4 August, 2007: Sarajevo

I must admit that it was with some relief that I left Majda and headed on to Sarajevo. Don’t get me wrong, it was a perfectly nice place and it was nice of Majda to let me have her bed last night, but not so nice to charge me extra without telling me beforehand. It wasn’t much and I would’ve been ok with it (I actually am), but it feels a bit, I don’t know. Not dishonest, maybe underhanded? Or maybe she just honestly forgot to tell me, but I’m now rather wary after Dubrovnik. Anyway, this morning I was woken up bright and early, but for some silly reason decided to take the later bus to Sarajevo. Majda drove me to the station and I had just enough time to buy a ticket and get on the bus before it started. The ride was beautiful and gave me ample time to think, which is dangerous when you have a rather active imagination.

Bosnia stands halfway between the ruins and reconstruction—for every newly-restored building, five bombed out ones remain. In one town, everything had been rebuilt, except the mosque whose lonely minaret stood out from the weeds in the empty lot like a lost thing. I remembered reading about Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb forces who would take over towns, expel the Bosniaks, destroy the mosques, and then pretend that the town had always been Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat. Looking at the lonely minaret, I thought of the burnt-out synagogues in Poland, monuments to vanished people.

Sarajevo is a brooding city, particularly in the fog, and I cursed as I got of the bus. It was gray and cold, making me long for the coast. No matter, I am a Poland girl at heart: I love gloomy gray cities with tortured histories. Having a sweater in said gloomy gray cities with tortured histories makes things all the better as well. The tram moved slowly and I kept seeing places that were vaguely familiar to me from watching the news with my parents or sneaking Newsweek to read another story about the genocide. The cheerful yellow Holiday Inn where the journalists and Bosnian government stayed throughout the siege stands over bullet-scared Sniper Alley, where Serb forces in the hills would pick off civilians running from shelter to shelter. I wished I had Anthony Lloyd’s fantastic book with me to read the different passages at the various places.

I got to the hostel without too many difficulties, though there are fewer signs here than there were in Bucharest (how that is humanly possible, I do not know) and gave the German side of me a headache. After changing into some slightly more weather-appropriate clothes (why didn’t I bring that fleece? Silly me), I went for a walk. Just down the hill from the hostel is a sprawling cemetery of war dead, one of many that dot the city. I wandered through, reading headstones and listening to the rushing water in the small channels that drained the crescent-shaped pool that almost surrounds a memorial tomb. One young soldier stands at attention in front of it, while directly across the pool another young soldier stands and wipes away tears. I wondered with the guilt of someone whose country dithered around and watched this city and country go up in flames because it was not politically convenient to take action at the moment who he was crying for—his family, his friends, himself?

And me? Why am I here reading names of people I never knew? I think of Milosz’s poem “Dedication”: 

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

…What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
That you should visit us no more.

Maybe that’s all it is, just another Westerner with a guilty conscience, trying to apologize for her nation's slothful neglect. I wonder how top policy makers sleep at night. I hope that when they do, they see the faces of the people they chose to wring their hands over rather than save. Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Chechnya…we let our leaders and diplomats dither and then deliver hollow apologies at the sides of mass graves with the engines of their waiting jets throbbing in the background, ready to take them away as quickly as possible.

Milosz again:

Love no country: countries soon disappear
Love no city: cities are soon rubble.

Throw away keepsakes, or from your desk
A choking, poisonous fume will exude.

Do not love people: people soon perish.
Or they are wronged and call for your help.

Do not gaze into the pools of the past.

Their corroded surface will mirror

A face different from the one you expected.

Czeslaw Milosz: “Child of Europe”

We are always able to say the right words before, during, and after the fact. Especially after the fact when it is so easy to pay a visit, lay wreaths, make a pretty speech, and then leave as quickly as possible. We talk and talk, but never back up our words. We see it over and over again and never learn how to break the pattern. I personally don’t think it ever can be broken. We never can learn.

I walked on thinking about Sarajevo in 1994 and Warsaw in 1944 and proceeded to get hopelessly lost.

Once someone pointed me in the right direction, I wandered to Bascarscja and poked around their fabulous bazaar and then tried to find something to eat. I ended up in a deli-restaurant and the waitress helped me select several small slices of delicious, delicious burek—cheese with potatoes and onions (burek ruskie?), spinach, and meat. I ended up eating on Pigeon Square and felt a lot better about things because it reminded me of Krakow a little. Then I discovered I’d been nailed on the arm by a pigeon. A year in Europe and this is the only the second time, but I was annoyed. Fortunately, I had baby wipes and water to get most of the mess off. To comfort myself, I bought a few gifts for people and ended up in a café called Planet drinking Bosnian coffee and eating the most delicious cake in the world. Then, I went to the Latin Bridge to see where the Archduke was assassinated and found a cool little museum with all sorts of pictures and multimedia displays in the window. Unfortunately, it was closed, but I decided to come back first thing the next day.

In the evening, I ended up watching Die Hard 4 with some people and chatting almost until midnight.

5 August, 2007: Sarajevo

My alarm is officially the most annoying thing ever and I thought everyone was going to kill me when it went off this morning. After breakfast, my friend Cynthia and I walked around town looking at the sites. She’s very smart and is ripping sections out of her Lonely Planet to make it more portable. I think this is brilliant but don’t have the heart to do it to my brand new copy. We grabbed lunch at a burek place and then went to see the mosque, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and some other interesting things. The museum near the Latin Bridge was open when we got there, and was pretty interesting for such a small place. It was only one room and covered the city’s history from the Congress of Vienna to WWI. I liked the photos, but the best part was an overdone ‘80s film about the assassination of the Archduke. The only redeeming quality of the melodrama (complete with a doe-eyed Princess Sophie making eye contact with the potential assassins in slow motion) was that the actor playing Cabrinovic was HOT. After reading the somewhat inaccurate and biased account in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, I rather like Nedja. I think this mostly has to do that he was the worst assassin ever (couldn't hit the broad side of an Archduke with a bomb) and also didn't sport that ridiculous moustache like Princip did.

We also went to this fantastic handicrafts store run by women who lost their husbands during the war and knit and crochet things to make money for themselves as well as several charities for refugees. It was a little more expensive, but the clothes were so gorgeous and it was for a good cause, so I didn’t feel guilty. After cake and coffee at Planet, we wandered back up to the hostel. This was where the drama began. The four Australians I met in Mostar were there and were having some serious disagreements about going to Albania. This made my head spin. Cynthia and I ended up going to dinner with them at To Be, which was fantastic. I had a yummy pepper steak with grilled veggies and some very nice house wine. One of the guys and I left early to go to the internet café and start looking for things for Montenegro (they leave tomorrow and I planned to join them the day after). Lord, lord the drama! Everything was full and Tim was trying to all the work for three people and also tried to see if I could be added in the next day, etc. etc. Anyway everyone was getting so snappy and stressed, so I checked out. These people were getting way too flaky for me and so I booked a room at a place in Kotor just in case, but I’m not crazy about that. The snarking and indecision continued among my potential traveling companions and I was just tired of it all and decided that I’d just do my own thing and avoid dealing with it. Too bad, as Tim seems cool, but the others not so much. It’s a dynamic I can definitely do without.

6 August, 2007: Sarajevo

I woke up before my alarm, so I decided to take advantage of the empty shower and beat the line. My only complaint about this hostel is that there is only one shower, making for long lines at convenient times or having to get up early. Not that I’m complaining much, as that means I have the whole day to myself.

A bunch of us went on the hostel’s city tour, which is done by two of Haris’ friends. They were both awesome and knew a lot about the city even though they were just students like us. We sang and bounced around in the van as we drove through the city, heading first to the Tunnel Museum out by the airport. To get there, we drove through the Serb part of Sarajevo and Alma (one of the girls) explained that everyone came to this area to do their shopping because everything was so much cheaper there…even petrol! This used to the be the capital of Republika Srbska (RS) until it was moved by the more moderate government to Banja Luka following Radovan Karadzic’s resignation as president of RS. Karadzic is a war criminal who remains at large today, living as a folk hero among Bosnian Serbs, and several UN manhunts for him have ended in embarrassing failure. I have nightmares I’ll end up meeting the guy in a bar or something, because that would be just my luck—drinking with a war criminal.

Anyway, the Tunnel Museum. During the Siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnians dug a tunnel from the city center out to the UN-controlled airport as a way of smuggling in humanitarian aid, as well as weapons and soldiers. Refugees also used the tunnel to escape into the mountains and make their way to Croatia. The UN was against the tunnel’s construction because of the (extremely stupid) arms embargo that it had placed on the Croats and Bosnians and also because it was still more evidence that they were not in control of the situation in Bosnia like they claimed they were. The Bosnian army wasn’t about to listen to the UN, and so construction proceeded and the tunnel was completed in 1992. It was 800m long, with just enough space for a small rail cart. People walked through it single file, carrying up to 80 kg of food on their backs, crouching so they didn’t smack their heads on the support beams. This would be like me picking up Alex “Red” Gordon (Vanderbilt’s starting point guard, for those not in the know), slinging him over my shoulder, and carrying him across slightly more than 7 football fields.  Keep in mind that I weigh about 55 kg.

Alma said that she went through the tunnel with her mother. They made it through, crossed the mountains to Croatia, spent some time in Slovenia, and eventually settled in Switzerland. She was 5 years old at the time. Her father remained behind to fight and they went for a couple of years without a word from him. He ended up surviving the siege and came to join them in Switzerland. When Alma opened the door, she didn’t believe that he was her father. She thought her father was dead. This reminded me of a much darker version of the story my cousin Eleanor likes to tell about her son Steve’s reaction to his father’s homecoming from the Second World War. “You can’t be my daddy,” said little Steve. “My daddy doesn’t have any legs.” He only knew his father from a framed portrait that showed him from the waist up.

We watched a film about the siege, images that I vaguely remember seeing flicker on the screen before my mother realized I was in the room and changed the channel. There were several clips of soldiers slogging through the tunnel, emerging blinking into the sunlight. One fellow still looked cheerful enough to wave brightly at the camera in a classic “Hi, mom!” gesture. I couldn’t help but giggle.

After our tour was finished, we piled back into the vans and bounced back to the city to look at some more sights. On the way there, we peppered Alma with questions, which she was more than happy to answer. I was especially interested to hear her say that she has no problem with Serbs (from Serbia proper) and has friends from Belgrade who study with her. She wouldn’t be opposed to dating one of them. Bosnian Serbs, however, are a completely different story. “How could you marry someone who tried to kill you?” she asks. Personally, I don’t blame her.

Our next stop was the Holiday Inn and Sniper Alley. The Holiday Inn became famous because it was the only place UNPROFOR effectively protected in the city, as it became the home of foreign journalists and the Bosnian government during the siege. Everyone else was fodder for the Serb snipers positioned in the hills. Sniper Alley runs along one side of the Holiday Inn down to the river and beyond. In his masterfully disturbing book, My War Gone By, I Miss it So, Anthony Lloyd describes watching people run from cover to cover, hoping to avoid bullets, and how he and a friend walked across Sniper Alley because his friend, a Bosniak, said that he “would not run for those people.” Me, I would’ve run like hell. People used to go down to the river to try and get water or try to swim across and escape the city that way. Most never came back. The first casualty of the siege was actually killed on the bridge going over the river—a young woman, a medical student from Dubrovnik, who was part of a peace march.

The Serbs battered the Old Town furiously, but also turned their guns on the Olympic Stadium (Sarajevo was the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics). In a flurry of shells, the Olympic complex was destroyed, the first time in history that such a deed was done. This act, along with the destruction of the rest of the city, prompted the then-president of the IOC to visit the city during the siege in 1992. He gave his support to the city and pledged aid for reconstruction. I remember watching a fluff piece about this during the ’92 Olympics—the commentator (Bob Costas maybe?) walking among the ruins of the blasted stadium and pushing aside some rubble to reveal the shattered rings. Today, the facilities have been rebuilt and Sarajevo put its name in as a candidate for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Though they did not get the bid, I hope that someday they will. How hugely symbolic would that be?

After our tour of the stadium, we went for a quick lunch and looked at the Latin Bridge, the site of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and then went for coffee. My friend Rebecca and I then went in search of bus info and my quest turned into a disaster! It turns out that there aren’t really any buses to Kotor from Sarajevo and the travel agent explained that I would have to get off the bus at some town in Montenegro at 3am and wait to catch a different bus. I peered at her over the top of my glasses and asked, “And you think this is a good idea why?” She agreed that it was “a bit inconvenient” and so I went to the bus station to see if they had any leads. Naturally, they didn’t and I cursed up a blue streak on the tram ride back before hitting on a Brilliant Plan^TM: why didn’t I just say to hell with Kotor and head straight to Ulcinj on the Montenegrin/Albanian border. The bus would get there around 5 am, but it would be light out and I could always go to the beach if I couldn’t find a place to stay that early. Then, I’d just hop on the bus to Albania. Since Montenegro was in the middle of a terrible drought, I figured this would be brilliant and so I bought my ticket and went home satisfied with both my plan and the fact that I got an extra day in Sarajevo.

7 August, 2007: Sarajevo and the Big Honkin’ Bus Ride

Thanks to my Brilliant Plan™ I was able to sleep in and have a relaxing morning. I took my time because I figured this would be my last decent shower until Tirana, or more likely Ohrid. As I said before, Montenegro was having a dreadful drought and I’d heard more than one story from my fellow travelers about showers with barely a trickle of water. Albania is also having an energy crisis—what this entails, I do not know, but it is apparent that I am heading to the Third World Europe-style.

I wandered around Sarajevo one last time, saying goodbye to my favorite sites. At the Jewish Museum, I ran into a friend and we had lunch together. He’s a nice fellow, very laid back and easy to talk to. It was nice to tell him my fears about traveling to Albania alone and not have him laugh at me or brush me off as being a silly little bint. Instead, he reassured me that I’d be fine and he was rather jealous that I was heading that way. It’s a pity that he and some of the other fantastic people I’ve met here are heading onto Belgrade rather than Montenegro/Albania. What can I do though? I got some Euros (since breaking away from Serbia, Montenegro switched to the Euro) and then had one last delicious piece of cake at Planet. My waiter was very sorry to see me go. Then, I went back to the hostel to grab my things and ended up watching a bit of the Simpsons Movie before heading to the bus station. Once I got there, I waited around a bit and encountered the only rude Bosnian I’ve ever met—the lady at the info booth who roller her heavily kohl-rimmed eyes at me when I double checked my platform. And then I made a very big mistake by trying to use the bus station toilet. You know how in Trainspotting there is a scene with “the nastiest toilet in Scotland”? Yeah, I got the nastiest toilet in Sarajevo. I was Not Pleased, yet slightly amused because though the toilet had no paper, there was plenty of soap and hot water. Go figure and thank God for wet wipes.

Anyway, the bus ride was loooooooong, but I made friends with this Kiwi named Miles. I convinced him to come to Albania with me (he was making his way to the Greek Islands) and he showed me a couple of really cool videos on his laptop, including one he was making. We both tried to get some sleep, but it was very difficult because the ride was so bumpy.

2 August, 2007: Mostar

I threw my stuff into my bags, said goodbye to everyone at the hostel, and headed off with the group to Mostar. There were 10 of us, plus Ivica and his friend who was driving the van. Because of my bags, I ended up in Ivica’s car with Tricia and Sara, which was much more comfortable than the van looked.  I was disappointed that I couldn’t sit with Greg, this really cute Aussie who I’d made friends with yesterday. Such is life. The drive into Bosnia involved four border crossings, no stamps, and oodles of gorgeous scenery that was only a prelude to the beauty I would later see.

Mostar is located in a deep valley cut in two by the blue-green river. On the left bank live Bosnian Croats, Catholics in other words, and a large cross looms on the mountain overhead. Cross the famous new Old Bridge (the old one was destroyed by Croatian forces during the war) and you are in the Bosniak Muslim section of town. That side seems much more lively, with a huge bazaar and little eateries lining the street. There are things on the other side, but that part was hit very hard during the war because the front line went down the street on the Croatian bank, about 400 meters from the river. On this street was a Catholic church and monastery, a synagogue, and I think a mosque as well. The church was rebuilt, but the synagogue is little more than a gravel-covered lot with a small memorial and a sign promising some sort of future reconstruction surrounded by a fence with menorahs and stars of David on it. Some of the buildings on the street have been repaired, others are still in ruins with large signs warning the curious to keep out. Still others are half-repaired and half pocked with bullet holes.

Spanning these two quarters 24 meters above the swift, yet glassy, river, is the Bridge. The destruction of the Old Bridge during the war was not just for strategic purposes, but also hugely symbolic. Here were two groups of people who had lived together for centuries with no problem and then came the war and everything changed and all the bridges were pulled down. Today, the reconstruction stands representing the crossroads (and, like Poland, sometime battlefield) that is Bosnia and is surrounded by the gossamer fabrics and painted copper of the bazaar. How beautiful.

We ate lunch at a traditional restaurant, where we stuffed ourselves silly. Meat, cheese, tomatoes…amazing. Then we went for Bosnian (NOT Turkish, as they are quick to inform the uneducated traveler) coffee at a café-bar called Ali Baba’s Cave, which is famous for both its drinks and its setting in a huge cave carved out of the river. It also has the reputation as being the coolest place in Mostar in the summer, and boy did we appreciate that!  While the others shopped, Ivica took me to give my stuff to the hostel, more specifically the hostel’s owner who was going to meet us somewhere close. It turned out that a little old lady met us and Ivica entrusted her with my bag, even though I was rather worried about giving such a small old lady my big heavy bag, but I was assured that it was fine. I assumed that the hostel had to be close, so I didn’t say anything and off we went again. It was a definite chink in DBC’s armor though—complete lack of concern for what comes after their place. I would have helped the old lady, regardless of how close the hostel was, but I was not in charge unfortunately. I quickly forgot about that though as we went to photograph ruins on the main road, which served as the front between the Serbs and the Croats with the Bosnians, as usual, being stuck in the middle. Shells of houses still stand, trees growing from the foundations to create a leafy green roof and curtains in the shattered windows. On either side, their neighbors have moved back and rebuilt. Bullet holes still show through the new paint, scars that will never fade.

Putting on my journalist’s hat, I pestered Ivica with questions about the war, the West, and whatever else I could possibly think of. I wanted a “Croatian perspective” so to speak before going into Bosnia and then to Serbia. So we talked about the war, the West, Macedonia, language, everything. His home in Dubrovnik was destroyed during the siege and he lived as a refugee in hotels and casinos, but he says that Dubrovnik came back and so will Bosnia. 10 years, he says, and only a few ruins will remain for the tourists. I do not share his optimism because he seems to forget the economic side of things (strange for him) and that Dubrovnik came back thanks to the tourist dollars and the international aid given to the city because they were such a tourist attraction. Mostar? Bosnia? Not so much. His optimism is nice to hear though. He is still disappointed with the West though, for failing both Croatia and Bosnia, especially in terms of helping refugees and also by supporting an arms embargo that left them outarmed against the JNA. And the Serbs. “They would bomb a place out, then spray paint Cyrillic letters on them saying THIS IS SERBIA,” he says, gesturing at the ruins. I can’t help it, but my opinion of the Serbs is plummeting. I sternly told myself that I promised to keep and open mind and I damn well was going to, at least until I got to Belgrade.

We met back up with everyone and drove out of the valley and up into the mountains. First we stopped at an illegalbosnianwinery! and were liquored up with some passable red and white wine as well as a bit of brandy. This was supposed to be the liquid blanket to keep us warm while swimming in the waterfalls, particularly because it was starting to get late. The sun was setting by the time we reached the swimming area and the water was COLD. This is when I hate having little body fat. I consider myself to be in pretty good shape, but once again I was having trouble swimming because I was so cold. Lake Superior has nothing on this. In spite of this, we had a grand time splashing around.

All too soon, it was time to go and we drove to Medugorje so that I could catch the bus. Ivica took me to the stop, gave me 5 euro, and left quite quickly. I was no longer his responsibility. He did talk to a woman who promised to help me apparently, but I decided not to panic. The ride was too beautiful to do anything but reflect.

More so than Croatia it’s very easy to fall in love with Bosnia—it’s jagged mountains, rocky hills and deep valleys. It’s easy to see why people defended this land in spite of the stories of atrocities carried from mouth to mouth by refugees, and in spite of the arms embargo. Countries are not only defended because they are home, that’s a huge part of it of course, but I think the defense becomes that much more spirited when the country is so naturally beautiful. Ukrainians and Moldovans belittle their respective countries, calling them ugly and worthless. How can one defend something more than one’s individual property with a mindset like that? Granted, Moldova and Ukraine are not particularly rich in natural beauty, but still. Bosnia, however, pulsates with beauty, mixed in with a healthy dose of stubbornness. Reduced to rubble, it is clawing it’s way back, doggedly rebuilding and repairing. Like Poland Bosnia is rising from the ashes because it is simply too stubborn to give up and die. That, and it pisses off the Serbs, which seems something of the national sport. If coming back will send Belgrade and Banja Luka (especially Banja Luka) into paroxysms of apocalyptic rage, Bosnia will do just that and then laugh in their faces and those of the rest of the doubting, dithering and uncaring world. There is still a long way to go though, but this is forgotten once you look out the window. Drive through the countryside at dusk, jagged mountains slashing into the sunset, throwing long shadows over fields of ruins, shattered stones, land mines hidden beneath the weeds. You don’t think about the destruction because your mind is consumed and the only coherent thought you have is: how beautiful, how beautiful.

Unfortunately, I could only stay in reverie for so long. The sun set, leaving darkness and unfamiliarity in its wake, giving me the uncomfortable feeling that something was going to go wrong. The lady Ivica foisted me upon told me to get off with her, and once I did I had no idea where I was. In a mixture of Croatian, French, and Polish, we managed to go along and the lady eventually managed to fid someone who knew where the hostel was and how to get there. Finally we met up with a guy from the hostel in the square near the bombed-out school. He seemed nice enough, but then shouted at me for making his mother carry my heavy bag 500 meters to the hostel. I bit my lip hard to try to keep from crying—I knew, KNEW that I had been stupid to let her take the bag, but I didn’t know where the hostel was and the man even said that it wasn’t my fault but he wanted me to tell Ivica that he was pissed. I wanted to say that the chances of me ever talking to Ivica again were slim to none. The illusion was shattered and I wanted nothing to do with that hostel again. They were as nice as could be, but the bottom line was the most important thing. Economy, always economy. And here I was, taking the fall for something that was about 95% not my fault. The only thing I really could have done would be to insist that Ivica carry the bag wherever we were going. This would not have flown, I don’t think, and I assumed that the hostel was close. Once again when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me and let me tell you did I ever feel like one. Regardless of fault, I felt awful and the tears burst forth because I absolutely hate being yelled at (and also being treated like something was my fault when it mostly wasn’t). Majda, the owner, and her brother and the mother were all very nice and kept trying to assure me that it wasn’t my fault and the brother did say that he was sorry for being like that with me when I couldn’t have possibly known where the hostel was and all that. The mother kept telling me that she was very strong and it didn’t bother her so much. Grandmother would have said the same thing (well, at least to my face, in private she would have been pissed). They were also really peeved at Ivica for ditching me at the bus station in Medugorje. “Have you ever been to Mostar?” the brother demanded of me. I shook my head and blew my nose. “Have you ever been to Medugorje?” Again, a shake of the head. “Did you know where you were supposed to get off? Did anyone tell you?” Again, negative. The brother explodes. “Then why the hell didn’t he just drive you back?! It’s not like it’s that far!” I agreed wholeheartedly and felt much better. After things calmed down, I met some people in the hostel, including a girl who was going with a group to Montenegro and then to Albania and invited me along. I was psyched about this stroke of very good luck, as I wasn’t crazy about the thought of hanging out in Shkodra alone.

In short, everything works out for the best. I’ve seen this time and time again, but I still am not a believer for some reason. If I hadn’t given the mother my bag, I would have had to deal with ALL of my stuff coming back from Medugorje and try to find the hostel, the latter was hard enough on its own. If I hadn’t come in so late, I wouldn’t have met Thalia and gained a travel partner and if I hadn’t gone on the stupid excursion, I would have missed an opportunity to flirt with Greg. Life always works out, I’ve found.

