Polska (a long-ish journey)

Howdy!  It's been a busy travel week for me, though it was the last leg for a while - more on that later.  For now, we have Poland to talk about!  My friend Alex expressed a desire to see something 'happy' in Poland, saying he thought it was the saddest place on earth.  While Poland has not often enjoyed national sovereignty, and it's periods of outside rule have included the Nazis and the Soviets, the country has many beautiful architectural and cultural marvels, and Krakow, with it's circle park and trumpeter are no exception (can you tell that I'm writing this with internet access and some time?  Good old links).  C and I spent a total of four days in Krakow (the final an unintended consequence of a transportation mix-up) before moving on to the equally picturesque Polish town of Torun.

I had traveled through Krakow once before in 2001, on my 'study abroad' European tour.  Nick Pawlowksi hosted me there for two days and I remembered distinctly the parks around the old city (where the walls used to be) and the parks along the river where Nick and I spent an afternoon.  C and I also enjoyed an afternoon of lazing by the river enjoying pear vodka and tonic water in the 70 degree sun.  It was one of the most peaceful afternoons of my trip.  Other highlights include hearing a concert in a 14th century Church of St Peter and St Paul, touring the great salt mine of Wieliczka (will-itch-ka), and spending a number of afternoons sitting in the center of Krakow, admiring it's churches and tower and spring atmosphere.  So, for you Alex, some happy pictures of Krakow:

Note the decoration on the top 

Church of St Mary

The Trumpeter!  (look closely)

Inside Church of St Mary

The central square - the Trumpter lived in the church in the background

View from the same spot - towards the tower

The Tower

Fearsome guard of the tower

The Church where we heard the concert

A portion of the wall at nighttime

Center square with maypoles (I think)

The church!  (again)

On our third day, one of the very few cloudy days we had while traveling, we visited the Wielizcka salt mine - the 14th oldest corporation in the world (!).  The mine was lovely, much more open than the underground city we visited in Turkey, and much warmer than the silver mine we saw in Salbohed Sweden.  We toured a very small part of it (3% I think?), and saw many lovely statues and carvings, along with a few chapels and what they called an underground cathedral.  Everything was salt - the walls, carvings, even the chandelier - and while some of it was white and chrystally, most was the dull gray of rock salt.  It was an impressive tour - I hope the photos can do it justice:

Everything was made from wood and rope - everything else corroded like crazy 

The story is long but basically the princess inherited a Hungarian salt mine, but then they found salt in Poland (white gold), with her ring in it - this is the first bit of salt mined, found when they were digging a well

These dudes would crawl in to burn off methane - 1 in 10 died

Salt stalagtites

Old stairs

In the chapel

Everything carved from salt

Additionally, all of the carvings were done by miners - not professional sculptors

Salt chandelier - 2,000 pieces

JP2 - who was from the area

Support structure in the mine

After our Krakow visit and more transportation troubles than I've ever had in that short a period of time, we arrived in Torun, a small, similarly lovely town in Northern Poland.  Transportation mis-adventures take one: on our way home from the salt mine, we were told to hop a bus for the 15 minute trip back to town.  We did so, onto a packed bus - no ticket machine in sight, the driver a long way off.  We had just decided to try our luck when it ran out and a ticket checker guy came on (with a security helper who got in the face of someone who had our backs when we complained that there were NO indications of how one might get a ticket, nor a machine anywhere in sight) - alas to no avail.  We got off the bus, Corinne doing the talking, and we got ticketed for one count of freeloading (a 35 dollar bus ride - ouch) but less than a two count.  And C is not under warrant in a Prussian state.  Phew!  Take two: on our first attempt to leave Krakow, I asked for two tickets for the 942 to Torun, and was sold two tickets for a trip to Torun - only they were for the 930, which is a 'regional' train, not express, and did not have assigned seats, and was not for the 942 which we were not allowed to board.  This was confusing because nothing on the ticket indicated much at all other than Krakow to Torun (regional tickets are not for specific times).  Fine fine, we spent another day.  Take three: the next day, when we DID get tickets for the 942 express to Torun with a change in Warsaw, we found that we had tickets for the wrong rail company, whose trains alternated hourly with the one we were on.  So basically we had to buy new tickets on the train for the second leg of our journey and ask for some of our money back for our unused ticket in Torun.  Take four: after Torun and Gdansk (which I will detail for you in a moment) we found the Gdansk airport no problem and I checked my bag with our airline Wizz-Air, which was a classy and inexpensive as it sounds.  Corinne, having checked in online, did not check in at the airport.  So when we were in line to board (open seating on low-cost carriers in Europe), she was told that she needed to have her ID checked before she would be allowed to board.  Luckily by a mistake of mine, we were in the wrong line anyway and had a half hour.  Still, not a terribly comfortable amount of time for someone to journey back through security to the check-in counter (closed) to get her ticket stamped.  She was back in 10 minutes and we, breathing deeply, were on our way back to Sweden.

