New Years in Vienna

After Christmas in Lublin, my holiday travels took me to Vienna where I met up with some old friends.

I left Lublin at around 8 in the morning and took the regional train to the outskirts of Warsaw. It was quite beautiful seeing Eastern Poland with a fresh coat of snow. After a short wait in Warsaw, I hopped on a EuroCity train which took me directly to Vienna. There was actually very little worth mentioning on this train. I played some classic Legend of Zelda and watched some episodes of Seinfeld. I snacked on some sandwiches and Christmas goodies that Uncle Dominik prepared for me before I left. A Eurocity train costs a little bit more than the regional trains but the label ensures a certain level of quality, comfort, and efficiency despite each country offering different carriages. For example, the Austrian EC coaches offer climate control and power outlets in each cabin while the Polish and Czech trains don't but offer ashtrays instead.

I arrived in Vienna around 8 at night but still had to take the Viennese subway system to get to my friend Susi's apartment.

Susi and I met in Vienna when I did a study abroad program there during my freshman year of college. She lived on the same floor of the student-home where I was placed and we spent many hours chatting in the communal kitchen (when she wasn't studying for her tests). This year she moved out of the student-home to share an apartment with her brother and her best friend. Her brother was still spending the holidays with her family in western Austria so I was able to use his room. Along with the relief from the full day rail journey, I was treated to a decently quick internet connection. Susi and her roommate had also spent the day traveling, so we caught up with life over a bottle of wine before hitting the hay.

The next day we all went shopping on Mariahilferstrasse. The girls had to make some Christmas exchanges and replace a hair-straightener that they had mysteriously blown-up. They caught the subway back home but I decided to take a walk through the city center. It was a very strange sensation. This is the first time in my conscious life that I have ever really gone back to a foreign city after having visited it earlier. The city felt just as vibrant and full of life as it had the last time I was there. I must admit I really do love that city. The main avenues in the center were full of little huts that were taking a break after Christmas. These had been used for the Christmas markets but the city made the great idea to keep them around for New Years as well. I stopped by one of the permanent street vendors in Schwedenplatz to pick up a Käsekrainer, my favorite Viennese treat. These are hot dogs that are stuffed with a cheese and then kept on a hot-grill. The buns is also kept warm but isn't slit like american hot-dogs. Instead the bun has one tip cut off and is then impaled on a steaming-rod. Mustard and ketchup are squirted in before the sausage is jimmied in. I really do love those things.

Later that night I met up with Mark and Eva. Eva is an Austrian girl who lived on the same floor as Susi and I. Mark is a UW student who was in the same program as I was.

Though he lived on a different floor, he spent much of his time with Eva and I in our kitchen. During our first stay in Austria, he and Eva became a bit of a thing. She actually visited Mark and I over the summer in Seattle, so Mark decided to come over and visit here as well. They had just come over that morning from the town near Salzburg where Eva and her family live. We spent a lot of time chatting and catching up on life. It was fantastically refreshing to have old friends to chat with. I really haven't found anyone my age in Poland who I've really with so it was great just to have someone to talk to about life, the universe and everything. We also watched Avatar that night. Second time with that film...so good.

I actually wasn't as "productive" as I could have been during these days in Vienna but I didn't feel too bad about that. It was quite exhausting at school before the vacation as Mike, the Australian I had previously been staying with, was just beginning to get back into the class rotation after his run-in with the inept Polish immigration bureaucracy. I was quite busy in Lublin and since I felt so at home in Vienna it was a wonderful chance to just sit back and relax and catch up on a lot of sleep.

Things really go going on New Years Eve though:
Mark, Eva, and I met up in the late afternoon and explored the city center. We made an important stop however at the subway station near the University. There I made a little pilgrimage to the pizza shop there, which still holds the title of making my favorite pizza crust in the world. From there we explored the inner city, which was jam-packed full of Viennese, other Austrians, and tourists from around the world. The entire district was one giant street fair. Every little street and alley had a different sound system blaring different kinds of music. There was pop, rock, traditional Austrian, polka, waltz and even a disco area.

