On the Steps of the Palace

I'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

Several of my fellow Fulbrighters decided to gather in Krakow for a workshop on "Green English" (or, teaching environmental responsibility in English classes). Obviously, there could not have been a better location. Krakow is a gorgeous city (one of the few cities in Poland to survive the war without major destruction). It is large, expansive, beautiful, and literally spills history with each step you take. I do not exaggerate when I say the past has soaked into the ground like rainwater in dried soil. It felt part fairy-tale and part horror story when you consider the pristine, ancient loveliness of the city combined with its gruesome recent history. Beauty and tragic existing side-by-side is becoming a recurring theme, I'm discovering. More on that later, however.

Let's start with arrival.

Picture it: Poznan train station. Thursday.

Corinne and I walk up to the ticket counter:

Me: 2 billety Krakov?
Woman: Something in Polish. God knows what. *holds up a schedule indicating a train at 14:40 that doesn't arrive until 22:56.*
Corinne and I exchange looks of concern and terror.
Me: 2 billety Warsawa?
Woman: Speaks in Polish. The word problem is recognized. We assume she's saying "No."

Corinne and I end up on an 8 hour train ride from Poznan to Krakow. This fate could have been avoided if we could have been sold the tickets to Warsaw and then taken a train from Warsaw to Krakow. The trip would have been 2.5 hours shorter. However, had that happened, we would not have made a new friend known as "Gas man."

Gas man might call to mind someone with IBS or a kindly gentleman who you call when the gas in your house is off. Or, as I now know, it can mean a sketch-ass mofo who runs into your train carriage and sits in an empty seat. The room immediately smells like gasoline (or maybe paint thinner). The gentleman begins opening and closing the door to the carriage while peaking his head out. He then amuses himself by doing the same thing with the curtains. Meanwhile, the carriage quickly fills with the smell of gasoline (which we suspect he was carrying in a large plastic bottle that he shoved into his dirty hoodie pocket). Eyes immediately begin to water. No one can really breathe and yet here is gas man just doing his thing.

My immediate thoughts were along the "Jesus take the wheel" line. Who IS this person? Who?

Fortunately, after he decided to hop from carriage to carriage and hide in the bathroom, gas man was thrown off the train at the next stop and the world rejoiced.

We arrived in Krakow and discovered that the quiet nighttime streets of Poznan are deceptive. This place was party central. The music and shouting from the streets outside of the hostel continued well past midnight. I'm not entirely sure what they were talking about but I hope they had a good time while some of us were busy not sleeping.

The next couple of days consisted of Fulbright bonding and wandering around Krakow.

Photos follow.

It's 11pm. Do you know what statues your children are taking pictures of?

Turns out I don't really either. I'm not sure who this is a statue of, but the dramatic shadow was too much to ignore. 

Statue of a saint outside of St. Peter and Paul Church. It might not be a saint. In my defense, there are lots of statues of old white men here. I can't keep up. 

This is from the Dragon's Den under Wawel castle. Apparently legend has it that a dragon lived under the castle.

No. Really. This is an artist's rendering of what the dragon may look like. See the peasant? He's DONE with that dragon and those sheep. He literally can't even. 

Whatevs. Enemies of the heir beware. 

This is St. Mary's Basilica. I didn't go inside. However, this is the place where the trumpeter of Krakow plays the Hejnał Mariack on a daily basis to commemorate the sentry who signaled a Mongol invasion and allowed the city time to shut the gates and thus prevent an ambush. He was shot in the throat before he could finish and so the song stops abruptly in compliance with this Grimmsian saga. 

Wawel Cathedral 

Swans. Terrifying, violent swans. 

The inside of the beautiful Wawel castle and...

Some Jew holding bags of money and pennies! See how happy they are? 

           Wait. What? 

Yeah. This little tidbit caught my eye while we were visiting a gift shop inside the castle. I'm not totally sure what to make of this. Casual antisemitism is alive and well. Just look at how cuddly these things are. It's like if Wallace and Gromit had a quirky Jewish neighbor who liked to count his money and charge interest on loans.

Honestly, I'm still processing this one. Antisemitism is bad enough. Repackaging antisemitism so that it seems cute is even worse. This image sat on my stomach the entire day. I really, REALLY wish I hadn't seen this.

We ended the evening in the Jewish quarter of Krakow which is now synonymous with nightlife and trendy bars. We encountered one such bar in an alleyway that was featured in Schindler's List.

