Last day

This last day has been an emotional one.

Emma and Lucy at "Coffee Heaven"

We met up with a good friend of Dorit's, Lucy Gold, a Jewish woman from Bialystok who has been very active in preserving and commemorating Jewish culture and life throughout Poland.  To give you some idea of her standing and the importance of her work, she is invited every year to the July 4th celebration at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw (which is where she was, watching fireworks, while Emma and I were eating pizza in Gdansk!).  Lucy has so many good memories of Dorit--and she was so delighted to meet Emma.  She kept breaking into laughter, for example when she remembered Dorit ordering wine, lots of wine, at a restaurant when she visited Poland once . . . One of her more recent projects has been to involve groups of students in restoring the Jewish cemetery in Bialystok.

Our visit to the National Library has been scheduled and re-scheduled several times now, but we have finally made it!  We invited Lucy to come with us, and I'm so glad she did.

The reason for the trip was to see the Codex Suprasliensis, a manuscript from the 11th century in Church Slavonic that is on Unesco's Memory of the World list.  http://www.archiwa.gov.pl/memory/sub_listakrajowa/index.php?va_lang=en&fileid=001  The National Library of Poland considers it the most valuable item in its holdings--it's a national treasure.  

Notice the armed guard in the back.

The Codex has led a checkered past.  In the 19th century, it was divided into 3 parts, with the largest part in Poland. Like so many valuable treasures, it was "acquired" by the Nazis in WWII and somehow it disappeared . . .  In 1967 it surfaced again, and here's where the family connection comes in.  A shady character showed up at Harvard with the MS in tow, wanting to sell it for $20,000.  For various practical and ethical reasons, Harvard declined the offer, but they did ultimately contact Shepard Stone, American journalist, diplomat, and administrator of the Ford Foundation, who put them in touch with Herbert Moeller.  Moeller agreed to purchase the manuscript for the requested price and then turned around and gave the Codex to the Polish government.  I'm told he felt it was the crowning achievement in his life. And Herbert Moeller was Emma's great-grandfather.

Dorit herself had seen the MS, and I know it was a wish of hers that Emma would see it, too.  I'm very grateful that I got to be part of this adventure.

The manuscript itself is written in a strong hand without elaborate decorations, and it's on parchment of middling quality.  It was probably created for everyday use (it contains sermons and saints' lives for the month of March).

We were in a locked room with an armed guard.  The codex came out of a locked metal box.  Only the woman with the white gloves--from the conservation department--was allowed to touch the Codex.

I found it incredible and moving to be looking at something so old and so central to Slavic cultural heritage.  And what's even better ... there are doodles in the margins!  Little scribbllings and pictures that don't mean anything, and one marginal note that basically says "I pray to the Lord that I will learn how to write."  So human.

Much of what I know about the story of the Codex I learned through an article in Harvard Magazine back in the 1990s.  When we were leaving for Poland, Emma's dad gave me a copy of that issue to give to the libary.  The librarians had already acquired a photocopy of the article, but they did not have a copy of the magazine.  They were delighted to get it.

As seen from the Ministry of Magic ... our hotel is the building to the right.

Emma up at the top of the Ministry of ... er, the Palace of Culture.

After visiting the library, Emma, Lucy, and I walked for a while until we found ourselves at the gargantuan Palace of Culture, a generous gift from the Soviet government.  (For some reason, I can't help referring to it as the Ministry of Magic--it's so looming and out of place ...)

After that, Lucy took us to lunch at a restaurant serving Jewish food near the Nozyk Synagogue, which we visited next.  The Synagogue is still in use--we saw the parts of a chuppah that had been set up for a wedding a few days earlier.  (At one point, a man mysteriously walked up to the bimah and put his watch on it.  We were all puzzled.  Lucy chased him down and asked what he was doing.  He said something about compensation ...)  It's a beautiful space, but from up in the balconies where the women must sit during prayers, we could see what looked like trash (e.g. Corona boxes) stashed up behind the Ark.   There's a lot of work to do.

