Pilgrims' Progress

Krakow, Poland

“When we get back” conversations emerge occasionally now, and on one particular occasion turned to chores. I was most excited to discover that my workforce has now reached such proportions that I find myself almost entirely in a supervisory role.
I’ll have a three-year-old setting the table, filing breakfast dishes in the dishwasher and taking the compost out. There’ll be a bunch of five-to-nine-year-olds to do the dusting, clean the downstairs toilet, prepare the  lunch and tidy up the dishes, keep on top of vacuuming and sweeping, and maintain toy cupboard and bookshelf order.
The older four (by then aged 11-15) are going to try something new. For a week at a time they will take complete responsibility for a job or two. They will be able to call on me (or bribe siblings) if they’d like some assistance, but it’ll be *their* job to make sure things stay under control. The “areas of expertise” they will be working on are:

1) bake bread and cook dinner 
2) prepare breakfast and do dinner dishes (includes shining the sink!)
3) washing (get it sorted, washed, hung out, brought in, folded, put away)
4) clean upstairs bathroom and supervise littlies’ bathing (this is a cushy number!!)
 
See? There’s really not a lot left for me to do – although, as anyone with children will know, CONSISTENTLY CHECKING UP is probably the most important job! And while cleaning the bathroom sounds simple enough for the big kids, I intend to use the opportunity to proactively work with older ones about how they talk to their smaller siblings, how to gently encourage, how to give instructions politely and respectfully (who would’ve thought that Parenting 101 could be held in the bathroom?!!)

With this new style of responsibilities in mind, the biggies spent this afternoon working on their first week’s menu. (Shopping lists yet to be completed).
Dreams of croissants for breakfast and dumpling dinners disappeared quickly when they realised how much work was involved in cooking Every Single Day for a week! I’m sure we’ll learn how to bake croissants some day, but for the moment, they are wisely keeping things simple. A few “trip foods” have made it on to the menus – egg in broth for breakfast, zapiekanki, steamed pau, noodle soup, moussaka, kremowka, fried rice with lots of mint….and even the homemade baked beans that allowed us to save money to take this trip have made a comeback.

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They are following such guidelines as “we’ll make whatever we can from scratch” and “use produce that’s in season” and “we haven’t set the budget yet, but you can know for certain it will not be extravagant” and “if you’re going to heat the oven, make sure you make good use of it”.
They have already hatched co-operative plans:
“If you help me make a double batch of muesli when it’s my turn, you can use half it on your week”
”Let’s just do the same breakfast each week, so it’s quicker to plan”
”You’re making lasagne the week before me, so I’ll do moussaka instead”

Looks like we’re ready to hit the ground running.
I wonder if we’ll be in time to bottle peaches and make plum jam, not that I know where our preserving jars are any more! We have one experimental jar of tomato chutney hiding in a corner of Grandpa’s attic – hopefully, after two years it will still be edible. Everyone hopes so, coz they know there’s to be no buying what we could make ourselves. And they know when Mama makes such decrees, there’s no point creating a storm in a teacup over it <wink>

foodie picture of the day:
aaaagh we chopped it up before photographing – it was a 9kg pumpkin
that is one ENORMOUS pumpkin
it totally filled our GIGANTIC pot we are carrying with us!
and we’ll be eating it for two more days yet

Krakow, Poland

To be Polish is almost certainly to be Catholic.
To be Catholic means, among other things, following church traditions and one that happens every year on the first of November is honouring the deceased.
We took a chilly walk this morning and noticed that, despite it being Sunday, all the busses and trams were packed full of people clinging on to plastic bags crammed with chrysanthemums and candles. They were all on their way to the cemetery.
Yesterday everyone had been buying…

We waited until after dark to take our own walk across town to see the lights in the cemetery, bundled up against the temperature dropping below zero for the first time since Moscow in the spring.

The biggest collection of candles was by the memorial for the victims of communism.
The heat from them was enough to warm our freezing fingertips!

