Histoires, Part II

So as to not get too far behind while I catch up on spring break, I'm going to preface Poland with what I've been up to here in Paris in my post-JP glory days. I can't remember the last time it rained. So I'm trying to live outdoors (no Lyme ticks to worry about here!) Grandson Pierre was here again for the weekend, and we have quite a nice rapport these days - he knocks on my door to say bonjour in the morning. At 2 and a half, he also knows how to tell a chèvre from a Camembert: as my host dad says, "Bah oui, il est très précis!" So Saturday afternoon Isabella invited me and Rachel to a barbecue in the XVe arrondissement (near the outskirts) at the apartment of the son of her host family's friends. Terrace barbecues in France do not = hot dogs and sloppy joes, but rather heaps of merguez, chicken, etc etc. accompanied by fruity cous, fresh fruit, olives & feta, and so on. We spent the whole afternoon basking in the sun and speaking lots of French. Then we headed over to the Canal Saint-Martin, which is a sort of hip artsy canal (obviously) with a retro furniture market and space to hang out. And we rounded out the evening with another of my friend Paloma's tour de force dinner parties, complete with a balmy late-night dance party on her terrace, the beams from the Eiffel Tower visible above the skyline.

I spent Sunday afternoon basking and ostensibly working in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (which is indeed made up of lots of buttes). Mostly we watched adorable little French children toddle around in flowery dresses with similarly adorable little French dogs. The Parisians really love their jardins and their parcs - I still haven't visited even half of the major ones, but I'm working on it. As we walked to a dinner of Vietnamese pho at Chez Yu in hip old Belleville, we turned a corner and there was Chinatown! It's not NY, but it definitely exists more than DC's. In all, a glorious weekend.


And now for Krakow. Our flight from Madrid left at 6:45 am, and we spent a few bizarre, semi-sleepless hours on the carnival that is RyanAir (lottery tickets? smokeless cigarettes? cash register noises?) before touching down in Poland. I must have forgotten I was going to Eastern Europe. Sitting on a bus headed to our hostel in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter and now a very trendy, up-and-coming neighborhood, I looked around and realized that everyone was zipped snugly into their thick, darkly colored down jackets. Once I stopped worrying about the fact that we had no idea where we were going because no one, including the bus schedule, was decipherable (surprise! Polish is hard to guess at), I started to feel that I had unknowingly signed up for a clown gig in my white slipper shoes, leggings, argyle socks pulled up to my knees, bright red t-shirt and chartreuse cardigan. Overcoming humiliation and sleep deprivation, Allison and I soldiered through the very wet day and saw a lot of what is really a beautiful city. We explored the old central square, Rynek Glowny, which holds the Town Hall Tower, the Cloth Hall (now home to kitsch stalls), and a church that really blew us away. That's hard to do now given how many we've seen, but St. Mary's Basilica, from the 14th century, is covered from floor to ceiling with eye-popping patterns: the ceilings are all cobalt blue with gold stars, and the walls are filled with bright yellow, gold, black, and red designs. Every hour, a trumpeter can be heard broadcasting his tune to the whole city - only he breaks off before finishing to commemorate the 13th c. trumpeter who was supposedly killed was warning the city of Mongol attack. We got our first hearty Krakovian pretzels (about 40cents) and had pierogis for dinner (about $5, and they come with some tasty yet mystifying meat chunk dip). The next day, 3 more of our friends showed up and we started the day off with a trip to Wawel, the city's castle. Looking out over the Vistula River, the hill has pieces dating back to the 11th century or so (in the archeological museum) -- the rest is 16th to 19th c. Highlight was the ceiling of 30 human heads in relief looking down on the throne room, for no known reason. We also ventured into the 12 million-year-old 'smok cave' (smok, aka dragon, was the extent of our Polish mastery). In the afternoon, we rented bikes and rode along the Vistula to what we thought was a primordial mound outside the city. Biking in the damp, refreshing air was exhilarating, but the mound was not primordial: it was built to honor the war hero Tadeusz Kosciuskzko. Nevertheless, we climbed to the top and got a foggy panoramic view of Poland. I managed to secure kielbasa for dinner and then we warmed ourselves in the candlelight of a magical hole-in-the-wall called Alchemia. The next day we spent at Auschwitz (~1.5 hrs from Krakow), which we all wanted to do even though we knew it would be a rough day. I'd been to Terezin and Oranienburg before, but seeing, in person, the magnitude of Auschwitz-Birkenau was a whole new perspective. We were all silent as our guide walked us through the rooms filled with suitcases and hair and cooking pots and shoes, and then finally into the one gas chamber that still stands. Still in silence we rode to Birkenau, which was actually much larger but built almost entirely of wood, rather than brick, so little stands - although we went into the bathhouse, wet and frigid even in springtime, and a barrack, and of course we saw the train tracks where new arrivals were told to go right or left. When we got back, we weren't up for much else, so we had a long dinner and talked about our impressions before I had to catch my train to Vienna.