Copenhagen is marvellous. admittedly, i've only been in one building of any sort here as of yet (not including hostels and restaurants) and it was only for the (not-so-great) panoramic view of the city.
the "old" portions of Copenhagen are many and very spread out. there is an "Inner City", which is the oldest part of the city (see also 'old town'). and then there are many other districts that surround the "inner city", some which were autonomous villages, that are now part of greater Copenhagen. today, i did a modified walking tour that involved, well, no walking.
now, scandanavia is very progressive and sweden and denmark both like their bikes. copenhagen has a great system where you can basically have a free bike for as long as you like. the so-called "city bikes" are locked to a bike stand but you can free them up by slipping a 20dk coin into the lock-slot on the bike you wish to use. this frees unlocks them, but it also eats the coin. if you don't relock the bike in the end, you lose your coin. if you leave a designated area, as outlined by a map inserted in the middle of the handlebar, and are caught then you are subject to a 1000dk fine, i believe. (5dk = $1, if you include transfer and withdrawl fees) additionally, if you don't follow the biking rules (i.e. biking at night requires a light), then you are subject to a fine of 500dk.
to note, the designated city bike area is limited to the inner city and a neighboring district by the name of Christianshavn. my hostel is a little outside of the inner city, which is surrounded by lakes.
so i set out this morning with a single goal that would lead to a larger goal: to obtain one of these bikes. i walked from my hostel and into the inner city. i walked through the city to the harbor, without finding one of the darn bikes, so then i thought i'd head to one of the bigger tourist sites in the hopes that maybe i could purloin one there. the site? The Little Mermaid. the most well-known site perhaps in Copenhagen is the statue in the harbor of H.C. Andersen's The Little Mermaid. i walked all the way there, took some photos and still did not have a bike.
my mission was beginning to look dire. i started walking back into town. i walked by the royal palace and lo and behold, it was the changing of the guard. so i took photos and then resumed my walk into the city.
i eventually found a city bike. the city bikes operate on an honor basis wherein you don't lock them and you don't protect them if you aren't going to use them. somebody had left their bike buried underneath what i imagine was a friend's bike. there was nobody around. so i took the bike which was already unlocked with a 20dk coin. (this means, of course, that i actually made money by the end of my usage of the bike!)
anyway, i toured around the city and took many upon many photos. i followed the path suggested by a free guide book. which brought me back to the mermaid statue, among other things.
after biking around for a few hours and touring everywhere possible with the bike - that is within the bike's limited boundaries, including the artistic community of Christiania in Christianshavn - i parked the bike next to the central railway station. i went into the station and bought a train ticket to Berlin for tomorrow. Berlin, by the way, is the last stop on this trip so, if you want a postcard, let me know now.
having parked the bike and taken care of my transport for tomorrow, i grabbed a beer on the way to the Rundetarre (Round Tower), which one can walk up. up and up, in circles, round and round - there are no stairs, just a big circular ramp.
and i got up to the top, saw the wholly unremarkable panorama (due to a fence behind a fence that keeps one from the edge of the platform). descending the tower and heading back into the city, i met...
the scientologists. i talked to a lovely lad by the name of Kristian. the scientologists were offering free stress tests. and i decided to take one. he told me to think about people i know. i was thinking about my breathing, since the concept of a stress test would automatically rocket the pressure, i wanted to relax. i couldn't think of anybody, i could only think about my breath.
and my stress levels rocketed. Kristian looked at me and said, "there. that. who did you just think of? they're a source of stress."
i replied, "i was thinking about breathing actually. honestly, i was thinking about nobody."
and so it went on for a few minutes, before he realized that i am at a fairly relaxed, unstressed point in my life. and we parted ways, but not before he tried to small talk me by pointing out where i'm from.
"so, you're from New York?" he was looking at my hooded sweatshirt. i have been wearing on an almost constant basis during this trip a dark blue, hooded sweatshirt printed with the logo for the slackers, which on the bottom says 'Only the Best for Our Friends'. "Only the Best for Our Friends?"
"yeah. i'm not from New York. this sweatshirt is about one of my favorite bands, a ska band from New York named the Slackers."
"oh. have you heard about dianetics?"
"probably vaguely," i replied. "and i've certainly heard about L. Ron Hubard and scientology. i'm an atheist and i'm happy with no religious or associated type commitments. so, really, i'm not interested."
"oh. well, um..."
