bit of loud sobbing, up to the point where we were taxi-ing into the sky. It was all an invitation to eavesdrop but there wasn't enough disclosure to piece together the whole story. Something about a friend 'pissing her off'.




I’m staying very near two important things. The first is the monorail . Like Homer I love the monorail. When I’m on it I can see exactly where I am in relation to the major point of the city (the huge convention centre shopping mall, the Petronas towers, and various wonderful parks and gardens). The second is Bukit Bunding, a vast undercover market of knock-offs and cheap stuff for Malaysians. Their cheap stuff is so much more interesting than our cheap stuff, especially the clothing. I’m hugely tempted to buy one of those silk outfits the men wear which are like gaudy pyjamas with a table-cloth wrapped around the hips (called the Baju Melayu I think). Spending the day in silk pyjamas seems like a great advance on the business suit. And I love the cool hat.



Maintaining a servant free lifestyle in the normal course of things as I do it was embarrassing to come home last night and find a couple of young men restoring order to the floor and rearranging my higgledy piggledy heap of clothing and jars. One had thoughtfully placed a frangipanni on the turned down bed and a pair of hotel slippers by the night-table, all wasted on a frumpy Aussie sheila like moi.

This time around in KL I haven’t seen all the cosmetic surgery tourists I saw last time, roaming the streets like the ‘quarter-vegies’ (sic) in Peter Weir’s hilarious film ‘The cars that ate Paris.’ It was all downhill from there for Pete, in spite of the world fame that followed. Being tall, female, travelling alone and ‘old’ makes me feel fairly visible in Malaysia which seems a culturally conservative kind of place, in spite of its diverse influences and history. In Seoul it was worse. I felt as though everywhere I walked a spotlight was trained on me, like David Bowie. But Malaysia is a charming shambles, where things often seem on the verge of getting totally out of control. The street works are almost as bad as Brisbane’s, footpaths suddenly drop without warning, or even cease upon the hour.

When I arrived my driver didn’t show up for another hour. He'd slept in apparently. Then we pulled into a service station where he mumbled he’d be back ‘in a while’, and left with the engine running and the lights on:



After a while I photographed his empty seat, having grown a trifle bored with the sunrise, and in spite of the visitation of a Big Mac UFO.

Off to the Criminal Court with me

IALL 2010 The Hague

Another year, another migration and just when Naomi and Charles have made it so fashionable too.