I'm glad Lucy took us there.  Emma and I had walked around this part of Warsaw in our first few days here, but we didn't find the entrance to the Synagogue--and now I know why.  It's completely nondescript.

From Lucy's descriptions and from what I've read, it sounds as though more Jewish people from the U.S., Europe, and Israel are visiting Poland--but very few still live here.  The Jewish restaurant had a few Jewish patrons, but it was mostly people from surrounding office just there for a good lunch.

It's been quite a day.  Emma is now sacked out (once again) and I'm celebrating our wonderful trip to Poland with a half-bottle of very overpriced white wine from the minibar.

(More pictures of Warsaw here.)

The Nozyk Synagogue

Inside the Synagogue:  a machine that dispenses coffee, tea, chocolate ... and chicken soup!

And back to Warsaw ...

We spent one more day in lovely Ruciane Nida.  The weather was always cloudy in the morning but brilliantly sunny by the afternoon.  By the weekend, our hotel was really filling up with families and groups of friends on vacation.  Trying to make conversation with the grumpy man at the reception desk, I said "It seems like you're very busy!"  "Yes," he said, "it's because we have a lot of guests."

No beer for us!

Mikolajki

On Saturday we went for a longer ferry ride, all the way up to the town of Mikolajki.  The ride started at 10:25, but just about everyone other than us was already drinking beer.  Yep, it was sort of a mellow booze cruise.


And then in the afternoon, we went on a longer kayak trip.  We made a little circuit of our part of the lake, but mostly it was a great way just to relax:  sitting in the water, in the shade, playing with the paddles, seeing how still the water could get . . .

(More pictures of Masuria here.)

On Sunday, the big challenge:  How to get from Ruciane Nida to Warsaw.  I knew that we could do it by train, but that would take about 9 or 10 hours--IF the trains actually ran on time.  So, we checked with tourist information and found we could make the trip by bus in about 5 hours.  We got a cab to the bus stop ... and the enterprising driver offered to drive us himself, for a fairly reasonable fee.  So we got to Warsaw in even less time, in complete comfort.  It was just a teensy bit dodgy because he was obviously breaking the rules:  so he had to take all the phone numbers and seals and stuff off the car and tuck them away before he got too far from his designated area.  Capitalism in action!

When we got to Warsaw, Emma and I both collapsed.  Emma's been fighting a cold the whole time we've been here, and it finally got to me, too.  So, we just settled in and watched the U.S. vs. Brazil soccer game--what a game!!!  I'm so glad the U.S. won, and I'm so glad that Abby Wambach's head finally did what it's meant for and popped a ball into Brazil's goal.

Our tour guide, lecturing the Brazilians.

Today we rallied early on, because we wanted to take advantage of the tour of Warsaw that we had booked.  Our guide was a real character, marching everyone along quickly. "No, don't take pictures now, I'll let you take pictures in a minute!"  "Ok, now you have 4, no, 3 minutes to walk around."  There was a family from Brazil that was always straggling, and he made fun of them.  Not to mention the Asian family who didn't understand English who kept getting lost.  Emma and I and two women from Australia were the "good students" who kept up with him and answered many of his trivia questions correctly.  "Who is the smartest woman in history?"  "Marie Curie." Of course, it didn't hurt that Emma and I had already seen the house where Marie Curie was born and knew that was next on the tour . . .

Emma by the statue of Chopin, in the Royal Lazienki Park.

After the tour, Emma and I saw the opulent Royal Castle.  Once again, this was totally demolished by the Nazis in WWII, but was completely rebuilt in the 1950s-1970s.  Many of the art works and treasures were saved during the war and are back in their places in the rebuilt castle.  

Don't we just look spiffy now, in our headphones?

Mirrors . . . 