Jgirl15 is developing an eye for a good picture…. as well as the top couple above, the following are all hers – not bad without a tripod in the dim light and shivering with cold:

PS Our personal saint today was Kboy12, who for the first time cooked the entire dinner on his own (chicken curry, rice and tomato salad). He was chiding himself that his older brother had been the family’s Curry King for three years by the same age, but I reminded him that some people in their twenties, who we have met recently, confided they do not know how to cook and are just now learning how to clean!

Krakow, Poland

From ulica Batorego we used to walk to the Stary Kleparz (the old market you’ve seen in previous posts). This time we are staying virtually at the market and we walked back to Batorego, home to the second flat we lived in.

Due to the installation of domofones, we were initially unable to enter, but someone came out so I muttered a quick, “Dzien dobry, dziekuje” and walked in confidently. Everyone followed close on my heels, eager to see INSIDE where we used to live.

Considering we must have gone up the steps a thousand times, it seems surprising that at first we could not even remember which of the two staircases was “ours”. And not just that – are our memories failing us? – have we forgotten or did we never notice the beautifully tiled floors? Sure, they are grubby, and probably were back then too, covered in dust and grime, but the painted tiles and mosaics add a touch of art to everyday surroundings. Then we remembered. Up the rickety old wooden steps we clattered, running our hands along the wooden banisters, long ago rubbed smooth. Up to our doorway. Perhaps I was secretly hoping the current resident would just happen to step out on to their balcony and I could thrust my “we used to live here twenty years ago speech” onto them and invite ourselves all in for a peek. But it was not to be. The balcony was barely clinging to the building twenty years ago, and it appears it may now not be used at all; the doorway was blocked off completely, shelves inserted in the doorframe. Dream over. Back downstairs and out to the street, where the very same vege shop is still in operation. The bakery has been transformed into a pharmacy, the butcher into……well, we can’t say – we couldn’t quite work out which little shop was the one that used to be a butcher, the very butcher from which we first sampled horse meat sausages.

From ulica Batorego we used to make a Saturday evening pilgrimage every week to ulica Wyspianskiego, where we would look after the young son of an American couple. In this house we celebrated Christmas and Easter, we made bagels and froze cauliflower for the winter, we played UNO and made many good memories. In the church building next door, the four of us did the nineties aerobics thing, bouncing ourselves into fitness in the early morning a few days each week.

(our friends lived at the very top in the attic)

As we walked we remembered. At the end of the street there used to be a hand-operated pump where we’d queue to get our drinking water. We shot along the road – would it still be there? I guess it would have been more pertinent to wonder if people still get their water there – not much chance the pump will have moved. It’s surrounded by a fence now, gated and locked. Looks like they don’t.

We wandered back through “the park on the corner” towards another larger park just up the street. No wonder it was a pleasure to live here. There are trees everywhere, and not just trees, but big open spaces too. Wide paths run through these natural areas right in the centre of town. At the edge of the big-old-villa section, apartments rise – but they are not overpowering – largely due to the abundance of flora and generous spaces between them all.

As we cross the road, Rob says exactly what I’m thinking, “The doctor was up here.”
The no-English-speaking doctor, who operated on me with no assistants other than Rob. And even then, this MALE husband of mine was only allowed in when we bolshily INSISTED he would not stay out of the room (He’d been forbidden entry at the hospital, where I had been whisked away for a scan, and we were not about to let it happen again, figuring we’d make more of the Polskiego with two of us deciphering). I’m not sure what Pan Doktor would have done without him as the medically untrained Rob ended up as Pan Doktor’s Assistant, adjusting the drip rate of the anaesthetic, hoping he had understood the Polish medical terminology correctly, while I writhed about semi-conscious calling out, “Boli, boli” (it hurts, it hurts) Actually, nothing hurt; all I remember is desperately trying to speak, to inform them I was still alert, only to be told it was all over and when I could stand on one leg with my eyes closed for a few seconds I’d be allowed to go home. I remember too the hallucinations, the debilitating feeling of falling, Rob’s out-of-proportion enormous face lunging at me from across the room – but that was all after we had walked home and laid me down on the couch, minus our first baby that had not lived.