Everywhere we went there were different shops offering traditional Austrian holiday goodies, lots of little souvenirs, and hot foods and drinks. I enjoyed a hot cup of Christmas punch. Also traditional is to pick up little tokens of good luck. At some of the stall you would see various knick-knacks of chimney-sweeps, clovers, mushrooms and pigs. I picked up a plush pig hat that I wore periodically for the rest of the night. I intend on making it a part of many New Year's celebrations to come.

After enjoying the crowd for a while longer, I bid a momentary farewell to Mark and Eva. I trammed it back to Susi's apartment where we had a lovely dinner with one of her friends who was joining us for the evening. We left around 9 and boogied over to the Student-home where we all used to live. We sat around, had some beer, and talked about life. Several friends and acquaintances stopped by as well. At around 1130, we packed things up and hopped on the subway for a few stops till we got to Prater where we waited for the New Year.

Prater is a giant park on the outskirts of Vienna. Generations ago, it was a private park and hunting ground for the Hapsburg royalty. about 150 some years ago they turned the park public. It is now one of the most favorite parks for Viennese and visiting tourists alike. It is home to the Riesenrad (Giant's Wheel) which is essentially a twin to the London Eye. It also has a small amusement park, a planetarium, a football stadium, and hundreds of acres of parks and paths. We only got a few yards into the crowd and really had no idea how large the crowd was either...but we knew it was big. There was a growing electric in the group that became more and more pronounced as the seconds ticked down. At midnight cheering broke out, fireworks went off and champagne was had all around. Speakers all around the city started playing some waltz music and everyone danced a little bit. It was generally a fantastic sensation being there as a part of that crowd.

The group of us headed back down to central Vienna. Unfortunately, our little group got split up a bit. The plan was originally for Mark, Eva, and I to drop some stuff off at the student home, before going to the center to dance for a few hours. Susi and her friend decided to go straight there. As bad luck would have it though, Susi's cell phone had died somewhere along the way. Not sure where in the crowd of thousands, they would be, the three of us decided to stay at the hostel. It was actually quite another fantastic opportunity to sit and talk and reflect on life. I headed home around 2 or 3 or so and then spent another few hours talking with my friends and family over the internet. I didn't wake up that day until quite late and essentially spent most of the day recovering. Though I did have a lovely dinner with Mark and Eva back at the student-home. The next day was my last in Vienna. It was Mark's last too. We said our goodbyes and went our ways.

The next day was actually quite uneventful. Susi and I parted ways and I went to the train station to buy my ticket. Normally I would have gone to the Suedbahnhof to catch my train but this was actually being completely overhauled. Instead, the routed the trains to several of the smaller surrounding stations. I found mine in Vienna-Meidling. I initially got there too early to catch a train so I spent two or three hours sitting in the McCafe reading. Have I mentioned how fantastic the McDonalds restaurants are over here? The coffee is actually pretty damn tasty too. My train left Vienna at about 1 o'clock. It was smooth sailing all the way to Katowice which I reached around 530.

Katowice is the local ugly, smelly, industrial town that everybody hates...it's the Tacoma of southern Poland. The train station is a worn-down attempt at Soviet brutalism. Would fit right in next the J. Edgar Hoover building in DC or next to Kane Hall at UW. Forty years of neglect hasn't helped it either. It is cold, smelly, and has a lot of questionable restaurants and vendors along with a healthy handful of bums. Lucky them...and lucky me as it turns out. The trip from Vienna had incidently snowed the entire way. When I got to Katowice (which is only an hour away from Bielsko), the ground was snowy but looked manageable. I bought my ticket to Bielsko and then went to the platform to wait. People slowly trickled onto the platform as the supposed destination time neared. And then people slowly trickled off again as the departure time came and went without any sign of the train. Worried about what was going on, I went to the Information booth but the staff didn't speak English or German so I still had no idea what was going on with my train. I saw in the corner a guy who I thought I had seen also waiting for my train. I talked to him in very broken Polish and he replied in very broken English that the train was cancelled and that we would have to catch the next train at 9 o'clock. What should have been only an hour wait ended up being about 4...in the allegedly nastiest place in Southern Poland. Joy joy joy. Apart from giving a few coins to a bum who had a remarkable command of english and spanish for a bum, I was left in peace waiting for the train. When the time came, my new travelling companion signaled to me and we quickly hopped on to finally make our ways back home. I made it home about 10 and was never so glad to be back.

