Dateline: Krakow
My train into Warszawa was somewhat delayed.
I remember one moment, the train was stopped, it was dusk, the mostly-cloudy sky was pink and purple and the snow-covered fields reflected this. A row of trees along one side of the train, an unplowed road and a house painted aquamarine in the distance on the other. As we sat, a woman pulling a child on a sled came down the road. The child was about 3 or 4, wearing a pink bonnet. Running alongside, then in front, then behind, was a smallish dog with a tautly curled tail. The woman with the sled stopped, and the child dismounted the sled alongside our rail car, almost ceremoniously. She raised her hand timidly and began to wave.
Because of my latish arrival in Warsaw, and not in the mood to confront another strange city in the late evening hours, I splurged somewhat, taking a hotel just a block from the railway station that was rather pricey – a little more than what I'd paid in Amsterdam, per night. But, since this is poland, for that amount I was basically in a 4 or 5 star hotel. Not bad, though I felt terribly decadent.
Yesterday I walked around Warsaw, and felt challenged by the language. On the one hand, because of my Russian studies it seems like it should be easier than German – and I often feel on the edge of understanding something. But I can't yet seem to wrap my mind around the Polish orthography, and whenever I open my mouth, mostly lousy Russian comes out, which I'm sure the Poles find vaguely offensive. So many close cognates: pl dzien dobry vs ru dobry den. So I protest "nie mowie po polsku" (I don't speak polish) and lapse into English – which people are much less likely to understand here than in Western Europe, admittedly.
I went to a large art museum for many hours. More on this later, as, now in Krakow, I hope to visit some more. This morning I took the three hour train here from warsaw, getting in around noon. I walked around quite a bit before settling on a nice hotel basically overlooking the trainstation. A lovely old building, perhaps 1900, with a fairly nice renovation. Much cheaper than what I paid in warsaw, but hardly cheap in absolute terms. Let's say: more than the motel 6 in Duluth. Hostels are apparently generally out in the suburbs in Poland – possibly a relic of the communist era.
I'm in an internet cafe (mostly internet – not much cafe), as hotspots don't seem to have yet arrived this far east. Second floor of a building on the south side of Rynek Glowny (central square). It's wild to think that the cafe across the way is where Lenin hung out for years, before WWI. Krakow was unscathed by the Nazis and the Red Army, and therefore has beautiful old buildings and narrow medieval streets and squares. Well, I should say, unscathed architecturally – it's people were brutalized in large numbers, with Auschwitz just down the road. The city's huge Jewish population was completely removed. I didn't realize until coming here that this was the setting for Spielberg's "Schindler's List," which was largely filmed locally. So now the Poles struggle with the ethics of holocaust-tourism.