Sidetrack: sometimes we make collages that just don’t work.
                   Take this one, for example. Just a wee bit busy.
                   And some other obvious issues!

Ah the memories.

But this was not our first place in Krakow. We had started out in the suburbs.
So we went back there too. Today.

The tram ride was a bit disorienting – it used to wriggle along narrow streets; now it passes underneath big overpasses, between big modern buildings and an excavated building of some historical significance (well, there were big information boards beside it, and the road has been directed around the site, so we think it’s important).
A few stops from the centre and things looked more familiar; the changes in the suburbs are not as dramatic as in town. Arriving at our stop earlier than we expected, we thought we still had a few stops to go. But it *looked* right. A quick questioning of a fellow passenger assured us that indeed we were at ulica Ulanow and we jumped off as the bell clanged.
What used to be grey apartment blocks, are now gaily painted. But the paths were the same and the “supermarket” in the same place (and now it is truly a supermarket, not a few shelves supporting only a scrawny chicken, a few sausages, nondescript brown paper bags full of flour or sugar, strawberry or gooseberry jam, and a few bags of milk).

The bakery was in the same place (yes, we sampled more delicacies – and not just what’s in the picture! We had the Best Ever Yet kremowka as well as half a kilo of biscuits you used to be able to buy in only that bakery – we haven’t seen them anywhere else this time either, so we just *had* to get some….and the kremowka looked SOOOOO good….and it was….mmmmm), and the vege stall in the same place, although now it is a metal building instead of a wooden one.

We found our way to *our* apartment, set on top of a small hill, where we used to slide down an ice slide late at night after the neighbourhood kids had gone home in winter.

The next-door-to-us playground has been significantly upgraded and our kids enjoyed a good long play after a few weeks stuck in the inner city! Meanwhile, we tried to find old friends. Unfortunately all the flats now have domofones so we couldn’t just barge in and up the stairs. Even more unfortunately, most of them only have numbers and not people’s names on them, so our vision of picking out familiar surnames vanished. We approached anyone who came out buildings and asked about particular people – but it’s hard when one lady you used to visit regularly was only known to you as “Pani” (polite title for any lady), or Pani Redhead as we called her between ourselves. She was an artist, and so I stood by her block, wondering which one of the four stairwells was hers, and asking residents, who came out if they knew of an artist living there! Not surprisingly, this was singularly unsuccessful. Even when we remembered her son’s name (he ended up being our boss – through our contact with Pani Redhead we walked into good jobs working in his language school) and realised that she would share the same surname, and asked for her in person, we were no more successful.
Same story for every other block around.   
Except one. There was one apartment that Rob spent almost as much time in as our own. He got on really well with a couple’s same-age-as-us son and they hung out together, Rob improving his Polish, Krzysiek improving his English. I only met the couple once, at a farewell party for Krzysiek, who was moving to Australia, and although I could not remember what they looked like I did remember folk dancing with the father in the hallway! Rob assures me they look exactly the same today. And their hospitality has not changed. They welcomed us all with open arms, amazed at how many guests had descended so unexpectedly upon them. The offer of a cup of tea turned into a bowlful of soup and bread for everyone (except the hosts, who insisted they would eat later), followed by tea and cakes – all accompanied by profuse apologies at not providing enough food, and friendly admonitions that we should have told them we were coming!

Realising it was 10pm in Australia, they put through a call to Krzysiek and handed the phone to Rob! He could hardly believe his Kiwi mate from the now distant past was at that moment sitting in his parents’ apartment across the other side of the world.
Being our first conversation beyond marketplace pleasantries or our other standard exchange (yes, they are all our children, yes, there are eight of them, yes I gave birth to them myself, thank you for saying I’m so young, I don’t know how many more we’ll have, yes, that’s the youngest, she’s three years old, the eldest? she’s fifteen…), we found our brains struggling to pry out words that used to slip off the tongue effortlessly. Fortunately *understanding* was much easier – I think we caught 80% of their stories. Not bad after two decades.