Well that is all there is to really say about my vacation. The last three weeks have been mainly filled with lazing around and reading a bit, with some computer thrown in there. I feel like I sometimes sound a bit like the Arrested Development announcer when I mention what I might blog about next, but I'm fairly confident that you can expect something about skiing in Poland within the next period of time.

Christmas in Poland

I’m finishing this blog post up from my kitchen table in Bielsko, but it’s largely compiled from pieces written slightly earlier. It has been quite an eventful past two weeks, but I’m finally back home and am more or less ready to start up the new years.

I left Bielsko-Biała about two weeks ago to teach in a neighboring town for a few days. The town is called Opole and is considered the folk music capital of Poland. Unfortunately there weren’t any performances while I was there but I now know where to go to see people dance the Polonaisse. My school has several sister schools in the area and several of the teachers at these different schools made plane reservations a bit before the schedules were decided so those of us that remained were sent around to make sure that all the classes were covered. This worked out to be quite nice as it gave me the chance to see, although briefly, a beautiful city. Additionally, it meant I was able to get to my holiday destinations with one less train connection. Opole is home to one of the highest remaining concentrations of ethnic Germans in Poland. After the fall of the wall, this was a boon for Opole as they were able to reclaim their German passports and work abroad much easier than their Polish neighbors. The money sent back has greatly refurbished the town center and helped bring a decent living standard to this town, which brought a slightly more egalitarian element to the classes that I taught there. The only really notable thing about my stay there was the crazy experience I had at the Chinese restaurant.
In afterthought I probably should not have gone there but I was pining quite badly for something resembling Chinese. Unfortunately, I didn’t get anything close to it. The food I ordered ended up being turkey in a sweet apple sauce. The rice was cooked strangely and they wouldn’t give me soy-sauce or chopsticks. Didn’t really taste or feel like anything remotely Asian at all. BUT NO CHOPSTICKS!!! It’s definitely going to make me think twice before I stick my neck out and order foreign food in Poland…just not sure they can handle it very well.

I finished with work at 9 on the 23rd of December. I waited around town until 1 in the morning when I caught the red-eye train to Warsaw. As it was late night, I was expecting the train to be relatively empty. I was quite wrong. The train was jam packed, with people crammed in the aisles and even in the passage between train cars. I was lucky enough to find myself standing next to a group of young adults returning to Poland from England and they all spoke English quite fluently. We talked about England, Poland, and Seattle and they shared with me their Jim Beam that they bought at the duty-free…made a long journey a little bit better. I finally arrived in Warsaw around 6 in the morning. I had an hour break between trains, which I spent in the McDonalds drinking coffee and being kind of out of it…not having slept for almost a day. The train to my final destination took about three hours…which I mostly slept through. I couldn’t sleep that hard though for if I missed my stop I would have ended up in Ukraine or Moldova. That would have been quite bad.