3 August, 2007: MOSTAR

My bed was so comfy that I didn’t want to get up this morning! After a cup of tea and a failed attempt to upload some pictures onto Facebook, I went for a long walk around town. There was really no need to hurry, as I’d seen most of the main attractions, so I wandered at a leisurely pace and took the time to nose into various shops that all seemed to carry the same things—painted copper, silver coffee sets, flowing scarves and shirts—yet are each so intriguing. I wanted to buy something, but nothing really stood out, so I wandered off the main streets and came upon a little white cemetery. The markers were little white obelisks with green letters, a Muslim cemetery, and one for war dead. All the graves had similar dates: 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995. Old men and young men about the age I am now made up the bulk of the dead, but here and there were women’s names or a teddy bear placed near a the grave of a child. Looking around at the buildings that surround this little place, I wondered who these people were and if any of them had lived (and died) nearby, in their own homes. How unimaginable—to die so horribly in the one place you are supposed to feel completely and absolutely safe.

As I sat and wrote the last words, a little girl came up to me and started talking. She carried a cell phone, but was thin and dirty and missing teeth. I thought she was twelve and so nearly had a heart attack when she asked me for a cigarette. She wanted to talk, but I was so unnerved that I pretended to be Polish and fled. I ended up in a restaurant on a terrace looking toward the bridge and saw a young man prove himself (and earn a wad of Euros) by leaping off of it to loud applause. The call to prayer then blasted across the valley and I was just awestruck at the harmonies and melodies of the chanting from the nearby moques, so after I paid my tab I visited two of the oldest ones in the city. In the first, I climbed up the minaret and looked around the city while hugging the wall because those things are deceptively high. It’s a really excellent view and I snapped more pictures than I care to admit. In the second one, the wall paintings on the inside glowed in the early afternoon sunlight and a few looked like they inspired Tolkien’s patterns and designs that I’d seen in a book of his work. When I went back through the market, I bought a bullet casing that had been polished and then engraved with gold. “There were millions after the war,” the lady told me, “and really, what else were we going to do with them?” Throw them away? Not creative enough and what better way to laugh in the face of the world who ignored you than to sell the bullets that nearly destroyed you to tourists coming from some of those same countries looking for an adventure? I like it, I like it.

After more wandering and a bit of email-checking, I took a different route to the hostel and passed by another little white cemetery. This one was mostly Muslim, but there were a few crosses here and there. A girl’s face stared out at me from where it had been lovingly carved onto her tombstone, making me shiver and hurry home.

Back at the hostel I ended up going out to dinner with a Canadian guy named Dave, his Ozzie girlfriend Jane, and another girl from Australia named Jane. We had a lovely time and actually ended up eating at the same place where I ate lunch yesterday. Yum!

I asked if I could stay an extra night, which I could but I ended up sleeping in Majda’s room with her brother in the other bed, an arrangement which made me very uncomfortable. Plus, I got charged extra for it, which kind of pissed me off because I wasn’t told about it, but whatever.

To quote a friend, I've had a bit of a break keeping up this journal. It's just been much easier to quickly use the hostel's free internet then go out, find an internet cafe, and (gasp) pay. Do you know how many drinks books you can buy with that money?? DO YOU? 

Good, I don't either. 


30 JULY, 2007: DUBROVNIK 

With a skillful amount of pursuasion, I was able to foist Harry Potter onto Laura before heading to catch my bus to Dubrovnik. I had a bit of a bounce to my step, partially because I was setting out on another adventure and also partially because my pack was that much lighter now that I was rid of Potter. Anyway, I have no idea what possessed me to book a spot on the late bus (which of course showed up even later), but the ride to Dubrovnik was fantastic. Croatia is quite a country--leaving Zagreb you pass through lush green fields and Italian-looking towns with Slavic names as you go down the Dalmatian coast to Split. After a few chapters in a rather bad novel, you look up to see a drier, craggeir landscape, which continues down to Dubrovnik with the occasional slice of the brightest green to make it look that much drier once you've passed on. The mountains fall into the clear blue sea and the war that nearly tore this region apart seems like it happened in another world. 

Everyone is raving about Dubrovnik now that the rubble from the militarily pointless shelling it suffered 10 years ago has been cleared away. Yachts and crusies frequent here and the crowds are tanned, willowy, and more often than not wearing ridiculously large pairs of sunglasses. I flipped through my Lonely Planet, wondering if the city was going to live up to the fantastic hyperbole of the guide book and then looking back outside for some trace of the war. There isn't much: the occasional bare foundation, a blasted shell of a house, two broken stories. These alternate with elaborate roadside gravestones and plaques. At first, I thought these were tributes to fallen soldiers, but then saw that the dates were 2001, 2003, 1999. There are other, more common ways to die here as well, like in car accidents caused by zipping too fast around the switchbacks. 

Dubrovnik starts trying its damndest to impress visitors as soon as they get inside the city limits. The narrow road from Split becomes the delicate and extremely wobbly-looking Franjo Tudjman Bridge. Tudjman was a character: led Croatia to independence and then persided over a corrupt and ineffective governement. Some Croatians have wondered if the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague would have paid as much for his extradition as they did to Serbia for Milosevic. Personally, I doubt it. Milosevic had the reputation of a really bad sort, while Tudjman just sort of ambles by in comparison. He was never the big catch, mostly because it was Bosnian Serbs who committed the worst of the war crimes during the Balkan Wars (Srbernica massacre, the siege of Sarajevo, shelling Dubrovnik). I digress, as usual. Back to the less depressing stuff. Dubrovnik has been a major seaport and trading center for centuries. As a free city, it was an important trading post between the Ottoman empire and Europe, and a traditional place of asylum for persecuted peoples. Boatloads of Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain settled here, creating a lively Sephardic community still seen in traces. Byron called the city "the pearl of the Adriatic" and it is not an exaggeration. Even in the 19th century, without the cleaning up and restoration the buildings have undergone for the tourists, this would be an impressive, impressive site.

I finally arrived and, after braving the Vultures (little old ladies trying to get you to rent a room in their flat, no not that cow's flat, mine, and for only 20 euros! Don't you want a room?????), I grabbed a taxi to my hostel. The driver was nice, but was one of the scariest-looking men I've ever encountered. He had a hive of dark purple-pink warts sprouting out of beard I guess he was growing in an attempt to hide them. It wasn't working. Also, his shirt was opened Mediteranian-style to reveal another purple-pink growth, this one looking slightly like a spread-out nalesnik, growing over his chest. I tried very hard not to stare, but it was rather difficult especially because he had several random mirrors arranged on the dashboard. I kid you not. He was nice and did get me to the hostel without any senic tours of the city or other fare-upping schemes. 

Dubrovnik Backpacker's Club is really something. A family-run hostel (father, mother, six kids), it is a hopping wild place that, like the city, sucks you in from the moment you arrive. Before I knew it, my things were stowed in my room and I was on the terrace admiring the view of the city and drinking some sinus-clearing plum concoction that was given to me as a welcome drink. Most of the people staying ended up staying for quite some time, as evidenced by an Ozzie who came for three nights and stayed for an extra two weeks. I also happened to meet a fellow who went to college with some kids I knew from high school--what a small world! Dinner was provided by Milca, the smiling mother to this rowdy bunch of backpackers and a spectacular cook. She didn't mind having another mouth to feed (what mother does?), and I was soon up to my ears in lamb, chicken, and some sort of salad. Milca's cooking is apparently famous and has led to more than one marriage proposal and a couple of minor religions. After some chatting and drinking, we took the bus to town and went to a couple of the bars. Getting my first introduction to Dubrovnik by night was really something else. The place just glows. What I wouldn't give to just have the city all to myself, without the hordes of tourists! Even with them, it's easy to see why everyone is so crazy about this place. We watched some people try to jump up onto a tiny stone shelf by the church. Legend has it that if you stand up on this ledge, take off your shirt and put it back on without touching the wall, you will get married in Dubrovnik. I wouldn't mind that at all, but I've never been particularly fond of disrobing in public (those times in my car after early morning skating practice were acts of desparation so I could get a parking spot close to school). 

The bars were hopping, the drinks were relatively cheap, and everyone was having a good time. I decided to call it a night rather early, so another girl and I managed to catch the last bus home. Nothing interesting happened, other than being hit on by some drunken Germans, who shut up after a few choice words in Polish. 


31 JULY, 2007: DUBROVNIK

Much to my astonishment, everyone was up and eating breakfast when I came into the common room rather early in the morning. Considering that breakfast was free and quite good, I wasn't terribly surprised. I caught the bus down to the town and spent the day wandering through the marble-paved streets and exploring. Unlike Split, Dubrovnik is not easy to get lost in because it was built into a rather high hill and the steep sets of steps all lead up to one road from the main street. It doesn't really matter, because it is fun to explore without the spine-chilling feeling of: "Oh Lord, I'm lost!" I found a copy of The Hobbit in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian and also an English copy of Ivo Androvic's Bridge Over the Drina, which I've been meaning to read but never managed to find a copy. With an ice cream cone in hand (raspberry and green apple, just a mite too sweet for me), I ran up and down some of the stair cases and admired the view before meeting up with some people for a late lunch at one of the restaurants on the main road. We walked around the harbor a bit and watched a water polo game before heading back for dinner. Tonight, Milca served up enough spagetti bolognese to feed an army along with a salad with the closest thing to Trav's dressing I've encountered in a long time. I tried to get the recipe, but unfortuantely Milca didn't understand what I was asking for and piled more salad onto my plate. This is a standard reaction of host mothers when their foreign charges present them with a perplexing or incomprehensible situation. Feed them and everything will be happy. And indeed it is so. 

I didn't want to go out, but who can resist spending some time in Dubrovnik at night. Oh, what the heck! 


1 AUGUST, 2007: DUBROVNIK

Today a bunch of us went out to nearby Mokrun island to swim in some sea caves and generally bum around on the beach. The water was a perfect shade of blue and the paths to the island curved around it so well that we were quite ready to drop our stuff at the first convenient place and go for a swim. Unfortuantely, this was the nudist beach, and so we had to beat a fast and slightly awkward retreat. After some scrambling over the rocks (and flip flops were NOT made for this kind of climbing, let me tell you), we found a perfect spot and jumped in. The water was a lot colder than we expected and the current was strong, which wasn't a problem getting to the caves. Getting back was another story. I'm a fairly strong swimmer, though a bit out of shape because most of the sport I've done this year has been competitive Tram Chasing, but I was starting to get a little scared. We were close to a place where we could scramble out, so we climbed up those very sharp rocks and lay shaking for a while. After tending our wounds (who knew that rocks were so blasted sharp!), we lay out and tried to get a nice Adriatic tan. We fell asleep and thought we were going to miss the ferry back, but managed to catch it with enough time to do a little exploring and chase some of the island's resident peacocks.

When we got home, we had just enough time to clean up before dinner--tender brisket, noodle broth, and (glory of glories!) fried zucchini! And then another night of partying went into full swing. Just before that, Ivica, one of the sons who helps run the hostel, proposed a trip to Mostar, my next destination. A Brilliant Plan (TM) occurred to me: why don't I just tag along and then stay the night in Mostar before heading to Sarajevo. I asked Ivica and he thought it was grand. Bosnia, here I come!

20 April, 2007

The other day, Ryan randomly mentioned that he and a bunch of other people were going to Lwow for the weekend. When I expressed my surprise and asked if Luke and I could come along, he was equally surprised that he hadn’t asked me! Guess that’s what comes with not seeing each other as often as we did last semester. Anyway, so this evening a bunch of us headed down to the bus station and hopped on a bus bound for Lwow. My group consisted of Irena, Lilla, Balazs, Francesca, Ryan, Luke, and myself and we ended up meeting Nataila, Michal, Matthew, and Babis at the station. There had apparently been some coordination, but I was very surprised to see them.

The bus ride was pretty typical for one of our journeys. Ryan came late and almost missed it, but managed to run in just as they were starting the engines. Then, the bus driver pulled over and sent his underling to go get him a kebab. It was rather rude that he didn’t ask if anyone else wanted one, but I guess that’s one of the perks of being the bus driver. Now that I think about it, it’s possibly the only one. I slept some, but was very squished because the woman in front of me leaned her seat very far back and then looked at me blankly when I asked her in English and Polish to please move her seat forward because I had no room to move. We had several pit stops on the way to the border and we noticed that each time we got out, it was even colder. Natalia and I cursed ourselves for not brining more warm clothes (“but it’s April!”) and I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only ones.

We arrived at the Ukrainian border in the wee hours and sat in line for hours on end. Because Poland is in the EU, and a new EU country at that, and Ukraine isn’t, border security is pretty tight. People are known to do a lot of smuggling and so everyone is pretty anal-retentive when it comes to checking passports and vehicles for suspicious objects (usually in the form of tobacco and alcohol products) and persons (namely people without visas). The Polish border guard was extremely rude, which was surprising because I’ve always had very good luck with border guards wherever I go…

Border guard: Passport. [Doesn’t even say please!]

Gina: *Hands over passport*

Border guard: *Inspects passport, sneers at Polish visa* When did you come to Poland?

Gina: In September. My visa was activated on the 28^th of September—

Border guard: *waves passport in Gina’s face, much to her annoyance* What about Cieszyn? Huh? What about Cieszyn?

Gina: Um, I was over the border for all of an hour and a half, ok?

Border guard: *sneers at picture, which isn’t half-bad* You sure come to Poland a lot. *Hands back passport*

Gina: *snatches back passport* That’s because, as my visa states, I study here.

Just when I was thinking that I had troubles, the border guard began inspecting Luke’s passport. Now, admittedly he doesn’t have the best photo, but it’s reasonable. The big deal was that British passports apparently don’t list the country of birth, only the city. Luke was born in Albany, which the border guard had predictably never heard of…

Border guard: *Waves passport* What is Albany?

Gina: It’s the capital of New York.

Border guard: *Blank stare* What is Albany?

Gina: It’s still the capital of New York.

Border guard: But what is Albany: is it a city, a capital, a suburb? What?

Gina: It’s a city. *Calls guard nasty names under her breath*

It was only 5 minutes later that I got to thinking about it and guessed that the guy probably thought Albany was Albania and was salivating at the chance of kicking someone off because they didn’t have a proper visa. That, or maybe he thought New York City is the capital of New York. There are a lot of Americans who do too.

Oh, and on the subject of passports, I noticed that the woman in front of me who supposedly didn’t understand me when I asked her to please move her seat forward carried an Australian passport. This involved more swearing and more than one not-so-gentle nudges of the seat with my knee. I hope her legs fell asleep the whole way there.

21 April, 2007

Getting across the Ukrainian side was a piece of cake, with the only hassle being the long time it took to get our passports stamped. It wasn’t all that bad, and soon we were on our way in Ukraine. Looking out of the bus window, I could say that the landscape didn’t look as inviting as Poland. Ukraine is much more hilly than Poland and also there is nothing on the road. I never thought I’d see the day where I would miss roadside shrines. My favorite game is to count them because it gives you something to do when you’re supposedly acting as the navigator but you have less idea of where you’re going than the driver does. I guess parts of it were pretty, but I wasn’t all that impressed. Part of me kept wondering, “Why on earth was Stalin so insistent on getting this?” Yes, I am very nerdy like that. So far, I was excited about being in a former Soviet Republic, but not terribly thrilled about my first impression. However, this could have been due to lack of sleep and rude people sitting in front of me.

We pulled into the bus station on the outskirts of Lwow bright and early. Standing around on the platform, we all looked at each other and didn’t really know exactly what to do. Michal, who had been to Lwow before wasn’t sure what to do because he’d only been to the other bus station (of course!). This caused us to set off an adventure to find 1.) directions to the city, 2.) an exchange place, and 3.) a map. Fortunately, a lot of people in Lwow either speak or understand Polish because this used to be a Polish city before the War and also Ukrainian is fairly close to Polish, so we were on our merry way fairly quickly.

The best part about Lwow definitely has to be its busses. They are these little yellow numbers, about two thirds the size of a normal bus, but somehow still manage to have about the same capacity. All nine of us crowded in and attracted the same amusedly bewildered stares that Luke and I got during our trip to Moldova. The ride into town was pretty quick and I managed to see our hotel as we wizzed by to our stop about a block away. This time, everyone listened to me when I directed them (there is a first time for everything, apparently) and we were at the Hotel George in no time. Considering how little we were paying for the rooms, the Hotel George is a classy, classy establishment. It’s all art nouveau and marble and turquoise and makes you feel rather elegant as you trudge up the stairs to your room, even if you are residing in one of the rooms for peons on the top floor. After a quick rest, we went out to explore the city.

Lviv (or Lwow, or Lemberg, or…) was founded by King Danylo Halytskiy of the Ruthenian principality of Halych-Volhynia, and named in honor of his son, Lev, who made the city the capital of Halich-Volhynia upon his father’s death. The city is first mentioned in Halych-Volhnian Chronicle from 1256. It was captured by Poland in 1349 and in  1356, Kazimierz III of Poland brought in German burghers and granted the Magdeburg Rights, implying that all city issues were to be solved by a city council, elected by the wealthy citizens. The city council seal of the 14th century stated: S(igillum): Civitatis Lembvrgensis. As part of Poland (and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Lviv became the capital of the Ruthenian Voivodeship.

As the city prospered, Lviv became religiously and ethnically diverse. The 17th century brought invading armies of Swedes and Cossacks to the city's gates. In 1772, following the First Partition of Poland, the city known as Lemberg became the capital of the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. During WWI, the city was captured by the Russian army in September of 1914, but was retaken in June of the following year by Austria-Hungary.

With the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire at the end of World War I, the city became an arena of conflict between the local Ukrainian and Polish populations. Between the World Wars, Lviv was the third largest Polish city (after Warsaw and Lodz) and the seat of the Lwow Voivodeship. Lviv and its population suffered greatly from the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the invading armies of the period. Today, Lviv remains one of the main centers of Ukrainian culture with much of the nation's political class originating from the area.

We spent most of the morning walking around the Old Town, which is on UNESCO’s world heritage list and is stunningly beautiful. We ducked inside the Latinate Church (aka Catholic Cathedral), which was absolutely gorgeous, with wonderful wall paintings and all sorts of interesting little details. All of the signs and plaques inside were in Polish and were some of the few things in the city that we were actually able to read. In spite of what Lonely Planet says, Lwow is not a backpacker’s paradise and very little is in English or spelled without Cyrillic letters. We found this out the hard way by having to play pictionary as we went up to the kopiec (big hill) to take in the view and also take advantage of the New Orleans-esque open container laws (or lack thereof). The view from the hill was very nice, even though it was still freezing! We then split up and decided to meet at the hotel later on. My group (Ryan, Francesca, Lila, Balazs, Irena, and me) headed straight to the famous Lychakivskiy Cemetery. Because we are horrible people poor students, we managed to sneak in with another tour group and thus did not have to pay the entrance fee. I wouldn’t have minded, but we weren’t yelled at, and the cemetery gets so many visitors that I don’t think they’ll miss a couple of, of, of, well, whatever they call Ukrainian money. Francesca called it “gilly-gilly” because we couldn’t pronounce what it actually was! The cemetery is really old and beautiful, with all sorts of interesting old graves tucked among the hills. There is a big memorial to the young Poles, called the “Lwow Eaglets”, who defended the city during the extremely nasty 1918 Lwow Uprising, where the city’s Polish majority rose up against the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and were in turn besieged by the Ukrainian army until the Polish army showed up to liberate the city.  There is also a memorial to the intellectuals from the University of Lwow who were murdered by the Nazis in the 1940 Massacre of Lwow Professors. One of the victims was Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, the enfant terrible of the Young Poland movement in the first half of the 20^th century and a major translator of French classics. At the memorial, we met back up with the other group (Natalia, Michal, Matthew, Babis, and Luke), then trooped back out. Once again, we decided to meet back up for dinner at the hotel, and split up once again. Having already eaten lunch, my group wandered back to the hotel to relax. I found a bookstore along the way and purchased The Fellowship of the Ring in Russian, as they don’t seem to have a Ukrainian translation quite yet.

As I’ve said before, Lwow isn’t exactly the most tourist-friendly of places, especially if said tourist has only a vague grasp of the Cyrillic alphabet. Luke copied out the letters from a book at home, but somehow managed to only write down the capital letters, so we were stuck in some spots. That wasn’t too bad, because if three out of four letters look right, it’s probably the right street. Too bad we couldn’t pronounce anything to actually ask for directions. Being painfully aware of this handicap, we asked at the front desk about a good, inexpensive restaurant with Ukrainian food was. Instead, she very helpfully provided us with directions to a pizza place. We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and decided that there had to be some cheap, traditional café in the center and we were going to find it. It’s rather silly to travel all the way to Ukraine and not sample some of the local cuisine. Well, after about an hour and a half of walking, we found precisely one traditional restaurant, which was of course packed to the gills. We tried asking some girls who spoke Polish about a place, but they also directed us to the pizza place. Finally, after some more walking, we gave up and went to the pizza place, where the real fun started. First of all, there were seven of us, and of course the booths were only equipted for six, so we had to squish. Then, the menu was only in Cyrillic (naturally!) and so we had no clue what we were looking at. Balazs, being the sensible person he is, walked right up and ordered a pizza through guess-work while we were trying to figure out what was going on. Then Ryan went up to ask, which didn’t help because he didn’t understand the waitress and she didn’t understand them. Then, I got up to take a stab at it and ended up ordering three or four of their specials. All of them turned out to be really good, and we ended up having a very nice time, though things got a bit complicated when we tried to order another pizza which didn’t show up until we gave up and started going home. They huffily gave us a box and then we headed back to the hotel for a minor party with the leftovers.

22 April, 2007

We got up bright and early and headed to the train station to buy our tickets back to Poland. This was yet another adventure thanks to Lwow’s lack of tourist infrastructure, because everything was once again in Cyrillic! I understand why, but as an international train station, you would think that they’d provide something in English or Polish. Even Chisinau was easier to figure out than this, granted that’s because the two official languages of Moldova are Romanian (non-Cyrillic) and Russian (Cyrillic), so they have to have both, but still. We managed to make the woman at information understand what we wanted, and were directed to another window for international tickets. We had to stand around for a while because the person working at the counter had gone on break, but then managed to get tickets to Przymesyl (Pshe-mesh-ul), the first Polish city over the border. Since we had some time to kill, we went back into the city and tried to find the café my friend Kasia recommended. Unfortunately, it was only open in the summer, but the building it was in had a really nice photography exhibition, so it wasn’t a completely wasted adventure. Then, Ryan found a nice dessert café where we could spend the rest of our “gilly-gilly” and we had quite a party. Then, it was time to run for the tram back to the train station.

Going back to Polandwas almost as much of an adventure as the trip itself! The train we were in was about 30-40 years old, with primitive seating compartments that weren't really compartments at all. There was just an opening in the wall to form a door that led right into the next group of seats. The top three bunks were folded up out of the way, with the bottom bunks forming benches for three people. Another bunk was formed by the two seats across the ‘aisle’ and a table that would turn upside down when stowed away. It was, in a word, Soviet. Someone down the way was cooking some sort of sausage and onion concoction, which made things smell really pleasant.  Apparently, the train was also an overnight from Kiev, which made me feel bad for the poor people who had to put up with such conditions. I expected better from Ukraine because the Moldovan trains were so nice, and Moldova is much worse off than Ukraine.

Things once again got really fun at customs. The train was absolutely crawling with soldiers, who turned the place inside-out looking for smuggled goods. Apparently this is a really big problem, and they were quite serious about it. They had drug-sniffing dogs go through at least twice and also used screwdrivers and flashlights to peer into mattresses and behind things and into any nook or cranny that could possibly serve as a hiding place.

The train pulled into a brand-new part of the station at Przemysl, which was gated off from the rest of the station. We had to stand in line for a really long time because everyone’s things had to be x-rayed and then searched by hand. A couple of little old ladies looked at us and began telling us to go ahead of them, since we were tourists without much baggage. We managed to get through and not have our small backpacks searched (it was very obvious that we were poor backpackers who wouldn’t know how to smuggle our own shoes into the country, much less something illegal). Then, we grabbed our tickets to Krakow and had a quick bite to eat. I wished we could have stayed for a little longer in Przemysl, because it seemed to be quite pretty, but this was one of the last trains going to Krakow and we did have school the next day.