I'll toss a few final photos of Poland and a description of our time in Torun and Gdansk on the next entry - this one is too long as it is.  Thanks for reading!  

Von Deutschland!

Hello team!  I am writing from Krakow Poland, after a lovely three day stay in Berlin on the hospitality of Irina, who graciously offered us her Berlin apartment.  We saw some impressive cultural memoria, as well as the populous and architecture of the German capitol, and Corinne wasn't arrested on arrival!  In all, a satisfying trip.  Here are a few highlights.  

We arrived in Berlin on Wednesday April 13, me from Rome and C from Stockholm.  C, having arrived three hours before me, assumed control of Berlin and had our transportation and finances arranged for our three day stay in the city.  That first day was pretty slow, we stopped at a cafe on our way in, along with a grocery store with Michael, Irina's partner and our secondary host, and ate in and bedded early.  

The following day we undertook the post-war history of Berlin, which became our focus for our short stay.  We attempted the Dali museum, found it closed, and wandered over to the German history museum.  On the way we saw the Jewish memorial - a 'cemetery' of concrete blocks filling a city block in central Berlin.  It was a dreary rainy day, and C and I took in the gravity and power of the monument.  Here are a few photographs of the blocks, arranged in cemetery fashion to great effect.  

The block varied in height and the ground level changed, creating multiple perspectives and effects

The walk ways and some of the police force

An overview of sorts - the blocks in middle are 8 or 9 feet up from the walkways

An eye level view

After the memorial, we passed the Brandenburg along with a main drag of central Berlin, often crossing paths with police columns escorting tinted Audi's carrying the western world's diplomats to and from meetings of NATO, convening in Berlin to discuss Libya.  The constant stream of police, as well as the drone of helicopters, blocked roads and assumed proximity of Hilary Clinton made us feel very important indeed.  Amidst the excitement we visited the German history museum and saw the Rome and Europe through the eyes of the Vandal and Saxons (who just wanted to settle in Roman territory is all).  From the sound of it, the Germans were building cities and princedoms while the rest of Europe was killing each other or succumbing to the plague.  In my version of history lay a dark period from the fall of Rome in the 5^th century to the Italian renaissance of the 14^th century.  However, it seems like the Prussians were at this time leading the charge of civilization, building castles and centers of learning in and around the dark forests and mountains of eastern Europe. 

As we somewhat expected, Berlin was often colored by its postwar history (of course, we also toured these areas specifically).  The history museum had broad sections on pre and post war propaganda with exhibits demonstrating the nuance of the National Socialists rise to power (I for one had grossly oversimplified that process – many people warned about the extreme right and Hitler specifically) with special attention paid to the death camps.  I can only imagine how a curator might handle the construction and placement and wording of that diorama -  (poetry and art after the holocaust is barbaric, according to Theodor Adorno).  After enjoying the museum, we continued to skirt the diplomats of NATO while making our way back across the downtown area en route to the Dali museum (which was not really worth the price of admission). 

Our next bit of history was about the Berlin wall itself.  After the war Berlin was divided into four sections – British, French, US and Soviet.  We developed our half and played by the rules while the Soviets decided to keep everything for itself.  When the built the wall in 1961, Kennedy was (according to the history over here) somewhat relieved that war was less likely with the divide up, and that the US had little choice but to accept the reality of the Iron Curtain having fallen over eastern Europe.  Facts of this are likely obvious to people who were adults when this was all going on, but I did not know that Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet controlled Germany, a tiny enclave of capitalism.  The East Germans supposedly did not see or think of this barrier as a wall – but as an anti-capitalism blockade, working to keep the evils of capitalism out.  Of course, the purpose was to stop the mass migration of people from the Soviet east to the west (who were leaving at a rate of several hundred thousand per year).  The wall divided the city in half, along roads, rivers, and even buildings.  There is upsetting footage of people running across barbed wire barriers (before the concrete wall), or jumping out of buildings that faced the west.  It was powerful and visually stunning to see the footage next to the wall itself – such a recent history buried beneath the surface of my reality.  It, along with a visit to a Stasi secret prison gave me a new appreciation for (though not changing my mind about) McCarthyism.  Here are some photos of the wall memorial: 