Back in my first year at the University of Washington, I met many good friends in the dorms. One of these friends is Dominica Rohozinski. Her parents were both originally from Poland, although she was raised all over the world, though most recently in Houston, Texas. When the plans for Poland came through, she initially suggested that she would try to spend Christmas with me in Poland and we could both stay with her family in Lublin, a large town in Eastern Poland (about 2 hours south of Warsaw and 1.5 hours west of the Belorussian border). Her plans fell through, but her family was wonderful enough to extend to holiday invitations to me without the presence of their niece. I spent a matter of days there and each was fun and interesting. Many thanks to Dominica and her family for helping make my holiday experience what it was.
I spent most of my time with Dominica’s Uncle Dominik.
He is a retired math professor at one of the largest universities in Poland where he researched and taught about mathematical probability. The rest of the family is quite accomplished academically as well. His use of English was frequently spot-on perfect and his vocabulary was comically accurate at times. His house was in a soviet era blockflat turned condominium. His flat itself was wonderful. Though small, the originally concrete walls were paneled in fir so the entire flat felt cozy like a cabin. Whenever you walked in there was such a wonderful forest-y smell that you immediately felt at home. Walking into the living room was a continuation of the cabin theme as every sitting surface had a fur or two on it. Upon closer examination, rather than deer or elk hides, the skins were of kangaroos. Dominica’s nuclear family lived in Australia for a period of years and her aunt still lives there. Using his tenured position as an excuse to visit academic conferences on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he was able to make numerous visits to his family in Australia and picked up many of the furs along the way. Over the next few days I was privileged with his hospitality and depth of knowledge about the area of Lublin.
After arriving, I took a long nap and woke up just in time for Christmas Eve Dinner with the family (it was the 24th after all). Dinner was at the house of Uncle Jacek and his wife and two kids, both of which were around my age. Other guests included Jacek’s mother and father, his brother, and his brother-in-law. We all arrived at generally the same time. We started the “Christmas Vigil” with something called “Łamanie Się Opłatkiem” (Breaking the Wafer). Each Christmas card had a piece of edible paper (similar composition to the Eucharist…or rice paper) that was stamped with a Christmas scene or saying. Each person took one of these post-card sized papers and went around the room giving Christmas wishes to the other participants. You go up to someone, break off a piece of each others’ wafers, exchange wishes, and then eat. You repeat this until you’ve talked to everyone. Luckily the wafers aren’t very filling, for there was a lot of food to come.
After saying Grace, we began dinner. Polish Christmas Eve Dinner is traditionally comprised of 12 separate dishes (one for each of the disciples). I can’t actually remember each of the courses but I’ll do my best to describe those that I do. We started with White Barszcz (Barscht) and then followed with Red Barszcz with “uchka”( Uchka means “little ears” which they kind of look like but they’re actually just mushroom dumplings). Evidently the order of the Barszcz was deliberate as it echoes the color order of the Polish Flag. There was herring in a white sauce and herring in a red sauce. The main dish was carp. Carp is the extremely traditional Christmas Eve Dinner main course in Poland. The tradition is not to eat red meat in the days leading up to Christmas Eve and especially not on Christmas Eve itself. It was my first time eating carp and I have to admit it wasn’t bad (though far too boney). I think I still prefer other fishes over it though. There were also plum-filled Pierogi and a few dessert dishes.
After the meal, we had some coffee and exchanged gifts. I gave them a piece of ńan’duti (traditional Paraguayan lace). I got a wonderful book of sights to see in Poland. Afterwards we sang traditional Polish Christmas carols (kolęda). Jacek played most expertly on his classical guitar while his daughter accompanied on flute or violin. I also received a little Polish songbook with lyrics, chords, and notes. I’ll have to make a habit of picking up Christmas songs from around the world to play for myself whenever I settle down. After dinner, Dominik and I went to Midnight Mass in a Jesuit church in the Old-town. The church was quite full and it was interesting seeing the mild disrepair inside. Unfortunately, given my very limited knowledge of Polish the mass was rather lost on me.
