Travel : Wroclaw : A few unexpected

This weekend, we took the train to Wroclaw, the chief city of Silesia region located north west of Gliwice. I was excited because every Pole promised it was a very pretty city with the river Odra ran through it. The train ride was awful because it was completely packed with people; Marcin M. looked at us and said, “You know, this is very typical in Poland!�? We took turn standing and sitting at the entrance, where people getting on and off, with me and Sedef leaning against the toilet door near the entrance. There was one lady who needed to use the toilet where we sat and headed toward us, but Sedef held the door while telling her, “No, someone is inside mamm!�? Normally, I am not this mean but at such chaos time, I had no second thought about the possibility that the poor woman might pee in her pants. Oh well! Life! Life! Life! I am just a person in her early twenty; I can afford to be inconsiderate and mean and love every darn second of it.

Panorama painting

We went to see the famous Panorama Raclawicka (Panorama of the Battle of Raclawice), an enormous painting 120-meter long and 15 meter high depicting the defeating of the Russian army by the people near the village Raclawice.
For a few years, panorama painting was a phenomenon in Europe and North America, but died eventually because of the arrival of cinema. There was a group of Polish-Americans wanted to purchase the painting and had it shipped across the Atlantic, but failed.

Rynek

The structures of the square market were extremely, how do I say in layman term: cute; they reminded me of colorful dollhouses at souvenir shops. I felt that I had just entered a live color box.
I forgot to ask Sedef for their architectures, but I found out later that they were from the 18th century, and there were plenty of similar buildings in Gliwice, which I forgot or decided not to look since they were too close too home. Who cares too much in paying attention so close to home? Colorful and animated looking buildings are very typical in Poland, as I will see them again and again in almost every city I visited; Wroclaw happened to be the first.

Town Hall

The second object caught my attention as I walked further into the center was a majestic church-like Town Hall, a symbol of Wroclaw within the last seven centuries. You could never imagine that this magnificent royal building which strengthens the status of city as a major trading center was once a one-story junk constructed up during the time the Mongolian Tatar ransacking the city as well as rest of Central Europe. (Will give a bit of history of the Tatars very soon.)

At 12 o’clock, I heard a trumpet from somewhere, and I followed Marcin M. toward the east side of the town hall to catch the glimpse of the trumpet player. It took me quite a while to finally see the tiny figure of him in the tower on the top of the hall. Marcin M. told me that if I noticed, I would hear the sound from the trumpet was stopped sharply at the very end. So he started telling me the story behind it. During the fighting days, there was a person who stayed on top of this building to look out for enemies. When he saw them marching near, he would play the trumpet so that the town army could prepare. One day, while playing, he was shot through neck by an enemy’s arrow and fell dead before finishing the tune, and that made the trumpet sound stopped suddenly versus smoothly as heard from live-till-the-end performers.
Today Wroclaw, Krakow and other cities still follow this tradition, playing trumpet when the clock strikes 12, and tourists if notice will detect a sudden stop and some of them might ponder why.

I figure I should brief a bit about the Tatar so that you could have a clear picture of who they are. Since I don’t have the knowledge, I will simply copy/summarize the information from my guidebook, “The rough guide to Poland.�?

The Tatars

Early in the thirteenth century, the nomadic Mongol people of Central Asia were welded into a confederation of tribes under the rule of Genghis Khan. In 1241, the most ferocious of these tribes, the Tatars, came charging out of the steppes and divided into two armies, one of which swept towards Poland, the other through Hungary. Lightly armored, these natural horsemen moved with a speed that no European soldiery could match, and fought in a fashion as savage as the diet that sustained them-raw meat and horse’s milk mixed with blood. On Easter Day, they destroyed Krakow, and in April came up against the forces of the Silesian ruler, Duke Henryk the Pious. Henryk’s troops were annihilated, and a contemporary journal records that the “terror and doubt took hold of every mind�? throughout the Christian West. Before the eventual withdrawal of the Tatar hordes, all of southern Poland was ravaged repeatedly—Krakow, for example, was devastated in 1259 and again in 1287.
Within a generation, however, the Tatars had withdrawn into central Russia ceasing to pose a threat to the power of central Europe. By the late fourteenth century, they came under the sway of Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a vast eastern empire which later linked to Poland. These Tatars helped Poland-Lithuania armies defeat the Teutonic Knight in the battle of Grundwald, and granted the eastern land under King Jan Sobieski.
Today some six thousands descendants of these first Muslim citizen of Poland are spread all over the country. Though thoroughly integrated into the Polish society, they are distinctive for both their Asiatic appearances and their faith.

Because Teutonic Knights is mentioned in the above paragraph, I will tell their history also.