Kosiuszko's heart is in this box.  If you don't know who that is and you've been celebrating the 4th of July lately, you might want to check out Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko

(More pictures of Warsaw here.)

And now Emma is collapsed on the bed again, sleeping, and I feel like I'm about ready to do the same. After all, it's 7pm!

Quiet Lake Nidzki

We're now in the self-imposed slow down of our trip:  after so much sight seeing, we are taking some time to sit and enjoy the sunshine on a beautiful, quiet lake in the Masuria.

It's pretty much the way I imagined it:  forests and lakes, with tiny frogs and lots of butterflies thrown in for good measure.  We've seen families on mushroom-picking jaunts in the tall coniferous forests and others having picnics on grassy banks by the lake.  There's a rock concert coming to the town in a few days, and it's the beginning of the season, so the hotel is still sort of warming up.  A good time to be here.

Today's forecast was cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon.  So, we took a quick ferry ride down Lake Nidzki in the morning--not much to see, but pleasant enough.  In the afternoon, once the sun came out, we asked at the reception desk if we could rent kayaks.

Not us.  But you get the idea.

The people at the reception desk seem alternately very stressed and very bored.  There seems to be some sort of a meeting happening here--we stole some of the snacks outside their conference room--but until today, there didn't seem to be many guests in view.  (After all, the train we took to get here only started to run on July 4 for the season.)  The two people we've dealt with the most are a very nice woman (who offered to do some laundry for us for free!) and a very grumpy man.  We try to time things so that we are dealing with the very nice woman, of course.  No matter who is helping us, I think they just make the prices up.

At any rate, we got our kayak and paddle and life-jacket and took off for a smaller version of the circuit we'd made in the morning.  Drifting when our arms got tired from the wooden paddle ... speeding up a bit when it seemed like we might be in the way of a motorized boat.  We saw cranes, cormorants, and some sort of fish jumping around us.  It was hot in the sun, which made the lake water dripping on us from the paddles seem quite delicious.

Our hotel as seen from the lake.

The lake as seen from our hotel.

From our balcony.

Nice and quiet.


A few more pictures are here.

Yesterday, Malbork / Today, Masuria

(More beautiful pictures of beautiful Gdansk--early in the morning and late at night--are here.)  

Yesterday, the plan was to go to visit Malbork, the enormous brick fortress of the Teutonic Knights, early in the day, and then have time to do something else in the late afternoon.

Well, problem number one was that the train we picked never showed up.  Yep, just didn't show up.  And we weren't the only ones confounded.  There were 3 German tourists who were also trying to take the train ... and probably Polish people too, but they weren't as confused as we were.

So, we all had to wait 2 more hours until the next train.  Which, of course, was late.  Emma and I had been warned that Polish trains are often late.  (Adriana said that sometimes they are delayed because people steal the tracks ...)  So, when the second train was announced to be an hour late, we thought, "Well, that's better than having a train just disappear."  But the German guys gave up.  Wimps.

This means the train is late.

As it turned out, we got to Malbork just fine--only a couple of hours later than planned.

The castle itself--Europe's largest Gothic castle--is enormous and incredibly impressive.  (Emma points out that there probably aren't many Gothic castles outside of Europe ...)  My understanding of the history of the Teutonic Knights in this area is that they were invited in, in order to quell the pagan Prussians, who were causing the Christian Poles a lot of trouble. The Teutonic Knights decided to set up shop permanently in the area, and in 1307 moved their headquarters there.  Unfortunately, their strategy included attacking and dominating the very people who had invited them there.  They were finally ousted by the Poles in 1437.

(More pictures here.)

According to our guidebook, the only way to see the castle is with a guided tour, but they must have changed the rules since last year, because they let us just go in on our own.  They don't make it easy, though. It's a huge complex, and there aren't any maps, there are few written explanations, and there aren't enough audiotours to go around.  Fortunately, we had Rick Steves on our side:  his travel guide gives a room-by-room accounting that was pretty decent.

