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then and now; old and new

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Krakow, Poland 

Letterboxes. You wouldn’t think there’s much to say about a letterbox, would you? But they symbolise today’s observations.
Down in the lobby of our inner-city hostel, just like in all the other old buildings and new apartments in Poland, there is a stack of letterboxes. But in this block there are two; a brand spanking shiny new one, and an old one just as we remember having. Same colour even.

Out on the streets there are the old trams, and running alongside are new ones.

A before-breakfast-wander into the Rynek stuns me with cars parked around the entire square – it used to be so much nicer as a virtually car-free pedestrian zone. We return again after 10am, when shops have opened and all the cars are gone. YAY. Just the old tourist horse-n-cart…..and a few little motorised city tour carts……and people, people, people walking everywhere. In my opinion, this is a positive change, embracing the need to allow vehicular access to the area, but restricting it so that the special nature of the square remains.

Round the corner into ulica Szewska, thinking of old Pani Czernek, who used to sit on the concrete window ledge, begging….and there in blazing gold letters is McDonalds.
(First a sidetrack about Pani Czernek. She was old, short and fat. We were young and learning Polish, and she had all day to talk, so I would sit there on the ledge with her, chatting, learning, taking her some homebaking. Eventually she invited us to her home, because her bedridden-(and-never-been-washed)-for-many-years husband wanted to meet us. At the end of a long busride out of town, was her rundown smelly one-room-plus-toilet apartment. We went one Saturday afternoon, can’t really say we enjoyed ourselves, but she never stopped talking of our visit. A black armband soon told of her husband’s death; she cried as we sat in the snow together, contemplating her loneliness. She would cry again at one of my visits – the one when I would tell her we were leaving. By chance, one day I had been with her when Monk Artur had passed by. She was one of his “charges” and we had been introduced. She now had me write down our NZ address so that Artur could send us postcards from her – which he did. He also, of his own initiative, sent us a personal one to inform us of Pani Czernek’s death a few years later. That’s what I was thinking about as I saw the golden word). When we lived here, mercifully, there were NO big chain food outlets. None at all. At least, a little further up the street, our pizza shop (the only pizza shop back then) is still there now, still with its stand-up-at bar along one wall. It used to be crowded – you could hardly get in to the shop and had to wait a while to be served. Your pizza (flavour options: mushroom with ketchup or mushroom without ketchup) came on a real white ceramic plate that got washed when you’d finished and usually you stood there, holding and eating –  not often was there a free spot at the bar or one of the few tables.  There are over a dozen varieties on offer now, and all in two sizes. Surely we’ll have to buy mushroom if we eat there one day.

The old: an occasional bookshop, which you had to queue outside, waiting for a shopping basket to become available before you were allowed in to browse. Once inside, few books with illustrations, even fewer in colour, all but three in Polish.
The new: bookshops on every street, both new and used books for sale. Colourful books, picture books, scientific books, novels, translations, magazines, Polish, English, German, Mandarin.

The old: grey or tan-coloured concrete plastered buildings, often ornately decorated sculpture-wise (but dull, nonetheless). A small sign above a shop door advertising what is to be found within.
The new: a soft-hued rainbow breaking through the greyness, enough walls soaking up shades of paint to dispel the dowdiness. Out of every shopfront, a bright often-gawdy neon sign competing for your attention. Visual busy-ness.
If only the grey could have been painted over and the old signs remained.

Along the road from the hostel are some old-style shops with every saleable item carefully placed behind a counter. There’s also the old market, which looked newish to us until we wandered a bit further and came to the mall. How will the Babcias selling their traditionally-pickled gherkins or the young men with walnuts picked from their own trees be able to compete with the multi-milllion-dollar corporations represented in the sprawling expanse of glass and marble? Right now they still try, but I fear the old market, in spite of its upgrade (a fence around it, the addition of a few permanent stalls, a policeman to scare away the sellers, who shouldn’t be there – no, he wasn’t new, he was there two decades ago), will not survive. In the mall there are a number of large supermarkets where you can purchase Greek yoghurt, French cheese, Italian pasta, Mexican taco kits, English mustard…who, apart from the old folk wanting to cling to the old ways or those whose poverty forces them to the cheaper market, will go from stall to stall in the biting cold to make their purchases from a far more limited range? I would, and today I did, and I will as long as we are here. I appreciate being able to support the middle-aged lady (that would be the same age as me!), who wants to sell her homemade white cheese and special-recipe-Polish sausage. I will (and did) buy from the man selling just a few ears of sweetcorn, presumably grown in his garden plot. I will buy the free-range eggs someone brings in to town, and the berries picked from their own bushes. I am thankful for the opportunity to eat organic food purchased straight from the grower. But what will happen when those old people, my fellow shoppers, are gone? Change is undeniably inevitable. The old and the new, they stand side by side. But something will be lost the day the last market closes – a personal approach, a venue for small-growers/creators to sell their goods, a community, the opportunity to buy inexpensive unbranded organics, control.

Quote of the day:
Kgirl10 nonchalantly commented this evening, “I like it so much better here. It feels more like home all being in one room.”
I had to ask her, “Have you forgotten we have a whole house at home and don’t live in one room?”
But she knew what she meant, “Yeah, but when we were hostelling we were usually in one room and I liked that more than having to go between two vans.”