Krakow, Poland

Kazimierz, now a district of Krakow, used to be a separate entity, a region self-governed by the Jews, who were sent there for the first time in 1495. For hundreds of years it remained a Jewish enclave – right through to World War II when the word ghetto became more appropriate.
Today it is just another part of the city, filled with cafes and shops on the lower floor, residential apartments on upper floors, synagogues sprinkled through the streets, but nowhere near the 120 that were here in 1930.

We took a walk (as we do).

Highlight would have to be the cemetery. Large yellow leaves constantly fluttered down from the tall ancient trees, accumulating in massive piles on the ground, partly obscuring the tombstones inscribed in either Hebrew, Polish or both. Locals gave us directions to this cemetery, which turned out to the “new” one, opened in 1800. But we were looking for the old one, in operation from 1551 to 1800, and did manage to find it, although the steep entrance fee and the fact that we had already taken cemetery photos, meant we just looked from the outside.

All interesting enough, but probably most memorable would be either the pierogi we picked up for dinner or the fact that it was colder than we anticipated and being one layer underdressed, we all froze!

Krakow, Poland

Well, my dear boy, speak for yourself! YOU may have done nothing, but someone went to the market this morning to buy our food for the day.
So I could write about the things I saw, the conversations I had (people are so friendly and now that we’ve been here a week, and do our shopping on a daily basis, some of them are starting to recognise me and stop for a chat), I could write that I saw pineapples (last week I was saying there is nothing exotic like pineapple here), I could write about the secondhand clothes shops I pass along the way (the interesting factor to me is that they sell the clothes by weight).
But I’ll skip all that and just leave two photos of things I bought at the market before I write about what I had planned to.

fruity sernik on a chocolate base ~ m.mmmmmm

and smoked mountain cheese, an incredibly dense flavour-packed experience

Being a day spent mostly indoors at our hostel planning the Turkey leg (which, by the way, was far more satisfying than organising the Romania transport – possibly because we are ending up in what looks like a reasonable hostel in a great location in Istanbul, and partly because we have decided to hire a car and trip around for a few days and so now we have the excitement of choosing what to purge from a possible itinerary – Gallipoli, Troy, Assos, Pergamon, Ephesus, Helikarnossos, Aphrodisias,  Hierapolis, The Lake District, Konya, Cappadoccia, Ankara…..)…..as I was saying, having spent the day at the hostel, it seemed an appropriate day to take you on a hostel tour.

Here’s the view if you’re standing at the front door:

Here’s the front door itself underneath the yellow sign – and yes, the building does curve around that corner:

But we’re not staying in that exact building. We walk through that one, past a fancy staircase and the letterboxes, through a courtyard, and then into our building:

We’re up on the first floor in a very spacious room. The couch pulls out into a double bed, but it’s so short that we take down two mattresses each night for the adults and leave a small child on the couch.

There is plenty of storage – as well as this cabinet filled with our food and toiletries and shoes and books and wok, there’s another wardrobe (unphotographed) and the “laundry” you can see hanging on the heater. An altogether comfortable set-up.

Right next door is a kitchen and dining area with computer as well. Yes, it is that sickly shade of green. A contrast to the yellow walls and pink ceiling in our bedroom!

There’s bathroom, too, and toilet as well. Sharing with half a dozen other people, we’d have thought there might be queues, but we have been surprised to find it is perfectly adequate and only rarely does anyone need to wait. No picture!

So that’s where we are. It’s fantastic to be so close to the centre of town, and just a couple of minutes away from the market, tramstop on the doorstep, parks nearby.
What’s not so fantastic, something we had forgotten about, is that it is dark by 4:30. Yes, pitch black well before dinner. After eating later and later through the summer, we now find ourselves finished and tidied up and kids ready for bed far too long before seven to consider tucking them in for the night!
But it gives them time to do our homemade puzzles, draw their own maps, design houses and furniture, play games they’ve made up, write letters to me and even decorate paper for me to reply on. It also gave Kgirl10 time to hatch a cunning plan. It came in the form of a voucher, valid in any country in the world, for special food. However, it only works if she is given some of the bounty, and just in case I might be short on ideas of what to buy, she suggested sernik, kremowka or lollies would all make her very happy!