"have a good day?"
"yes. you too."
and that was my encounter with the estimable Tom Cruise's religion. or, at least, today's encounter...
after the encounter i walked back to my hostel. i joined another hosteler on her way to dinner at a vegetarian, organic restaurant. we had a delicious, healthful, if bland dinner and came back. we talked for awhile (with another hosteler from Germany), they headed off for a club and i'm finishing this post for ya'll.
oh, and i'm getting sick. something i attribute to the night cruise i took from helsinki to stockholm when i stayed outside in the cold with the aforementioned blue hoody.
i woke up and left the hostel to deposit my backpack in a locker at the train station. a combination of being confused by the change machine at the station, all the lockers being full and the fact that i had left something at the hostel led me right back to the hostel, where i chose to leave the bag for the few hours i still had left in Stockholm.
after redepositing my bag, i headed for the Stadshuset (or City Hall) which i erroneously reported yesterday as being the place where they award the Nobel Prizes (or "Prices" if you're writing in Swedish-English). in fact, it is where the banquet is held after the award ceremony - a ceremony which actually takes place in Konserthall (yup, "Concert Hall").
anyway, the tour is great, but very brief. it starts in the Blue Hall, which is where the banquet is actually held. the Blue Hall takes it's name from the color it is not. originally, the architect wanted to paint it royal blue, after the swedish flag, but he liked the looks and texture of the bricks so much that he left it as is. the design of the building itself is patterned after two things: one, it is designed to look, on the exterior, similar to the old (now gone) royal palace of Stockholm; two, it was designed on the interior to be based around two courtyards, similar to classical italian villas. the blue hall represents one of two courtyards, but has a roof, unlike the larger exterior courtyard.
the blue hall also contains the Elsa stairs, named after the architects wife who trod up and down many different model staircases in high heels and a ball gown over the period of one day to determine the ideal height from step to step. the guide jokingly said that this must've worn her out considerably, because by the time the project was finished, the architect had a different wife.
the tour then proceeded into the interiors of the castle, starting by going up the staircase and into a long corridor. the corridor featured a bust and a painting of one man. the construction crew got to vote on the most important member of their crew who would be immortalized in the bust and painting. their vote? the local brewmaster.
following that was the Medallion room which contains many old Nobel medals and in its early incarnations served as the office of the few female members of the city council. now the council is a majority women and might someday relegate the men to the Medallion room, or so joked the guide.
the room after the Medallion room is the actual council chamber, where in the head councilman sits on an enlarged, throne-like chair on a dias - a subject of much controversy on its initial completion.
up next was the room in the middle of the tower. it was a plain room with a circling sculpture of saint george and the dragon - the dragon in this instance represents the Danes, the classic rivals of the Swedes.
the next room was adorned with many old French tapestry and up to 25 weddings take place in it every weekend. apparently there are two versions of the civil ceremony, the longer one taking 5 minutes.
after that came a long banquet hall with a fresco, painted by a prince when the building was first built, that mirrored the views from the windows facing the opposite direction.
the following room contained an old cabinet with many famous Swedes sculpted onto the doors. the room serves as the resting room for the royal family during the Nobel banquet. a side room to this room is where journalists interview the winners during the banquet.
the last room is a long gold hall where the post-banquet dance. the hall is adorned with many mosaics of Swedish history and culture. there are some noticeable errors which i will point out when i post the photos.
and then it was back into the blue hall. and that was the end of the tour.
after the tour, i wandered around the city, grabbed some seafood stew for lunch, tried to see the Konserthall but missed the guided tour (the only way to see it) and regained my bag and finally caught the train.
i got into Copenhagen about an hour and a half ago and now i'm staying in a hostel that has tri-level bunks.
whew.
i awoke about two hours before we arrived in Stockholm this morning.
it was a cloudy, rainy day. the first truly rainy day i've had on this trip, actually. and it even cleared up at the end, but this is all really unimportant...
upon docking in Stockholm, i walked all the way into town to the information center. i took a number and felt all relaxed (as if the world was perfect) while watching a young boy play with the Brios the office kindly provides for those children who are stuck with their parents who are inevitably waiting. after about 45 minutes, i finally got to talk to an agent, in the hopes that she could help me arrange a room or a place to stay. but she referred me to the information station in the central railway station where they could help me...