Thank you, Rick!  (Or "Steve," as we like to call him.)

After those experiences with the train, we decided to change our reservation for the first of our two trains today to an earlier train, just so we'd have some breathing room to make our connection in the likely event that the first train was late.  Everything went smoothly, though ... And now we are here in the middle of Masuria, surrounded by forests and lakes.  We haven't done much more than walk around a bit and eat dinner in the overpriced restaurant, but the woman at the reception desk promises that we can ride bikes or rent canoes tomorrow . . .

Perhaps the worst sushi I’ve ever had.

Emma striking a pose in the surprisingly comfy "mod" chairs in our hotel.

Don’t come to Gdansk for the sushi.  At least, not if you’re going to eat at the little sushi restaurant across from the Mercure Hevelius hotel.  The edamame were brownish and withered, the sushi was warmish, the saki seemed watered down.  They serve “meat” sushi … As Emma pondered, was any Japanese person even connected with this restaurant?

But do come to Gdansk for the beauty of the city, the amplitude of amber, and the recent historical site of Solidarnosc’s beginning.

(More pictures of Gdansk here.)

We got here yesterday afternoon, but even so, we enjoyed ourselves walking through the incredibly beautiful streets—all reconstructed after Gdansk was destroyed in WWII.  The facades are lovely, and what's more impressive is the sheer number of obviously prosperous streets, from the city's heyday as a rich and bustling port.  One house has been maintained with much of the interior furnishings and decorations intact, so we took a look inside.  As in Amsterdam, the houses were taxed based on how wide they were, so most buildings are skinny and tall. 

Inside the incredibly huge St. Mary's Church--the largest brick church in  the world.  

From the top of the tower of  the St. Mary church.

(Speaking of skinny and tall … This morning at breakfast Emma and I noticed a number of very tall, skinny young men wearing jackets that identified them as members of some national teams:  Italy, Brazil, Bulgaria.  We amused ourselves by going over to get some juice and standing next to them—we looked so shrimpy in comparison!  As we guessed, they are members of volleyball teams, obviously playing in some tournament.)

The amber museum (which we saw today) was very interesting, although few of the placards were in English.  There was amber with bugs in it, an explanation of all the different colors of amber, maps of  the ancient trade routes for amber, and lots of things made from amber—both historic and modern.  About 75% of today’s amber comes from Poland, and apparently it sometimes just washes up on the shore after a storm.

Of course, we ourselves had already made a few amber purchases yesterday—and some of them were from the Wydra Gallery!  We saw the sign as we were walking along, and we had to go in and shop.  I asked why the store was called “Wydra,” and the explanation was that it was the name of the owners.  A few  minutes later, a portly gentleman came out to meet us—Mr. Wydra.  Of course, we couldn’t really say anything, but laughed and shook hands and said “Do widzenia” before going on our way.

Yesterday we also visited a surprisingly moving museum on the political history of Poland between 1956 and 1989, specifically, workers' riots, Solidarity and the events leading up to the fall of communism.  I have to admit that one of my favorite parts was the restroom, because it was right next to another room showing what public restrooms *used* to look like—which wasn’t all that different from the grotty restrooms at a few cheap bars I’ve seen.  But really, the museum was incredible because it showed footage from all the major events and had all sorts of artifacts from Solidarity, including the pieces of plywood that the striking shipyard workers wrote their demands on.

You can also see the gates of the Gdansk Shipyard (Stocznia Gdanska), where Solidarity was born.  It’s still adorned with a picture of the pope.  Next to the shipyard is a hugely tall monument to the shipyard workers killed during the strike in 1970, when at least 44 people were killed.

Now there's a souvenir shop outside the Gdansk shipyard ...