What did YOU do today Kboy12?
What did you find to write about?

Krakow, Poland

The first time we visited Auschwitz, it was the middle of winter. Snow covered the ground and fell on to our woollen coats; we shivered, wondering how *anyone* survived in a pair of striped pyjamas, not that many did.
The scene was a striking black and white, made perhaps even more stunning by the fact that we were the only people there, the only ones being stared at by the thousands of pairs of eyes lining the walls, identification photographs of prisoners who perished.

Today was a bit different. Hundreds and hundreds were there to pay their respects, to bear witness, to acknowledge the gruesome reality. Tour guides escorted most of them, hurried their headset-wearing charges through the exhibits. Modern signposts obstructed the minimalist photos we were able to take twenty years ago. There’s a movie to watch now (although we elected not to, expecting it to be unsuitable for most of our kids) and there are more explanations in English. A poignant addition is the largescale reproduction of artwork by prison survivors. There was no snow – just trees resplendent in brilliant bright yellow tinged with red.
But still the piercing gaze of the murdered follows you up and down the halls of cold constructed-by-prisoners brick buildings.

At Auschwitz the brutality to *real people* astounds. The tortures, the photographs of mere skin-and-bones freed at the end of the war, the execution wall, the medical trials, the evidence of starvation and slavery – it’s all horrific. The rooms full of leather suitcases and wicker baskets, enamel bowls and cooking pots, wooden toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shaving brushes and scrubbing brushes, round-rimmed spectacles, shoes, children’s clothes, Jewish prayer shawls, prosthetic limbs…..they all make those people REAL. 
At Birkenau, another camp just 3km away (we walk there), the expanse is what amazes. Initially it looks big, but then as you start wandering around, you realise you had not even seen most of it when you first took it in; the “barracks”, or rather, what is left of them, stretch on and on and on and on and on. The number 1,100,000 killed here starts to fill with meaning.

Sheer evil.

Photo credits: Rob and Jgirl14

Krakow, Poland

There’s only one bus a week from Krakow that connects directly with the bus to Brasov. We tried to book it today, only to discover it’s full. So’s the one that leaves a week earlier and the one that goes a week later.
Plan B. Take the bus two days earlier to Budapest, then get on the original one to Brasov. This requires finding a hostel in Budapest, two late late nights instead of one (the first bus arrives at 11pm…..the next one leaves at 11:30pm – two days later – so the kids will be up til midnight twice in one week…not to mention then trying to sleep on the bus that leaves at 11:30 and doesn’t arrive until noon), having to change money coz Hungary still uses their own currency. Nah, Plan B is not an option.
Check out the trains online. Oh, that’s right. They cost five times as much – that’s why we had decided to go by bus.
Look for other routes to Brasov – through the Ukraine instead. But maybe we need visas, and no busses go that way anyway.
Try another bus line. After half an hour give up – can’t find any.
In Krakow the main bus depot and main train station sit side by side. I breathe a sigh of relief as Rob goes to make in-person investigations; maybe we’ll have more luck talking to a person instead of typing at a computer screen. Plus, other train tickets have turned out to be much cheaper when bought on location. 
As Rob walks out I mutter, “You’ll be back soon saying we’re going to Budapest.”