This is the alley as it looks today. 

The alley as seen in the film. 

I kept most of my internal conflict internal during this time. However, I found it difficult to concentrate by this point in the evening. The combination of the magnets and the realities of being in the area where Krakow's Jews lived before they were evicted and sent to the ghetto weighed a lot on my mind. When we were standing in the center of the Market Square in Kazimierz, I literally couldn't look at anything without thinking about the catastrophic loss that occurred not only in Krakow, but in Poland in general. I looked at the windows and saw tombstones staring back. I looked around at people walking through the streets and began playing a righteous gentiles game in my mind. I clearly pictured the most disturbing scene in Schindler's List when the German soldier puts down his gun and plays Bach on the piano while the sounds of machine gun fire and the destruction of the Krakow ghetto is heard in the background. The sophistication of European art and music is dropped disturbingly in middle of savage and inhuman destruction. Then I thought back to the magnets in the store and the beehive of thought came to a boil.

Simply put, I placed too much trust in my emotional distance from events that happened 70 years ago. I've studied the Holocaust in books since I was in 4th grade. I did major college research projects on the NS period in Germany and antisemitism in Europe. However, the page failed to transmit the conflict of thought that exists when something is tangible and no longer existing sole in academic terms. I've walked through Yad Vashem. I've seen the pictures and home movies of a culture and people ripped out of the planet by the roots. Yet I could barely walk down a street that I would not have recognized without a few pictures on a wall in an alleyway. 

I'm not quite sure what else I can say on the matter. I'm still working my way through a bit of a shock in terms of confronting the actualities of contemporary history. It is one thing to read about something. It is quite another to stand where it happened. Yet it seemed almost impossible to be solemn. Music blared from colorful bars. People (myself included) spent lovely evenings with friends sipping drinks and having some laughs in this area that seemed almost haunted. This is only the beginning. My research will include visits to concentration camps and visits to countless museums about genocide education. However, these places tend to be frozen in time. There is an intellectual stability that comes with these places. They are designed to inform rather than illicit emotion. They focus exclusively on what once was. There is no accounting for progress and healing. There no accounting for plump little Jewish figurines smiling blankly into the glare of a coin in their hands sold alongside postcards of Krakow, cobalt china,  and floral-print aprons. It goes back to the beautiful and the perverse sitting on the same stoop.  The inevitable occurs. Life continues but memory and history remain like persistent green plants growing in sidewalk cracks. 

I'm working harder to check where I'm walking. 

It's Hot Up Here

Throughout my 24 years, I've honestly made a career of causing accidents. It's almost miraculous that I've lasted as long as I have. Casualties have included family heirlooms, numerous pieces of china, and, more realistically, my person. I've fallen on my ass in public more than Laurel and Hardy. So, I realized that it would only be a matter of time before I brought my talents across the ocean. Gertrude Stein and Earnest Hemmingway had their writing, Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan had dancing, and F. Scott and  Zelda Fitzgerald had alcohol, torrid love affairs and mediocre writing. What shall the history books pin my name to? Falling in public.

My class has been moved from the Collegium Chemicum back to Collegium Novum. This is really not of particular interest, but it does play into the story. I was rushing up the stairs to my class which I believed started in five minutes (it actually didn't start until 3pm). In the process, I miscalculated a step and bang, boom, yelling timber. I'm down for the count and I can already feel bruising in my shin and blood pooling in my shoe from where I once had part of a toenail. A collection of Polish students stopped, staring at me with an interest probably not unlike those Joseph Merrick probably received walking through the streets of London. It's impolite too stare, but who the hell would look away?

I hurry to my feet and rush to the classroom to discover that I actually have an hour and forty five minutes at my disposal. However, walking back down the stairs to get the key to my office would mean possible exposure to the legion of students who had just seen me fall. So, I did what any red-blooded American would do: hid in the bathroom for 10 minutes for the next class to start and the halls to clear. 

It's at this point in the story that I need to stop and inform you all of how normal I am.

I decided after emerging that the stairs were not to be trusted and the only safe option was to take the elevator. I push the button and wait a few moments for the elevator to come down from floor 6 to floor 2. However, the elevator was moving at a positively glacial pace. So, to pass the time, I read about Cambridge summer programs via a poster on the department bulletin board. The elevator arrives, and as I'm walking in, the door promptly shuts with me not quite in the car. I'm pinned for a moment, thinking about the rabbit posters on the Paris Metro that I'd only just finished mocking. I feel another bruise forming on my arm from the surprising force of closing door.