When I was in high school, I dreamed of participating on March of the Living. I heard an acquaintance of mine speak about her experiences during some High Holy Day service and was inspired. When I was much older, I saw my good friend’s pictures and heard her stories about her experiences. I was so jealous because she got to participate and I simply couldn’t afford to miss the two weeks of school required for the trip (school, basketball, skating, drat them all!). It might sound weird or strange, but I imagined myself doing it all through high school: walking through the camp museum (which would look just like the pictures I’d poured over), walking the road to Birkenau, singing Hebrew songs, being surrounded by Jews and wondering over how miraculous it was for life to go on and team after the Holocaust.

Even when I finally journeyed to Poland and visited Auschwitz-Birkenau once, twice, three times, I felt something was missing. It just wasn’t the same as being on the March, the nagging thought bothered me each time I walked through the exhibits, looked at memorials, and lit candles amid the ruins. I wondered if participating would make me feel more outwardly emotional and allow me to cry rather than just numbly stand there with dry eyes. I felt it was sort of a mark of shame for me, a Jew, to not cry there, especially since I cried buckets amid Treblinka’s jagged stones and before the mausoleum at Majdanek. Was I too desensitized to Auschwitz-Birkenau? Did I just not understand? What was wrong with me? I always felt somewhat inadequate, not Jewish enough. Academic interest makes one damnably dispassionate.

This year, I was finally, finally able to join the March. My sociology professor, Annamaria, is an expert in Polish-Jewish relations and mentioned in the fall that each year she puts together a group of Polish students, who then march with a couple of groups of Jewish kids whose leaders she knows. I signed up in December and waited eagerly for the day to arrive: not only would I be fulfilling my dream of participating on the March, but I would also be furthering my interest in Polish-Jewish dialogue and maybe pick up some interesting tidbits to help with my research.

The commemoration began on Sunday evening, and I nervously waited in front of the hotel where we were supposed to meet. I wasn’t nervous about meeting the group we were going to march with—I refuse to let a bunch of high schoolers intimidate me, even if they are from Australia and New Zealand—I was actually more nervous to meet the other Polish students/students studying in Poland. I met some Germans, then some Polish kids and a Czech girl and we got on very well. We had to wait a while because the group was driving into Krakow from Majdanek that evening and they had to arrive, then put their things in their rooms, and then get back on the busses to head down to Kazimierz. I found myself on the bus with Hanna Nela, from the Czech Republic, and Magda, from Poland. They were really nice and we chatted away in Polish because Hanna Nela doesn’t speak much English. One of the survivors on the bus with us was from Krakow and tried to join in our conversation, but he couldn’t remember a lot of his Polish, so we spoke English and translated. Everyone seemed very nice and the kids were just like my friends from NFTY.

When we got to Kazimierz, we met up with a few other people, including my friend Ola, and tried to make our way through security and then through the packed platz. There must have been hundreds of people from all over the world there and everyone was talking and walking about and generally being social. This was all well and good, but I couldn’t hear a thing of what was said during the ceremony and couldn’t follow along because some idiot put the subtitles at the very bottom of the screens rather than at the top where people could actually see them. What I was able to catch was really nice and I wish people had been more respectful. I did yell at some French kids in French, which got them to shut up for all of five minutes.  Apparently my intimidation abilities have been dulled since my days in NFTY--pity that.

Mild irritations aside, it really was something else to stand on ul. Szeroka in front of the Great Synagogue and with the Remuh Synagogue a small white ghost on my left surrounded by Jews. This area was the heart of Jewish Krakow before the War, but you can't really imagine the life that teemed here, even though the Nazis never got around to destroying Krakow and Kazimierz. I always feel a bit out of place when I ramble my way through Kazimierz--making me think of a Stanislaw Wygodzki poem I once read:

A biographer of quiet and pogroms
Of dead streets and desolation,
And of the gale that blows at night
Over the ruins of my house,
The historian of people, shoes, and dresses
Of mine who were burnt and of yours,
I walk on shattered pavements—
With this poem, which gives no peace.

*

Those who no longer live in their own landscape
Wander in the night, flee their homes
Just as, when they were put to sleep by the gas,
They saw the unsteady influx of dusk.
But I remain. I am the house
And the city, the pavement, the window in the wall…
And I again enter their courtyard
And silence resounds in me like thunder.

*

And I again reveal the landscape
Not only with their gates and homes,
But also with a shadow, which motionless
Stands and reaches out its hands
And silent—shields its yellow patch
With a hand against my blow…
I am the silence and its voice
Like a song broken off, a halftone.

*

A biographer of death and conflagration
I do not only collect quiet sorrow,
I have to clothe my terror
In their terror, as with a bloody cloth.

I too am out of my landscape here: American, Jewish, comfortable and confident enough in my faith to be open about it. Whenever I walk through Kazimierz, I feel like a ghost. People here are interested, many genuinely so, in the Jews who once lived here and what they contributed to Poland. Sometimes I wonder how many prefer memories that can be ignored to living, breathing reminders. It’s all well and good to lunch at the Alef Restaurant, or pass by the Kupa Synagogue on your way to work, but running into a Polish Polish Jew—now that would be ghostly and frightening.

Needless to say, it was a long walk home to Zaczek.

The next day, I was up at five and out of the dorm at six. I managed to catch the tram up to the center, which was mostly deserted at this time of day. Taking advantage of that, I had a small picnic pod Adamem—sitting below the shadow of Adam Mickiewicz’s statue and enjoying the fact that I was the only person sitting there. Even the thrice-blasted pigeons weren’t out this early. I guess they were all bothering my poor friend by mating on her balcony or something.

I got to the hotel at the appointed time only to discover, yet again, that I was the first person. The German Jewish side of the family kicked in, and I did a lot of pacing and cursing the irritating Krakow/Jewish Standard Time. I wouldn’t have hurried my lovely picnic breakfast if I’d known that not only would everyone else be the predicted 15 minutes late, but also that we wouldn’t actually leave for another hour. Instead, I did a circuit of the Planty near the hotel and made friends with a little old lady and her equally small dog. What was I doing up so early? Mam spotkanie, I mumbled. I have a meeting. She snorted, I guess at the get-up-and-at-‘em Western culture that is even invading stately Krakow, and I managed to intercept Ola on the way back.

The Ozzies/Kiwis were still eating breakfast when we sauntered into the hotel, so we were invited to join them. I’m beginning to understand the Hobbits’ point of view: but what about second breakfast? All right, just this once. It’s going to be a long day and Israeli humus is too delicious to pass up anyway. I still think it’s weird that they bring kosher food all the way from Israel for the March. Annamaria says there’s a schochet in Warsaw now and I’ve seen a few things that are marked Kosher even in humble Jubilat, it can’t be that difficult. For some reason, I was very hungry for kiełbasa at that moment. Trust me to turn heretic the minute I run into a large crowd of Jews, after entertaining rabbinic thoughts among large crowds of Poles. I must be losing my mind.

The bus ride out to Auschwitz was long and quiet. I talked a little with the girl sitting next to me, but she fell asleep (I always know how to keep my audience riveted) and I spent a lot of time staring out the window and counting down the towns. The sad thing is that, after four times traveling this route, I have a pretty good idea of where we are.

The crowds, bearing flags and signs, were already flooding through Auschwitz I when our bus pulled in. There were so many people from all over the world that it was a little overwhelming for everyone. I’ve never seen the place this packed before and I felt bad for my group as we went on the world’s fastest tour of the museum. There wasn’t any time to pause at an exhibit and think, or even look closely. Ola and I kept examining things and ended up switching groups three or four times because we kept falling behind. It didn’t matter much, since we could do just about whatever we wanted, and it was interesting to talk to some of the kids as we walked together. Toward the end, I ended up in a group with three of the survivors, Ola, Messalina, Magda, and Hanna Nela. We all spoke Polish together—and I was able to keep up, for the most part. Just as I was sending a mental birdie to certain professors who think I’m stupid, a girl from one of the other groups walked up to me and asked me if I went to BT! Turns out, this girl was in my cousin’s age group and happened to recognize me after 3 years. What a small, small world it is.

The line of marchers snake through the avenues between the barracks. We were at the far back of the line, nearly the end, so we could only hear the muffled announcement that marked the beginning of the March. Somewhere, a faint note of a shofar sounded, and after a while, we were walking forward toward Birkenau.

The walk itself was shorter than I thought, but I managed to get quite a bit of reflecting done as we walked through Oswięcim, then over the viaduct into Brzeznicza, the small town where Birkenau is located. The Australia/New Zealand March of the Living stipulates that the group must march in silence, which everyone remarkably obeyed. Annamaria sometimes whispered a few interesting things to those around her, but we stayed quiet and reflective. Behind us, the last group started singing Hebrew songs as we crested the viaduct and looked over the village and the first unloading ramp to the camp itself. Behind them walked the entire police force of lower Silesia. I kid you not. As we walked, I saw people looking out of their windows at us, but there was never any problem. It’s a normal reaction, to look out of your window at a huge crowd of people walking by, even if you see it every year. At the beginning, the March was only for foreign Jews—not even members of the Polish Jewish community were allowed to take part, for fear that the young people would see a few remnants of life among the ashes when they should only see that in Israel. Relations between the organizers and the local community were tense, but now groups of Polish Jews and Polish Catholics also participate. I saw several groups of scouts marching with Israeli and Polish flags and a couple of the Jewish student organizations from Warsaw and Krakow were also there.

I walked alongside one of the survivors as we approached Birkenau and talked with her a little. She came from Rzeszów, which isn’t far from Kraków, and managed to be one of that community’s few survivors. She met her husband in a DP camp at the end of the war and they moved to Melbourne because it was as far from Poland as they could get. They both still speak Polish, and didn’t seem to mind it at all, though. I wonder if that helped her survive, because so many Jews could be recognized by their Yiddish accent when they tried to pass as Catholics: ł was pronounced l like in Russian, for example. I could hear traces of it when one of the other survivors spoke with us, but she did not use that. Like many of the Marchers, she carried a small wooden plaque with a personal message written on it. Hers said: in memory of my school friends Emila, Raja, and Maria and my aunties, uncles, and cousins from Rzeszów. Numbers are no longer numbers when faces are attached to them.

We toured the barracks in the front of Birkenau, then headed up toward the memorial for the ceremony. Watching my group was very hard because of their emotions. Most of these kids hail from Melbourne, which has the largest community of survivors outside of Israel, and so this was not just something from a history book, but something that their grandparents lived through. We sat through the ceremony together, which was nice but just as hard to hear as the one from the night before. Then, we broke away and found a place to sit and reflect. Several of the kids prepared stories, poems, or songs about their feelings or that told the stories of their families. The three survivors stood with their children and grandchildren as they told their stories. We sang some songs, prayed a little, and watched the sun begin to set. Then, we went though more exhibitions and Annamaria led a group of us beyond the camp fence to the Mały Biały Domek, the Little White House, which was an old farmhouse sealed and used as the first gas chambers in 1942. Mostly Polish and French Jews died there and in the little Red House not far away.

Candles flickered in the twilight among the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. We prayed some more, then walked on because it was getting dark and no one wanted to be stuck in this place at night. Scaring the daylights out of myself in one death camp is quite enough for me, thankyouverymuch, and I think everyone else felt about the same. It’s very easy to theoretically not believe in spooks, but walking through Birkenau as the sunset begins to fade is a different story all together.

As we headed out of the gates, a group of the boys noticed the worst real estate in Poland, the cluster of houses that can clearly be seen from the camp, and wondered why anyone would want to live there. I’ve always wondered that myself. I believe that those families are the ones who were displaced when the camp was built and after the war were given lands as close to their old location as possible by the Communist authorities. I remember reading something in Krajewski’s book Poland and the Jews about this, but I can’t remember the details for the life of me.

It was nearly midnight when I got back home, nearly two before I fell asleep, and about four when I woke up again after dreaming of sunset over Birkenau.

Cieszyn is really nothing to write home about. It’s a pretty town, especially the Polish side, and had a nice rynek and a few cool main streets. The boarder crossing is popular with foreigners too lazy to get a visa, who join the masses of Poles and Czechs in boarder hopping although instead of doing it for the shopping, they do it to get their tourist visa extended. Bad, bad, bad. Ilissa and I walked across the boarder, though we spent some time standing in no-man’s land (aka passport control) because we actually had to get stamped. The guards even asked us if we wanted a stamp or not (I wasn’t stamped into or out of the Czech Republic on my Christmas Break Adventure), and Ilissa of course wanted one. We got the really old-school, pre-EU stamps and continued on our merry way. Cesky Tezin is drab and ugly, attributes I tend to associate with the Czech Republic because of my attachment to Poland. There wasn’t much to see, so we sat in the square and talked for a bit before going back to Poland. We met back up with Luke and Emma and hiked up to see the Jewish cemetery. It was an absolute overgrown mess, with tombstones scattered around broken or toppled. It looked like someone had tried to at least account for the stones, because we saw a few that had been numbered, but the place is in complete disrepair. A gutted building that looks like a small synagogue stands guard over the cemetery, but it also in ruins, with holes in the wall and broken windows. A plaque in Polish and Czech commemorates the community and a group of men executed (or something) there in 1944. It was a rather depressing way to end our visit.

“Can I leave early?” I shyly asked my literature professor, a jovial man by whom I’m still intimidated.

He laughed the way he did when we attacked the racier parts of Schultz and Gombrowicz. “Fine, fine!” he said, not even bothering to ask where I was off to. “No problem!”

No problem indeed, I thought as I raced across Dietla, heels clicking on the sidewalk. Here I was, dressed in the most modest clothes I could find and I had approximately fifteen minutes to get to synagogue. I felt like I’d stepped back in time, as this is probably not the most common reason for hurrying in Poland these days, but replacing my tights that had snagged on the wall was something that needed attending to first. Two minutes later, I was freshly hosed and was running like a bat out of hell to make up for lost time. 6:41, four minutes.

The more rational part of my mind was lecturing me on the absolute stupidity of running to a synagogue service. Surely these Polish Jews (or whomever I would find at Remuh Synagogue), also functioned on Jewish Standard Time—that elusive time zone created by taking the amount of time it takes you to get to Temple without breaking any speed limits, multiplying it by the number of people you have to greet before you sit down with your prayer book in the sanctuary, and adding it to the local time. Even if they didn’t, this is Krakow and Cracovians are renowned for being perpetually 20 minutes late. Studies of this phenomenon suggest that it has to do with the fact that the city’s many church bells all ring at different times, meaning that no matter where you are, you will think that you’re on time because your internal clock runs in time with the bells of the church nearest to you, and whomever is waiting for you will think you’re late because the bells of the church nearest to them ring slightly earlier/later. Throw in finicky trams, uneven sidewalks that put power-walking out of the question, and the absolute necessity of smoking a cigarette right outside the building in which your business is about to be conducted, and you’re 20 minutes late. Or, perhaps it’s everyone operating on Jewish Standard Time, garnered by osmosis before the war. This of course did not slow me down at all, as the completely OCD German-Jewish side of my psyche has this tendency firmly under its influence. When they say 6:45, I will be there at 6:40, if not 6:30, and then worry why everyone’s late. I did manage to slow to a walk as I rounded the corner of Jozefa and into Szeroka. It would not do to show up looking breathless, I was nervous enough at the prospect of attending an Orthodox shul with my ankles showing and then trying to find a girl I’d only met once and go to the Seder.

Fortunately for me, Jewish Standard Time and Krakow Lag Time are pervasive beasts and there was quite a crowd standing outside of the gates having a last smoke or a chat before going in. I quickly glanced at my fellow Jews and breathed a sigh of relief that I was appropriately dressed. Hasids these people were not, just regular-looking people who came to celebrate Passover in Krakow, and I felt a lot better. I still wasn’t exactly sure where to go, as I’d only been in the Remuh Synagogue as a tourist, meaning I got to use the men’s entrance so my group could see the bimah and the ark up close, and couldn’t remember where the women’s door was. After a few minutes of standing around awkwardly, praying that the women would start walking in, I followed a group into a door right beside the men’s entrance and huddled in a pew in the far corner.

As with most Orthodox rites I’ve been to, the service seemed little more than organized chaos to me. The synagogue is very small, but it’s difficult to hear what’s going on in the men’s section from all the way in the back over the voices of other women who are admiring the new baby in their midst or wishing each other chag sameach. I also didn’t have a prayer book, which didn’t exactly matter because it didn’t seem like many people—men and women—were paying much attention except when it was time to stand up and then sit again. Instead, I took the opportunity to look around at my surroundings, especially my fellow worshippers. The Remuh Synagogue was built in the 16^th century and named for Rabbi Moses Isserles, who was known by the Hebrew acronym ReMA. When it was constructed, it was on the edge of the area the Jewish community inhabited at the time, bordering the new (now the old) cemetery. It’s a pretty white building, elegantly understated and easy to miss if not for the Hebrew letters on the arch above the entrance gates, and about the same on the inside. The walls are white and there is no decoration except for some chandeliers and the gray ark with a few gold accents. Functional applies to every aspect of this synagogue—from the décor, to the exterior, to its purpose today. The Remuh Synagogue is the only functioning synagogue in Krakow today, in comparison to the 120 officially registered places of worship in the 1930s.

Bored with the interior and completely lost in the service, I took a good look around me at my fellow worshipers (or worshipettes, I suppose it would be). There were about 25, 26, of us in the women’s section, all of whom but me seemed to be native speakers of Polish. Interestingly, we all ranged in age from about 20 to roughly 60, which was surprising because Jewish guidebooks frequently stress that there are only 200 aging Jews left in Krakow. Granted, I wasn’t seeing the entire population, but there were mighty few gray or white heads in the men’s or women’s sections. There were a couple of children too, but I think only one family, so the congregation was a bunch of adults who had either come of age under Communism in the ‘60s and ‘70s (after Stalinism) and students.

After the service, which was the fastest Orthodox service I’d ever attended, I stood around looking for Daniela. She was there, but I wasn’t sure if she’d remember me as we’d only met once, so I slipped outside to just head to the seder. Fortunately she stopped me and told me to join her and a large group heading to Kupa Street for the seder. I got over my nervousness quickly and made friends with a woman who happened to have sat next to me during services. Her name was Regina, which was pretty funny as that’s the only Polish equivalent of Gina that any of my Polish professors and friends have been able to come up with. It’s nice to know that it’s actually used. This got us giggly and we talked about Poland and what I was doing here and her family in America and Germany. She lives in a small town about 100km away, near Kielce, and came into Krakow for services because the Jewish community of Kielce lacks a rabbi and enough organization to have a Seder. When we walked into what I’m going to call the social hall of the Izaak Synagogue for the sake of the argument, I ran into a friend of mine who studies at the Center as well. Her name is Matilda and she’s from Switzerland, but is the daughter of two Polish Jews and speaks beautiful (but very fast) Polish. We were also joined by a girl named Ola (Alexandra) and we had a great time.

Like most Seders, this one was organized chaos. We all had little Haggadahs in Hebrew and Polish (copyright 1927, Germany, reprinted in Warsaw in 1991) and also an extensive song sheet which, to my delight, included the Hebrew/Polish versions of the fantastically popular ‘Who Knows One’ and ‘A Kid, an Only Kid (that my father bought for two zuzym! Ha-gad-yaaaahhh ha-gad-yaaaahhh!). There were about 50 people at the service and it was led by young people, more specifically the rabbi’s two oldest sons and Daniela. It was hard to hear exactly what was going on because everyone was talking and the kids were very hyperactive (there were maybe 6 or 7 of them and Lord help me if they didn’t pull the same shenanigans that certain members of my family pulled at that age). We started going around the table and had a rousing rendition of the Four Questions, as sung by an adorable eight-year-old who looked like a miniature academic, complete with little round glasses and a Harry Potter-esque suit, standing on a chair and puffing out his chest as he loudly sang the words. Why is this night different from all other nights? I could think of several, nontextual, answers to that. After all, I was sitting conversing in (quite passable, if I do say so myself) Polish with two native Poles and a heritage speaker at a Seder table of all places. On all other nights, we speak English and dine with goyim.

We continued around the table, trying to read over the noise. I started getting extremely nervous as my turn drew closer. If I get one of those long paragraphs, I thought to myself, I’m done for! This language is WAY out of my league! My whole body was shaking when my turn came. Thankfully, I only had to read a small paragraph, and only stumbled over a particularly tricky word. It wasn’t until Ola started reading that I took a closer look at the text. I had been so nervous about my turn that I hadn’t noticed what part of the service we were reading. As it turns out, we were at the part of the story of the Four Children: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who cannot yet speak. Depending on my Dad’s mood, I am either the simple (dumb) one or the wicked one if I’ve been particularly mean to David. I think the year I got into Northwestern I might have read the part of the wise child. Much to my amusement, I realized the passage I’d just read was the part of the one who cannot speak, or as this particular Haggadah says, the one who cannot yet speak. It was so deliciously prophetic.

Before I knew it, the meal was served. I think people were getting so lost that the reading was called off after the important prayers and songs. Plus, we apparently had quite a few English speakers who weren’t able to follow the service so the reading dwindled to a halt of sorts. The food was quite good, though I found the horseradish not particularly up to scratch in that it tasted a lot more like beets than horseradish. I seriously thought I was eating the chopped beets the Poles call salad, until the Rabbi’s wife mentioned that the chopping machine had broken down from exhaustion and she had to chop the stuff herself. It was a very, very good effort in that case (as she is rather pregnant as well) and the charoset more than made up for it. As I ate and talked with Regina, Matilda, and Ola, I noticed that there were some rather interesting…things that varied with my normal Passover experience. First, instead of parsley, we dipped a potato into salt water and then made a Hillel sandwich out of matzo, horseradish, charoset, and a lettuce leaf. I don’t know where the first tradition came from, maybe because back in the day it was easier to get potatoes than parsley, but the second tradition makes a lot of sense. Everyone in Poland eats open-faced sandwiches with bread, some sort of spread (usually butter), a lettuce leaf, some sort of meat (usually ham), and a tomato. This was just a kosher for Passover Polish sandwich. I did miss the parsley though and the combination of charoset and lettuce was kinda icky. Then again, as Stephanie and Alissa will attest, I’m really not fond of lettuce on anything.

During dinner, Regina told a story about her younger cousin from New York who came to visit Poland on a March of the Living type of deal. Regina drove all the way to Krakow to see her and they apparently had a great time. This gave her the idea to see if maybe Czulent could hook some of their students up with these groups so they could see that there is still some Jewish life in Poland. It was a no-go. “They’re just not interested in what’s here today,” she said, in between bites of matzo ball soup. “They only want to see the graves.” Both she and Ola really got excited when I told them that was one of the reasons I decided to come back to Poland—no one on European Roots answered my questions about the remnants of the Jewish community, not even when they had just mentioned that the Remuh Synagogue was still open. How many Jews live here today? I asked the same snotty rabbinical student who I had to trot out the ‘my uncle the rabbi’ line on in order to get him to listen to my point of view. He looked at me like I’d grown horns, shrugged, and got back onto the bus without looking around at the street we were on.

To this day, I am still floored by that conversation. Yes, I understand the gravity of the Holocaust. Yes, I understand that most survivors left Poland. Yes, I understand that there wasn’t Jewish life under Communism (except a bit at the beginning and a little under Solidarity). But to be completely ignorant of a community, no matter how small it is, is completely and utterly ridiculous. I’ve spent six years trying to find the right word or phrase to fit that attitude and the only thing I can think of is willful ignorance. We sang that song in Sunday School:

Wherever you go, there’s always someone Jewish

You never need to feel alone ‘cause you’re a Jew.

If you’re ever in a place that feels kinda new-ish

Don’t be afraid, ‘cause you’ll find someone Jewish!

It’s really true, but in more places than just Amsterdam, Disneyland, and Tel Aviv, in places you don’t even expect. There are Jews in Wroclaw (aka the town formerly known as Breslau), Warsaw, Krakow, Opole, Kielce. Granted, there aren’t many, but there are some and there are quite a few young people among them. Jewish Polandophile that I am, I don’t understand why people on my ‘real’ side of the pond are not interested in people like Regina and Daniela, Ola and Kasia, and all the other people at the Seder. The Rabbi’s wife, beaming over her two eldest sons as they led the Seder, remarked that she’s so proud to have raised two boys to be good Polish Jews. And this is coming from an Orthodox woman originally from Israel. How can people not get excited about the opening of a Progressive congregation in Warsaw? Or that there’s an active Jewish student organization? What about the Polish schoolchildren who showed up at the Krakow Ghetto Memorial March of their own volition, because their teacher happened to mention the march during class? People who dismiss these things as small and insignificant and not good enough do not understand what a miracle it is that these things are happening at all. Every member of this community is a survivor—whether of the Holocaust or of the Communist regime, which wasn’t fond of Jews either. How can we expect this community to survive unrecognized and unsupported? It’s hard enough to be Jewish in Poland and the current political situation isn’t making it any easier, but it’s possible and people need to recognize that. Mourn for what is lost all you want, decry the Giertychs and the anti-Semites that flock to LPR as loudly as you can, but spare a thought for a few good things that have happened since 1989.