For the first time I have had enough. A year ago adrenaline pumped as we negotiated timetables and hostel bookings. Now it’s just a nuisance when things don’t go according to plan (and why should things start falling into place now? nothing has been simple up to now!)
The thought crosses my mind that I might be ready to go home. But no, not yet. I still want to be in new places, hearing other languages, eating different food, discovering, seeing, experiencing, learning this way. I consider that it would be much easier with fewer children. But we would not have had *this* particular trip without them. And we can’t get a babysitter for six months while we-adults continue unencumbered.
As I sit knitting, my mind starts wandering to another trip….Swaziland to Scotland! Starting in South Africa and Swaziland, we’d skip up to Somalia, maybe Sudan, on to Spain and Switzerland, stopping by Scandinavia on our way to Scotland. That week we missed in London on this trip could be tacked on the end…and maybe Sorrento at some stage, too. Or would we add South America instead? Or the Solomon Islands on the way home? And guess what! This time we’d be on bikes. With tents.

“We’re going to Budapest!” Rob bursts into the room. He’s done his best, considered all the options and there’s really only one way forward from here. Plan B.
Back to the computer. There’s a couchsurfer, who has a yurt – yes, a yurt right there in Budapest. We’ve stayed in three of them, and liked them considerably….but he lives forty minutes on public transport from the centre of town and the bus depot where we’ll be dropped is another half hour from the centre and we’re arriving close enough to midnight anyway. We’ve turned up at this hour in enough cities to know that public transport can be anything from erratic to non-existent at this time of night, so we keep looking for hostels. Are we perhaps a little less crazy now?
I don’t think you could call us sensible yet. Spare hours are spent hunched over kiwi real estate sites…..we’ve found the ideal block of land. No, not five acres, not even ten; it’s 155 acres.
“What do we know about farming 150 acres?” Grandpa asks. 
Nothing. But we’d learn.
The boys jump around with excitement when they see the pictures of deer and wild pigs caught in the thirty acres of bush. One presses hands together begging Dadda to catch the vision. There are stock yards and fencing and good grazing and firewood and four dams. It’s more than our dreams. There’s no house on it, but we are good at living in confined spaces – we could rig up a shed in no time, we could dig a longdrop before sunset. And we could start making mud bricks to build our house with. We already have the plans! 
“I’ll come and visit in the holidays,” Rob generously offers. There’s a reason this piece of land costs almost nothing. It’s in the middle of nowhere. A six and a half hour commute from Auckland.

Another email arrives in our inbox. A real estate agent is letting us (and probably 732 other people on her mailing list) know that 16 acres is soon coming on the market – on the very street where we tried to buy a block once before. At that point we had to choose: trip or farm. The fact that the lady decided not to sell was irrelevant; we had resolved to put the trip on the timeline before a farm.

So that’s why we are  trying to get to Brasov. We’ll even get a couple of bonus days in Budapest – days we’ll be able to wander on foot instead of driving around and around and around and out again! The prospect is tantalising. We’re enjoying the journey, but we’re a little tired of the work involved in making it happen. That must be a sign that we are preparing to settle down. Surely.

Till Swaziland anyway.

Krakow, Poland

Who would have thought that we’d be eating out in Europe? It’s meant to be expensive, right?
But look……we’re managing to find cheap eats wherever we go, all of them decidedly Polish, all of them things we said we must let the kids try at least once. We had thought we’d be buying one piece of cake and divvying it up, one mouthful apiece, but there’s been no need. Not when, mini doughnuts (that are not actually all that small) cost NZ30cents each (that’s near enough to 15 US or euro cents for you non-kiwis).

You can get a dozen pierogi at the market for a couple of dollars (of course, we have seen it on hotel menus for $10 too, but even that is not so bad for your average tourist, now, is it?)

You can pick up zapiekanki everywhere – cheaply if you keep your wits about you, although we’ve seen them exorbitantly priced as well. It’s the kind of food you don’t expect to pay a lot for, but tastes delish – a baguette topped with mushroom, onion, cheese, mayonnaise and ketchup, sprinkled with chopped chives. That’s the original variety anyway. Now you can find different flavours, and different shaped dough bases, but none are an improvement on the original.

And because our fruit and veg are costing so little (a dollar for a kilo of plums or huge broccoli or cabbage – even less for peppers, and not much more for mushrooms), we are able to nip in to the ubiquitous bakeries, sometimes more than once a day, coming out with treats that we have been compelled to find authentic recipes for.