so the waiting was all for naught. and i walked to central station. i killed two birds with one stone and fairly quickly at that. i found a room, which was surprising because stockholm is PACKED to the brim right now, in a hostel which i had investigated online but which was "full" online... anyway, i also bought a ticket to copenhagen tomorrow. i've given myself a very limited window for seeing Stockholm. which is a shame, but i'm tiring out and i'll be happy to progress quickly.
after buying the ticket and walking to my hostel and checking in and putting my stuff in my room, i went and grabbed some lunch at a cafe (named "mojo") and followed that by running an errand. you see, something happened on the cruise that wasn't to my liking: i lost one of the nose guards for my glasses. in fear of gouging my eyeball out, i started an hour long hunt for a glasses shop that could repair the damage. after that, i high-tailed it to the Vasa museum.
the Vasa museum is spectacular and i'm glad i followed the many recommendations i've had about it. the Vasa museum contains the only full-sized, genuine 17th century ship. commissioned by King Gustavus Adolphus in the mid-1600's, the ship sunk less than an hour out of its dock because it was a really absurd design. with two levels of gun decks but a thin (in width, not thickness of the material) hull, there was not enough room for proportional ballast - in other words, it was very top heavy and the nearness of the bottom gun deck to the water meant that, well, all it took was a light wind and the gun windows were pushed below water level. it took on water and sunk.
the salinity of the Baltic Sea is so low, it allows many things to be preserved that would otherwise be eaten by nefarious sea worms in water with a higher salt content.
anyway, the entire boat is now housed in a custom built museum, which is more or less a sheltered dry dock. it is absolutely one of the most spectacular museums i have ever been to. if you are ever in Stockholm, do not pass this museum up.
anyway, after that museum i did the walking thing and took a plethora of pictures. i walked, in particular, all around "Gamla stan" which in English means... wait for it... wait... "Old Town". it's a beautiful town and is dwarfed by the surrounding areas.
that was more or less it for my day. tomorrow, i'm torn, but i'll either do a walking tour of the city (which is sponsored by my excellent hostel) or i will take a guided tour of the City Hall, which is where they award the Nobel Prizes. probably latter...
on a different note, like most of these northerly countries, bikes are in abundance in Stockholm. and the talents of people who ride them (or walk them) seem to be quite diverse. whereas i saw one woman collapse while simultaneously walking her bike and trying to open her umbrella, i saw another happily munching on an apple while unhurriedly biking across a busy bridge. very funny, indeed.
the window for a postcard is closing rapidly.
yesterday was another great day.
i started my day by transporting my huge backpacker's pack to the cruise line terminal where i deposited it in a locker. after leaving the bag, i headed for a ferry to suomenlinna, an 18th-century fortress built on a series of 6 islands just off the coast of Helsinki.
there was a mix-up and i barely made the ferry for the island - i wanted to be at the Visitor Center on the islands by 11 because there was an English-language guided tour scheduled to start then and the next one after that started at 2, which would be too close to the departure time for my overnight cruise to Stockholm.
it turns out that, even though i walked in the doors of the Visitor Center at 11 exactly, the guide was on the ferry with me and she needed a few minutes to prepare.
and so we headed out.
Suomenlinna is a fascinating place to visit. it's one of the oldest buildings (or series of buildings) in Scandanavia... "huh?" you say. "i thought everything in europe was older than everything in the states." not so, i say. you see, in scandanavia most buildings were made out of wood, not stone, up until the 18th century. this, of course, means that they are no longer around because the wood has expired one way or another since those buildings were initially built. fire was extremely common - a huge fire in Turku helped precipitate the already in-process movement of the Finnish capital from Turku to Helsinki in the early 1800's. and, even though Porvoo suffered a very large fire that took with it the original town hall, many buildings there survived - see the update for day 16.
anyway, Suomenlinna was built by the Swedes - it's name in Swedish is Sveaborg, which means "Swedish fort" and so does the Finnish equivalent "Viapori"; "Suomenlinna" is Finnish and means "Finnish fort". it served primarily as a base for the Swedish navy (and later on for the Russian and Finnish navies, respectively). it has a spectacular (if shrunken) dry dock, where many war ships were built up until the first world war. during WWII, the dry dock served as a base for the Finnish submarine fleet - a whole 5, rather small, submarines.
the fortress is unique because, even though it is a bastion fortress, it is not shaped in the traditional star shape. this is due to the rocky quality of the islands it was built on and the shape and size of the islands.
