MagBlog

I’m a bit behind — it’s been months since I left lovely Warsaw behind. Til next time!

In the meantime, here are the remaining, and to me most exciting, fruits of my Polish writing labours:

• Can you spot the family resemblance? Globe and Mail, Sept. 2 (with photo taken by my dad!) (see a photo of the article, with photo, above)
• What to do with Warsaw’s ‘palace’?, Toronto Star, Sept. 3 (with photo taken by my Varsovian roommate, Dorota!)

That’s it for loose ends. My graduate work is keeping me busy — not much time for non-academic writing these days…

Thanks for reading.

I thought I knew Polish food. After all, I’ve been eating it all my life. But it turns out that, as with the language, there’s a lot I didn’t know.

Here are some odd things I’ve found myself eating, and enjoying.

Birch juice. This was clear, colourless and odourless, but had a very delicate sugary taste. I expected it to be largely sugar and water, but it was strictly birch tree extract. It’s meant to clean your soul, or something. At 10 zl (more than $3) a bottle, though, I decided once was enough.

Marinated garlic cloves. Sounds yucky, but they’re wonderfully flavourful and not as pungent as raw garlic.

Inka wheat “coffee.” A remnant of communism. It’s not caffeinated, and made me realize what I really crave in the morning is the coffee experience, not necessarily coffee itself.

Apparently kasza manna is one of the oldest foods. It’s just ground-up wheat, often flavoured with fruit (artificially of course). It’s Poland’s hot cereal of choice.

Oscypki may be the only cheese that almost caused a war. When the EU set about making a register of which country produces what, Slovakia claimed this Polish smoked mountain cheese. Fortunately, we won. On a recent trip to the mountains I even visited the mountain shacks, bacowki, where oscypki are made. There I also discovered they’re fantastic fried, too. (Fried cheese is much much better than it sounds.) Here’s a dinner of fried, or prazone, oscypki.

Warsaw never ceases to amaze me with its creative events in unusually venues. Tonight is the leek festival, at an old swimming pool, which — unlike most buildings in this city — survived the war and was the only covered pool in the post-war years. The place was gradually taken over by artists and is now a theatre, concert and art space. It’s now called Centranly Basen Artystyczny — the central art swimming pool.

The leek festival thing is a gimmick, I think, put on by a band called Vegetables and Fruits. It’s a pun anyway — “pora na swieto pora” means “it’s time for a leek festival.”

I’ve had a flurry of work recently, the most interesting being an article exploring why Poles are suddenly making historic films. For that article I interviewed Ryszard Bugajski, who made a famous anti-Communist film in the early 1980s, then fled to Canada for a few years (where, incidentally, he befriended June Callwood’s son and planned, though failed, to make a film with him based on his mother’s book, Emma). My interview with him was my first in Polish in a long time, which was a bit nerve-wracking, though went well.

The article appeared in Warsaw Voice late last month. I have three articles in the most recent issue.

• Fulfilled Expectations, where I talk to local experts about what people expected of the first 20 years of freedom, and how it compared with what they got;
• Remember How It Was?, where I note some of the more absurd features of Polish life of 1989; and
• Art of Interpretation, in which I talk to Canadian singer Holly Cole about what it’s like to perform for a Polish audience.
  
   

As part of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 elections in Poland, I went to perhaps the most creative party I’d ever attended. It was in an old power plant by the river, which, as far as I can tell, stands abandoned most of the time. The large central hall was mostly empty — thus a great place for a dance party — though an old crane did hang ominously overhead. Large chunks of styrofoam were arranged in various places to create rooms with different atmospheres. In the main room, a fantastic jazz band played songs including hits from the time.

Above are photos of graffiti on the wall of the plant. The first says “I chose freedom.” In the second, the dude on the left is saying “long live freedom” and the dude on the right “let’s party.”

This is what the hall looked like:

But the best moment came at midnight. The party was called “Wylącz system,” or “Turn off the system,” to commemorate the metaphorical “turning off” of communism 20 years ago. At midnight, a giant (5 metres long?) hand bodysurfed (in a manner of speaking) into the room and pressed a giant switch, “turning off” the system. Then there was an enormous sheet cake to celebrate the 20th birthday of the fourth Polish republic. (In case you lost count, the first was 996-1795, the second 1918-1944, and the third 1944-1989.)

The hand, unfortunately, fell apart into a giant mountain of fluttering bits of styrofoam. But the finger that turned off the system survived. Here’s my friend Katharina posing with it.

Thursday was the 20th anniversary of the first free (semi) elections in Poland since the start of WWII, the start of the end of communism in eastern Europe. (It was also, in that ironic way the world has of letting its complexities be known, the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square.) It was a week of parties, Polish-style, laced with memories, commemorations, controversies and lots of beer.

Thursday there was a party along Krakowskie Przedmiescie, one of the main streets in the city. In Canada, everything would have been organized around a single focal point. There probably would have been some speeches, some thank-yous, some moving orations and lots of dreary yacking. In Warsaw, they didn’t seem to care that everyone would have a different experience. Booths were set up along the length of the street, many with photos and film from the time (though, Polish-style, most of the film setups weren’t working). There were also artistic installations along the street — my favourite being a guy who set up a bus stop as a dj booth and was mixing electronica with the sounds of people complaining (Poland’s national sport).

