Welcome back comrades, it's Polska and Czesky. The idea of this trip was to meet up with our friend Andrew who is living in Brno (pronounced Bri-NO) Czech Republic, in Krakow, Poland and travel back via Prague and Pilsner to Brno.
So we flew out, leaving about the only warm weather London had all autumn, and landed in bitterly cold Krakow. Straight away we knew we weren't in Kansas any more, as we were confronted with slabs of grey concrete which function as dwellings in these parts. We soon saw horse-drawn carts filled with cabbages. It was the beginning of a recurring theme in Poland. As Alice said, Poland is very cabbagey.
We stayed at the Goodbye Lenin hostel, after the film of the same name. As you might have guessed this establishment had a kind of pop-art communist thing going on. Our room had a giant social-realist (look it up) mural painted in Andy Warhol day-glo colours. The bar downstairs looked like a cold-war bunker with emergency red lighting. I, being in my mis-spent youth something of a fan of the somehow simultaneously functional and propagandising socialist aesthetic, loved it. [That is possibly the best sentence I've ever written]. Nothing warms the heart like soviet furniture. Incidentally, the drink of choice in this most urbane of regions is vodka flavoured with,um, grass. A single blade of genuine bison grass from the vast plains of Poland sits in each bottle like a worm in a tequila bottle, only less chewy. Some say...that the yellow colouring of the vodka is actually bison piss on the grass. Tasty with apple juice.
Outside it was more concrete, unending roadworks, homicidal tram drivers and rain.
Second theme of eastern Europe – beautiful and ancient town squares. Krakow is no exception. They are brilliant – narrow medieval streets, cafés around the square, an old church or ten, and no cars.
We also went to the old Jewish suburb, and saw the wall built to keep them in. It wasn't built by the Nazis. The Jews were ostracised a lot longer than that. Coming from Golders Green, the biggest Jewish area in the UK, made it especially poignant. For Alice and I it was easy to picture what that Jewish district would have been like, as Golders Green, our little London suburb, is home to many orthodox Jews. We know them as friendly, honest, happy people with a fantastically strong community. In 1941, a ghetto was created outside of Krakow, and (according to Wikipedia) all but 15,000 of the 68,000 Jews were moved. Worse horrors, of course, were yet to come. The Jews never came back to the old district, and it is now occupied by the Polish.
A meditative note: the fallout of the war is still on-going. The government (in order to join the EU) is now having to grapple with the problem of compensation for all the land that was grabbed by the Germans and never given back to the former owners. A thorny issue we know all-too-well in NZ, but on a much larger and more complex scale.
As you might expect our trip was light-hearted, yet punctuated with reminders of a time which seemed to us for the first time recent. Geographical distance gives an illusion of distance of other kinds too.
Honest, hard-working proletariat rain, two decadent capitalists, and a portcullis.
1 comment:
Where is the photo of the cabbage carts????
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