Now that I’ve found my thesis topic (and maybe, just maybe NU will get back to me this time), I’ll end my rant now.

I ended up having to leave the dinner early because it was already 11:30 and it’s a good 30 minute walk from Kazimierz back to Zaczek. It’s all very safe and well-lit, but I was tired and had things to do in the morning—like the ever-tedious summary writing one of our teachers makes us do because she simply doesn’t have the five extra minutes it would take to make up/find questions about the text so we’d have something to talk about rather than sounding like parrots. Also, Regina had to leave early and her place was taken by possibly the most unpleasant expat in Krakow. We have mutual friends and so have met, and I really didn’t relish the prospect of him acting like the snotty New York Jew he desperately wants to be (he’s from Cali and so has a complex of sorts about being Jewish-er than thou), which includes denigrating everything about Poland. I’m still not sure why he’s living here. Anyway, after him asking Ola if I had an American accent—the asshat doesn’t even try to speak Polish—I had enough. I made my goodbyes and headed back home.

It was funny, on the way back I happened to go down the street where the Bishop’s Palace is located and ran into a whole mess of people. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but then remembered that it was the anniversary of the Pope’s death. There were memorial candles everywhere—piled up on the ground floor windows of the palace, on the sidewalk, on the low wall across the street, spilling into the Planty where they looked like something from that kid’s book where the girl builds an elf village in her backyard (Afternoon of the Elves maybe?). People were kneeling and praying, singing, or just sitting and reflecting. I hurried on by, but it was strange to end a Passover night with a sight like that.

14 February, 2007

After partaking in Butterfly’s famous breakfast, we set out to see as much of Bucharest as possible before catching our train to Chisinau in the evening. First we went back to Gara de Nord to get our tickets, which was much easier than I expected. Then, we hopped on the subway to go check out some of the sights. This turned into a bigger adventure than we originally planned because, once again, there were only a few extremely unhelpful signs and we kept getting off at the wrong stop or the wrong place at the right stop.

Out of all the cities we’d been to, Bucharest was by far the youngest, entering recorded history only in the 15^th century. It became the state capital of Romania in 1862 and is quite an interesting place, with eclectic architecture and a mix of old and new that makes Warsaw look well-balanced. In the Inter-War years, Bucharest was known as the “Paris of the East,” because of its beautiful architecture and highly cultured elites. Although many buildings and districts in the historic centre were damaged or destroyed by war, earthquakes and Nicolae Ceauşescu'a program of systematization, much survived. In recent years, the city has been experiencing an economic and cultural boom and, thanks to Romania’s recent ascension to the EU, this will probably continue into the future.

Once we got the subway somewhat figured out, we ended up in the heart of Nicolae Ceauşescu's Communist fantasy land around Piata Unirii. It’s so awful that I thought this might be the one thing that whiny little so-and-so Robert Kaplan got right in his appallingly dreadful book Balkan Ghosts. What Nicolae Ceauşescu did to this city is just one more criminal activity to add to the long list that eventually led to his execution in December of 1989.

One simply can’t mention Bucharest without going into detail about Nicolae Ceauşescu. The leader of the People’s Republic of Romania from 1965 until shortly before his execution in 1989, Ceauşescu takes the term megalomaniacal to its extremely frightening conclusion. Initially, he was a popular figure in Romania because he pursued a foreign policy independent of the Soviet Union—in the 1960s, he ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member); he refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and actively and openly condemned that action. Although the Soviet Union largely tolerated Ceauşescu's recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania maverick status within the Eastern bloc and eventually the US granted Romania ‘Most Favored Nation’ status. In addition, recognized the State of Israel and had diplomatic relations with it and sent a Romanian delegation to the 1984 Olympics (one of only four Communist nations to do so). Incidentally, the biggest American statement of the 1984 Olympics was Mary Lou Retton’s win over Romania’s Katya Szabo in the all-around gymnastics competition, a result that is disputed by most knowledgeable gymnastics fans because the politics of the time greatly influenced the scoring and Retton had the artistry of a brick. As usual, I digress.

Slowly, but surely Ceauşescu’s popularity went down the drain. His 1966 ban on birth control and abortion to up the fertility/birth rate of ethnic Romanians was only the beginning of the madness. He also made it much harder to obtain a divorce. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell, accompanied by rising poverty and increased homelessness, particularly street children, in the urban areas like Bucharest. In turn, a new problem was created by uncontrollable child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population and facilitated a rampant AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s - created by the regime's refusal to acknowledge the existence of the disease, and its unwillingness to allow for any HIV test to be carried out. Beginning in 1972, Ceauşescu instituted a program of systematisation. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society", the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to completely reshape the country's capital. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished in the 1980s, in order to rebuild the city in his own style. The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Parliament House, is the world's second largest building, after the Pentagon. Ceauşescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanisation" and "industrialisation" programs. Thankfully, this plan was thwarted.

Throughout this time, Romania became more and more isolated internationally and increasingly impoverished. In the 1980s, Ceauşescu ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its massive debts. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday life of Romanian citizens a fight for survival as food  rationing was introduced and heating, gas, and electricity black-outs were becoming the rule. There was a steady decrease in the living standard (and especially the availability of food and general goods in stores) between 1980 and 1989. Although people accepted these hardships at first, it became clear that Ceauşescu was gradually losing his grip on reality. He was often shown on state TV entering stores filled with food supplies and praising the "high living standard" achieved under his rule. In late 1989, daily TV broadcasts showed lists of CAPs with alleged record harvests, in blatant contradiction with the shortages experienced by the average Romanian at the time. Any attempt from people to get their dictator to wake up was discouraged and, though many people sent him letters and petitions, he probably never read them and the senders were harassed by the State Security.

Things came to a head in December of 1989. A protest in the western city of Timisoara on the 16^th, originally in support of an ethnic Hungarian priest, exploded when students joined the crowd and the meeting took on an anti-government character. Government troops fired into the crowd, killing dozens. The protests then spread throughout the city and the army attempted to crush them. This failed and resulted in several days of chaos and casualties, causing parts of Timisoara to look more like a war zone than a stately university town. These events were not broadcast in the national media, but word of them spread via Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. On 21 December, Ceauşescu appeared on the balcony of the Central Headquarters of the Communist Party in Bucharest to address the nation. In the middle of his address, sudden movement coming from the outskirts of the mass assembly and the sound of what various sources have reported as fireworks, bombs, or guns broke the orderly manifestation into chaos. Scared at first, the crowds tried to disperse. Bullhorns were used to spread the news that the Securitate was firing on them and that a "revolution" was unfolding, and finally the people were persuaded to join in. The rally turned into a protest demonstration and in the end a revolution emerged. Securitate agents fired into the crowd, and more blood was shed. Finally realizing that the situation was out of control Ceauşescu and his (almost equally hated) wife hid inside the Central Committee building, and then attempted to flee by helicopter in the early morning of the 22^nd. They were quickly captured, put on trial, and executed on national television. So ended the last old-style Communist dictator and Romania joined its ex-Soviet Bloc neighbors on the path to democracy.

Back in Piata Unirii, Luke’s eyes were beginning to glaze over as I excitedly ooh-ed and ahh-ed over Ceauşescu’s legacy—an urban wasteland uglier and on a larger scale than Warsaw. We walked past the dry fountain (did it ever run?) and down the street to take a look at the monstrosity known as the Presidential Palace. At first glance, it was hard to believe that I was looking at the largest building in the world after the Pentagon, but it was a shocker once we turned the corner and realized that it was just as big on the sides (and presumably the back). The building is up on a hill and we couldn’t figure out how to go right up to it, since the gates were guarded by intimidating-looking soldiers and, while I can have a conversation about gymnastics in Romanian, I do not know how to ask about tourists’ entrances.

After getting our fill of Socialist-realist architecture, we attempted to figure out the metro and eventually made it up to Piata Universitii and then to Piata Republicii. We saw a few interesting buildings there, then walked up to see Bucharest’s baby Arc de Triumph and then further north to the incredible Village Museum. We saw all sorts of examples of traditional houses and buildings from villages from all over Romania, which were all amazing. Unfortunately, it was really cold and rainy, so we didn’t stay as long as we would have had we come in the summer.

Back at the hostel, we had lunch with Gabi and Jeff, two of the people we met at the hostel, then grabbed our bags and headed back to the train station. We got there really early, so we killed some time in a café and did lots of people-watching. The authorities might have cleaned up Gara de Nord, but there are still plenty of interesting characters walking around the station. Fortunately, they aren’t trying to hit you up for money—they’re just going to be in the same compartment as you. Fortunately, the train to Chisinau was not particularly crowded and we had a whole compartment to ourselves.

Oh lord, the train to Chisinau. For those of you who don’t know, I hate flying. I’m scared of it. After all, how can I be sure that the Alitalia people know where they’re going, that the Lot pilots haven’t been sneaking shots of zebrowka before telling us to fasten our seatbelts for takeoff, or that the mechanics for United or Southwest are happy with their current situation? Besides, I usually tend to get stuck in airports because of freak Thanksgiving snows, strikes, or other unforeseen delays wishing that Ursula LeGuin’s stories in Changing Planes were true and I could go to some other plane of existence for a nice relaxing vacation until whatever difficulties have been sorted out. Sadly, I am forced to sit like a mournful Vanderbilt football fan after another heartbreaking loss watching the departures screen and cursing the world. But trains. In my opinion, trains rank slightly above headphones (but slightly below Advil™ Liquigels) in terms of greatest things ever invented. Considering how well I can tune out the world with a pair of headphones—or, by contrast, my roommate can not torment me with nonsensical Korean soap operas—and how Advil got me through four years of basketball (they were particularly useful to have after a Grover Tirade™), you get the picture. There is really nothing better than riding a train, especially in Europe. You get to watch the countryside fly by and are able to move around whenever you feel like it, so your knees don’t hate you. Sleeper cars are particularly fun because there’s just something so incredibly romantic and 19^th/early 20^th century about taking a sleeper train. I could just imagine Agatha Christie popping in and introducing herself as our compartment-mate or Dame Rebecca West coming in and eventually showing me her manuscript of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon. Very historically sexy (I must remember to take this part out before posting, my grandparents are reading this thing).

So here I was: traveling to Moldova on a sleeper train. Cloud 9 had nothing on me, I was on Cloud 15. Luke patiently endured my excitement, eventually distracting me with The Name of the Rose by Umbarto Eco (an excellent train book, by the way). We went to bed pretty early and slept well, but had to endure the fascinating experience that is crossing the border of an EU country to a non-EU country. By train. In the middle of the night. We didn’t have any trouble, far from it. Tourists don’t usually go to Moldova, so we were regarded by the border guards with amused bewilderment as they collected our customs forms (they hadn’t bothered making new ones so that the date didn’t read ‘19___’).

*          *          *

It is a dark and snow stormy night at the Moldovan-Romanian border. Wolves howl and searchlights cut through the inky blackness as the train stops for passport control. In the train are two intrepid adventurers, off to see the wonders of Chisinau, bearing a British and American passport respectively. Two border guards enter the compartment.

Guard 1: Buna ziua. Va rog passport. [Romanian for Good evening, may I please see your passports?]

The intrepid adventurers hand over their documents. The two guards, much to their surprise, find themselves face-to-face with the seals of the United States of America and Great Britain. Dark eyebrows are raised and fuzzy hats are removed to reveal equally confused-looking heads of hair.

Guard 1: Sounding a bit like Dracula, except after inhaling helium. Vat ees thees?

Intrepid American Adventurer: Stating the obvious because she tends to do so when nervous. Our passports.

Guard 2: Stops staring at Intrepid British Adventurer’s passport. Vy ees you here?

Intrepid British Adventurer: We’re intrepid adventurers from America and England come to see your fair country. Guards 1 and 2 stare blankly at him and IAA kicks him. What? I mean, we’re tourists!

He’s said it. Thunder rolls. Wolves howl. Horses neigh wildly. Lightening crashes. The train itself trembles, though this could possibly just be from ongoing process of changing the gauge of the tracks.

Guard 1: VAT? Vat deeed yu say?

IBA: Brightly. He’s attributed the howling wolves as a reaction to thunder and lightening when it’s supposed to be snowing. We’re tourists!

Guard 2: Toureeeests? Toureeeests? No such ting in Moldova!

IAA: Um, I’ve heard people come here in the summers…

Guard 2: Shaking with terror. Nu! Nu! Nu! [Romanian for Are you kidding me?] Vee must go get boss.

He and Guard 1 beat a hasty retreat, taking IAA’s and IBA’s passports with them.

IBA: Pleasant fellows. Looks out the window after a particularly loud crash. Oh look, I think they’re changing the railway gauges!

IAA: I wish they’d bring our passports back. Starts getting really nervous.

After what seems like hours, Guard 2 returns with his superior, Guard 3.

Guard 3: Looks over IBA and IAA, yep, there’s no doubt about it. So, yu ees *toureeests*?

IBA: Tears self away from window. That’s right.

IAA: Is there a problem? Really wants passport back.

Thunder crashes. Wolves howl. Horses neigh wildly. Lightning flashes. The train shudders and the searchlights outside go nuts. Guard 3 looms like a wraith. A very angry, red-faced wraith who wants to eat you and your children.

Guard 3: Ees there problem? EES THERE PROBLEM? Yus ees toureeests. This word no exist in Moldovan. Loses accent, a common occurrence when angry. His subordinates tremble. Now I have to go make a report with the government that we have tourists, but I can’t explain what you are because there is no word for tourists in Moldovan. So, to explain to my superiors who exactly has crossed this godforsaken border at this ungodly hour, I must first register the word tourists with the Moldovan Academy that oversees our lovely language. Shouting. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FORMS ARE REQUIRED TO REGISTER A NEW WORD WITH THE MOLDOVAN ACADEMY?! The wolves outside whimper in terror.

*          *          *

Fortunately, this is not what happened at the border. We answered some quick questions, filled out our forms, handed over our passports, and watched the train change gauges. After a long while, we were stamped in by a very nice (and English-speaking) Moldovan soldier and we were on our way!

 
15 Feburary, 2007

Today was one of those see-saw days when something delightful happened and was immediately followed by a disaster of some magnitude in a headache-inducing cycle that left me in tears more than once. We got to Chisinau bright and early and did a little victory dance in the (surprisingly modern and clean) station before trying to get our bearings. This is where the trouble started. Our copy of Lonely Planet Eastern Europe did not include Moldova and so we didn’t have a map. I thought this wouldn’t be a problem because I had the addresses of two hotels in the city, as well as directions from the train station. Besides, I figured we’d be able to get a map or some sort of information at the train station. This, in a word, did not happen. Moldova has two national languages, Romanian and Russian, so that means everyone is bilingual and that knowledge of English is going to be sparse (knowing two languages is hard enough!). The lady at the information desk had no idea what I was asking for in my combination of French/Polish/two words of Romanian and so we decided to set out and find the center for ourselves. This was all well and good, but we weren’t 100% sure of the way and so had to go back to the station and find a cab. A very nice guard got us into a cab with another fellow who spoke English and we went off to the address of one of the hotels I had written down. We got to the correct street easily and the cabbie told us that the place we were looking for was 40 meters back. Our fellow passenger insisted on paying our fare, so we were two very happy campers when we got out of the cab. Then we realized we were in the middle of a bustling market and there was no hotel sign to be seen. We wandered around asking people who would point in one direction or another, but add something I couldn’t understand afterwards. It wasn’t until a nice Russian girl stopped us and asked us what we were looking for did I find out what people were trying to tell me: the hotel didn’t exist anymore. It shut down a couple of years ago and the market had taken over the property. No problem, I said, I have another address. The girl pointed us in the right direction and we set off. Chisinau is very well-laid out (and by that I mean it’s a Soviet-style city on a grid, so it’s hard to get lost), and we were on our way. Since we didn’t have a map, I got worried after a while if we were going the right way and so we stopped at a travel agency to get better directions and see if they could help. Miracle of miracles, the English-speaking receptionist provided us with a map and directions and we were soon on our way again. Of course, when we got to the hotel, we discovered that it was full and were then pointed to another place that also didn’t seem to exist.

It was about that time that I felt a lovely Gina Panic Attack™ coming on. Here we were in Moldova and we didn’t have a place to sleep! I nearly burst into tears. Fortunately, Luke is much more calm and came up with the bright idea of looking at the hotels recommended on the map. They all looked dreadfully pricey, but we didn’t have much of a choice, so we picked the one with the fewest stars and headed there. That was possibly the best random piece of luck we had! We arrived at this small, cozy hotel on a little side-street and were enthusiastically greeted by the receptionist. She gave us a very nice room at a discount and we were back in business. The room was fabulous: huge and bright with a really nice bathroom and even a little sitting area with a TV. We were paying less than what Dad and I do when we stay at the La Quinta in Champaign on the way back from Wisconsin and we had a palace! Best of all, the whole adventure only took an hour, so we had time to rest up before going to see the sights.

After a very nice shower and nap, we headed out to see what else Chisinau had to offer besides a bustling market and nonexistent hotels. We had a nice lunch at a place called, I’m not kidding, Green Hills. I was thrilled to find a random reminder of Nashville all the way in Chisinau, Moldova. It was even better than being able to use my French and what little non-gymnastics Romanian I taught myself a couple of summers ago to figure out the menu (we later discovered that there was an English translation in the back, but that didn’t stop me from feeling rather proud of myself).

Chişinău, formerly known as Kishinev, is the capital and largest city of Moldova. The city was founded in 1436 as a monastery town and was conquered by the Ottomans in the 16^th century. In the early 19^th century, it was occupied by Tsarist Russia who made it the capital of the province of Bessarabia. The city became one of the most important in the areas and its prosperity caused the population to explode throughout the 19^th century. Jews in particular settled in huge numbers in Chisinau because of the favorable economic conditions as well as the relative peace there in comparison to the situation in the Russia and the Polish lands occupied by Russia. By 1900, Jews accounted for 43% of the population, one of the highest in Europe. The turn of the century was marked by two bloody events—the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, an anti-Semitic riot that lasted three days and left about 50 people dead and hundreds wounded, and the crushing of a 1905 protest of Nicholas II. Following the October Revolution, Bessarabia declared independence from Russia and joined the Kingdom of Romania as an autonomous state. The city was almost completely destroyed during WWII, thanks to the Soviet and Nazi occupations and a devastating earthquake that measured a 7.3 on the Richter scale. When Chisinau finally fell to the Red Army in August of 1944, 70% of it had been destroyed and its Jewish population decimated, with about 10,000 killed. After the war, a rebuilding campaign began and the city was built in the lovely Stalinist socialist-realist style of blocks of flats and heavy-looking government buildings seen today. On the bright side, Chisinau has one of the highest percentages of green spaces among European cities, making it a pleasant place to stroll when the weather’s nice. Restoration of a few historic buildings has also brightened the landscape a little bit.

Moldova’s ethnic situation is also quite interesting today. As I said earlier, the country’s official languages are Romanian and Russian, reflecting its historical situation as a crossroads (and often battleground) between these two nations, as well as the contested status of ‘Moldovan’ ethnicity. With identity being so closely tied to language in this part of the world, the lack of a Moldovan language (though there apparently are attempts to create one) allows Russians and Romanians to lay linguistic claims on this region. As of 2004, about 22% of the population belongs to ethnic minorities: ranging from Russians to Romanians to Bulgarians and Ukrainians to Gagauzians (a Turkic-speaking, Christian group) and Jews (according to the JDC, there are about 24,000 Jews in Moldova today, in comparison to 10-12,000 Polish Jews). Once again, I digress and Wikipedia is ever so interesting and addictive. I just went to look up Chisinau’s history and, well, look at this mess!

We return to the scene: me and Luke walking around possibly the most remote point I have ever been to. Bucharest was a rumor and Poland mere fantasy. I thought I knew about remote when I wandered about Mazuria, or stood on the Baltic coast in the middle of winter, or drank in the sunset at Rosh Hanikra and pointedly ignored Lebanon at my back. That is a different sort of remote, a feeling you get when you’re far afield and just how far away from home you are hits you like a ton of bricks. Wandering Chisinau was like wandering in some weird plane where things clash. I knew that Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, but you only see that in the contrasts: the shiny black BMWs and Jaguars cutting off rusty junk buckets on the wide streets, shops filled with goods but people thronging to the bargain shopping mall or the market, shiny new hotels competing with ones so old the receptionist still asks you to register with the local Soviet and you wonder if there are bugs in the telephone. Moldova tries, much like I felt that Poland did when I first visited. See, we aren’t as bad as you think. Won’t you come and take a chance with us. We have potential, you’ll see! In Poland, this became a reality with EU integration and I no longer feel that little voice as I ramble through the country. Poland is secure in its future; here things seem a bit more tenuous. But then you grab a good bottle of local wine, attend a concert, praise the artists’ works at their market, eat a good meal, and you forget that there is a breakaway region a short bus ride away and that while peace is pretty solid, tensions are high enough to have Lonely Planet warn travelers to avoid the area. Lonely Planet says keep out of Northern Albania, but does not include that in a large boxed warning like they do for Transnisteria in Moldova.

So, as I was saying, we had a very pleasant time wandering about Chisinau and seeing the sights. We bought tickets to an organ concert, leading to another edition of me having fun with languages I can’t speak. I successfully ordered the tickets (doi bilety [ok, I fudged the plural] va rog) and handed over the money. The confusion started when Luke pulled out some money to pay me back, but the lady at the ticket kasa thought that he was trying to pay her, so she told us something in Romanian (something like, I’m getting your change as we speak). Not realizing the confusion, I stared at her blankly. This causes her to fluidly switch into Russian, causing the blank stare to deepen. All the Russian I know is from the opera class I accidentally signed up for last spring and we definitely weren’t talking about Sadko or Ruslan and Liudmilla here. Finally she realizes that we have no idea what she’s saying and slowly says in Russian Nie romunski [you don’t speak Romanian, do you?]? We nod. She thinks and then asks, a nie ruski [and you don’t happen to speak Russian either, am I correct?]? We nod again. The light bulb snaps on brilliantly. Ah, she says, ani romunski, ani ruski [Neither Romanian nor Russian?]? Again, we nod. The light bulb is shining like the sun. Jasne [Oh, I get it!]! she declares, handing us our tickets and change and laughing.

Still chuckling to ourselves, we killed the hour before the concert at a coffee shop, where I managed to make myself look completely and utterly stupid by putting salt in my tea. Why on earth they had salt right by the tea spoons is beyond me, maybe Moldovans are smarter than us’n stupid Americans. The lady behind the counter had a good laugh at me, and tried to drain the worst of the salt out of the water. Salty-sugary tea was not my cup of tea (oh why did I just use that?} and so I just drank some of Luke’s beer. He’s a nice guy like that. Then, we went to the concert, which was excellent. The first half was the advertised organ concert and then the second half featured the city children’s orchestra, who were absolutely precious and amazing! We had a great time sitting in the elegant blue-white-and-turquoise concert hall pretending to be elegant and listening to some great music. Gershwin in Chisinau, what a night!

After the concert, we couldn’t be bothered with finding a restaurant, so we decided to have a picnic back in our room. That was very, very fun.

 
16 February, 2007

Today we walked around Chisinau and saw a couple of museums. First we went to see Pushkin’s house—he was exiled here for three years after the Decemberist Uprising because a lot of his friends from school were involved in the Uprising and the authorities decided that, although Pushkin wasn’t involved directly, he was guilty by association and so was sent to cool his heels in Chisinau. We got there a bit early, but the two sweet little old Russian ladies running the museum opened it up for us when they saw us standing outside the gate looking like stupid, but adorably forlorn, tourists. The museum is quite small and consists of the little house in which Pushkin lived, decorated with a lot of his things, and then a exhibition on his writings in another building. Everything was in Romanian and Russian, but the little old ladies were enthusiastic about making us understand what they were trying to tell us. Although Polish isn’t terribly close to Russian, we were able to figure some things out and talked to our amused guides in Polish and everyone was happy. Then, we went to the history museum. Well, when I say ‘went’, I mean we walked around a lot because I got the address mixed up with another museum, realized our mistake and backtracked only to discover that the place was closed and so walked back to the museum to which we were mistakenly headed in the first place. That museum was the national Ethnographic and Natural History Museum and we had a grand time learning all about Moldova’s wildlife, both past and present, and some of the natural culture. Once again, everything was in Russian and Romanian only, but a stuffed badger is a stuffed badger in any language. In the last room was a temporary exhibit on the Holocaust, which I found very impressive and gave the museum a big thumbs up for having it. Yay for raising awareness!