In short, by the end of the class, my shin, my shoulder and my toe were damaged, bruised and in moderate pain.

But then again, pain is beauty? Maybe? 

I ended up drowning these sorrows in a bar called "The Proletariate." It's decor is made up entirely of Soviet novelties. These include: a wicker bear, several Soviet Realism paintings, photographs of Lenin and Marx, a giant bust of Lenin's head, and a hog's head wearing a commander's cap (all animals are equal...). All in all, it looked like the place George Orwell and Leon Trotsky would go to hook up. There was something irreverent and fun about it at the same time and it was truly the perfect environment for sipping beer.

In potentially more interesting news, I've experienced a proverbial culinary cabaret the past few days.  I'll break this up into three parts so that you may get a better sense of exactly what I'm talking about.

Cooking with a Hotplate
I learned one of Poland's harshest lessons early. If you are a vegetarian, nothing can be trusted. Pierogies can easily house meat inside their deceptive, delicious shells. Bacon is used as a garnish with alarming frequency. I once ordered pumpkin soup from a small cafe and spent the better part of a minute asking a series of questions to the poor waitress to be sure that the soup was 100% vegetarian. 

What I ask normally: Is this vegetarian? 

What I now realize I have to specify: I consider fish a meat. Is the base chicken or beef stock? Is there some zany Polish surprise where the soup is actually served in a bowl fashioned out of veal cutlets or something?

The end result is me doing a lot of my own cooking. 

So far, I've mastered the following on the hotplate:

Sauteed chickpeas with cherry tomatoes, garlic, onions and a shot of gin.

Chardonnay cream sauce and noodles 

Eggs poached in tomato juice and a hint of vodka.

SIDENOTE: Who knew that "cooking with alcohol" meant you were supposed to put it in the food? 

I'm trying new things without an oven. It's awkward and has a generally confusing vibe (which I normally dig). We'll see where this goes and what else I can come up with. 

Pierogies and Art

It was really only a matter of time before pierogies found their way into my system. Stupid, fattening, delicious pierogies.  I've spent some time actively avoiding them because it would be just like one to have meat in it. At the grocery store, I managed to pick up a couple of packages of pierogies (sauerkraut and mushroom and cheese) and fry them in some olive oil on the old hotplate. However, as I recently discovered, nothing quite compares to stuffing and cooking them yourself. 

Blogs always tend to make the process of cooking traditional foods in foreign countries totally romantic. 

"I lost my wedding ring in a loaf of pan de muerto once because I was so interested in my host's story about her time as a Marxist revolutionary."
"I named the chicken Hilda without realizing her head was about to be cut off."

"People came from all over, contributing vegetables and spices for the sweet potato stew of love."

 They make it sound so easy. 

Don't get me wrong. I had a blast making pierogies (see the delightful pictures Corinne posted on my Facebook) and it truly was a fantastic way to bond. 

That being said, I don't see "pierogie chef" in my future.

The process involves rolling and cutting the dough, stuffing the pierogies and then sealing them so that they won't fall open while being boiled. 

Except they just don't want to %#^ing seal sometimes. It was an act of God that none of them fell apart in the pot of boiling water. Some especially stubborn ones required a subtly made water and flour adhesive. 

In the end, the pierogies were as delightful as the evening. My stomach rumbles now just thinking about them (that cranberry and cheese crepe suddenly seems like it was ages ago). We had a fabulous conversation and the comforts of cooking (despite the difficulty) and speaking in your mother tongue are a wonderful substitute for the things you actually miss (my kingdom for a Texas margarita).

Food and Drink. But mostly drink.

I'm finally getting the point where I don't accidentally order sparking water. By finally getting to the point, it means it has been 24 hours since the last time I ordered sparkling water by mistake. However, I won't waste anyone's time talking about sparkling water when we're really all here to discuss liquor and beer. 

Some of the more interesting things I've tasted so far include:

Bison grass vodka and apple juice. 

Polish beer. Oh, Polish beer. 

Czech beer. It's somehow different from Polish beer. 

Shots of vodka. 

I've found a new appreciation for both vodka and black coffee the past few weeks.