Comssioned art on the East wall - done 90 and 91

These images are mostly based on famous photos - (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,615900,00.html ,  http://in-humanity.net/tag/east-german-soldier/ )

The following day C and I visited the secret prison of the Stasi (after the Soviets changed it from a soup kitchen into a secret prison – only the Soviets could use Communism to change a soup kitchen into a prison).  The tours (in Polish) were given by former inmates – our tour being in English was given by an historian.  The prison structure was simple enough – prison like, what was notable was the evolution of the function from torture to solitary confinement.  The Soviets initially used several forms of water torture (drips, a few inches of freezing water on the ground) sleep deprivation and packing people into tiny windowless basement rooms called U-Boats by the prisoners (who were exclusively political prisoners).  Later the prison used solitary confinement only to torture the inmates.  They went so far as to not allow prisoners to pass each other in the hallway.  It was a depressing, difficult tour.  C took a few photos inside of the submarine, though I do not have them with me.  I'm sure you can appreciate what it felt like to stand down there for even a minute - a cell with no moving air and twelve people.  Yikes.  

We were then on our way out of Germany and into Poland, where we have enjoyed the beautiful city of Krakow for the past few days.  Incidentally, due to a train station mishap, we are here for one more day – not the worst place to be around for a little more time.  Before we left we saw lots of Berlin, enjoyed several delightful meals (we looked often for German food but found mostly SE Asian fare – Thai, Korean, Tibetan, Vietnamese).  We a great brunch with Irina and Michael at a café they selected for us (whose name escapes me).  I took a photo of our food (along with a few of the city). 

Note the giant sculpture in the background

A beautiful rail bridge!

It was lovely weather, and a lovely city!

One final travel story on this entry – on our train from Berlin to Krakow, a fellow sitting in front of us managed to snooze his way out of Germany with a ticket meant to get him to Dresden in southern Germany.  The German ticket check had stamped his ticket without comment, but the Polish conductor was paying more attention and forced him off at the next station (in rural Poland).  He spoke Italian, and miraculously the woman across the aisle from him spoke Polish and Italian.  Corinne and I watched the exchange, the conductor telling him to get off, not swayed by the confusion with the first stamp or anything else the woman said to him.  As the Italian (maybe 19 years old) got off the train the woman who had advocated for him gave him a 50 euro note (almost 80$).  It was a powerful little episode about being cared for by strangers, and made me more resolved than ever to pick up fluency in another language (or two).  Thanks for reading! 

Rome part due

Rome has once again captured my heart, though it is of course a different  experience, both being joined by my mom and staying in the city itself, rather than at the home of Paolo and Alessandra.  We are at a converted convent within a 5 minute walk of St Peter’s Square.  It is a nice landmark to come ‘home’ to after wandering the town, we are generally making our way north along the Tiber river

Our second night in Rome was spent on lovely Aventine Hill, once again in the company of William.  I mentioned a few of the sights he shared with me but I’d like to clarify and flesh a few out.  The church of St Dominic, where he would lay prostrate to pray, where time passed in centuries rather than seconds, the church where we stood had been built in the 5^th century, which meant that when St Dominic (founder of the Dominicans) prayed there it was already 700 years old.  I took some photos, though they are on my Mom’s camera.  William also showed us a keyhole through which one could see the temple of the Knights of Malta, the Vatican dome, and of course Rome, which comprise three individual countries among them.  William called it the most famous keyhole in Rome. 