When we had admired all the stuffed animals and peasant clothing we could handle, we thanked the nice ladies and headed back. The exterior of the museum is really pretty—very Moorish—and there are bits of the interior that are still extravagantly painted, which leads one to wonder what the building was originally used for. We wandered around some more and I couldn’t help but sort of wonder if the people who warned me about how terrible and dangerous Moldova is before I came actually have ever been here. Oh, I’m sure that there’s plenty of trouble if you’re looking for it, especially in Transnisteria, but we were quite comfortable in Chisinau. The roads and sidewalks could use a lot of work though, as I nearly killed myself several time by tripping over broken cobbles, stumbling over uneven pavement, and nearly drowning in a couple of large puddles that were actually lakes. We grabbed lunch at a pizza place with funky décor and absolutely dreadful food. After living in Poland, I am quite used to having ketchup and mayonnaise being served with the pizza. The ketchup is not like Heinz, it’s actually made of tomatoes and serves as a very nice sauce and apparently some people like mayo on their pizza. I don’t understand the latter bit, but I have developed a taste for Polish ketchup on my pizza. So, when I saw that the pizza came with ketchup and mayo, I didn’t think anything of it. Of course, when our pizzas were brought out, I couldn’t help but ask where’s the ketchup? I didn’t think anything of it: restaurants usually don’t bring condiments out to foreigners, and took a bite of my pizza. That was when I discovered the location of both the ketchup and (most predominantly) the mayonnaise. They had been baked into the pizza. Luke and I managed to get some of it down, but it was so awful that we slunk out of there really fast, leaving behind two half-finished pizzas. Ew, ew, ew. Definitely the worst food experience ever.

We killed a little more time, then headed back to the hotel and got a taxi to the train station. We sat around for a while, and then enjoyed another night in a fabulous Moldovan train (I’m not kidding). The ride was very smooth and quiet, but we got to have four hours of fun at the border crossing. First, we stopped two towns away from the border and a doctor got on the train to see if anyone was ill. Those five who were got kicked off the train (I saw a group who I assume came from the train walking over the tracks back to the station house as we pulled out). Then, we had to change the gauge of the rails, which involves a lot of banging and swearing and jostling. The Moldovan border guards once again took their sweet time with our passports and left us sitting nervously for a long time while they presumably went to fill out some forms over a leisurely dinner. Once we got all of that taken care of, we chugged to the Romanian side and sat for another two hours while the Romanian border guards took their sweet time with our passports as they had to take every Moldovan and their luggage off the train, search them, stamp them in, and put them back on the train. Since our passports are pretty easy to deal with—Luke’s doesn’t even require a stamp since he’s an EU citizen—we were left for last. I was so tired by this point that I couldn’t see straight, but I couldn’t go to sleep because I didn’t have my passport and we didn’t know if one of the guards was going to come in and ask us questions again. When we finally got our things back, I zonked out almost instantly.

17 February, 2007

We got a bit of a surprise this morning because we woke up when the train was pulling into Bucharest! We thought that someone was going to come around and get our sheets, like they did on the way to Chisinau, but that wasn’t the case so we scrambled a bit. Fortunately Gara de Nord is the last stop, so we didn’t have to rush too much. It was really early when we got into Bucharest, so we caught the bus to Butterfly Villa and checked in, but couldn’t go back to sleep because all the beds were full. We talked with Iulia for a bit and played with the cat, then helped make (and eat) breakfast.

When we could eat no more, we headed back out into the cold to see some of the sights that we missed two days before in Old Bucharest. We stopped for a map at the Athenee Palace Hotel, which in the interwar years was Bucharest’s most fashionably seedy hotel. It is said that King Carol, Romania’s notorious playboy king in the ‘20s and ‘30s, used to personally solicit the prostitutes hanging around the elegant dining rooms there. All the journalists stayed there, looking for leads and getting spied on by all sorts of plainclothes policemen and informants. The Nazis then used it as their headquarters during WWII, so it got bombed pretty heavily. Today it is a sleek, respectable looking grand hotel run by Marriott. Going inside and dealing with the very friendly staff and seeing how completely non-sketchy the place is makes me again wonder which Athenee Palace Hotel Robert Kaplan was whining about in Balkan Ghosts. Methinks he was just another stuck-up East Coast reporter who resented his editors shunting him off to the Balkans. Obviously the man did not have a nose for news, or taste for that matter. I’ll stop complaining about Kaplan and his wretched book now, I promise. 

Our first stop was Piata Revolutionarii (Revolution Plaza), where the crowd gathered to hear Ceausescu speak and launched a revolution. A huge monument dominates the square, commemorating the struggle and listing the names of those who died when the Securitate agents fired into the crowd when they began to protest Ceausescu’s regime. Across the way is the former Communist Party headquarters, where the great dictator gave his last speech and from which he and his wife escaped early the next morning. The most amazing monument was the building shell that once used to be the headquarters of Securitate and was destroyed during the war. The shell stood as a memorial to the violence and recently the Bucharest Architectural Society designed and built an amazing glass structure inside the shell. It’s really something else.

We had a coffee break to get out of the Chicago-style wind and walked around more of old Bucharest. There isn’t much left, but here and there are glimpses of buildings that gave the city its nickname of Paris of the East. Most people had the good sense to stay inside, so we didn’t run into many people as we walked around and saw some of the churches and the Princely Court. We found a cute little street of artists, where I bought a little painting, and then went in search of a Romanian translation of The Silmarillion. This took a bit of patience because we 1.) had to find a bookstore, and 2.) had to ask where the heck they kept their Tolkien books. We did eventually manage to do both and I now have another book for my ridiculous collection.

After a very late lunch, we were both so tired and cold that we decided to head back to the hostel. We had been walking for almost six hours (10am to 4pm) by then and it was starting to hit us. It’s a shame because we did miss some sites, but I don’t think we would have enjoyed them that much if we had gone. It just means we have to come back!

18 February, 2007

Flew back to Krakow and began looking with trepidation toward second semester.

11 February, 2007

We woke up early the next morning and began our quick exploration of the city. We only planned to spend the day in Cluj, then take a bus or train to Sibiu. Remember that best-laid plans go oft awry. More on that later.

Cluj, or Cluj-Napoca, is one of Romania’s most important academic, cultural, and historic centers. In the 2^nd century, a Roman legionary camp was established there by the Emperor Trajan and given the name Napoca. It subsequently received municipum and colonia status during the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius respectively. Eventually, Napoca became a provincial capital, but was overrun and destroyed during the Migrations Period as the Roman province of Dacia was overrun by invasions from the east. The area was eventually settled and rebuilt by Magyar tribes and became part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 10^th century and was named Kolozsvár in Hungarian. Germanic Saxon peoples were also invited to settle the area starting in the 13^th century and the town received the name Klausenburg in German. Over the centuries, Kolozsvár-Klausenburg was a major center of learning and religion, although it was not the region’s provincial capital. In the late 17^th century, the town and its environs became part of the Hapsburg Empire and in the 19^th century was the seat of the Transylvanian Diets. Over the years, Cluj became one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s most important cities. [On a slightly random note, the town was taken over during the 1848 Spring of Nations by Hungarian troops led by the Polish general and freedom-fighter, Jozef Bem. This proves that no matter where one goes, one can always find a tie to Poland]. After WWI, the city was part of the territory given to the Kingdom of Romania by the Treaty of Versailles, but retained a Hungarian majority. In 1940, Cluj was restored to Hungary and was occupied by the Nazis in 1944. At this time Cluj had 16,763 inhabitants of Jewish ancestry in 1941. After Hungary's German occupation in March 1944, the city's Jews were forced into ghettos under conditions of intense overcrowding and practically no facilities. Liquidation of the ghetto occurred through six deportations to Auschwitz between May and June 1944. Despite facing severe sanctions from the Horthy government, many Jews escaped across the border to Romania with the assistance of Romanian peasants of neighboring villages. They were then able to flee Europe from the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta. Other Jews originating from East European countries were helped to escape from Europe by an Anti-Nazi group led by the Jewish Joint and Romanian politicians in Cluj and Bucharest. One synagogue remains as a memorial to the vanished people, who included the Hasidic Sanz-Klausenburg dynasty.

Cluj was returned to Romania after the war and became a Romanian-dominated city in the 1960s, and was the scene of a great deal of nationalist, anti-Hungarian initiatives during and after the fall of Communism. In the 1970s, the town’s name was changed officially to Cluj-Napoca, to highlight the original Roman character of the town. Because the Romanians are descended from Romanized Dacian tribes, this was a significant move to underscore the “Romanian-ness” of the town, while deemphasizing the Hungarian and Saxon contributions. Language, politics, and identity strikes again. After 1989, a series of public art projects were undertaken to highlight the Romanian symbols of the town. Today, Cluj is about 20% Hungarian and 80% Romanian, with a (naturally undercounted) Roma population and apparently a few Jews are still around (.06% of the city’s 2002 population). In addition, it is also one of Romania’s most important university towns and boasts 10 public and private universities.

Although it had been rather drizzly and cold the night before, the morning was quite nice and we took advantage of the sunlight to see the sights. Cluj is quite a nice city and definitely a good way to start out an adventure in Romania. We saw the St. Michael’s Church in the central square and the big statue of Matthias Corvinus again, then walked down to see the statue of St. George slaying a very wimpy-looking dragon near a Romanesque-style church and admired the remnants of the Tailor’s Bastion down the street. Then, we grabbed breakfast at a nice little café, where I successfully put the bit of Romanian I taught myself that does not have to do with gymnastics to use. The windows looked over Avram Iancu Square, home to the National Theater and Opera as well as the main Orthodox Church. Since it was Sunday morning, the place was packed with churchgoers, so much so that we realized that the strange music we’d heard upon entering the square was actually the church service being brodcasted on loudspeakers because the church was so packed that the latecomers had to stand outside in the square. Since neither of us had ever been to a Romanian Orthodox service, we stopped by after breakfast to check it out. I couldn’t understand a word of what was going on, but it was really pretty to listen to. Then, we walked back to St. Michael’s square and saw the art museum. There was an exhibition on a modern painter who did very hazy, abstract landscape pictures downstairs while upstairs contained the city’s extensive art collection with a lot of very nice impressionist paintings. After we grabbed lunch at a pizza place, we grabbed our bags and headed to the bus station to catch our bus to Sibiu. That was when disaster struck. The buses were very crowded for some reason and so they were only allowing people with reservations on. Since we didn’t have a reservation and didn’t know how to make one, we couldn’t get on our bus. Undeterred, we sprinted to the train station to see if we could catch the train. This failed because the clerk tried to rip me off by charging me the ticked price in old lei with the expectation that I was a stupid, flustered tourist and so would pay her in new lei. Fortunately, Luke caught on and we decided to go back and try the next bus. This too was without success and we had to make new plans. I broke out the guidebook and decided that we would just forget about Sibiu and go somewhere else, like Sighisoara, the next day. We headed back to the hostel for the night and ended up having a lot of fun hanging out with our roommates—a Canadian from the Yukon and a British fellow. We went out to a traditional Romanian restaurant and ate until we thought we were going to explode, then stayed up chatting at the hostel for a while.

12 February, 2007

We got up bright and early the next morning, checked out again, and headed back up to the train station to catch our train to Sighisoara. I wasn’t feeling too hot from all that walking in the rain and the stress of the afternoon before, but managed to catch a nap on the train. Our compartment-mates included two students who got on with us at Cluj and a chatty grandmother and a young girl who seemed to be her granddaughter who were traveling from Satu Mare to Bucharest. They were all very nice and we had a nice chat, with the grandmother pointing out all sorts of interesting things on the way. The Romanian countryside is really quite pretty, a lot more hilly than Poland, and threading in and out of the hills was pretty spectacular when the sun started shining. Unfortunately, it was also quite dirty in places—the rivers and roadsides were choked with trash. Hopefully the EU can give Romania some money with firm instructions to use it to finance a cleanup campaign, because it’s so beautiful that it doesn’t deserve to be trashed.

When we passed through Medias, I got the fascinating experience of once again having my Language, Politics, and Identity class get applied to the real world. That was definitely the most useful class I’ve ever taken. As we pulled into the station at Medias, I was looking out the window and noticed some apartment blocks which looked fairly new, but were absolutely run down and looked more like a garbage dump. Trash was everywhere and all the windows and doors were gone along with their frames. This sight made the chatty grandmother get really wound up and she started talking to me in rapid-fire Romanian. From what I was able to understand, these blocks were public housing blocks built for the Roma not terribly long ago and their inhabitants had shown their gratitude to the Romanian government by tearing the place apart (or so the grandmother said). I was reminded of a bit I read in Bury Me Standing, where Isabella Foncesca mentioned that the Roma are known for ripping out windows and doors and selling them as well as knocking the inside walls down to make the flats bigger. The short-term is much more important in their culture, as are movable assets, because as a displaced, marginalized people they had to be ready to leave at any moment and so prepared for this (subconsciously or not) by making sure that any wealth was easy to move. It’s a completely different way of looking at the world, one that I don’t think any non-Roma can really understand. It is interesting to see it up close and personal though, along with the reaction of non-Roma observers. This was also after we’d been bothered by no fewer than five people trying to sell us something or just begging for money. One girl (I think) with tangled black hair and a pitiful face was walking around in a pair of ripped jean shorts much too small for her that showed off these horrible burn scars on her skinny legs. It was just awful and we waved her away, but none of us could take our eyes off what looked to be leftovers from incredibly painful injuries.

The train station at Sighisoara was an interesting experience. The Romanians, much more so than the Poles and Hungarians, are allergic to signs and so it was a little nerve-wracking trying to figure out exactly what station we were supposed to get off at and, once we got off, whether or not we were at the right one. Fortunately, everyone is so kind and doesn’t mind it when you ask stupid questions like “Sighisoara?” while pointing at the ground. The train guard sent us on our way, with very good instructions on how to find the ticket booth, and we got our first taste of the city.

I must say, I was really disappointed with my first sight of Sighisoara. The train station was run down and the whole place was dirty and ugly. It looked more like a godforsaken town rather than what has been said to be one of the most beautiful towns in Romania and a member of UNESCO’s world heritage list. My heart was in my toes as we plodded into town because I just knew that I’d really screwed up this one. Fortunately, our spirits lifted once we crossed the bridge into the old town proper and wound our way up the narrow medieval streets to the Bastion. It was still gray and icky out, but the main part of town was certainly quite pretty. I was in a much better mood when we got to our hostel, in spite of the lack of signs and being hit up for money by at least four beggar kids. Fortunately, a few words in Polish send them on their way—even the street kids don’t equate Slavic-sounding languages with rich tourists. After we set our bags down in our new hostel (the Burg Hostel), we walked around the town and admired the views from the top of the hill. By this time, I wasn’t feeling good at all, so we went back to the restaurant attached to the hostel and grabbed some dinner. We ended up hanging out with a fellow from Vancouver and had a pretty nice time. He was a very interesting fellow and the food was excellent (mamaliga is my new favorite side dish). Since I was sniffling a lot more than I liked, we turned in early.

13 February, 2007

Although I still wasn’t feeling 100%, I was not about to let a silly cold stop me from enjoying Sighisoara. The weather cleared up over night and we had a pleasant, if chilly, day to enjoy the town before catching our late-afternoon train to Bucharest. We slept in, then walked around the town to see some of the things we liked the night before in the daylight.

Like Cluj, Sighisoara is also a town with a history shared by Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans. The town entered recorded history in the late 12^th century and was settled mostly by Saxons at the invitation of the King of Hungary in return for defending the kingdom’s borders. The German-dominated city became one of Transylvania’s most important commercial centers, attracting merchants and artisans from all over Europe. However, Sighisoara is best known as the birthplace of Vlad Tepes Dracul (1431), the Wallachian prince whose fondness for impaling his enemies captured the imagination of Bram Stoker. Vlad Tepes was also the first person to use the city’s Romanian name in an official document, before it was officially referred to by its Hungarian name Segesvár or its German one Schäßburg. Today, it is a sleepy medieval town on the Tarnava River and a favorite with backpackers such as myself and Luke.

Our walk took us all over the bastion, which is not a terribly hard thing to do as it’s very small. The clock tower on the square was especially pretty because it has multicolored roof tiles, which are slightly iridescent in the sunlight. We saw the city museum in the clock tower and then the arms and armory museum almost next door. Since we didn’t really have much else to do, we walked around aimlessly and poked our heads into some of the shops. The best by far was a little shop, which looked more like the proprietor’s kitchen, that sold homemade tuica, a type of brandy that is the Romanian national drink. The owner was very kind and allowed us to sample his wares, which were good but really have a kick in them. He got a good laugh from my expression as I downed one particular shot—which tasted a lot more like cough syrup than anything else. I think he gives out samples just to watch the reactions of the unsuspecting non-Romanians.

After lunch, we killed time and then caught our train to Bucharest. The train was one of the new InterCity trains and absolutely sweet. It was all shiny and new and looked like it had accidentally been rerouted from Germany or something. One of our compartment-mates said that all the IC trains were like this and we were suitably impressed. Western Europe, eat your heart out.

The ride was long and there wasn’t much to see after it got dark, but we caught a glimpse of life at dusk in some of the small towns. It’s really amazing to see the contrasts between old and new in Romania: there I was, sitting on this beautifully modern train while watching a shepherd, crook and all, leading his flock home for the night. Although I’ve become used to seeing these contrasts in Poland, they are much sharper here and I figured that they would become moreso as we got to Bucharest and then continued to Moldova.

Bucharest’s Gara de Nord has a reputation of being one of the worst places in Europe to be a tourist. Guidebooks warn of pickpockets and scams and put in large letters that you should be on your toes at all times. However, when we got off the train, everything was very quiet and normal. Unlike in Budapest, no one approached us for so much as a taxi, much less tried to swarm us with offers for rooms or how to make charity donations. I wondered a little at this, especially since Lonely Planet had devoted a precious section specifically to it, but then I noticed as we were walking out that the entrances were roped off and there were people checking tickets there. Apparently, you must have one to get in or pay for the privilege. Considering that most beggars could probably not afford to do this day after day, the problem was resolved in a simple, yet brilliant stroke that probably left a lot of people wondering why it hadn’t been implemented years before.

Our ride out to the most fabulous hostel not called Wombats in Europe, Butterfly Villa, was easy and relatively painless (I say relatively because it was blasted cold out). While we were waiting for the bus, I got to see examples of two of Bucharest’s major problems: street children and wild dogs. Neither bothered us, and so I just got the opportunity to be a nerd and channel everything I read about Ceausescu's  insane urban redevelopment plans that led to a lot of dogs getting set loose by their owners who were being forcibly displaced which led (as can be imagined) to an explosion of stray dogs. Every so often, the city authorities go out and shoot a bunch of them (to the animal rights people: you have not seen wild dogs until you see some of the denizens of Bucharest’s streets, these guys are not fuzzy), but they always miss some and the problem never gets resolved. Street kids are also another major social problem: a lot of them are Roma, but others are from very poor families. Some believe this has a lot to do with Ceausescu’s banning of birth control and abortion, done in order to make the Romanians outbreed the Hungarians and Roma but really resulting in Europe’s most overcrowded orphanages and a lot of unsafe backdoor abortions (an example I usually cite for those in favor of banning abortion, abstinence-only sex education, and limiting access to birth control, they oddly never seem to have an answer for it). Many are addicted to one sort of drug or another, usually glue, and are frequently exploited by older street toughs for any number of unpleasant things. It’s really sad.

Butterfly Villa hostel was hopping when we came in, and we soon found ourselves in the company of an eclectic group of travelers. There were a couple of Americans, who were traveling with a Canadian girl from Istanbul via Greece and Bulgaria as well as a few Brits, a Frenchman, and an Iranian fellow who sounded like Herman Munster. This merry circus was presided over by Iulia, the girl at the front desk, and hostel’s pet cat. We went out for dinner, then watched Army of the Dead, which was almost as hilariously bad at the New York Knicks and as full of melodrama as the life of Pacman Jones. Luke, being British and thus have a much more sophisticated sense of humor than most of us, didn’t think much of it though, but did humor me by sitting through it.

7 February, 2007

Oh, what a day it has been! I got up early to prep for my speaking exam and proceeded to miss the tram. This was not exactly my fault because the stupid tram definitely came early as I watched it sail off into the distance at exactly 8:06 (it’s supposed to come to my stop at 8:07). Cursing a blue streak which caused the paint on the shelter to peel and two unfortunate pigeons to explode in horror, I slogged off through the snow. About a block later, I started cursing again because I remembered that I had left my Indeks back at the dorm and so had to turn around and go back. Indeks in hand, I barely managed to catch the next tram, which also decided to come early. My kharma was seriously off on the day I needed it the most.

When I got to school, I prepped some more with Emma and Ewa before our turn. The exam itself was a disaster. I looked at the topic I was supposed to talk about and couldn’t exactly understand what I was supposed to be doing. This caused me to practically burst into tears and the professors giving the exam decided to let me chill while they grilled the other two. I finally figured out what I was supposed to be talking about and did all right. I managed to think on my feet during my monologue because I had to talk about my favorite places in Nashville and in Krakow and had only prepared something about Nashville. I did all right, but I mixed up the words for ‘bookstore’ and ‘library,’ but managed to recover by saying the place I was talking about was both. Then Professor Smirk asked me if I liked country music, which made me start talking about how much I absolutely hate that question. Oh, I also managed to throw in a Star Wars reference because my other topic was about cloning and, not knowing really what to say, I referenced Attack of the Clones to back up my argument that cloning humans was bad. After all, if Jango Fett hadn’t been cloned, we wouldn’t have had Boba. I think that brought up my grade from a 3 to a 4 for complete nerdiness.

After we got our now-complete indeksy, Emma and I went for lunch and a jaunt to the outdoor store where I bought a much-needed backpack. Then, I went home to pack and kill time until our night train. I spent some time with the guys and said goodbye to some of the first semester students who were leaving. *sniffle* It was really sad to say goodbye to Brian, but he said he was going to try to swing through when he was coming back from the Balkans and going to Russia. I hope that works out.

Luke and I went to the train station and hopped on our train to Budapest to start off our adventure. Nothing particularly interesting happened, except that it was a very uncomfortable car which we shared with this batshit insane Croatian guy. He was actually very nice, but he wouldn’t stop talking! I wouldn’t have minded a chance to practice my Polish, but he spoke a mixture of Croatian, Polish, English, and German, which was extremely confusing. He was saying some interesting things, but I could only understand about half of what he was saying!

My passport now sports Slovakian and Hungarian stamps. Go me!
 

8 February, 2007

I woke up around 1:30am to realize that our crazy Croatian companion had stretched out over the seats to go to sleep. This was all well and good, except that it meant that his head was practically in my lap. Sore and slightly perturbed at having my personal space bubble invaded at such an ungodly hour, I carefully tiptoed over to Luke’s side and tried to fall asleep again there. However, in accordance with the Narrative Laws of Comedy, every time I tried to fall asleep, I was jolted back into awareness. It was all right though because I was awake and super-excited to get going as our train pulled into Budapest.

Budapest’s train station is…interesting to say the least. Our feet had barely grazed Hungarian concrete for the first time when we were surrounded by a crowd partially of peddlers and partially of denizens of the Court of Miracles. Fortunately, we had our wits around us enough to revert to Polish mode and thus be left alone as we threaded our way through the station. Thank God we can communicate in a language that doesn’t cause the neon: “we’re rich tourists!” sign to flare up (rich is the operative word here).

Anyway, we managed to figure out enough of the fascinating, yet absolutely impossible, Hungarian language to get Metro tickets and then headed into town. Budapest’s underground system is small, but quite good and pretty easy to figure out. The Hungarians have my abiding love because they like putting signs up, unlike almost everyone else in Central/Eastern Europe. Of course, said signs are in a language that is distantly related to Estonian and Finnish. We decided to head to the one place where all the lines converged, figuring that: 1.) if all the lines converged there, it was probably the center of town, 2.) it would be easiest for our friend Bori to meet us there since we knew she had to take the metro to get into town, and 3.) if this station was in the center, there were probably some tourist sights that we could admire while waiting for Bori. Aren’t we brilliant?