Dough:
1/2 lb flour
1/2 C powdered sugar
1/2 C butter
2 egg yolks
1 grated lemon peel
Mix ingredients together, wrap in foil and refrigerate for half an hour

The kids have latched on to another idea to take to our home kitchen, a great one, we decided, for taking on picnics or out hiking. Bread sticks are not a new concept. The carts that pretzels are sold from in Krakow have not changed in the twenty years we’ve known them. But one day someone took a pretzel, which used to come in the flavours “with poppy seeds” or “with sesame seeds” and they added in a bit of dried chilli and some other seeds as well. The result took a plain piece of bread, that we used to nibble on for nothing more than nourishment value, to a place of culinary delight. We’ll be making these for sure when we get home, and will definitely use a dough with caraway for that authentic taste.

Now, if you think we are spending all our time eating out, don’t be fooled. It’s cheap, but not *that* cheap. Look, we are cooking in the hostel too:

And while our bread might be bought in a shop, you can hardly call that eating out!

Oh yes, and as if we haven’t had enough cakes, another birthday crept up on us. Oh the agony of choosing a cake when there are so many to pick from.
Lboy-now9 ended up with walnuts (much to the parents’ disappointment – both of them were hanging out for a decent sized slice of sernik!)

And we started the day with a Polish dish – nalesniki, easily translated as pancakes, made by us, not from a shop! We ate them with also-made-by-us apple and cranberry sauce, and strawberry yoghurt to cut the TARTness of the cranberries.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Lboy9.

Krakow, Poland

Down the flights of stairs, across the courtyard, through the front building, and we burst out the door onto the busy bustling street. Only it isn’t busy. It’s quiet. There are no trams running, no cars passing, not even any people filling the sidewalk. In unison everyone utters a variation of, “It’s so quiet!” The contrast to every other time we have left our hostel is striking. For the benefit of the children we explain, “Its Sunday. Almost everybody in Poland goes to church on a Sunday morning.”

We amble up to the Rynek, the main market square.
They say it again, “It’s so quiet. It’s almost empty.”
And we repeat, “It’s Sunday, almost everyone is in church. It’ll be busy later.”

There’s no shortage of churches. I wonder if you can stand anywhere in Krakow and NOT see a church. We choose the closest to poke our noses into.
Priest is chanting, congregation replying, both to the deep mellow strains of an organ.
The church is full, there do not appear to be any free seats. And it’s not just grey-haired older folk. A young boy runs up and down the aisle. A baby is jostled on someone’s knee. Young people sit alongside the ancients. 

When we were in another church during the week, we noticed it was not just an old lady, who sat fingering her rosary beads. A tall young man, old enough to not be there if he didn’t want to be, entered and took a seat, stared straight ahead, lost in his own thoughts and presumably prayers.

We walk. We pick out churches on every street corner, and more in between. We wonder what possesses a man to become a monk, a lady a nun – there are plenty of them to prompt such thoughts here. More than any other country we’ve been in.

After a couple of hours we return to the Rynek. It’s humming, buzzing, full of people. Church must be over.

The church prevailed against communism.
Will it stand so strong against consumerism?
Already the walls are crumbling. Once upon a time, all shops, restaurants, newspaper kiosks, markets, everything stayed closed all Sunday long. Now some of the shops open at 11 to trade for a few hours.

What does the future hold?

Krakow, Poland

Apologies about the recurring WhenWeUsedToLiveHere theme, but here goes the next edition…..