In the middle of our time here we visited the Villa Borghese, the house and now museum collected by the Pope’s nephew.  It most impressively contained several sculptures by Bernini, an absolute master of the form.  His pieces had a liveliness and movement to them, along with delicate features and craftsmanship.  His most impressive to me was his statue of Apollo and Daphne.  The story is that Apollo was chasing the less than willing Daphne, who prayed to her father the river god to save her from Apollo’s amorous clutches.  As Apollo catches her, she is turned into a laurel tree.  Bernini shows this in action, you can almost hear her limbs creaking into wooden branches, her toes plunging into the ground as roots.  Her outstretched fingers sprout twigs and leaves.  Apollo is just behind her, his cloak billowing behind him, his back leg suspended in the air.  The sculpture looks like a 3D photograph or a wax model, rather than carved marble.  His other pieces in the museum, his David, his god of the underworld carting off his captured bride, all had the same life like quality to them.  Check out some images here.  

We spent our last morning in Rome touring the obscene opulence of the Vatican Museum.  It at once housed great works of renaissance art and an overlarge collection of Greco-roman antiquities, seemingly collected for numbers alone.  To catalogue the latter, there were dozens of rooms and hallways filled, stacked with busts, statues and friezes depicting god knows what from ancient Rome.  I overheard a tour guide saying that to give each statue one minute would require a visit of 25 years.  While the Borghese museum had a few dozen statues, among them great works of Bernini mastery, the Vatican housed anonymous faces and scenes, uncurated and unapproachable. 

However, it also had rooms painted by two of the ninja turtles - Raphael and Michelangelo, including the Sistine chapel which was worth every accolade.  I’ll lodge one more complaint about the nature of the work they were commissioned to create, then admire the works themselves.  It seemed like every painting (indeed every facet of the Vatican that I noticed) seemed directed at salving a great ego crisis suffered by Pope after Pope after Pope – every one in his turn trying to establish his legitimacy in the history of the Bible and of the world.  The Sistine chapel is ceilinged by Michelangelo’s famous creation of Adam (and his less celebrated fall from innocence), but two of the walls contain mirroring scenes from the lives of Moses and Jesus, establishing Jesus in the Mosaic tradition of punishing disbelievers and wayward skeptics.  They seemed to say – I am the Pope, and if you don’t like it you can join that guy suffering in hell.  Raphael’s work in the Papal apartments included the ‘School of Athens’ where the Greek scholars resembled renaissance artists and holy folks, saying that even back then Christianity was just around the corner. 

Of course, the works themselves were beautiful.  Michaelangelo’s chapel was a masterpiece for its assimilation of so many images and themes, like a visual history of everything.  He painted the ceiling at 25, and the altar wall at the other end of his life at 66.  The altar wall depicts the last judgment and is a chaotic swirl or salvation and damnation.  All the familiar faces are present in one form of another, including one guy holding his own skin (having been flayed alive).  Yikes.  

Unfortunately for me (and indirectly you), the Vatican museum confirmed my deep skepticism of the Catholic church’s commitment to social justice, now and throughout history.  I’ve seen some opulent palaces in my day, and have done my share of inward head shaking at this or that king or queen who decided themselves worthy of everyone else’s livelihood (or life), but they never pretended to give a rat’s ass about the poor.  The Vatican library apparently housed one of the world’s greatest collection of literature and history – preserving for us texts and ideas that lend themselves to the foundation of our civilization, but that’s where it ends for me.  The Vatican is not directly responsible for the poverty of the world (though I think a case might be made), but it’s wealth could go a long way towards alleviating it.  “Until you give up everything you have, you cannot be my disciple.”  JC

When we weren’t touring the Coliseum, a famous museum or a church somewhere, we were wandering around  or eating or in transition from one to the other.  The city treated us well – our weather has been unreasonably lovely, sunny every day but one and no rain, and our walks have always been fruitful in one form or another.  It has been very different traveling in the comfort of Italy, particularly with my mother with me, and is serving as a lovely transition back to home for me after my time in the Arab states and India.  Tomorrow morning Mom heads back to the US, and I am off to Berlin where I will meet lovely Corinne.  I am eager to see her, eager to tour the north of Europe, and eager to head home, though the feeling is bittersweet.  I have reconciled many of the tensions I have encountered on my travels, and am at present much more adjusted to the road than to being in one spot.  Most likely the transition will be plenty smooth, and I’ll be feeling restless again in no time.  But for now, German here I come!  Thanks for reading!  

PS - here are some general images from the Coliseum and Vatican Museum:

Entrance to the Vatican Museum

Raphael's 'The School of Athens'

The famous exit

  

Firenze!