There were also recreations of Communist times (like the grocery store line I mention below), Communist-era music and a communal toast to freedom at 8pm.

On Friday, I weasled my way into a conference that had Poland’s prime minister of that era, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, debating the country’s second president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, formerly of the Communist party. In the afternoon, they brought in Lech Walesa, the first president and leader of the opposition Solidarity movement of those days, to talk about the last 20 years.

The talk was at the former University of Warsaw library, seen in the photo above.

This is the best photo I managed to take of Walesa in the dark auditorium. I have since then learned that it’s best to put my camera on self-timer when there isn’t enough light, so I don’t shake it by pressing the shutter button. Expect better low-light photos in the future.
Some interesting things they said:

• Kwasniewski on why the celebrations of June 4 are important: We rarely celebrate events that brought us success.
• Mazowiecki: If someone had told me in the fall of 1989 that unemployment would reach 19%, I would have hesitated. The changes destroyed the big institutions that were the source of the Solidarity movement, and the costs of reform were much higher than expected.
• Mazowiecki, on the endless arguments that pervade Polish society: People at the bottom need to speak up to destroy this hatred. The grassroots needs to bring people together.
• Kwasniewski, on why June 4 is the day to celebrate, even though 20 years ago no one was yet sure that it signified the end of communism: It’s a celebration of the people, not of the government, which is why it’s appropriate to celebrate when the people came out to vote.
• Walesa, on what he achieved: What we did was close one era and open the opportunity to another. Young people need to show the way forward now. They are the ones without historical baggage.
• Walesa: The communists lost for the first time in the shipyard, when we forced them to sign the agreement creating Solidarity. Even if they’d shot us all then, we still would have won because we showed the west that we don’t want this system.
• Walesa, on what the young generation needs to achieve: It depends on you whether what we went through was worth it.
• Walesa: I hope I don’t make it to hell, because Stalin and Lenin fill important roles there.
• Walesa: It doesn’t matter how you judge what we did, remember this: My generation didn’t have the opportunities to change our world, but you do.
  
   

Some of my best photos from yesterday’s celebration of Poland’s first free election June 4, 1989.

The statue of Copernicus peaks into a display on the importance of the pope to the fall of communism.

As part of the commemorations, there was a recreation of a 1980s-era grocery store line. There were two grumpy women behind the counter, yelling at people to stand straight and quietly and refusing to tell people what they were standing in line for. “When it comes here, you’ll know!” they screamed. That’s really the way it was in the 1980s — people would line up first, then find out what they were waiting for later, because whatever it was that was being sold, they certainly needed it.

I’m not sure how many people appreciated the irony of the Communist palace of culture advertising the anniversary of the first free election.

I’ve been slow about updating here, and have left you hanging about our adventures at the Maluch parade.

We didn’t arrive at the parade in full regalia (we ended up in a Fiat seiscento, the grandkid of the Maluch). I did get to drive a Maluch though, around my hosts’ yard before we hit the road. That involved a bit of pushing, a bit of digging around under the hood, and a bit of scrubbing the engine grease off my hands. Nothing atypical, really.

(I’m not really sure, incidentally, why I’m so obsessed with Maluchs. I’m hardly a car person… perhaps it’s the fact they’re such a tangible sign of times gone by.)

In any case, here’s a bit of a visual story of our adventures.

I’m not sure it was fully appropriate, but indulged ourselves, taking our seiscento down the parade route. Here’s the sight in our rearview mirror.

Here are the Maluchs lined up at the end of the parade.

The parade ended at a church, where the Maluchs were blessed. Here you see a priest spraying this Maluch with holy water. Yep, only in Poland.

We got the last hotel room in the whole town — turns out the Maluch parade was part of a large collection of events forming the local spring festival. We didn’t have hot water, but hey, at least we had a roof over our heads. Thank you, Motel Montana.

This Thursday, June 4, marks the 20th anniversary of the first semi-free elections in Poland — elections that, by many people’s estimation, led to the fall of the Berlin wall and of communism across the Eastern Bloc in subsequent years. But Poland is in an endless row, over this as over everything. How should we celebrate? When and where? Is there even anything to be grateful for? When I mentioned my plans to attend events commemorating the end of communism this week, someone responded: Communism’s over? I’m not even sure I know what that’s supposed to mean…

What I do know is that there will be celebrations, lots of them, on Thursday. The main events are being held in Krakow. They were to be in Gdansk, but members of Solidarity, the trade union that, with its leader and eventual Polish president Lech Walesa, precipitated it all said they’d organize simultaneous protests against the closure of the local shipyard, whose they represent. But Warsaw will have its share of commemorations too, and I’ll spend the first part of the week planning which to attend.

In the meantime, here are some interesting articles on the anniversary and commemorations:

• Divided Poland falls out over Solidarity, May 31, The Guardian: on the commemorations and why no one can agree on whether when and how;
• The soldier and the shipyard worker, May 31, CNN: how Walesa and Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader, both believe they contributed to democracy in Poland (part of CNN’s “Autumn of Change” series)
• Jaruzelski: I agonized for months over martial law, AP, May 28: Jaruzelski acknowledges mistakes
• Still in the soup, The Economist, May 28