Teutonic Knights

They are one of the three military-religious orders which emerged from the Crusade. They were founded in 1190 as a fraternity serving the sick, the order combined the ascetic ideals of monasticism with the military training of a knight. Politically their main aim was territorial conquest, especially to the east which with their religious zealoustry already established in Palestine.
Recognized the common enemy, Poland and Luthiania joined forced and defeated the Teutonic Knighs at the battle of Grunwald, however let them retreat in peace.
The Grand Master converted to Lutheranism, dissolved the order, transformed into duchy. Politically, he had to accept the King of Poland as overlord but he had full internal jurisdiction, which allowed for the adoption of Protestantism as its religion. This turned out to be a crucial step in the history of Europe as the Duchy family formed a power base outside of the Holy Roman Empire.

I will stop history here. If I continue, this will be non-ending entry because to explain A, I need B, to explain B and need C and D, so on and so forth; you get my points don’t you?

Back to the present

We sat down on the steps in front of the Town Hall to listen the street performer who was singing “Sweet Home Alabama.�? He had this typical nasal earthen vocal of American singers which made me wonder whether he was from America. Rob and I gave him two zlotys. We even discussed whether we could ask him to perform a song by Neil Young, “Heart of Gold�? particularly. But we had to follow our group so we just waked away after dropping the coin on his guitar case.

Ripped off

We split into two groups for lunch; other group chose a familiar Sphinz restaurant::since when I opt for anything familiar, so I went with the other group to a German restaurant. After a while deciding I picked the cheapest dish I could find on a menu, a BBQ pork stick for 8 zlotys and a bowl of beet root soup, one of the best authentic soup of Poland. You should try if you have a chance. The food was excellent except for my BBQ pork; I didn’t like it very much. There was a group of Polish army brats sitting on a table next to us, drinking, eating, and talking very loud. Marco, with his usual anti-military, anti-American except for McDonald smirked and said, “You see, this is so typical Americans. They follow the American style.�?
We were all happy eating our food; at least I was until the check arrived. I had to pay a swooping 35 zlotys for my BBQ pork, as stinky as it was. The thing was I totally forgot that here they sold thing by grams, so 8 zlotys for 100 grams, but my BBQ pork was 450 grams. And of course, they didn’t have smaller meat. It made more sense if they didn’t have a smaller fish since you couldn’t really aim to hook an exact 100 or 200-gram fish, but this was dead pig. How hard it was to cut and slice 100 grams worth of pork into a stick? Hmm there was something I could never fathom when it came to these Poles. We argued with the waitress and later Basha who was Polish told us that the waitress gave us some information for a cheap student restaurant since, “this is the center you know, and everything is expensive!�? Marco turned red, “What? They ripped us off and now call us cheap? What?�?
So, you ignorant cheap tourists, remember to look for the GRAM beside the food.

Sweet, Tea, Rob, old friend’s memory, and personality (say waaat?)

For the past couple of months, I developed this unusual habit of looking for a tea or coffee shop where I just sit down and have a cup of tea or coffee. Wroclaw and Rob, in a lot of way, introduced this pleasure into my life.
Rob is a kind of philosophical rebellious wandering type. He doesn’t like to follow order, always has to find some objections to orders and rules. Much later, Sedef told me that while growing up, Rob had to try really hard to get attention from his parents because they focused their energies and time on his brother who was weak and sick at the time. In a way, his upbringing had a lot to do with his sort of different-from-others personality. But this is how it works isn’t it? My native country has this saying “Parents bear child, God breeds personality,�? and I think they still believe it till this day, and worse they believe that the child sometimes develops those strange behaviors himself or herself. Oh my Lord! Eh! Personality is a combination between genetics and environment, internal attributes and external factors; meaning there are certain hard-coded wired bit and information inducing certain behaviors that can’t be changed and the remaining behaviors formed and reinforced over time by interaction with the external world consists of contact with close/immediate/distant people and degree of exposure to of frequent/sporadic/rare environment. Good Lord! All I want to do is describe my friend Rob.

Despite Rob’s constant announcing, “I don’t care,�? he really did do a lot for other people. He and Mariana had a showdown one night when she asked him to move the table for us.
Mariana: “It’s a man’s job to move stuff for women.�?
Rob (low voice): “It’s a man’s job to tell a woman to f..k off.�?
Mariana (to me, Sedef, and Marcin M.): “What? Did he say f..k?�?

They became instant enemy since day one and the very best of friends as days went by. Who would have imagined that my controlling hardheaded Mariana and also stubborn rebellious Rob would cry the day Mariana left Poland to go back to Ukraine? I asked him if he liked to hook up with her, and got the immediate scary shrug, “Oh no!�?