This week will include a visit to Krakow, a workshop on teaching environmental responsibility, and a much-needed reunion with some of my fellow Fulbrighters.

More posts to follow. 

All my love,
Kyle.

PS. I wasn't kidding about the margarita. 

Down the Block There's a Riot

The signs around me still caused some ping of internal alarm (though I knew the chances of actual danger were remote). Airports, simply put, are not the kind of place you like to see placards telling you where to go in the event of an air raid. 

Then again, such things aren’t terribly uncommon when a nation is at war. 

I sat in the large atrium of David Ben Gurion Airport, happily arrived, checked, and thoroughly grilled by El Al security (what did you do in Jordan last year? how did you teach a class if you don’t know Hebrew?), I sat looking at the flight board. I double checked to make sure my flight back to JFK was still happening (of course it was) and to see if the the travel plans of any of my remaining TALMA brethren would be interrupted by any last minute cancelations. However, as the calm that only comes from realizing your travel plans are going exactly as you had planned settled over me, I began thinking about what my mother (I’m sure you’re reading this, Ma, taking a break from all the wedding excitement) always seems to say to me in such situations:

“You are never far from disaster.”

It’s a barb in good humor. My southern family is inclined to worry. Anxiety runs in our bloodlines with the same frequency as brown hair, freckles, or acidic sarcasm and it manifests just as potently. We work in fretting the way an artist might work in marble or pastels. 

In a way, however, my mother has a point. 

Sample comments over the history of my life include:

“He threw WHAT at another kid in Mission Friends?” (a toy car and the son of a bitch had it coming)

“Well, Randy. You’ll never guess what our son did today. He made a dumb waiter out of an Easter basket and all the shoe laces he could get his hands on.” 

“I have no idea why he thought dryer fresh, just folded wash cloths looked enough like Easter eggs for him to feel he should hide them all over the back yard.” (My cousin Megan should also remember this, so should Jennifer since she’s the one who tattled). 

“I tried to warn you before the wedding. Making him the ring bearer was a dreadful choice.” 

“I’m so glad I paid a plastic surgeon to fix the scarring over your eye from your accident so that you could turn around and get your eyebrow pierced.” 

“I told you the chemistry set was an awful idea. Maybe if we move the desk, no one will notice the stain.” 

Rambunctiousness, really. 

My best hypothesis is that my early childhood chicanery stemmed from an underutilized imagination. After I started school, most of these issues went away. I channelled my penchant for mischief into more constructive endeavors (like writing, painting, theatre, cooking, and developing a love of chardonnay and frozen margaritas) and metamorphosed into the well-bred, composed, highly functioning adult you see today. 

I say all this to say that it was only natural that before I left for Poland, I would get a healthy dose of reminding that the crisis in Ukraine, like Ebola, could spread rapidly and without warning. 

I honestly have no clue what they were talking about. In their minds, I’m some patrician sitting in a tree near the frontline, a sniper in a make-shift militia, shivering while fighting off the advancing Red Army. It seemed almost laughable. 

And, especially in retrospect, I can appreciate the humor of the situation. 

So why am I writing this? You’re probably asking it. I do find a good narrative sets up a commentary on global affairs in a more comforting way.

While I was at a bookstore today (side note: I found the English section and came away with enough Truman Capote and J.D. Salinger to last me the next couple of weeks), I waited in line to pay and, like any red-blooded consumer, scanned the shelves of magazines and confectionary used to squeeze pennies out of shoppers with poor impulse control and access to disposable income.

I begin to notice something quite common on all of the magazine covers. They all feature Putin and they all either mention or also depict Stalin. I don’t speak Polish, but the message is clear. 

I immediately assume sensationalism. Magazines are digging into a nations not-so-distant past to drum up sales. It is at that moment, things seem to come full circle.

I think back to the good-natured plug at Fulbright orientation, reminding us to eat apples (boycotted by Russia currently) with the same gentle guidance of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” I couldn’t fathom something as simple as eating apples to be a political statement. However, after a few glasses of apple juice and munching a macintosh on the train from Warsaw to Poznan and running across a magazine shelf drawing uncomfortable parallels to a time just before Warsaw saw the Palace of Culture and Sciences rise from the ground like that volcano in Mexico which sprouted from a field in a matter of weeks, I have to do some serious thought into the political climate I walked into.