My biggest achievement of the day was figuring out how to get to our next destination, Ruciane Nida.  We worked our way through several travel offices until we found some nice people who speak English who were willing to help us research the transportation options.  But even they sort of threw up their hands—apparently, this is the sort of place one usually drives to.  Oops.  But I went online and found a train connection myself, and then carefully wrote down all the information in Polish and went to the train station.  To quote Rick Steves, “Ticket and ‘information’ windows are more often than not staffed by monolingual grouches,” but despite a few annoyed looks I managed to get what I needed.  I think.  We’ll see what happens when we show up for the train on Wednesday.

Vacation from the Vacation

In the Frankfurt airport

Planes, trains, and automobiles … We’re coming to the end of a little mini-excursion within our Poland trip: a visit to Mainz and Sinsheim, to watch the U.S. play Columbia in the early rounds of the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament.

Two days ago, we took a train from Zakopane to Krakow, where we were greeted by Adriana and Arek again.  Well, “greeted” sounds too organized.  Adriana and I had worked out a clever plan by which they would come to Krakow, get us to a lunch spot, and spend a few hours with us before dropping us at the airport.  Unfortunately, we didn’t nail down the important detail of exactly WHERE we would meet—and it’s a big station.  It took us about 45 minutes for the two parties to find each other and then a bit more to make it to where Arek’s car was parked.  And then a whole hour to drive 3 km. to where the restaurant was.  But a  lovely (and plentiful) lunch was had by all, at a nice Italian restaurant with a subtle Mafia theme. . . .  I really hope that Adriana and Arek will be able to visit us some day—we have lots of Italian restaurants to share with them!

The point of our going back to Krakow was to catch a plane to Frankfurt, and then a train to Mainz, where we would be staying for 2 nights.  And that point of THAT was to travel to Sinsheim (train) to see a match in the Women’s World Cup Soccer Tournament.  It was U.S. vs. Columbia, and it was so much fun.  The game was good—though the U.S. pretty much dominated throughout the entire game, so it wasn’t nervewracking, if that’s your idea of fun.  The biggest source of uncertainty was whether Abby Wambach was ever going to score, given her numerous attempts (no).  The fans were spirited but not nasty or proto-violent—I’ve never felt so comfortable and happy at a major sporting event. (And believe me--it wasn't due to a lack of beer being consumed by the crowd.)

(More pictures here)

Abby Wambach

The first goal.

Sold out

Mainz

Before the game itself, Emma and I spent some time walking around Mainz, seeing some of the sites that her dad remembers fondly from his stay there many years ago.  In addition to sentimental sites, we went to see the Dom and the Gutenberg Museum, where among other treasures we saw several of the Gutenberg Bibles.  (More pictures here)

It was interesting being in Germany and Poland back to back.  They both have a lot to recommend them.  Germany’s trains are a wonder of elegant simplicity:  we could ask about getting from point A to point B at any of several times in the day and get a printed schedule that included all different sorts of trains (intra-city, city-to-city, regional), with all the connections—with the arrival and departure time and  platform for each one.  The ticket-dispensing machines are plentiful and offer instructions in a variety of languages.  Nothing like the frustrating experience in the Krakow train station, where I couldn’t find someone or something to help me buy a reservation. 

And in Germany, I have a fighting chance of understanding simple written and spoken phrases!  What a joy!

No one in Poland has yelled at us for not knowing what to do or has gotten significantly irate at our not speaking Polish.  Everyone involved in the service and tourism industries is working extra hard to make sure that we have a good time and tell our friends to visit.  Not like the irate German taxi driver who almost slammed the door on my arm when I had trouble figuring out how to give him a tip.  Everything we’ve encountered in Poland is clean and well kept up (one of the advantages to being on “the tourist grid,” of course).  It’s almost as if the free market is so new that things haven’t had a chance to get run down and dirty again.  I hope it stays this way.  German cities, like American ones, have their mix of clean and orderly places/people and those who are a bit grittier, even in the touristic showcase bits.

Now we’re in Gdansk, where there are lots of German tourists and thus German being spoken.  It’s very confusing …