Budapest, the capital of Hungary and its largest city, actually consists of two cities separated by the Danube River that joined together in 1873. Buda, on the western side of the river, is the older part and home to the famous castle as well as the wealthiest districts of the city. Pest, on the eastern side, is home to several universities and all sorts of other interesting things. The majority of the city’s prewar Jewish community also lived in this area. With the exception of the bridges connecting the two parts, the city was mostly spared during WWII and retains much of its prewar charm and historic monuments. Budapest was also the scene of a major anti-communist uprising in 1956 (which actually spread from strikes in Radom, Poland) that was brutally put down by the Soviets and resulted in hundreds of deaths. Today, new anti-government riots have occurred, but the city is mostly calm and has become one of the major tourist destinations in Eastern Europe.

After we explored central Pest enough to get our bearings and find a coffee shop for a much-needed espresso, we phoned Bori who came with her boyfriend to pick us up and take us to their place in Ujpest (northern Pest). Her flat was really super nice and not at all far from the city center. Unfortunately, she had to go run and see about some exams at her university, which is another hour away, so she couldn’t show us around the first day. It wasn’t too big a deal because Budapest is fairly easy to navigate once you have a map, so Luke and I dropped our stuff and headed back into town. It was fairly late by then, so we walked around Pest and then crossed the Chain Bridge to Buda and climbed up to the castle and admired the view. Then, we met up with Bori and her friends Agnes and Csencso, who showed St. Istevan Basilica, which was gloriously huge and imposing. Then, we hiked up the hill to see the huge Freedom Monument, which depicts a large metal woman holding a palm leaf of victory above her head and can be seen from anywhere in the city. I’m not sure where the notion of a palm leaf symbolizing victory comes from, I always thought it represented a fan preferably wielded by a handsome slave for a wealthy Roman (like in History of the World, Part I). Apparently the statue was given to Budapest by the Soviets, so the fan-wielding analogy could hold some water: Budapest is the woman holding the frond not as a sign of victory, but rather hurrying unwillingly to fan her Soviet master. This could possibly be why the locals call the thing “Tin Tits.” Symbolism debates aside, the view was gorgeous and well worth the looooong hike up.

After such an exhausting hike, we needed some refreshment, so we went to a café Bori and Csencso like and hung out. Then we went to go see one of their friends and his new band play. It was a lot of fun, but Luke and I were so tired that we headed home pretty early for a night free of snoring, space-hogging Croatians.

 
9 February, 2007

Today was our big Budapest day, so we got up bright and early to take full advantage of the few hours of daylight. We caught the bus and then the metro and started out at the top of Andrassy Avenue, Pest’s main street and a UNESCO World Heritage site. We saw one of the city’s public baths and then visited Heroes Square. The street is set up similarly to one of Haussman’s avenues in Paris: a large roundabout with an imposing monument dominating the end furthest away from the central areas (in this case, the Danube River and the Deak Ferenc area) that opens into a wide, elegant avenue with exclusive residences and shops shaded by trees. Heroes Square’s central site is the Millenium Monument, which commemorates the 1000^th anniversary of the founding of Hungary by the Magyar tribes. It contains statues of the seven tribal leaders as well as other important historical figures as well as a monument to Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary executed by the Soviets after the failed 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Then, we walked down the street towards the river and admired the architecture. We grabbed a bit of breakfast at a café and Luke laughed at me for putting too much milk in my tea (or was it tea in my milk?). This was rather amusing as I’ve gotten used to Poles laughing at me for fixing my tea British-style and have gotten so carried away with it that even the Brits can make fun of me. We also stopped in a bookstore, where we bought Bori a copy of Kerouac translated into Hungarian and I got my copy of The Silmarillion in Hungarian. This one is completely impossible to try and understand, but it’s cool having printed material in such an interesting language.

After that, it was time to do the Jewish thing. This mainly consisted of me dragging Luke off Andrassy and down some random side streets to admire various synagogues and relate my limited knowledge of Jewish life in Budapest. First, we poked our heads into the courtyard of a still-functioning Lubavich synagogue, which was small and not much to see. Then we saw the Rumbach Street Synagogue, which was done in the Neophyte style, and has only just been opened for the first time since the War. It’s really sad because it looks so beautiful as you approach it, but once you get up close you can see that it’s in really bad shape. The outside is brightly painted and retains its towers, but the paint is fading and the walls are cracked in places. The side doors are merely rotting wood and the main stairs are cracked and uneven and I had to gingerly step around a pile of what I can only hope was dog droppings. The inside is even worse. It seems like the Nazis stripped it, leaving only the walls, the cord from which the Eternal Light hung, and a few broken benches. Even bits of the floor tiles are gone and have been replaced by white gravel. The beautiful wall decorations and stained glass windows remain, but there is water damage everywhere. It smells of decay and neglect and cat piss, not the things you usually associate with houses of worship, and there is nothing to do but stand under the swaying frayed cord that once held the Eternal Light and question God.

Budapest’s Great Synagogue could not be a bigger contrast to the Rumbach. The largest still-functioning synagogue in Europe, it looks like Uncle Billy’s synagogue taken to its logically ornate conclusion. It is also in the Neophyte style and dominates the area with its gorgeous exterior and distinctive towers. Inside, there is the main synagogue, a museum, an amazing Holocaust memorial, and the remnants of the cemetery. Simply amazing. We drank in the sanctuary and then explored the museum. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to see the memorial up close because it was Shabbat and so closed early. However we were able to peer through the bars at the metal weeping willow that memorializes the Budapest Jews who were murdered during the Second World War. The square it stands in is named after Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by providing them with forged Swedish passports which prevented the Nazis from deporting them as they were allegedly citizens of a neutral country. There are stories about how Wallenberg stopped a train about to leave Budapest for Auschwitz by showing the SS these forged passports, literally snatching people from the jaws of death. When the Soviets entered Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested and disappeared. Officially, he died in prison in the USSR in the 1950s, but no one is exactly sure of the circumstances either of his arrest, detention, or death.

When I finished my Jewish history spiel, which Luke actually was surprisingly interested in (that or he is very, very patient with me), we went for some lunch at a sweet underground café and then tried to go up to the baths. We planned to meet Bori there, but she wasn’t able to come at the last minute and by that time it was too late to go and actually enjoy the place, so we decided we’d just have to come back to Budapest and check them out then. After our adventure at the train station getting tickets to Cluj, we wished that the baths stayed open longer in the winter, but we settled for a beer instead. Getting stuck behind four obnoxiously rude tourists for thirty minutes really does drive one to drink, especially after having to deal with Budapest’s Court of Miracles twice to boot. After a bit of a destresser, we headed back to Bori’s place and had dinner with her and her friends. It was a very relaxed, fun night with lots of great Hungarian food and wine and even better company.

 
10 February, 2007

We said goodbye and many thanks to Bori and Geiger this morning and headed into town to see the last few things on our Budapest itinerary before catching our train to Cluj. It was fairly warm and very sunny, so we had a lovely time at the Fishermen’s Bastion in Buda, which wins the award for the most gorgeous/romantic place in the city. The Bastion is a series of white limestone walls and towers set into the hill that look right over the Danube and onto Buda and is absolutely breathtaking on a clear day. There were lots of people taking advantage of the nice weather and a lot of street artists plying their trade. I bought a small painting from a crazy artist who threw in a couple of little drawings for free because I listened to him chat. It was very well worth it, even though the roll of paper was a bit difficult to carry.

Getting to the train station was an adventure and a half and included two Gina Panic Attacks™. We were going to take the metro, but discovered that the line we wanted to take was under construction and so had to take a shuttle bus. It was just our luck that we didn’t read the signs carefully enough and ended up going in the complete opposite direction. I realized this and decided that it wasn’t a big deal, we’d just get off at the next stop and turn around. Of course, the challenge was getting the bus to stop. We crossed the river into Buda while I started hyperventilating a little as images of the bus never stopping clouded my vision. Fortunately, this did not happen and we found the bus going the right way and were at the station in plenty of time. It was still a terrifying experience though and I needed a good hour on the train to get my heart rate back to normal.

The train ride to Cluj was long and dark for the most part. We chatted and slept and at the Romanian border entertained the guards with my very bad Romanian. The ticket collector was very confuse why two tourists wanted to go to Cluj…

Conductor: You go to Cluj? No Bucharest?

Me: Yes. We’re going to Cluj, then later to Bucarest.

Luke: That’s right.

Conductor: You’re going to Bucharest? But your ticket say Cluj.

Me: *Curses profusely to self for giving confusing details* I said we’re going to Cluj! CLUJ-NAPOCA. Like it says on the tickets. Cluj.

This continued for a few minutes, until we managed to straighten things out. The man was actually very helpful and told us he would come and get us when the train got to Cluj. He, like most Romanians we encountered, was extremely nice and helpful. When we got to Cluj, we discovered exactly why he was so nice…there weren’t many signs marking the stations! As I soon discovered, Romania has a great rail system, but a severe allergy to any sort of helpful signage (or any at all for that matter).

It was a dark and slightly rainy night, which felt rather appropriate for Transylvania, so we hopped into a cab and went to our hostel. We took a quick walk around the main square and admired the St. Michael’s church and the little park. I did a victory dance for finally being in Romania, which attracted some amused glances from the passerby. I wasn’t a bit bothered by that: after all, it’s not everyday that one sees a girl doing heel clicks while wearing a big stupid grin that is meant to be one of triumph on her face.

19 December, 2006

I got up bright and early to say farewell to Prague (especially the yummy sweet rolls on the Square) and catch my train to Munich. I was super excited to be on my way because not only was I going to a new, never before visited country, but I was going to Munich, another of my little obsessions. I sat with two (smart) Japanese girls who were studying in Berlin, but spoke better English than they did German, and we had a great time. Since we were the only people in the compartment, we spread out and had a picnic breakfast. This made a very long and boring ride go by a lot faster than it would have had I just been sitting and counting down the minutes until we finally arrived.

When I got off the train at Munich Hdb., I did a little dance of joy that attracted stares from the people around me. I didn’t care because, holy mackerel I was FINALLY in Munich! It was cold and gray and not at all the kind of place I’d imagined from all my White Rose fangirling studies, but I was too excited to notice. Following the directions scribbled into my notebook, I found my hostel with no trouble and checked in. Wombats Munich is seriously one of the coolest places I’ve ever stayed. It’s big and modern-looking from the outside but very cozy inside. When I checked in, I got a coupon for a free beer at their bar (ahhh bar in the hostel! Bar in the hostel!), and walked through a nice indoor winter garden with bean bag chairs strewn everywhere to get to the elevator up to my room. It looked like that there were several people staying with me, but none of them were in, so I just made up my bed, locked up my stuff, and then headed out to explore.

Hellooooooo Western Europe, was all I could think as I headed to the Marienplatz (the main square). The Iron Curtain may have fallen 17 years ago, but I still felt like I had walked out of a fog into a New York-like place. It was huge and modern and there were all sorts of interesting people walking around speaking German. For once, I didn’t feel so terribly out of place—I don’t look particularly Polish or Czech so it’s fairly easy to tell that I’m a foreigner before I even open my mouth, while in Germany it’s assumed that I am a native just because I’m there. This is where having a German last name can get a 6^th-generation American into trouble. I paid for something with my debit card and the woman keeps talking to me in German although I’m blankly staring at her. Finally she realizes that I have no idea what she’s saying and switches to English, and laughs because she said she’d assumed I was German because I had a German last name. Apparently she missed the fact that the card was from Bank of America.

The Marienplatz is much smaller than the Old Town Square in Prague, but had just as many people wandering about and enjoying the Christmas Market. I indulged in a lot of chocolate-covered strawberries and mulled wine as I glanced at the czoczkies being offered. I definitely love the mulled wine system here—when you order your wine, you pay 6 Euro and receive the drink in a nice ceramic cup which you can return for a 3 Euro refund or keep as a souvenir. Being cheap (and also getting the ugliest mugs reserved for tourists), I turned mine in and used the change to buy another round. I managed to see some of the main sights before it got too dark for my camera, so I wandered back to the hostel looking for something affordable to eat. Just as I was about to curse the Euro and go back to the train station for something cheap and disgusting, I found a nice little Tex-Mex place that was affordable and served giant portions. After five days, I was getting thoroughly sick of eating alone, it feels like everyone’s staring at you and thinking that you’d been stood up or something.

I went back to Wombats to kill time before deciding what to do that night and met one of my roommates, a girl named Taryn from Canada. She was super nice, so we decided to go down to the bar together and cash in on our free drink offers and take advantage of Happy Hour (all drinks for 1 Euro!) as well as see who we could meet. So we went down and made merry with all sorts of interesting people ranging from a group of Aussies to a couple Irishmen to a deaf-mute Russian fellow wearing a funny green hat. Yes, you can meet all types at hostels. It was very happening, but Taryn and I made friends with some of the Aussies, who invited us to come out to a beer hall. We readily accepted and went out to enjoy some real Munich beer (in 1 liter glasses—oy!) and good company. We had a fabulous time until Taryn got sick and I had to hold her hair back and make sure that she threw up in the toilet and not anywhere else and get charged 6 Euro. There was a selfish bit in this because she’d left her wallet in the hostel and I promised to spot her some money, so I’d have to pay for any throw-up…eeeeewwww. Anyway, I managed to enlist one of the guys (Travis) to help me get her home and so we called it a fairly early night.

20 December, 2006

I woke up early this morning to see Taryn off as well as get an early start on my White Rose pilgrimage. The guy at the front desk was rather confuzzled when I asked about the Perlach Cemetary. Normal tourists apparently don’t usually ask about random forests and cemeteries that lie on the city’s outskirts, preferring to catch a repeat of the Glockenspiel or see the treasures of the Residenz or possibly (though their types tend not to frequent hostels) check out Der Moderne. All of those things were on my list, but I do have my priorities in order: I came to Munich for the White Rose and so I planned my itinerary accordingly.

So, the White Rose.

Once again, my illicit childhood readings of Holocaust books in the Temple library got me into this one. I was nine, maybe ten, and was flipping through a book when a chapter title “RESISTANCE” stared out at me in friendly black letters. Having just finished Number the Stars, I was a little curious to see if there were other people like Lois Lensky’s characters and so started reading. There was a lot I really didn’t understand about Wallenburg and the July 14^th Plot. To a kid who wanted to find something a gripping as Number the Stars, the summaries were a little boring and I was tempted to just go onto the next chapter. As I flipped the next page over, the famous photograph of Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst stared up at me. For some reason, maybe because I thought “wow, another girl like Annemarie!” when I saw Sophie’s face, I started reading and to my nine-year-old mind, this is about how it read:

Once upon a time, during the Holocaust [WWII had not really entered my consciousness], there were three friends at school in Munich. Their names were Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst. They were very upset about what was happening to the Jews, so they wrote notes that said it was wrong and that Germany would be sorry that they did such horrible things. They put these notes everywhere: at school, in the city, and even threw them out of windows so that everyone could read them without knowing who wrote them. They also painted slogans on the walls just in case anyone forgot to read the leaflets. Unfortunately, they got caught and were executed. Hans yelled, “long live freedom,” right before he died.

It wasn’t the whole story, nor the ‘real’ one (there’s some debate as to what the real one actually is!), but I was hooked. Maybe it was because my Hebrew teacher was trying to cure me of my own illicit note passing by making me eat the note or read it out loud, maybe it was because Hans and Sophie and Christoph were ‘big kids’ (ie: not adults), or maybe it was because Sophie was really the only girl the RESISTANCE chapter talked about, but in my own kid way I got it. And then I started thinking about it and couldn’t stop. This led to an ever-growing collection of rare and used books that were heavily underlined with various sparkly gel pens with a few comments as I got older and read more. When I realized that no one had ever heard of the White Rose, I decided to set them straight with my enthusiasm, approximately 3 paragraphs in two books, and Andie’s Rabbi for a Day class in Hebrew School. Strangely, no one was as fascinated but this is not surprising given that I’ve never been a particularly good public speaker. Then, I tried writing and discovered that my OCD doesn’t allow for taking too many leaps of faith and I had my facts all wrong from my 10-year-old White Rose story.

The plot expanded. Instead of three leaders, there were actually six. Besides Hans, Sophie, and Christoph, there were Willi Graf, Alex Schmorell, and Prof. Kurt Huber who all contributed to the writing and distribution of the leaflets. Hans, Alex, and Willi were the ones who carried out the graffiti operations in January 1943. Much of their opposition to Nazism came from their various Christian (particularly Catholic) backgrounds and was solidified during their experience as medical externs in France, Yugoslavia, and Russia. Alex had an especial interest in the treatment of Jews and Russian because he was from Russia. It’s possible that Willi even witnessed mass executions in Yugoslavia. On their way to Russia, their convoy stopped in Warsaw so Hans, Alex, and Willi probably at least heard about the Warsaw Ghetto. Sophie had friends working as nurses in mental hospitals during the “T4” campaign, where the mentally ill were murdered, who witnessed their patients being taken away to their deaths. The reasons to resist piled up and they all decided—some sooner than others—that enough was enough.

And then a new layer was added when I finally read translations of the leaflets. They were definitely not the type of note one would usually pass in class. Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation than to allow itself to be ruled by a clique that has yielded to base instinct…passive resistance…an end in terror is preferable to terror without end…up, up my people, let smoke and flame be our sign…we will not be silent, we are your bad conscience, the White Rose will never leave you in peace… Strong words, but ones that ultimately did not reach their audience and shake intellectuals and students out of their passivity as was hoped. The scornful expressions futile and idealistic and useless and (my least favorite) a waste were bandied about and I wondered why every time I tried to give up and banish them to a distant file cabinet in my mind they refused to leave. I was stuck with them, so I kept on plugging away and wishing I could speak German so I could get my hands on even more books. Short stories were abandoned and I wrote essays and research papers and college application essays in their place.

A new intrigue came up when a woman named Ruth Sachs presented her version of the White Rose story in over-priced three-ring binders. While it was refreshing to see someone besides Hans’ and Sophie’s older sister writing something about them, Ms. Sachs’ attitude quickly turned me sour. I do not have a weak stomach, nor do I mind seeing my heroes brought down to earth, but I do mind shoddy research and unprofessional first-person musings in the middle of what is presenting itself as THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WHITE ROSE. Believe me, I have no problem with dealing with flaws of these people because they definitely had them, but I do and always will have a problem with works that are written in such a way as to embrace a strong, virulent bias and thus piss on people’s memories. In a nutshell, Ruth Sachs went to go do research on the White Rose and (according to her) was barred from accessing the archives by Hans’ and Sophie’s older sister Inge and her son because Ms. Sachs refused to let Inge censor her work. Undeterred, Ms. Sachs tracked down other family members and friends of the six leaders who were executed, interviewed them, translated (very well, I might add) all the court and interrogation documents that were just released from various archives, and wrote her book. This was great because some of the stuff she said was really interesting and true, but she focused a lot of energy on demonizing the Scholl family. Pointing out faults is one thing, revising previous assumptions about who did what and giving credit to the right person is one thing, but saying “Hans and Sophie Scholl resisted for the wrong reasons” is quite another. Um, this was NAZI GERMANY we’re talking about. Remember? Diss Hitler and you go to a concentration camp, if you’re lucky. Help Jews and you get sent to prison (or shot, along with your entire family, if you’re in Poland)? Yeah, ok, glad we’re on the same page here. And yes, some people are going to be slower to turn against the Nazis, or any evil, than others. Some people, like Alex and Willi, have that sort of moral compass and the will to say “no, I won’t do that because it goes against my beliefs,” from the start, in spite of the risks. Others who get caught up in the enthusiasm of the movement or go along for the ride, like Hans and Sophie when they were younger, will take longer to come around.

It’s an issue of awareness. In a way, I see parallels to the “Save Darfur” campaign. Some people were aware of the genocide there early on and they started the movement and began spreading the word. Eventually, other people—including some of the least likely—got involved because they heard about it from friends, did some thinking, and decided to get involved. Little Suzie happened to read Amnesty International’s page on Darfur way back in the day. Morally outraged, she took up the cause and became actively involved in setting up one of the grassroots movements in the campaign. She starts telling friends about the issue and they tell their friends. One of the friends of friends is a fellow by name of John. Now John appears to be your average frat boy, who likes to party it up and is focused on more immediate concerns than an African genocide (this is from his perspective). However, he happens to pick up an article about the genocide and is shocked and so decides to get involved and eventually becomes a very active member of Suzie’s group. Now, does this make Suzie a better person than John because she was active from the very beginning in helping stop the genocide? Because John is a little more self-centered than Suzie and came into awareness later than she did, does this make his reasons for joining the Save Darfur coalition wrong or less valid than hers?

Darfur and Nazi Germany may be worlds away from one another, but the issue of awareness is not. Besides, who are we to judge the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ reasons for resisting in Nazi Germany? Would we have had the courage to do the same, knowing full well what would happen if we were caught?

As you can tell, the long subway ride out to the very edge of Munich gave me a lot of time to brood.

This of course left me rather bewildered in that groggy sort of manner you get when you’ve been thinking too hard in a short period of time and aren’t quite ready to return to the real world when you have to. Fortunately, I had reviewed the directions and set off at a nice trot toward my goal. If walking a long way on deserted streets past shops closed on Sunday and over the autobahn, then by all means head out to this part of Munich. It wasn’t all that long a walk, just enough so that I was getting a little nervous when I finally found Stadelheim prison, where members of the White Rose were imprisoned and executed. It’s very large, very white, and very much in use (though not as a place of execution since Germany abolished the death penalty). I looked at it, gave a frightened “eep!”, and quickly moved on. I wanted to snap a picture, but wasn’t sure if I was allowed to do so and decided to err on the side of caution. Since I’d read that the cemetery was on the other side of the prison, I pushed onward. This is where the ridiculousness began. First, I was all nervous about not being allowed in (isn’t the Temple Cemetery always locked up? I wondered as I ducked in the first entrance I could find, which seemed to be for cars. This leads to my first realization: the cemetery’s still in use. In my imaginings, I’d always thought Perlach Forest was where all the criminals/people who made the Nazis mad got buried. Not so much. I guess it was a regular cemetery during that time (as well as before and after!) and the Nazis just added to it. This led to the second problem: I had no clue where the graves were. I had read somewhere that there were signs and so off I tramped looking for signs and anything that might vaguely look like the graves I’d seen in pictures. After about 20 minutes, I admitted defeat. I was hopelessly lost in some godforsaken German cemetery and so tantalizingly close to the first part of my pilgrimage. So, I gave up on the signs and went looking for someone who might happen to be in charge. I found a sexton…but, he didn’t speak English. A merry game of charades (rather similar to Amy’s in China) ensued…

Me: Guten tag.

Him: Guten tag.

*Silence, I’ve exhausted 50% of my German*

Me: Um, die Weisse Rose? *Makes motions like I’m looking for something*

Him: *looks at me like I’ve fallen from the moon*

Me: *Sighs and tries again* Die Weisse Rose.

Him: *Says something in German roughly translated as, “What the hell are you talking about, you fool girl?”*

Me: *light bulb comes on* Scholl!! *Makes searching motions* Hans und Sophie Scholl!

Him: *Looks like he might possibly know what I’m talking about. Makes his fingers walk and then makes motions that I think are saying turn around and go home*

Me: Nien! They’re not over there!

Him: *Makes same motions*

Me: Goddamnit, I have come all the way from Poland to see my heroes and I am NOT turning around and leaving. I’ll find a sign. Auf wiedershien! *Marches off huffily*

It wasn’t until when I had marched huffily to the middle of the cemetery did I understand what the guy was trying to tell me. The cemetery church has a large, round tower that (as I discovered from the sign on the bulletin board nearby) I was supposed to walk behind to find the graves.

So then I found the graves. First was Hans’, Sophie’s, and Christoph’s. This is the one everyone knows about: three wrought iron black crosses with their names rise above the graves, Hans’ and Sophie’s joined by a single arm. It really is a very nice memorial: simple, yet powerful. So I stood there in the chilly quiet and thought some more. Then, I went around the corner and found Alex’s grave and stood thinking some more. Alex has always been a personal favorite of mine (though, like with children and Vanderbilt basketball players, it is impossible to definitively pick a favorite member of the White Rose) because he seems the most real, not some idealized hero. Maybe it’s because he’s not as famous outside of Germany as Hans and Sophie are or maybe it’s because of his Russian heritage and that he and Willi were the ones who insisted on putting in the only German wartime protest against the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because he was an artist and remembered as a lighthearted, fun-loving type of fellow, the kind of guy everyone is friends with.