Rob had this characteristic, which resembled that of one of my Ohlone College’s friend who was laid back and liked to be indulged in the “good life�?—maybe a little too much. What do I mean by “good life�?? “Good life�? means take a step back to enjoy life a little: to drink a cup of tea while other drink a paper cup of soda, to really taste the bite of food on your tongue instead just shove it into your mouth, to sit back and look others hurry, to read a book not for school requirement, to miss one or two deadlines you set for yourself, to say “nah I don’t have to do that�?, to do things that bewilder others and sometimes even yourself. By the way, that Ohlone friend of mine, a bright student, a high school Jeopardy finalist, a promising engineer major suddenly graduated with a Comparative Literature degree. We talked for the last time before he went to China to teach English, pursuing the “good life�? I figured. He is the only one guy I know who writes stories and poetry while others study and code, sings Schubert’ lieder when others rap, dyes hairs green while others gel hairs soft, bikes when other drives, and sells hotdogs when others applies for internships.

Rob insisted in trying cheesecakes, being that we were very close, Sedef and I chose to stay at the square looking for cheesecake shop while others in our group returned to the hostel to rest, shower, and prepared for the night at the pub. Actually, I was dying to see some other attractions suggested on my guidebook: the “Hansel and Greitel�? house, Baroque houses, other churches, and–I don’t know–the more the merrier. But then, I told myself, “Maybe I don’t have to see those places since there will be many places I can’t ever see. Instead I will sit down talking to my friends, looking at others, and seeing how the evening go by.�? I had this small cappuccino, some cake and an ice-cream cone at a round plastic table, under an umbrella next to a group of Gypsies singing openly in public. It took us quite a long time to conclude that they were Gypsies. .

I think from that moment on, I too am at ease when I feel like I am being over indulged with the “good life.�?

Orange Hostel

We stayed Orange Hostel, nicked name “Spooky Place�? which I didn’t know until later when I had to be in my room by myself at night. As we met in front of the building, the girls informed me that there was a scary man with long white hair tottering around the hallway. I asked them what room he was in, and Nejma said, “The room next to my room.�? Oh yah, Nejma and I were roommate. How about that?
From then until my leaving the hostel, I constantly had this spooky feeling bathing myself in a share shower place, being in the room by myself, and walking all the way to the end of the hall to fetch the others.
On the next night while walking around in the city, we were informed that there was a bomb exploded in Prague, somewhere near the center, where the other group was at the moment. People pondered whether this was another terrorism act. I remember my asking the group, “they should have bombed Warsaw as they threatened they would instead of Czech Republic. What did Czech ever do?�?

Train back home

The highest point of this trip was the train ride home. It was uneventful for the first hour. Friedl and Basha were teaching each other Dutch and Polish as I snatched Friedl’s book “The horse whisperer�? to examine whether the movie followed the book. Before I could open my mouth to comment anything, Friedl rounded up her eyes, “No don’t tell me the ending!�?

Our train broke in the middle of nowhere, and we all had to jump off to change to other train. It was already hard to step down to the platform from the train because of the height; it was now even harder to jump off into the ground filled with big rocks with a heavy backpack on the back. This was when I thought of the Vietnamese who sold stuff at train stations and had to jump on and off while the train running. It’s amazing how they manage to do that. I also remembered the physics lesson on seventh grade; the teacher used the people who jumped running trains as example to show us how to jump without hurting ourselves. I acted like an idiot choosing my position, deliberated which direction should I face before I jumped so I wouldn’t hurt myself. Eh, I knew the train was not moving at all.

There was a guy who stayed at the door entrance to hold our hands and lift us up. We all managed to take a quick picture in the middle of the train change-over event.

We had to get off this train at some unplanned station. To our surprised, the big train which carried the freaking people from the Woodstock rock concert in Gdansk, a city near the Baltic sea, was also here, and the conductor for this train waved us in and gave us a free ride back to Gliwice. Oh holy god! I would never see any dirtier, stinkier, and weirder-looking people like these. People with monthly-washed hairs and ragged clothes. They very much resembled the hippies and the homeless Berkeleyans I saw once in a while sauntering the street; the thing was I never saw that many together as a group. The two-story train was packed with the Rock fans with very intimidating appearances, but they turned out to be cool to us. One drunk guy took out a small knife and carved away the train signs and plastics. The conductor saw but could do nothing. Seem like these sorts of behaviors were expected in such occasion.
Rob kept making a sound with his tongue feeling sorry for himself for not going to this concert instead. It would have been fun I think.

I sat on a staircase behind two guys sitting at the train doorstep with their feet hanging out in the air. It was chilling, but it was a good chill from the fresh air blowing inside through open doors into the train which was going really fast. There wasn’t much to see as the train passed by an unimpressive landscape of the South Silesian; the unattended woods, the coal and dirt carrying trains, the gray and ugly inhabited buildings, and the smoke from the industrial plants of Katowice.

6.30.04