The first year we lived here (we arrived in 1990) we did not see ANY Western products at all. The choice was Polish or Russian. That included everything from mattresses (ours were Polish strawfilled ones) to sturdy metal hand-operated mincers (we bought a Russian one for making Christmas mincemeat) to cars (which we did not purchase, and could not have done as there was still an eighteen year waiting list at that stage to be in the running for a car – there was also a lot less congestion on the streets!)
At the market, food was both (or should that be “only”?) local and seasonal. All winter long there were potatoes, cabbages and onions. On a good week, someone brought out a sack of carrots too. We got sick of them all. In the summer we adored cherries and strawberries, and eagerly embraced tomatoes and cucumbers until we got sick of them too. We also, on one domestically unfortunate occasion, in the hopes of augmenting our winter vegetable selection, pickled jars and jars of gherkins, and then went away to summer camp to teach English. While we were gone they all exploded. Every. Single. One.
Obviously more easily deterred by failure at that stage of our lives, we remained too fearful to attempt making sauercraut like everyone we knew, who had bucketsful brewing on their balconies.

Walking through the market today, we could have bought the little ogorki, just the right size for pickling. We could have sampled someone’s homemade sauercraut straight out of a massive tub. It’s autumn, so we expected to see mushrooms, and were not disappointed. All sorts of wild field mushrooms were on offer and we brought home the cheapest we could find. There were also the strings of dried mushrooms, which we never bought in the past. Once I had attempted to buy a string and was surprised, when I asked, to discover they cost “sto” (one hundred). I had been expecting to have to splash out about 20,000 zloty or so. My amazement magnified upon discovering it was one hundred thousand, not one hundred full stop. That was a whole week’s worth of food for us. One hundred bought one stick of chewing gum back then – yes, people bought chuddy by the piece, never a whole packet.
Anyway, the relative price of dried mushrooms has come down, but something else has happened too. Now they are all packaged in plastic bags. When you walk past they do not exude their delicious rich autumnal fragrance; it remains, unfortunately, trapped inside the plastic and removes a little of that feeling of connectedness to your food that the market used to provide.

But there are other smells and sights. Being autumn, there are piles of walnuts on offer. There are bright red cranberries and gigantic orange pumpkins. There’s what must be nearing the last of the dill. There are cabbages, green and red; capsicums, green, red and yellow. There are purple plums and three varieties of apple. You can tell they are local – they have what Grandpa would call “that organic look” ie they are misshapen, perhaps bird-pecked, probably pitted.
Kiwifruit from New Zealand, oranges from Greece and bananas, origin unchecked are the only obviously-non-local products (unless you also count the dried spices now available too). There are a lot of things that I wonder about origin-wise. I’m not sure if they are being grown here now, or if they are imported, but there are enormous heads of broccoli and cauliflower. There are enormous bunches of spinach, which used to be an exclusively springtime vegetable. You don’t, however, see mangoes or pomelos as you might in Western European supermarkets.

Less exotic, you can buy kefir and sauercraut and kasha. All distinctly Polish. But the kasha no longer comes in a brown paper bag. It’s in a box. And inside the box are four little plastic bags, individual portions. I *liked* the lack of packaging in the past. I liked everyone walking round with their wicker baskets – twenty years on I am still using mine – that has got to be better for the environment than plastic bags, don’t you think? Even the reusable ones don’t experience such longevity. Sadly, I’ve only seen one basket here so far:

It’s hard for the children to understand how little food was available when we first arrived. I wonder if today’s Polish children tire of their parents saying, “In our day…”

We were here when the West started to infiltrate. We saw Fanta arrive, although on our salaries we could not afford to buy it. We saw Swiss chocolate make its appearance, but we had even less hope of being able to sample that. One day we went to a big town somewhere (I forget where) with someone (I forget who) and went in to a brand new supermarket. It had big shopping trolleys (surprise number one) you could fill up with exclusively Western goods (surprise number two). Or you could if you earnt more than we did – we might have been earning two million zloty a month (rich eh!), but half of that went on rent….800,000 went on food and the rest paid for letters home and the occasional tram ticket.
So Western goods with their food colourings and additives and ingredients made of numbers and unpronounceable chemical equations started to arrive about the time we went home.

(outside the market, *illegal* sellers still try to make a living selling bunches of flowers or a few bags of walnuts or an armful of women’s underwear or a few old tools or a pair of shoelaces)