First off my apologies for being so behind in posts – Florence was marvelous and between enjoying the city and enjoying the company of Mother, I had very little down time during which to write.  We are now already back in Rome – having spent time in Florence and Cinque Terre!  I will do my best to bring some reflection to bear on those places, seen in the light of my Mom’s new eyes as well as my personal experiences. 

Mom touched down in Rome a bit later than expected, having been delayed by weather in NY.  I found my way to the Roman airport later than expected because of a local transportation strike in the city that morning.  Paolo, my most gracious host, actually offered me his car for the cross city trip to the airport but I was able to catch the last bus of the morning to the Termini station for a quick jaunt out to the airport.  To touch off a dicey pick-up, the customs exit dropped Mom at a different terminal, so we spent the better part of an hour looking for each other – I being worried that her checked bags did not make it off the plane because of ANOTHER strike.  She wisely did not check bags, found me, and we were on our merry way into town. 

It was a joyful and somewhat teary reunion for both of us – she talked often about how big of a deal my journey was, of how her friends all shared her excitement to get her hands on me.  For my part it was a first real feeling of being home after my seven month trek.  Spending time with Corinne has always grounded me, but seeing one’s mother after being away is something special and I appreciated all the more her trip overseas.  We shared many hugs before she conked out on the train.

 

View from our window!

Our place in Florence, after we got in the door, was pretty great – we staying at San Giovanni hotel on the Duomo piazza – we could see the Cathedral from our window.  Florence is mostly known as a city of renaissance art, and we wasted no time visiting the Ufuzzi and the Academie the next day.  While we didn’t quite distinguish all of our Littis from our Giottos, we saw an amazing arc of western art culminating in Titians and Michaelangelos that were truly breathtaking. 

There he is!

The other notable mark of Florence is its picturesque cityscape.  We spent many hours wandering (sometimes lost) around the north and south bank of the Arno river, enjoying the Florentine architecture, Florentines and of course the ubiquitous tourist.  We stopped into a number of churches – some of them housing the final resting place of the renaissance artists like Galileo and Michaelangelo.  We found a number of lovely dinner spots and enjoyed our fair share of Tuscan fare and wine.  Florence was pretty magical for me – a smaller version of Rome which condensed both the sights and the tourists.  Here are a few images from our various haunts around the city.

St Anthony?  Did we find St Anthony?  

Michaelangelo's tomb - with the muses of painting, sculpture and architechture

 

We also, at the recommendation of Mom’s former student, visited the nearby town of Siena, home of her patron Saint Catherine, whose head was on display (along with a thumb) at the church of St Dominic’s in Siena.  There is a dimension of iconography that deepened my already profound confusion at the intricacies of Catholic doctrine.  I had some difficulty experiencing anything other than that confusion as we witnessed this 13^th century head preserved and on display on an altar.  Siena was a nice little day trip for us, a comfy train ride, a comfy city, and a lovely lunch with a German couple.  We ate on a hillside café on propped tables, across the street from 17^th century address plates marked in Roman numerals.  A final note of interest in Siena – the town’s colors seemed to be black and white, and the Duomo of Siena (which almost became the biggest church in the world) was layered black and white marble – and even in its ‘unfinished’ state was pretty massive for a town the size of Siena. 

80's Michael Keaton movie?  Anyone?

It was a big church

Surreptitious photo of Mom with her patron Saint

Floor panel - slaughter of the innocents

Leonardo's St John

14th century rose window

Siena!

Siena and Florence gave us great flavors of the Tuscan area (if its somewhat well traveled parts), and I was sad to leave them, even for the beauty of the Mediterranean coast and the villages of Cinque Terre (5 lands).  Cinque Terre is five villages perched on the hillside over the sea, all within a 4 hour walk, all almost entirely boxed by their surroundings for most of the year until the railway came through.  We spent most of our time wandering in Monterrossa and Riomaggiore (where we stayed in a furnished apartment).  Monterrosssa had a lovely beach where we enjoyed the spectacular weather (unusual for Italy at this time of year, 70s and sunny every day), and Mom even took a dip!  Cheers Mom!    

That will have to do it for this entry – we are as I mentioned back in Rome on the final leg of our journey together.  We enjoyed a lovely dinner with William last night and are looking forward to meeting Paolo and Alessandra for a meal in the next day or two.  Thanks for reading!