That mass was however, not the only one I went to. I actually went to mass four times during the few days that I was there. I’m not sure whether it was merely the holidays that inspired the piety or whether it was a normal occurrence (my own great-grandfather went to mass every day for most of his adult life). Regardless it was quite interesting, as it gave me the opportunity to observe the differences between the styles of the different orders. I saw Dominican, Jesuit, and Franciscan churches. On Sunday morning, I went to mass at the Cathedral in Lublin at the same time as the local Bishop. It was interesting to see how the mass differed with his presence. It was admittedly hard to breathe, as the cathedral was already full to the brim with people and then the frankincense made it even trickier. I didn’t participate in the Eucharist at any of these occasions though, as I’m not a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church.
The next night we had dinner at dinner at Uncle Dominik’s brother and sister-in-laws flat. The food was once again quite good, but there wasn’t too much of a difference between Christmas Dinner and Christmas Eve Dinner. The third night, I skipped dinner and went to see the film Avatar with some of Dominica’s friends from when she was in Poland. I unfortunately didn’t get to spend very much time with them, but I’m hoping to connect again whenever I visit Warsaw. The fourth and final night, we had dinner at Uncle Dominik’s house. There was more barszcz and pierogi but there was also a dish called “flaczke” which is essentially a spicy soup made with tripe. I really enjoy this dish but it’s not very popular with anyone else my age. The main course was rather comical, as Uncle Dominik ordered in Pizza. I do love myself some Hawaiian Pizza. I finished the night with an airing of Love, Actually in Polish.
Of all the cities in which I’ve been, Lublin must be commended as having the most visitor-friendly tourist system. The tourist-council established several walking trails of the city based on several themes. Each monument had a coded and numbered sign on it, written in Polish and English, based on whichever trails it was on. For example, the castle was a part of the Jewish history, town history, and local heroes’ trails and had small signs detailing how the site corresponded to the trail. The numbers allowed tour-books with more detail to be purchased. They were even thinking about releasing an iPhone app for a tour of the city! Even without a set trail, it was still highly entertaining walking around the city and running into these signs. The town center was still in the midst of being renovated, which led to some beautiful buildings being restored right next to a historical building that hasn’t see a new coat of plaster in a couple of decades.
Also while in Lublin I stopped by their local cemetery. There were very clear divisions between the different sections of the cemetery. There was Roman Catholic, Jewish, Evangelic, and Eastern Orthodox divisions. Even without the walls, there were still strong ornamental differences between the different sections. Another curious point was that the area for the cremated bodes was in its separate section from the regular catholic graves. There was also a really touching memorial to the Katyn Massacre. In 1939-40 22,000 Polish POWs, officers and intellectuals were murdered by Stalins Red Army. It wasn't until after the fall of the wall that any of these memorials across Poland were even allowed to exist.
The rest of the cemetery was quite unique in the variety of grave forms that I found. I might be starting up a correlating blog devoted to cemeteries and gravestones. We’ll see how that goes. This was apparently the old cemetery, as it had very recently been filled to capacity. The new cemetery is on the city limits next to another site I saw: the Majdanek Concentration Camp.
Majdanek was originally constructed as a work-camp but quickly became a death camp for those interred. It was quite disconcerting how close to the city this camp was. Standing from the gates I could easily discern the individual buildings and steeples of the old town. How horrible it must have been to look out the window of one of the sleeping buildings and see not only your former dwellings, but the chimney of the crematorium that you knew would kill you. Next the road stands a 50 foot tall memorial to the Jews who died there. Farther away sitting next to the mass graves, stands an enormous covered bowl. When you approach, you look inside at the ashes of the victims. This site was not just for Jews however. Many Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, political dissidents, and Poles were kept and killed here as well. While Jacek was giving me the tour of the camp he shared with me that his father had been kept at Majdanek for two or three weeks. It was in his luck that Jacek’s grandparents convinced the regime that their son was necessary for the war effort. He was released but in the six decades since the war he hasn’t returned to Majdanek. This was quite a revelation to me, as I’d never had such a close connection to a victim. It made the tour of the camp incredibly real to me. It also made me further resolved not to concentrate on the Nazi atrocities but to make myself more aware of similar terrors that still manage to pass under the radar despite our cries of “never again”.
My post is running out of space and if you’ve made it through all this congratulations. I’ll tell you all about New Years in my next post.