I hoped to buy flowers or candles so that I could leave a small token behind, but I found neither and so settled back on the old Jewish custom of leaving stones. I’m sure the next visitors will find it a bit strange that someone left stones on four half-forgotten graves, but that’s really not what matters. It is more important to show that someone is not forgotten rather than worry about what other people think.

When it got too cold and I’d fulfilled my morning quota of depressing thoughts, I said goodbye and hopped back on the train to the complete opposite side of town to pay a visit to Ludwig-Maximilian University. By the time I’d climbed out of the metro, the sun was shining and the sky was blue for the first time since Prague. It was rather appropriate that the weather decided to clear up when it did: I might be in Munich mostly for depressing reasons, but the people I was honoring by visiting their graves and their old haunts were kids my age and would have wanted me to enjoy their city and have a good time. There really is nothing like seeing a clear sky when coming out of a metro station to reinforce this.

Anyway, the University. The main building I visited was really big and solid in that sort of 19^th century Bismark style with lots of straight lines and curved so that it sits back from the street. It’s nice, just rather more intimidating than friendly and confusing Collegium Novum in Krakow. The inside is really interesting because you have to go up a steep flight of granite stairs to a landing where you could choose to go down another steep flight of stairs to get to the main atrium, or go up two large staircases to the second (European first) floor. Until I saw the old 1980s movie, I never really had a concept of how big this place is. I could never imagine being a student there, it’s built in a way that tells you that you are a little nothing wandering through hallowed academic halls. OK, maybe I was just feeling a little silly poking around and snapping pictures of the atrium and its lovely dome as well as the nice White Rose memorial in the corner.

February 22^nd, 1943. Hans and Sophie Scholl walked into the university just before classes let out with a suitcase of leaflets. As they were walking in, they ran into Willi Graf and Traute Lafrentz (Hans’ sometimes girlfriend and the only major member of the White Rose to survive the crackdown) and made plans to meet later. They quickly dropped stacks of leaflets around the corridors and in the atrium before quickly leaving. When they got outside, they realized they still had a few leaflets in the suitcase. Probably thinking that it would be silly to keep them—after all, an empty suitcase would be much easier to explain to overly-curious policemen—they went back inside. They went up the steep stairs first to the landing, then turned and went up to the galleries looking out onto the atrium on the second floor. They probably looked up across the atrium at the clock as they deposited the last of the leaflets to make sure they would get out unnoticed before the morning lectures let out. Somehow, no one will ever be sure exactly what happened, some of the leaflets fluttered from the second floor down to the atrium. It has been said that Sophie threw the leaflets from the balcony, but it is equally likely that it was done accidently. Regardless of how the leaflets ended up in the air, they did, and they attracted the notice of a janitor who saw Hans and Sophie. They were immediately arrested and the crackdown on the White Rose began.  By the end of October, 1943, Hans, Sophie, Christoph, Alex, Professor Huber, and Willi had all been executed and many of their associates were in prison.

After I worked up my courage to pretend I was doing something completely normal by taking photographs of the memorial in the atrium, I checked out the small museum. Most of the information was not new, but there were photographs I hadn’t seen before as well as the typewriter Alex borrowed from an unsuspecting friend to compose the leaflets. Then, I headed upstairs to see the view from the second floor. I looked for the clock and then peered over the ledge where Hans and Sophie Scholl dropped the leaflets all those years ago. I’ve tried to pinpoint exactly what I felt standing there, but I haven’t been able to yet and I don’t think I ever will.

Though my photos were not terribly satisfactory, I decided I was in need of a break that preferably involved getting lunch. I grabbed a kebab and munched on it as I explored the happier areas around the university and headed up to Franz-Josef Strasse to see the flat Hans and Sophie lived in before their arrest. The whole area is very student-y and fun, with some cute boutiques and little bookshops and lots of people on bikes who may or may not have homicidal tendencies. The flat isn’t much—there’s a plaque, but it’s been redone and I can’t really imagine it as it might have been. Still, it’s definitely a prime area for a student to live and I wished for the millionth time that Evanston boasted such classy digs.

I headed back toward the university and finally got my camera to obey me so that I could take a non-fuzzy picture of the memorial in the atrium. Stupid manual function was obviously not made to take pictures of important bronze reliefs mounted on shiny granite walls. I must write to Canon to have them fix this.

Since it was still really nice out, I walked from the university to the Pinakothek der Moderne because it’s one of the most amazing collections of modern art in the world and my parents would have killed me had I squandered such an opportunity. So I spent a couple of hours admiring everything from Franz Marc’s Blue Horses to a couple of my beloved Kandinsky’s, and Jasper Johns. The major exhibit was of a fellow who made sculptures with fluorescent lights, which were really amazing. By this time, I was beginning to feel the effects of 5 days of almost-constant walking and decided I should head back and rest up the knees and back in preparation for a fun night.

I grabbed some Japanese food at Munich’s version of Ken’s and got a kick out of seeing a group that looked remarkably like the Linda-Donna-Elaine-Gina lunches of last summer. Then, I met up with my friends from Australia and went ice skating! This was extremely amusing because I had to wear hockey skates *gasps in horror* and fell all over the place. We had a great time sliding around all over everywhere and laughing. Then, we headed to a beer hall and continued the party for quite some time. It was about 3:30 when we decided to call it quits and stumbled home.

21 December, 2006

I got up super early and grabbed a quick breakfast before catching the subway out to the airport. On the way, I made friends with a baby in a fuzzy snowsuit with bear ears sticking out of the hood—too cute! I miscalculated my train because I got out to the airport WAY too early. When I checked in, the guy told me that he couldn’t print my boarding pass from Milan to Paris because it was too early. Since I had gotten approximately 3 hours of sleep, I could not figure out what the problem was. I got sent to the Alitalia desk to see if they could do anything (naturally, they couldn’t) and then had to go to another desk to check my bag. I then sat for several hours waiting for the lady at the gate to ask her if I needed to go out of the security zone in Milan to get my boarding pass or if I just needed to proceed to my gate. After I finally got my stupid question answered, I decided to look in my notebook to double-check my flight out of Milan. Well, I looked in my backpack and my stomach sank. No notebook. I tore through my other things. Still no notebook. A full-scale panic set in (it was approximately 11:20, my flight was to board at 11:30) and I went running for the nearest security guy who pointed me to the exit. I managed to get through passport control and confuse the guy stamping the passports because I was so panicked (“how long will you be in Germany?” “20 minutes more, I just left something at the ticket counter”). Then, I managed to confuse another security guard and irritate the Alitalia people when I finally got back to the ticket counter. Fortunately, I went back to the place where I checked my bag and there was my notebook. It was now 11:26. Shaking, I stuffed the notebook in my bag and went back through security and discovered that my flight was boarding at 11:40, so had some time to collect myself. The rest of the day was spent in airports and then in traffic in Paris. My adventure concluded at 7pm when my mom practically tackled me as I got off the elevator in our hotel.

16 December, 2006

What an adventure already! I was so nervous about the prospect of traveling completely on my own really for the first time that I was up half the night worrying about whether I’d done everything right. Questions ranging from “Did I pack enough socks?” to “Do I have the directions to the hostels? My airplane info?” and “Am I completely out of my mind?”  took away any remote possibility that I was going to have a nice birthday dream (preferably involving the Spurs, a large heap of books, or Romanian gymnasts who don’t make my eyes bleed). Can’t have everything, I guess. My 21^st birthday was actually quite calm and understated, mostly because everyone is gone and it just isn’t the same celebrating turning legal in a country where I’ve been so for the past 3 years. That’s another story entirely though. I will only add that I have the best friends in all of explored space. If only I could have magically transported everyone to one place to increase the awesomeness to staggering levels.

Anyway, I got up really early and tiptoed out of my room to begin my adventure. Luke, being the fabulous person that he is, insisted on accompanying me to the station. It was very dark and cold and I was excited but was too tired to be anything but slightly groggy. I watched the absolutely glorious sunrise over the countryside and dozed for a while. Somehow, the girl across from me and I got to talking and it turns out that she’s from Slovakia and doing Erasmus at UJ. We had a great time because she speaks such good Polish and was very patient with my fantastic bumbling. Things took a turn for insanity when the ticket collectors showed up. The Slovak girl and I had no problems, but the third guy in the compartment most certainly did. The Polish train system, the PKP, always gives two slips of paper when you get a ticket with them: the reservation, which shows that you paid a little extra for a nice seat, and then the actual ticket which are both stapled together and placed in a handy little envelope. Well, this fellow only had his reservation (no ticket and no envelope). Since the reservation only shows that you have reserved the seat by paying a 5 zloty fee, not that you have actually paid for the full ticket, this was a problem. This is like trying to get on an airplane by presenting the reservation ticket thingy they give you when you get a paper ticket (the thing that says “NOT A BOARDING PASS” in friendly black letters) and saying you never got a boarding pass. Add in that the guy was Japanese and didn’t speak good English and we had a fine mess that had me and the other girl trying to translate to both parties (the ticket controllers and the guy) what exactly was going on.

The guy insisted that he never was given another piece of paper, that the lady at the ticket office had just given him what he had and written down his ISIC number and he paid 100-plus zloty for the ticket but only got “just this one thing.” Knowing the PKP and its love of being anally systematic, this could not possibly be. First of all, Poland doesn’t give ISIC discounts on public transportation so there was no point in the lady’s writing down his ISIC number as it wouldn’t have made a difference in the price. Secondly, I’ve had people at the train station try to cheat me by charging me the full price instead of the Polish student discount (boy do they get huffy when you flash your UJ id and tell them in Polish to please not treat you like a stupid tourist), but have always received my two tickets stapled together in their little envelope. There’s no point in cheating any other way because that means someone else benefits. Anyway, he kept insisting that this was the only thing he was given and we kept insisting that that could not possibly be correct (he did slip out that he might have thrown something away, but then went back to his original story). Finally, the controller guys had enough and told him to pay again (up to the Czech boarder, so we’ll say about 50 zl) or they’d throw him off the train. The guy kept protesting, which is understandable since he had paid the correct 100-ish zloty price for the Krakow-Prague ticket already but couldn’t prove it since he didn’t have his ticket. Finally, I made up some story about how he could probably go complain in Prague and get some money back. He calmed down a bit and was especially pacified that he could use his credit card. We rolled along quite merrily after this, with me and the other girl chatting away and watching the countryside fly by while the fellow sat and brooded. Naturally, since this guy was a completely stupid tourist, we had to go through the same thing when the Czech ticket controller came through. He bitched, he moaned, he started talking to the controller in Japanese (which I’m sure was real helpful), etc. He was especially upset that he couldn’t use his credit card because if he paid in cash he wouldn’t get any of it refunded. I was like, “it’s all of five euros, sweetie, suck it up and pay so I can have some peace.” He finally paid, but then threw another fit because the controller wouldn’t give him a receipt. She finally took his money and left, ignoring the stupid tourist who couldn’t figure out how to hold onto his things in the 400 meters between the ticket counter and the train in Krakow. By this time, the Slovak girl and I were fed up. The guy had a wallet full of credit cards and euros and was throwing a fit about having to pay 5 euro so that he wouldn’t get kicked off the train at some godforsaken Polish-Czech border town. Now I understand why most countries are not terribly sympathetic towards tourists who are victims of theft or serious crimes, I sure wouldn’t be either if I had to deal with 100 idiots like this guy to every 1 real crime.

The train finally arrived in Prague and I said goodbye to the Slovak girl and went searching for my hostel. Getting to my hostel (Ace) was not nearly as much difficult as I thought, considering how much trouble I had trying to get out of the train station. Honestly, I do not remember having any problems with it when I was there with NFTY, but I was on the verge of tears when I finally found an information booth and the exit. This sketchy-looking guy approached me as I was looking at my map and was making some offer about a taxi, but I pretended I was a Pole who couldn’t speak English and fled. Fortunately, he didn’t follow me out of the station but I slipped my keys between my fingers just in case.

The hostel itself was a bit hard to find because the Czechs, like the Poles, are allergic to signage. The main door was also bardzo sketch—covered in graffiti and peeling brown paint—which gave me pause when I first rang the bell. The inside turned out to be very basic, but not bad at all, and I was soon settled in and on my way to reacquaint myself with the city.

Although I only experienced three jet-lagged days of Jewish Prague on NFTY 2002, I fell in love with the city. It was great to be back and free to do whatever I pleased and not having to worry about anything more pressing than dealing with the crowds who’d come for the Christmas market. I took a bad way to the main square, through this teeny tiny little passage that was so packed with people that I was picked up off my feet and carried along for most of the way. It was a little like being at the NU/Ohio State football game freshman year when everyone just had to get onto the field RIGHT NOW to celebrate. Madhouse, much? It was more than a little scary, but I elbowed right back and was soon out in the relative freedom of the square. I admired the churches and the astrological clock and went for a bite to eat at what turned out to be the same restaurant where Megan, Nicole, Joanna, Rachel, Jorie, and I had our first NFTY Euro Roots meal all those years ago. After that, I wandered around the market and listened to an a cappella choir singing Czech Christmas carols. I started to head to the Charles Bridge, but then went and heard the Prague Mozart Ensemble. There were all sorts of offers for classical music or Christmas-themed concerts all over the city and so I just couldn’t resist the temptation to hear Bach and Mozart and Schubert in Prague (ooooohhh, romantic!). Plus, the concert hall was heated and the Charles Bridge was not and it was really blasted cold out. The performance was very nice, but I didn’t realize how tired I was and kept nodding off. Drat you, classical music—you’re so pretty but WAY too relaxing!

When the concert got out, it was still quite early, so I completed my trek to the bridge. It was dark and cold and I couldn’t get my stupid camera to obey me and take decent photographs, so I started wandering my way back. To waste time, I poked into about 7 billion souvenir shops but didn’t buy anything because it’s extremely uncomfortable to have a salesman follow you around and breathe down your neck as you look around. I understand that maybe he was trying to make sure nothing got stolen or broken, but there really was no need to stand so close that I bumped into him every time I turned around. The weird thing was that it kept happening wherever I went, so I eventually just stopped going into the stores. On the bright side, I was mistaken for being Polish 7 times in the course of the evening. Polish is very close to Czech, so I just spoke it everywhere I went and got more favorable results than just speaking English.

When I got back, I met my roommate Carol, who was from Malaysia, and we chatted over a beer before crashing.

17 December, 2006

Today was my day to ramble through Josefov, the Jewish Quarter of Prague, and used it as a research day for the Never-Ending Novel. It really was the reason why I came back to Prague at all, as I didn’t get any time to take notes or really look at anything as our NFTY leaders rushed all 120 of us from one site to another. Josefov is one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Europe because Prague was not destroyed during the War. The synagogues fell into disrepair, but were fixed up after the war and further restored after the fall of communism. Today, they stand as museums commemorating another vibrant, dynamic, vanished community. For some reason, wandering around this area made me a lot more sad than going through Kazimierz back home in Krakow. I’m not sure if I was just in that sort of mood or if it was because of the connections I’ve made through my writing.

I spent the most time in the Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of all the Czech Jews who were killed during the War have been carefully inscribed, along with their dates of birth and death. I looked for names of my characters, sort of in the way one looks for a tombstone. I couldn’t leave a rock or anything, but each time I came upon a name, I would stop and pay my respects as best I could. After all, none of them have tombstones and the ashes in the fields around Auschwitz are too overwhelming. As I looked at the names and the dates, I noticed that for many the father was taken away and killed first while the mother and children usually died together. I wish I had been allowed to take photographs of the names because I felt rather awkward scribbling in my notebook. No one asked me what I was doing, of course, but I still felt strange. I felt the same way at the exhibit of the drawings upstairs. There, I couldn’t even write because there were too many people. I did find a drawing of Home 13 done by one of the girls who lived there, which was interesting. I wish someday they will publish all of the drawings and poems in their collection rather than selections, as I would love to have a definitive guide rather than continuing to spend my money on different editions of the same slim book.

As I wandered, hiding my grief in my notebook and camera, I couldn’t help be feel incredibly angry. If there was any justice or fairness in this world, THIS WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. If mankind was truly good at heart, this would not have happened. I dare anyone to come and walk through the empty streets of Josefov and Kazimierz and then trek through Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka to still hold that people are inherently good. If the killing fields and gas chambers (not to mention the genocides that happened later, though the world kept hollowly promising never again) do not provide a definitive argument against that thesis, it would be interesting to know what would.

After the synagogue tour, I wandered about for a while. I grabbed dinner at this nifty crepe shop and also went to another concert, this one in a small baroque-style hall near the Old Town Square. The theme was Ave Maria, and so four different versions were performed, but there were also about 10 other pieces (including a couple of Bach pieces and one of the Four Seasons). The performers consisted of a soprano, harpist, organist, and a violinist and were really just lovely. I also made friends with a delightful British lady from Heathrow, and she was a hoot. It was somewhat like talking to Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet) from the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. Some gems from our conversation included:

“It’s really quite lovely, except for all the noise from the planes.” (on living in Heathrow)

“You are rawther young, aren’t you?” (peering over her glasses at me about halfway through our conversation)

The best one, was this:

Her: You don’t happen to have a young man, do you?

Me: Well, yes, I do and as a matter of fact, he’s also from Britain.

Her: Really? Where’s he from?

Me: Birmingham.

Her: (Looks appalled) Gracious! Have you ever been there?

Me: No, but—

Her: That’s good. If you visited, you’d probably not be with him anymore!

Me: But, but, I’ve heard it’s nice! Wasn’t Tolkien from there?

Her: (Ignores me and huffs a bit)

I did try to defend poor Luke’s city, but it was to no avail. Not even the Master himself could redeemed Birmingham in the eyes of this lady. Of course, it was rather amusing given that she was from Heathrow for crying out loud. Hmmm…live in Birmingham, or next to the busiest airport in Europe? Decisions, decisions!

After the concert, I rambled about and watched a children’s choir perform in the Old Town Square. They were about 4-6 years old with a couple of older kids in the back and were absolutely precious! The choir director stole the show though. She was a tall, voluptuous women with long white hair and the high-pitched voice of a former opera singer. She was dancing all over the stage, alternately yelling at her small charges to pay attention and helping the soloists. She whipped off her ankle-length fur coat about halfway through (“I’m undressing,” she announced to the crowd) and got those kids singing like they’d never sung before. One of the little soloists, a tiny little red-headed girl of about 5, walked up to the mic to sing and then something happened (I guess she missed her cue), which led to the director yelling at her for messing up as well as wearing the wrong color scarf, which was disposed of as another child took her turn to sing. But then, when the little red-haired girl tried again, she couldn’t quite reach the mic, so the director picked her up so that she could be heard clearly. It was too cute. For one of the last numbers, they launched into a really rousing rendition of something Christmassy and Czech, which led to her dancing around the stage. This was all great, until her stiletto heel got caught by one of the wires and down she tumbled. She was all right, and everyone was dying with laughter by this time. I really hope one of the parents caught the performance on camera, because it was priceless.

When I got back to the hostel, I hung out a bit with my new roommates, two nice girls from Argentina. Since I was planning on having a long day the next day, I zonked out pretty quickly.

18 December, 2006: Terezin

I was about 10 years old when I first picked up a copy of I Never Saw Another Butterfly and I don’t really think I’ve ever been the same since. I don’t mean that in a pretentious, sappy, “oh-my-god-it-made-me-just-bawl” type of way, I mean that I started really thinking about the War and trying to find human faces so that I could understand the scope of what happened. Just looking at numbers or reading documents or even looking at pictures gives you a certain type of separation from the reality. Of course, those of us who were lucky enough not to have lived through those years can never really know what things were really like, but having some sort of human connection to the Holocaust makes it that much more real.

Sometimes I feel I’m a bit of an anomaly as a Jew. Both sides of my family emigrated to the United States very early on—on my Dad’s side, I’m a 6^th or 7^th generation American, and a 3^rd/4^th on my Mom’s side. Thus, none of our close relatives were victims of the Holocaust. Apparently we did have some distant cousins who died: the story is that the husband and wife came to America in the ‘20s to live with my many-greats Uncle Simon, didn’t like it here, and returned to Germany and were never heard from again. Now, I have no clue who these people could possibly be and since they were such distant cousins, there isn’t really the same connection that there would be if for example my grandparents had been survivors. I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, so I’ve had to rely on books and (at times) my own over-active imagination to get a feel for the scope and tragedy of the Holocaust. I guess that’s why I started reading and writing about it from a very young age. Not only was I curious, but my mother specifically told me not to read about it. And that was a guarantee that I most certainly would. Hunkered in the corner of the old library at Temple, I would read and keep half an eye on the door so that I could quickly hide Smoke and Ashes and replace it with something slightly more appropriate for an 8-year-old, like The Story of Esther. From these times arose GTB, my Never-Ending Novel, and my obsession with interest in the White Rose. This led me further and further until it wasn’t just the Holocaust, or the war, or Anne Frank that I was interested in…it was Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Romania. Such places a nice Jewish girl usually not interested in, no (sorry, had to cue Yoda for a second).

So I read and I wrote and I thought and I started asking a lot of questions. When I got older, I started asking more questions, some of which people weren’t really interested in (or sure) how to answer. Then I started traveling and seeing things for myself. I went to the Holocaust Museum in DC, then to Prague and Krakow and Auschwitz with NFTY, back to Auschwitz again with EIL and World Teach, to Treblinka with my host father, and to Majdanek just this past October. Two sites remained just out of my reach: Terezin and Sobibor. When I decided that I was going to have myself an adventure before seeing my family, I did so in part because it would give me an opportunity to take one place off my list. And so—11 years after first reading about it, 8 after first writing about it, and 4 after first attempting to convince someone to change their itinerary to take me there—I boarded a north-bound bus in Prague to go see Terezin for myself.

Terezin was built in the late 1700s as a garrison town by Franz Josef II of Austria, who named it for his mother Maria Theresa. During the 19^th century, it served as a prison for political prisoners, the most famous of whom was Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In June of 1940, the Gestapo seized the town, converting the Small Fortress into a prison for anti-Nazis and then turning the Large Fortress into a ghetto for Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as some ‘privilaged’ German Jews—scholars, some spiritual leaders, and especially decorated veterans of the First World War. Billed as ‘Hitler’s Gift to the Jews,’ the town was nothing more than a collection point for the death camps in the East, mainly Auschwitz. In spite of this, a tremendous cultural life flowered in the ghetto—both secretly and at times encouraged by the Germans. When protests over Nazi treatment of the Jews were made by various international organizations such as the Red Cross, Terezin was cleaned up and transformed into a spa-like town and hosted an inspection team from the Red Cross. Fooled by what they had seen, the Red Cross wrote glowing reports of German treatment of Jews, leaving the Nazis to their own devices and transports East continued. Towards the end of the war, another Red Cross team came to Terezin, this time they stayed permanently and control of the camp was handed over to them by the retreating Germans. All told, from 1941 to 1945, over 144,000 Jews from the Czech lands, Germany, Holland, and Denmark were sent to Terezin. Of these, only about 17,300 survived. Of the 15,000 children who passed through Terezin, only about 100 came back. After the war, it became a garrison town once again until 1996. Now it is little more than a quiet, crumbling village lost in the Bohemian hills.

My bus dropped me off just outside the walls, about halfway between the town and the Small Fortress. At first, I was a little confused about which way to go, but eventually set off following the road away from Prague and soon Terezin’s walls filled my vision. I was half-expecting them to loom forbiddingly over me, but the thick brick structures are so overgrown and tired that they look like they’ve just sort of plopped down, exhausted by all they’ve gone through…

Once I was inside, the first thing I noticed was how very small Terezin is. It sounds stupid, but I was shocked even though I’ve known for years that it is approximately one square kilometer in area. I also know that at its height, 58,497 people were imprisoned here. Standing in this tiny town where I can see the outer walls at the end of every street I wondered how this could have possibly been. Like at Majdanek, the facts and statistics are all well and good but they don’t really give you a solid image. Even when you’re actually there, you still can’t fully comprehend.

