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.
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