Warsaw Packed Weekend
My itinerary was to be Berlin, Warsaw, Lviv, Lublin but other realities intervened and I had to cut out the overnights in Berlin and Lviv. I flew into Berlin on the Friday morning and killed/maimed a few hours in the east of the city. I breakfasted on Lidl Stoff, cheap and good, in a little park in the city. My companions on the adjoining benches were a woman with a little white dog, another woman reading a book and three chaps whispering to each other who were clearly not planning the launch of a new poetry magazine. I finished my frugal repast then I had a coffee afterwards in a little hipster café where I chatted with a young building site manager called Nikolai from Khazakistan about current and less current affairs.
I caught a cross-border train for Warsaw in the afternoon, arriving in the city as night was falling. Gazing at the proliferation of new high buildings (I hadn’t been in Warsaw since the late nineties), my taxi driver said to me
‘Lots of American companies. But you work twenty hours a day.’
Some things hadn’t changed in the thirty years- most notably, the Empire State pastiche called The Palace of Culture, a very Soviet structure. Warsaw seemed a lot less fraught than modern day Berlin (which I happen to love if, mostly, from a distance). The little bits of Poland I have seen this year – Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw, Lublin, Warsaw – remind me of the early eighties Germany I worked in for a few summers, as a student: efficient, on time trains, friendly, spic and span. Is Poland Germany, avant le deluge? I met more than one Pole who thought so.
After locating my mini room in a quiet apartment block, I spent a few late evening hours wandering around the city. I crossed the Vistula to Praga, from where the Soviets had once watched the Germans flatten Warsaw in 1944 (deaths – 150,000 to 200,000) during the Warsaw Uprising. Being of a certain age, all local transport in Poland was free to me, foreign or not. And free is good, whether under capitalism or communism.
The following morning, I took another random ramble. I had decided against museums as my time was too short. I walked around a slightly down at heel market near the central station, snooping on food, clothing and other prices. Afterwards, I took ‘any’ tram out of the city and ended up outside a very modern looking Catholic church (‘Sanktuarium’) dedicated to Andrzej Bobola; 1591 – 16 May 1657, missionary and martyr, done to death during the Cossack rebellion (the Khmelnytsky Uprising), which took place between 1648 and 1659. I reminded myself that Poland had long been the jam in the sandwich between many forces, German, Scandinavian and Eastern Slav. A Polish British architect I ran into outside the building filled me in on a few details and we had an enjoyable chat about things over in the East.
I catnapped in the PM, after walking around the good old Stare Miesto, the rebuilt old city. I made a deal with myself: if I woke within an hour, I would head back to the old quarter to the Chopin recital I had my eye on. My head had hardly touched the pillow when I rolled out of bed onto the floor to the thunderous roar of an F-16 or two in the skies above the apartment. Dusting myself off manfully (the last time that had happened to me was in Virginia. U.S.), I took it as a celestial sign to go and hear Chopin.
The pianist, one Mamiko Ueyama, played a selection of both softer Chopin pieces and more ‘kinetic’ ones. Each, as always the case with Chopin pieces, sounded like a unique short story. The little recital room was full. It was a long way from the turkey feathers on an F-16 but the sentiments underlying some of the music pieces and the thunder of the jets weren’t too far apart: backen sie off, Bitte! After the recital, I trammed back over to the east, to the darkish streets of Praha. At one stage, a bit bemused in the low street lights about which tram to get back to the centre again, a slightly jumpy looking youth approached me and pointed at the oncoming tram
‘This one! Get this one!’
Back in my mini apartment room, I slept more like the deaf than the dead. There were no planes trundling through the skies and the street outside was quiet. The only sound I could hear – faintly – was the rhythmic snoring of one of my fellow guests, in another mini apartment room. In the morning, Sunday, I breakfasted on a splendid salad at the central station and took the train south for Lublin.