I made my way to the memorial museum, housed in the building that once served as a home for Czech-speaking boys. Upon arrival in Terezin, families were torn apart. Men lived in one set of barracks, women and children in another. The Ghetto Council of Elders set up the children’s homes in June of 1942 as a way to shield the children from some of the horrors of the ghetto as well as promote group living and cultural life that would hopefully prepare them for life in Israel after the war. Most of these children did not live to fulfill these hopes. The boys in this building, L417, are best-remembered for their creative talents and the many drawings, poems, and newsletters they produced during their time there. After Communism fell, the building was converted into a museum and set up much like the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. On the first floor are two rooms devoted to the memory of the children who were imprisoned in Terezin. The first room serves as an introduction, with several poems and drawings on display—a less-crowded version of the exhibit in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. The second room is a memorial project where the names and dates of birth of all the children of Terezin are carved into the wall. Sometimes there are full names and dates of birth, while other times there is just a first name or a last name and a year of birth. Part of the wall remains blank because researchers haven’t been able to find all the names, including those of the children from the Bialystok ghetto who were brought to Terezin after its liquidation and then sent to Auschwitz with their new Czech caretakers.

I finally tore myself away from the Room of Names and made my way through the rest of the museum. It’s a very well-done and informative exhibit, making sure that the information is accessible for all visitors—old and young, Czech and foreign—and also doing great multimedia presentations. In one video clip I watched Hana Greenfeld, the woman who accompanied us on NFTY European Roots ’02, talk. I haven’t spoken to her since Nationals, but I miss her and think of her often. I hope life has been treating her and her husband Morrie well, they both deserve it.

After I finished the tour, I wandered through the town looking for ghosts and poking my nose into places it probably had no business in. My first stop was the old Czech girls home, L410, and I thought of all the girls whose drawings and writings I so love. It now is home to a pharmacy and I walked in pretending to look for some Advil so that I could go out the side door and into the main arched entrance and courtyard and see what all remained. No one yelled at me. Then, I went to the additional exhibit in the Magdeburg Barracks, which focused mainly on cultural activities in the ghetto. They also had a recreation of one of the typical rooms and I couldn’t believe how crowded it was. Once again, numbers mean nothing until you have an accurate image. It reminded me a little of TM or BLT gone completely insane—less space and more possessions, but about the same number of people (30-40…my BLT had 35 and TM had 30). After that, I continued my wandering and poked around into what I think was the Hannover Barracks. It was decrepit and I got a mild case of the spooks as I peered into barred windows looking into cellars (there wasn’t enough room for everyone so frequently the elderly had to live in cellars and attics, where they wasted away—I couldn’t imagine my grandparents going through something like that) and then went into the inner courtyard. Once again, on one yelled at me, but I felt eyes on me and cleared out of there pretty fast after snapping a few photographs.

I then walked outside the walls to the Columbarium and then to the memorial cemetery/crematorium. A lot of these areas sustained heavy damage from the floods in 2002 and there still isn’t enough money to clean everything up. You can really see this in the memorial cemetery where letters are missing from signs and the dead “children’s tree”—a tree cared for by a group of children in Terezin that was replanted in the memorial part over a monument to their memory—that stands guard over a lonely stone. In the Columbarium, cardboard boxes of ashes of those who died in the ghetto remain and a few memorial plaques to family members lost during the war have been put up.

It was getting late as I walked back, so I decided to forgo a visit to the Small Fortress. For the purposes of my research, it made sense to skip this part since none of my characters go there, nor do they really know what is going on there except that it’s a prison. Plus, I felt like I needed to take a walk and brood for a little while. Fortunately, they’ve made a nice memorial walk by the river that takes you out into the fields and gives you a spectacular view of the mountains and surrounding red-roofed villages so I tramped through the mud for a bit and thought about things. Why do I write about something I have no hope of accurately portraying? What’s the point of writing constantly but being too afraid and self-critical to show it and so hide it away in shame? What am I doing here, really? I wasn’t able to get an answer from the river, the fields, or the sun that decided to peek out for the first time that day, so I made my way back and caught a late-afternoon bus back to Prague.

*        *        *

It was quite dark when I got back to Prague, but I managed to find my way back to the Old Town Square for dinner and general recovery. I thwarted an attempt to cheat me and bought a delicious, delicious sweet roll to nibble on as I walked home. Back at the hostel, I chatted with the two Argentinean girls and ran into Stupid Japanese Tourist #2. This one showed up without a reservation and assumed that the hostel had a 24 hour reception. He then proceeded to treat us like we were in charge, in spite of our numerous protestations that we were also tourists and (although we were smarter than him) didn’t know a thing about other hostels and what they might cost. I happened to have seen a Radisson on the way home, so I told him to go there and he proceeded to roll his eyes at me when I couldn’t tell him how much a room might cost. Humph. Had I been in Krakow, I would have sent him to Nowa Huta for his rudeness.

Before today, I have been lucky enough to have spent every Thanksgiving with at least some of my family. Sure there was a jaunt to participate in the Macy's Parade and a nasty 15-hour snow delay in O'Hare, but I managed to come home from both in time to enjoy family cheer and plenty of my mother's excellent sweet potato pie. Needless to say, I was a little sad at the though of being away from my family during a holiday that they are pretty essential for. Fortunately, I happen to have the best (and most creative!) friends in all of explored space, so we made our own family-style Thanksgiving dinner…Polish-style!

Cooking American food in Poland is more than a bit of a challenge, even when you’re as good a cook as our head chef Christian. He found a turkey, which looked more like the turkey the deli cold cuts come from, and made a nice crust for it as well as homemade dressing and mashed potatoes. He,Brian, and Ryan also managed to find green beans and corn (I’ve never seen corn for human consumption in Europe…it’s generally considered animal fodder over here).  All of us guests contributed something to the spread: Antonela and Diane made deviled eggs and brought rolls as well as a dessert, Stephanie made a cheese and sausage appetizer tray, Luke and I brought dessert and a bottle of Bulgarian (or possibly Moldovian) wine, and Piotrek and Michelle brought a bottle of excellent Hungarian wine. I also attempted to find some sweet potatoes so I could make some sweet potato pie, but sadly  there is not a single sweet potato in Krakow. Also, cranberries have not made a splash over here yet either. I wish I could trade all the nasty American cultural imperialism would be sent back to the States--because, really, no one should have to have SUVs, McDonald's, and Gwen Stefani et al inflicted upon them--and some nice things like sweet potatoes and cranberries take their place. Enough of my silly complaining though.

So the ten of us all sat down for an excellent Polish Thanksgiving meal. It was so much fun because not only was the food good, but we were quite an international group, with six Americans, an Itallian, a Scot, a Pole, and a Brit all sitting around the table. In spite of the diversity, it was still quite home-like, especially when Brian pulled up CBS Sportsline so we could keep track of the football games! Unfortuanately, I must say that watching little animated helmets on a computer screen really takes the fun out of watching the game.

30 October, 2006

After much planning and assorted craziness, we set out on our crazy whirlwind car tour of the Baltic States.  This morning, the guys went and got the car—a brand new Nissan we christened Zabka (little frog)—and I threw my things in around 1pm. The car is very nice, with only 1,000km on it, but tiny and very “Euro-looking” with bug headlights and such (thus the name). Apparently it was the one car in the lot at the airport that Brian and Christian thought was too small…so of course it was the one that they had to rent! All in all, it’s not a bad little car. One of the perks of Euro-style cars is that it’s tiny, but deceptively roomy. With five people, it’s a squeeze, but there’s definitely more room than there would have been had we loaded everyone and everything up into my little Corolla. Around 2, all five of us (Brian, Ryan, Christian, Michelle, and myself) piled in and we set off on stage 1 of our journey: Białystok (bee-ah-weh-stock). The ride was fairly uneventful for a journey over the ever-interesting Polish road system. There was a lot of construction (someday we will have good roads in this country!), but we got through it ok. There of course were plenty of bumps and jolts from both the construction and the bad road condition, but our rallying cry was: “We’re insured! Just watch the undercarriage!” For 6 more euros a day we were totally insured, except for the one part that was likely to get damaged while driving down Polish roads. Funny thing that. Anyway, we took the A7 up toward Warsaw and then turned toward Białystok via Minsk Maz. and Ostrow Maz. Another typical feature of Polish roads is that they are pitch black at night except in the immediate area of the city, so there wasn’t too much to see after about 4:30 when the sun went down. The conversation and the rocking out to various random artists as well as the adventure of trying to defog the windows without catching hypothermia kept us on our toes. I’m seriously in awe of Brian and Ryan’s driving skills—it takes nerves of steel to drive in Europe in general and Poland especially. One funny incident occurred on the pitch-black road to Minsk-Maz. where we ran into some construction. It wasn’t well-lit of course, so we didn’t see the construction fellow with the dim light until we were about 30 feet from him. Since we didn’t see any equipment or lights, we thought he was stopping us for something else and rolled down the window to see what was going on. The poor guy looked very confused and, since by that time we’d figured out that it was just construction, we rolled up the window. We could see him staring at our plates and wondering what sort of crazies were living in Warsaw these days as we rolled by him. Dinner was at a truck stop diner outside of Ostrow and not bad in the least. Then, we were back on the road to Białystok.

Getting into Białystok was an adventure and half. The actual getting in the city was quite easy (it is very, very difficult to screw up getting into major Polish cities, the highway simply goes right through them) and well-lit, but the hostel was absolutely impossible to find. The directions were awful! You’d think that the one hostel in town would make itself easy to find! We drove around the center in circles for a while, which was fine by me as I got a little tour of the town from which quite a bit of my family hails. All in all, it’s not as ugly and nasty as some have made it out to be. Granted, it’s not the sort of place where I’d spend a week, but I’d definitely come back to poke around and reflect on what might have been. The combination of Polish and Belarussian is supposed to be fascinating and that’s what the city is all about, since it’s served as the major border town for many years. It’s sad knowing how much was lost during the war—the city was destroyed three times (Russians, Germans, and Russians again) and it as well as the surrounding areas had a significant Jewish population. Someday, I will get over my fear of driving, get a car, and visit these forgotten places to clean what’s left of the graves and place a stone at the memorials to show that they are not just part of a fading, tragic memory.

When we finally got to the hostel, we crashed. It wasn’t a bad place—clean, comfy beds, nice showers—so I’ll have to remember that when I go back for my family roots trip.

31 October, 2006

Woke up bright and early at 6am and left Białystok around 6:30. Ryan and Brian left the car where we originally parked (we were supposed to move it half a kilometer away and we didn’t think it would be worth it for 6 hours) and had a beer while pretending to move it, so it was only a short trot in the cold. The ride up to the Polish-Lithuanian border was pretty uneventful, though the sunrise was super pretty and made me fall in love with the Polish countryside all over again. Going through Augustow and Suwałki (soo-wahl-ki) brought back all sorts of fun memories from World Teach, so I was in a great mood even though it was way too early for my taste. We arrived at the border around 8:45 and got through easily. Much cheering ensued and I was thrilled to once again be venturing off the map and into the unknown. After all, this trip would take me further east and north than I had ever been before! Always have to push those boundaries, you know. The only disappointing thing was that there appeared to be an ink shortage because our entry stamps were so faint. Michelle and I celebrated our arrival into Lithuania by quoting the opening lines of “Pan Tadeusz” by Adam Mickiewicz (Mitz-kye-vich): "Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie; \ Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, \ Kto cię stracił. Dziś piękność twą w całej ozdobie \Widzę i opisuję, bo tęsknię po tobie." and I did a little squeeing over being in the birth country of Czeslaw Milosz (I understand that it’s considered abnormal to be a crazy fangirl of someone as sophisticated as a Nobel Prize-winning poet and am totally fine with that, thanks). The roads were also super nice, which was surprising considering we were entering a former Soviet republic. I guess the country is so small that it was easier for them to take the money from the EU and quickly build up a nice system of roads. Also the approaching winter might have had something to do with speeding things along as well as ensuring the quality (no one wants to have a wreck on bad roads in East Jesus, Lithuania in the middle of a snowy February night). The countryside was a lot like Poland—flat, with lots of fields and little clumps of forests. There seemed to be a lot more wooden buildings and really tiny clusters of houses than in Poland though. The fields were still green, but the leaves on the trees were changing and it was just magnificent in the early morning light. We hit Kaunas (aka Kovno, don’t even ask me how to pronounce it in Lithuanian) around 10 and didn’t see much except for the ugly, dingy blocks of flats typical of the Soviet era. It’s a pity because I heard it was a nice town before the war (so was everything else, of course). We got a bit lost on the highway around Kovno and ended up heading toward Vilnius (Vilno) instead of toward the Lithuanian-Latvian border and Riga, but we were able to right ourselves without too much time lost and crossed into Latvia in the early afternoon. We stopped at the Hesburger (Latvian Burger King) for lunch and I had my first loaded hamburger (lettuce, onion, cheese, pickle, ketchup, mustard, mayo) because I can’t say “just plain,” or anything else, in Latvian. It actually wasn’t too bad, but I think I like the plain way best.

We reached Riga around 4 and did the sensible thing of stopping at the tourist information booth for directions to our hostel. Of course, we got a little lost anyway because we’re not familiar with the city and Europeans are allergic to left turns. It ended up not being a bad adventure because we got to go over a really awesome bridge and see the skyline. The hostel, Elizabeth’s Hostel, was very nice and we managed to get a room to ourselves. After setting our clocks forward an hour (who knew?!), we tramped out in the rain for dinner. We ended up at this great pancake place and had a blast. Then we went to an Irish Pub to warm up from all the walking and then to a club. The club would have been a lot better had the music not all sounded the same, so I got bored after an hour and Ryan and I went home.

1 November, 2006

Apparently I slept so soundly that I didn’t hear Brian, Christian, and Michelle come in around 4am…kudos to them for being so quiet! I woke up at 9:30 and went with Ryan and Michelle for an art nouveau tour of the city. Riga is quite famous for its art nouveau architecture and we had a whole walking tour with recommendations from a book. On the way to the main street, we happened to pass by the Jewish Museum and I decided to break off and go there. As it turned out, the museum didn’t open for another hour, so I went to go find some breakfast to kill time. As I walked by a coffee shop that looked more like a bar, I happened to glance at the window and saw Michelle and Ryan sitting there! So I went and joined them for an omelet before heading back to the museum. It’s very small, but the exhibits are very interesting and informative. There seems to still be a pretty active community—the lady at the information desk said there were about 10,000 Jews in Lithuania and about 8,000 of them lived in Riga. Yes I know that this is only a tiny remnant of the pre-war community, but it gave me hope to see pictures of young people celebrating various holidays and doing performances for the community at large. Maybe there still is a place for Jews in these parts, though I recognize that nothing can ever be even close to the same. When I finished up there, I wandered around the old town and poked around some of the open-air stalls selling various souvenirs. I ended up running into Brian and Christian as I was purchasing a little painting to add to my collection. We then ran into Ryan and Michelle as we walked around and decided to go our separate ways and meet back at the hostel for dinner. The three of us went to the Occupation Museum, which was very grim but incredibly well-done. I think Nathalie would really like to see how it’s set up and how things are displayed and made accessible for people of many different nationalities who come in. There were cards of information with the major exhibits, but supplementary information about every artifact in the museum was in little black folders and translated in various languages. It was pretty smart thinking I must say. I really learned a lot from the museum and it’s just so sad how much this area has gone through in the past 60-70 years. Believe me, you will come out of the museum hating the Soviets and the Germans, but mostly the Soviets. I guess this was the point, but a few places got me steaming angry. Not Warsaw Uprising steaming angry, but pretty ticked.

It was rainy and freezing when we left the museum, so we broke up the trip by stopping in a bookshop, where I got The Fellowship of the Ring in Latvian, a post office, and a convenience store on the way back to the hostel. When we got back, I was in full nerd mode and tried to go through my new book to see how much of it I could read. Yeesh. And I thought Polish was hard! Next time I start complaining about the trials and troubles I’m having with my chosen language, I’m breaking out my Latvian FOTR to remind myself of a really hard and really useless (relatively speaking of course) language. Dinner was at this great restaurant which had a buffet of traditional Latvian cuisine and a great bar.

2 November, 2006

The alarm went off at 5am Polish time, so we actually got up at 6 and left the hostel at 6:30. Still, there was much grumbling from certain parties which shall remain unnamed at Christian’s and my ability to wake up before the alarm and to just go. We loaded up and, after a small detour, were on our way to Tallinn. It was already snowing when we left the hostel, but it started going crazy the closer we got to Estonia. The countryside was very beautiful and Scandinavian looking and I almost expected to see some moose-drawn sleighs with little bells on them as we drove. We crossed the border around 8:30 and got to tiny (but exquisite) Tallinn around 11. Our hostel, the Old Guesthouse Hostel, was right in the old town and felt very homey and comfortable. After depositing our luggage, we went on a tramp through the snow to see the sights. We grabbed traditional Estonian fare at Harry’s Estonian Buffet (I did wonder where Harry was originally from, since that’s not an Estonian name!) and then went to see the Orthodox Church. I’ve always found the Eastern Orthodox Church to be fascinating since I didn’t learn very much about it (damn you western-oriented comparative religions class!) and there aren’t many people of that faith in Nashville. It seems very mysterious and exotic, a lot more remote-feeling than the Roman Catholic Church or the various Protestant denominations I’ve had contact with. I’m fascinated by all the golden Byzantine-style icons and the flickering beeswax candles and the black-bearded and –robed priests. It just adds to the mystery and I would love to see what a service is like. I did have a moment of nerditude because I found an icon of Nicholas II and his family, who were canonized in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was pretty cool to actually see that after reading about it in various books.

Then, we braved the snow again and went to a couple of lookout places and a market. Unfortunately, the snow and Chicago-esque wind kept us from seeing much and the market was a normal Eastern European bazaar full of all kinds of useless junk and crazy old Russian ladies. I did manage to find a Tallinn painting before we went to thaw out at this nice café on the main square, Tristan ja Isolde. It was very medieval-looking and I could see Stephanie and Alissa spending a lot of time there with a nice glass of mulled wine and a slice of berry pie while doing work. Ryan went to check out the knitted goods and I found a bookstore to add another part to my Baltic Tolkien trilogy (somewhere between Riga and Tallinn, I decided that it would be really cool to get one LOTR book from each country, cutting down on the billions of extra copies of The Silmarillion that are clogging up my shelf). The saleslady was very amused at my request and asked me why I wanted Tolkien in Estonian of all languages. She got a big kick out of my answer and gave me a discount. Come to think of it, she was the first person who has asked me about my weird habit of collecting Tolkien books in languages I obviously can’t read. Haha.

We stopped in the Estonian History Musem, which was small and decent. I liked the archaeological findings and the random screenings of old turn of the century films the best. Then, we met up with Ryan (who bought a totally happenin’ sweater and hat) and went out for dinner at a good pizza place.  The night was finished by spending the last of our Kroons at the Hell Hunt (Hell Hound) pub, which was rocking. Brian was disappointed that we didn’t go to the Depeche Mode pub, but the rest of us would have had a minor rebellion had we been dragged there.

3 November, 2006

We were woken up in the middle of the night by our roommate the Finnish professor stumbling in drunk, relieving his munchies with a chocolate bar, and then falling into bed and snoring like a drowning seal. Christian, who had the top bunk and speaks Swedish and a little Finish, said a couple of choice words in Finnish, which made the snoring slightly less ear-splitting. Our real wakeup was at 7:30 and we sat down to a great breakfast with a nice English teacher (an English English teacher) by a roaring fire before hitting the road for Vilnius. Once again, the ride was uneventful except for the obligatory getting lost when driving into the city. I’ve learned from this trip that one cannot merely rely on Europe on a Shoestring to get you from point A to point B when point A is two countries away and you’re going by car. Humph.

At Ryan’s (aka Rick Steves) insistence, we stopped for a moment to take in the awesome sight of the Baltic on a freezing late fall morning. It was really something else, but I was almost too cold to enjoy it. We basically pulled off, jumped out, waded through the snowy woods and the icy beach, snapped some pictures, were nearly blown out to sea by the wind, waded back to the car, and turned the heater on full blast. Definitely an excellent pit stop.

Our hostel, the Vilnius Backpackers Hostel, definitely ranks #2 on my list of hostels from this trip (Tallinn being #1). It is right in the Old Town and feels a lot like home. I also think it’s in the old Jewish district because I found the remnants of a Hebrew street sign and it was very close to the synagogue. We ate dinner at this great Lithuanian restaurant not far from our hostel. I had some sort of meatloaf with potatoes and a nice tall glass of cider. The boys definitely enjoyed the liter mugs of beer, which I could only pick up with two hands! Afterwards, we went to sample the Vilnius nightlife and hit up a nearby club. It was all right, but the bartenders were sort of stupid (didn’t know how to make mixed drinks) and the crowd was definitely the 17-and-under as well as the over-40-and-creepy, so we left after a couple. Then we hit up a students club which was really crowded and had a tiny dance floor. We had a good time there, but Michelle and I decided it was time to head home around 1:30. Some idiot stepped on her ankle while she was dancing and she was not happy. Poor Michelle.

The guys came in roaring drunk around 4 and were very amusing to listen to before rolling my eyes and nodding off to sleep again.

4 November, 2006

Since we were so focused on, um, having a lot of fun last night, no one remembered to set the alarm! I woke up around 9 and Michelle also was up a bit later, so we left the still-slumbering guys and went on a walking tour of Vilnius. It was snowing like crazy, so we decided not to go to all the overlooks because there really wouldn’t have been a point.

First, we stopped at the synagogue to pay homage to what once was the Jerusalem of the North. I thought that the community had been completely decimated by the War and then 60 years of Soviet rule, and so thought it was a museum and that we wouldn’t have a problem getting in early in the morning. I got the surprise of my life when the man at the door told us in a mixture of Hebrew and Russian that there were in fact services going on until 2! He pulled a curtain over a partition, gave us a siddur in Russian and Hebrew, and let us watch the service. Both the service, which I think was a little more in the Conservadox tradition, and the interior were just gorgeous. I could have stayed for hours listening to the mournful voice of the cantor echo around the mostly empty building. The worshippers tended to be older, but I saw a few men with full heads of hair among them. It’s a little bit uplifting to know that in spite of everything, a Jewish community is hanging on in Vilna.

After getting our fill of Hebrew, we started on the walking tour recommended in our book. We saw the National Cathedral, and then hiked up the slippery path to the castle (cobblestones and snow do not mix). We couldn’t see much because of the snow, but we did run into some Poles who were making a film of some sort and were extremely amused. Then, we took the cable car back down and went to St. Anne’s Church, which is a beautiful Gothic brick building but is falling apart on the inside and undergoing extensive restoration. It’s sad to see what the communists did to so many of these houses of worship. All were closed down after the takeover, the priests exiled or shot, and the buildings turned into warehouses or museums of atheism. Thus, a great deal of the original interior art and architecture was lost or badly damaged. I hope they’ll be able to restore these places to their original beauty someday.

Lunch was on the main shopping street at a nice little Italian restaurant. I popped in a bookstore and found a copy of The Return of the King in Lithuanian to complete my Baltic JRR Tolkien trilogy and also a copy of The Hobbit in Russian which I couldn’t pass up because the illustrations were so trippy. Mom will get a major kick out of them. The rest of the tour took us through the courtyards of Vilnius University and then to the Gates of Dawn. We went up to the Bastion to see the view and, miracle of miracles, the sun came out enough for us to get some decent photos. Then, we made our way back down the hill to the Independent Republic of Uzupis, a ‘bohemian’ district of artists, drunks, and dreamers that randomly proclaimed independence from Vilnius possibly as a result of a bad (drunken) idea gone funny gone to reality. We tried to find the metal tablets for the constitution, but were unsuccessful and so went back home to thaw out before dinner. At the hostel, we met up with the guys and went to sample more Lithuanian food (and enjoy more of their beer too) before turning in for a short sleep.

5 November, 2006

The alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 5am and we cleaned off Zabka and were on the road at 5:30. The drive back was mostly uneventful, as far as I know because I slept for most of it. We did have some fun because we apparently missed our turn in the dark and got within spitting distance of the Belarussian border. This would not have been good because Americans need visas for Belarus and I’m pretty sure there was a “no going into communist dictatorships in this car” clause on our insurance. Anyway, we righted ourselves and got to the right border crossing in Poland and barreled back to Krakow. On the way, we encountered every sort of miserable weather God can throw at travelers—snow, snow mixed with hail, sleet, more hail, and finally rain. Zaczek was a most welcome sight as we pulled in at 4:30—7 days and nearly 3,000 km later.