I think back to what my mother said, silently agreeing that I am (by coincidence) never too far from trouble. 

I pause here to remind everyone of two things: 

Primarily, I don’t know jack about the inner machinations of former Soviet-bloc politics. I have literally no answers and thus cannot reach any conclusion beyond the vocal acknowledgement of my observations. 

Secondly, I am not an alarmist. The point of this is more of a reflection of what I’ve seen rather than a verification of Cold War paranoia. 

Also, I’d kill right now for a hot apple brandy. Can you imagine? In a clear glass mug with a cinnamon stick, steam hovering just slightly above the rim? Is it the alcohol or the smell of apples and cinnamon that is more warming, more filling? It just sounds too divine. 

I don’t recall a day that I’ve been here that I don’t come across some reminder of recent history. There are statues all over the place commemorating the catastrophic loss of life that occurred in Poland at the hands of both invading Germans and Soviets. Entire cities were reduced to rubble (only a thousand people were in Warsaw by the end of the war in Europe). These monuments are solemn, grim, and in many ways are exactly what I would imagine them to be.

I’m not entirely sure what to say. I embark on my research knowing that many of the conversations will be …academically unpleasant. I say this to indicate that I cannot possibly relate to or even understand the process of healing and relapse in chaos which have marked the 20th century here. It’s a process of stitching and hemorrhaging that can’t be comprehended by those of us who were raised on the narratives of the United States in war time. 

When I think of this, I think of Simonova’s sand art. Granted, she was Ukrainian, but there are certainly parallels in narrative. I showed this clip in virtually every class I taught. It was haunting and it was beautiful. There are thousands of possible comments and questions that can arise from a video that is less than 10 minutes long. However, the same one always came up (it’s frankly what I thought the first time I saw it), “Why is everyone crying?” 

There’s the obvious answer. It’s an artistic statement about the history of a people who in a very short amount of time became experts on loss. 

By the time the video ends, we are left with an image of a child (newborn when the war began, now a toddler)  making some faint, bittersweet contact with the ghost of someone whose love he is unable to remember, a love he will spend his entire life only understanding in hearsay and family anecdotes. 

This concept of national loss and national healing is still quite elusive to me. I’m not totally sure what to make of it. However, I feel as though the early stages of this blog would be entirely artificial and incomplete without some reflection on my part over the current state and its relationship to the past century. 

This place was home to the first truly democratic elections in the former Soviet bloc. It houses a history and culture of perseverance, beauty, art, science (Chopin, Copernicus, Sklowdowska-Curie, Wajda, Szymborska, Warlikowski…to name a few). Yet in a modern context, it is also associated with atrocities that are measured in bullets, bomb shells, and unfathomable destruction. 

It’s odd to consider and I realize that my point is not something easily graspable (largely because I’m not sure that I have one and I may just be verbalizing everything that swarms around the hornet’s nest that is my mind right now). Imagine granite blocks etched with the bronze faces of the men and women who were taken by something terrible sitting in a park in front of an immaculate, plush opera house with immaculate tracings in gold leaf.

The Spartan and Athenian existing simultaneously. 

It’s a dreadful metaphor, I recognize this. 

I also recognize that I am yet again pouring sentiment like thick gravy over something that I never intended to be an exercise in emotional outpouring. 

However, I doubt that I could explain the impact that seeing those magazines had on me without some elaboration. 

In honesty, I’m not certain why that image disturbed me as much as it did. 

I didn’t have the guts to take a photograph. Seriously. How would you respond to someone who took a picture of the checkout line? 

However, imagine if you will a picture of Stalin and Putin, both blood-red with the communist banner hanging in the background, surrounded by candy on all sides. Stalin looks ample, healthy and is covered with waving, though tamed hair. Putin, by contrast, looks thin, hairless, and thoroughly untrustworthy. It’s as though you walked into to Willy Wonka’s chocolate room (the Gene Wilder version because obviously) and saw the two of them playing chess. It’s like something out of Orwell. The adjustment from fear to temporary indulgence is so immediate that I guess some pause isn’t out of the question. 

Around this time, however, a woman tapped on my shoulder and pointed the open cashier who had just been calling me for the last few seconds. 

I chuckled to myself as I walked over, wondering if maybe slowing down a line to gaze at a magazine stand was the kind of disaster from which my mother feels I’m never far . 

In Search of Apple Brandy, 

Kyle