Our house is really going to feel very big, isn’t it!

back again

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Krakow, Poland

Very quickly Berlin city is left behind and we enter open fields, pine forests, allotment gardens (some with most substantial houses on them). In the shadows that the sun has not yet licked away, frost lingers; making paths slippery and long grasses crispy, and accentuating dirt track ruts and the dark curve of rounded haybales lying in the fields.  We pass an expanse of freshly tilled earth where hundreds upon hundreds of black birds stand waiting. We wonder how they know when it is time to fly south, but apart from thinking there might be something such as birdy instinct, we don’t know.
Neither do we know when we cross the border into Poland, but suddenly there are Polish words on buildings. And the buildings are different. The roofs are steeper, there are big overhanging eaves, occasionally a carved wooden gable-end. Each building has its white-lettering-on-blue-background sign attached proclaiming street name and number.
But the differences between Poland now and then (when we used to live here) are greater than the differences between Germany and Poland.
Now on the edge of the first town we stop at there’s a Kaufland, a large German supermarket. There are big billboards. What’s more, one is advertising credit; both concepts (credit and billboards) were unheard of here two decades ago.

The smooth train rolls on mostly through agricultural land. We might be comfortable in our airline-style seats, but we notice it was easier for the kids on noisy Asian trains. For eleven hours they need to try to stay *really* quiet – on Asian trains they could talk normally without anyone giving them a stare – oh yes, people looked at them, but not with *that* disapproving stare. We wonder why ER couldn’t have chosen one of those trains to have her two hour crying stint on! Four different ladies tell me in Polish and German that she is too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, tired, bored, has a headache, has a stomachache, should get some fresh air, should go back in the compartment out of the cold…. Actually she was just stubbornly, loudly, dramatically, heartrendingly insisting, “I don’t want to sit with you Mama; Dadda will let me do what I want.” My resolve was stronger than hers, especially as Dadda was feeling most grotty, having picked up the Berlin Bug from the people we’d been staying with. By tomorrow half of the kids will have as well.

8:30pm we roll into Krakow Glowny (those words don’t look half as good without the squiggles and dashes they are supposed to have on them!)
What is touted by the hostel as an eight minute walk from station to room, we expect to take quarter of an hour. In darkness, with lights reflecting in puddles we try to avoid, we stumble up the street. Whenever we’ve had packs on our backs up until now we have not been carrying a massive solid-based preserving pot, a heavy cast iron wok, a mega-set of Carcassone and two flea market dollies with complete wardrobes that have been created out of worn-out clothes over the past five months.
As we walk, the Lao phrase “same same but different” springs to mind. We had never had much cause to spend much time at the train station when we lived here, but it is immediately obvious that there is huge difference – big neon signs and a mall right beside the train station are the first signs of progress change. It looks very unKrakowlike. We do not recognise anything, although my internal destination finder still knows where the centre is. Then round the corner trams, the same blue and cream trams, are running. Same same. The streets are still cobbled rather than asphalted over like in many other European cities. The distinctive Krakow smell, which I had not known was in my memory, wafts by. As expected, the horse monument has its back to us and at the end of its street is the old barbican – it’s hardly going to go anywhere in twenty years when it’s been there for a few hundred now, is it? The Stary Klepparz (old market) is still there. I had heard a few years ago that no markets exist in Poland any more, but I am quietly pleased to discover this to be untrue. We’ll go back during the day and have a look round – it used to be just a series of wooden tables covered with roofs, but now it seems to be little individual metal stalls. We’ll see another day, and check if the bakery is still across the street too.
Many of the lower floor shops have, as we predicted, turned boutiquey – but some are still the old style of everything behind the counter. I have a feeling Krakow has not changed as much as we might have thought, and it’s nice to think the kids might see things As It Was.

sacrifice

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Berlin, Germany

The mayor, the chief of police and the head judge are all females in a particular town in Brazil. You’d have thought one of them might have objected to a twelve year old starving girl being ... [Continue reading this entry]

more questions

Saturday, October 17th, 2009
Berlin, Germany For once our family makes up fewer than half the residents of the house we’re staying in. People are constantly coming and going. Copious quantities of food are constantly being prepared and consumed. It’s a hive of activity. ... [Continue reading this entry]

Loony in Leipzig

Friday, October 16th, 2009
Berlin, Germany by Rob - because only he was there It was time for one final skirmish with the German Bureaucracy machine. Having successfully abmeldung-ed (de-registered) one van the previous day without any real problems, I was anticipating my trip to ... [Continue reading this entry]

Thursday: presenting TheRoadRace retrospectively

Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Berlin, Germany I’ve just published all the posts for our RoadRace from Biser to Berlin. We had Plan A as outlined on the blog. We started driving and came up with Plan B. Some days started with a Plan C, but we ended ... [Continue reading this entry]

Wednesday: we arrive

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Meissen to Berlin 226km In the vans from 1pm until 6pm with a half hour race round Lutherstadt Wittenberg in between

 

So it’s over. The RoadRace is finished and another chapter is ending. It’s the last night ... [Continue reading this entry]

Tuesday: taken by surprise (winter arrives)

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
almost at Prague to Meissen, just past Dresden, Germany 296km In the vans from 9am til 1pm, then another hour or so later Yesterday we watched the temperature drop from 16 degrees to 6 degrees. Today it went down another six. Yes, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Monday: Bratislava Birthday

Monday, October 12th, 2009
to infinity Bratislava and beyond 320km In the vans from 9:30 to 5pm, with a couple of hours in Bratislava Tomorrow I will turn forty. Tomorrow we plan to be in the Czech Republic sans local currency. And so today – but when it ... [Continue reading this entry]

Sunday: Budapest been and gone

Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Budapest, here we come….and go…. 328km In the vans from 8:15am til 5:15pm, with a stop for an hour and a half in the capital It feels like we’re *almost* back in the Central Europe we left in spring. Is it merely ... [Continue reading this entry]