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maybe fairy tales are true

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Krakow, Poland

 

If you find yourself in an ancient city, with a castle (called Wawel) and a cave that once housed a dragon, you’d wonder if you’d stepped into a fairy tale!

A popular version of the Wawel Dragon’s tale takes place in Kraków during the reign of King Krak, the city’s legendary founder. Each day the evil dragon would beat a path of destruction across the countryside, killing the civilians, pillaging their homes and devouring their livestock. In many versions of this story, the dragon especially enjoyed eating young girls, and could only be appeased if the townfolk would leave a young girl in front of its cave once a month. The King certainly wanted to put a stop to the dragon, but his bravest knights fell to its fiery breath. In the versions involving the sacrifice of young girls, every girl in the city was eventually sacrificed except one, the King’s daughter Wanda. In desperation, the King promised his beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage to anybody who could defeat the dragon. Great warriors from near and far fought for the prize and failed. One day, a poor cobbler’s apprentice named Skuba Dratewka accepted the challenge. He stuffed a lamb with sulphur and set it outside the dragon’s cave. The dragon ate it and soon became incredibly thirsty. He turned to the Vistula River for relief and he drank and drank. But no amount of water could quell his aching stomach, and after swelling up from drinking half of the Vistula river, he exploded. Dratewka married the King’s daughter as promised and they lived happily ever after.
(story courtesy of Wikipedia, although some of the other version we have read suggest the shoemaker was called Krak and somehow became the founder of the city – King Krak did not feature in those ones)

When you read a story, you get a picture in your imagination, and unfortunately in this instance reality proved to disappointing for the smaller kids.
”I thought it would be much bigger,” Tgirl5 stated as we tripped along the path winding its way around the forty-year-old dragon rearing up outside his cave under the Wawel castle.
Hmm, now that you mention it, it does look rather scrawny.
”Can a statue really breathe fire?” she asked, her illusion not quite completely shattered.
”Let’s stand here and watch,” I noncomitally suggested.
We didn’t have to wait long; this dragon huffs every three minutes (and if you can’t wait that long, you can text a certain number and it will perform on cue for ya!)
”Look, it is, it really is! But it’s not real, I can see the pipe for the gas.”

It was still a good story!

Posted in 2008/09, children, history, parenting, postcard: Poland, tradition | 1 Comment »

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!

Posted in 2008/09, craft, food, health, history, justice, postcard: Poland, price, quote, tradition | 1 Comment »

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]

Posted in 2008/09, justice, postcard: Germany, tradition | 3 Comments »

birds-n-bees bulgaria: Random unRelated obseRvations

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Biser, Bulgaria A black cloud swoops across the sky and delicately separates into three different strands, each taking its own direction before rejoining into one shimmering mass of darkness again. It’s a flock of hundreds of birds, preparing for migration. ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, learning, postcard: Bulgaria, tradition | 2 Comments »

bike, bus and braying donkey

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Biser, Bulgaria (and a trip to Haskovo for Rob and Kboy12) by Rach....and Rob writes, too What do you do when two of the boys take a van for the day and you really don’t know how long they are going ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, housing, postcard: Bulgaria, tradition, transport | 2 Comments »

Biser emBraces

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
Biser, Bulgaria We’ve been here a week and haven’t even walked through the village. Unheard of for us! But in some ways it didn’t matter where we were right now – just had to be off Schengen territory and preferably ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, history, housing, language, learning, postcard: Bulgaria, recreation, tradition | 3 Comments »

gourmet greek

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Meteora, Greece

 

Being on a limited budget with lots of mouths to feed means eating out in Europe is a rare occurrence for us (or it means you buy one tiny cheesecake and each enjoy ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, food, money, postcard: Greece, tradition | No Comments »

living on paper

Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Same beach south of Patra, Greece If we felt like we were in a fairy tale in Germany….and preparing for medieval battles with the kings and queens of England….and swimming round bowls of pasta in Italy with place names that ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, book, history, postcard: Greece, tradition | 1 Comment »

GREECE DISTINCTIVES

Saturday, September 12th, 2009
Beach south of Patra, Greece – waves breaking metres away from us (no, we didn’t get to Killini again today either – there are just too many nice beaches!!)

 

Even before breakfast, which we ate ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, dress, postcard: Greece, recreation, tradition | 1 Comment »

Rach’s Bikini Shot

Saturday, September 5th, 2009
Capitolo, Italy A friend’s request for what is stated in the title inspired today’s post. Read on only if you dare! Bikinis there are aplenty on Italian beaches. The little girls just wear bikini bottoms, but once they grow up, they ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in 2008/09, children, dress, postcard: Italy, recreation, tradition, weather | No Comments »

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