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: