Pleasure Before Business, Part 2
Ms K has been treating me like an idiot on this trip. I resented it at first, but it’s working out quite nicely.
Yesterday, for example, we traveled from Krakow to Zurich, where I was to hop on a flight to London and she was taking a flight back to Miami 90 minutes later. The process began first thing in the morning, with her instructing me, in the simplest of terms, how to get my things together. Likewise, as we made our way through security and passport control. Likewise, boarding the plane and again before de-planing. In Zurich, she accompanied me all the way to my gate, to make sure I didn’t wander off somewhere and miss my flight. And she did all of this very matter-of-factly. As if this was how we always traveled, her guiding me like a very nice kindergarten teacher.
And me? Well, I found it very helpful indeed. It could be long-term COVID symptoms. Or more likely those untested and possibly lethal vaccinations. But the natural declination of my mental capabilities has become steeper in the past 12 to 18 months. To the point where it’s difficult for me to give the attention needed to read an electronic flight schedule board or find my seat number on my boarding pass.
I’ve always been absentminded. Which is why I don’t feel uncomfortable when Ms K or the kids notice that I’m not paying attention to what I should be. They worry that it’s early-onset dementia, but that doesn’t scare me. I’ve always told them that as long as I’m not soiling myself or in evident pain, I’m fine.
It’s actually reassuring to have Ms K tending to me so solicitously. I couldn’t blame her, after all she’s been through with me over these past 45 years, if she let me wander off into a crowded foreign airport one day, never to return.
That said… I want to catch you up on the rest of our stay in Poland.
After three days in Warsaw, we took a train to Krakow and spent four days there.
Krakow, like Warsaw, has its own rich history, including being next to several of the largest concentration and extermination camps of the Third Reich. We spent a day touring Auschwitz, which felt like something we should do. It did not evoke in me the feelings some of my friends have reported after being there. I think that was because I’ve been several times to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which was, for me, more edifying and considerably more moving.
Most of the tours at the camps we visited were comprised of slowly following an uninterrupted train of people that the museum’s planners had engineered to tread through at least a mile of corridors with nothing to see except blown-up posters of what had taken place in the buildings we were in. I am tempted to say that if you are in Krakow, you should avoid this “must-see” destination (as well as Schindler’s ceramic factory, which features much the same experience). But in the second half of the Auschwitz tour, I was strongly moved by seeing the cement cells into which the SS crammed prisoners so tightly that they had to sleep (and defecate) standing up. I won’t soon forget it. It changed me in some way.
The other two days in Krakow were taken up with doing all the recommended tourist things. And they were very good and gratifying, as such “traps” always are. There is a reason they end up being cultural clichés.
But what I want to tell you about Poland is this. If you haven’t gone, you should. It is an amazingly (to me, at least) clean and beautiful country, with an engaging culture, a fascinating history, and a citizenry that, though not disarmingly warm like the denizens of Italy, Greece, and Turkey, are nevertheless friendly and very good at making tourists feel welcome.
What else? Some generalizations…
Poles are, for the most part, a strong and sturdy race. Most of the Polish men I encountered had thick forearms, forelegs, and necks. They reminded me of my friend Ziggy, whose last name is almost entirely spelled with consonants. Polish men are not generally Fred Astaire or Rob Lowe handsome, but they could be competitive in a pulchritude contest with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As for the women, I can’t claim to have worked up a defensible generality because there are so many damn tourists in Warsaw and Krakow that I couldn’t be sure. But my guess is that, like most countries where the population is racially homogeneous, they are good looking in the way the men are good looking.
The Poles are a proud people. Not proud in a condescending way like the French, but proud in the way Americans used to feel proud of being American, before we discovered we were the most racist, homophobic, and xenophobic nation in the world. You can feel the pride when they talk about the beauty of their cities and countryside (undeniable) and their history of hundreds of years of suffering under German and Russian oppression. They don’t brag. But they don’t apologize either.
They are big beer drinkers and reasonably big eaters. But their cuisine is pretty much what you would expect it to be. A bit too heavy on the meat and potatoes and not much interested in marinades and sauces and the like.
As a whole, they support Ukraine. But not because they are left-leaning like so many Americans. They lived through Communism for many years and are happy to be done with it. But the memory of the German occupation and their anti-Polish racial doctrines are still very much alive in their memories. (Fact: Half of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis were Polish.)
They have many admirable qualities that perhaps they inherited from their occupiers. They are organized and efficient like the Germans. And they are durable and fun-loving like the Russians.
There is, however, one thing they have that needs to be fixed ASAP. Their orthography. Like the Slavs and the Germans, their lexicographers of the past were disdainful of vowels. Which means it is absolutely impossible to have a glimmer of a chance of understanding anything posted on the street or on a menu. It’s just a morass of Cs and Ts and Vs.
But if you are a tourist and favor recommended tourist spots as I do, you don’t have to worry about that. There is always a big, sturdy, somewhat handsome man or woman around that will be happy to advise you in English.