suomenlinna was ceded to the Russians in 1808 (and Finland overall in 1809) with no conflict. the Russians initially attacked in the winter, an uncommon and unnatural tactic this far north. the Swedes stationed at the Fortress sent a liaison and they agreed to a proper naval battle at the beginning of May, if the other Swedish ships could make it. if they could not, the Swedes in control of the fort would have to cede it. due to an uncommonly cold winter, the rest of the Swedish navy was still frozen in the ice in Stockholm in early May and the fort, which had poor communication with the outside world anyway, was given over to the Russians. the commanding officer stayed in Helsinki after the war in order to avoid being tried for treason back in Stockholm.
during the Crimean war (between the Ottoman Empire and the Russians), the fortress was bombarded by the French and English navies (allies of the Ottomans) with little resistance from the Russians in the fort. most of the military action of this war was on the Black Sea between what is now Turkey and Russia, but since there was a Russian military presence and the Ottomans' allies were closer... anyway, because the Russians had not updated the artillery on the island and they still had the old Swedish cannons, which had a range of about 1.5 km, and the French and English navies' cannons had a range of about 2 km. so they shelled the fortress secure in the knowledge that they were not going to get hit.
since the British and French really didn't need or want to occupy the island, but rather wanted to demonstrate their respective navies' superiority, they left the scene of the crime without ever setting foot on the island. that was the last direct conflict the fort saw, being mostly passed over as a target for the allies in WWII...
the fort finally went to the Finns on their independence in 1917. again, it was used for the Finnish navy in WWII. it ceased opearation as a military institution in the 1970's, but the dry dock was used for ship building up until the 80's. it is still used today, but only to house boats during the hard, unsailable winter time.
there are currently about 900 people living on the islands, which is possible because there is more than just the fortress there.
i'm going linguistic on you for a second: on the tour i learned that Finnish does not have a "b" sound. which is odd, considering that they also have a "p" sound. those two sounds are cognates and the only difference between them is that one requires sound and the other is just lips and air. same goes for "k", which they don't have, and "g" (pronounced "guh"), which they do have. there are others, i just found it strange.
other things i learned, not necessarily relating to the fortress: Marshall Mannerheim, after whom many streets have been named, is a huge, albeit controversial, national hero. he's controversial because in the Finnish civil war he was on the German-influenced side (the white side) when they were fighting the red side (who were influenced by the Soviets), both sides had Finns. in other words, he led a battle of Finns against Finns. oh, and he didn't speak very good Finnish, apparently, which is kind of odd considering that we went on to be president for a short time...
there are about 3000 people in jail in all of Finland. but, according to my tour guide, that's partially due to the difficulty of actually being sentenced to jail - only violent crimes, really.
after the tour, i took a tour of the Augustin Ehrensvärd museum. he was the man responsible for the building of the fortifications of the fortress. the museum was small but informative and contained some interesting relics of the era.
i had some lunch at Piper Cafe on the island, while seated at a table on a rocky promontory that overlooks the Baltic Sea. after lunch, i walked around the island - it's still many islands, they're just connected by bridges, so in effect it's one big island now - and took many photos. somewhere towards the end of my walk, i got to tour a beached submarine, which is the only one of the Finnish fleet left since part of the Finn's agreement with the Allies at the end of WWII involved the dismantling of their navy and all 5 of their tiny submarines.
after the submarine, i headed back to the mainland.
back on mainland and having t-minus 2 hours until i had to be checked in for the overnight cruise, i hurried to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma for a quick look at the exhibits. the Museum itself is a fantastic design with interesting level changes. the art was also incredibly fascinating but also a very mixed bag - some was worth seeing and some just looked like garbage. but then again, who am i to say what is art and what is not.
one thing about the museum which was not directly related to the art was that their audio tours were on mini iPods. i loved the idea but i'm wondering how many have disappeared...
i then caught a tram to a grocery store in the opposite direction of the cruise line terminal. i bought my dinner and my breakfast and got back on the tram. i checked in and went to my room of 4 beds. in the end, however, there were only two of us in the room, which was very pleasant.
on board the ship, i wandered around for awhile taking many photos and then i saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on a very jerky screen - jerky due to the vibration of the ship. speaking of the vibration, the duty free shop was hilarious because when you walk in the entire room echoes with the sound of clanking bottles as every one on the shelf hits its neighbor in constant, vibratory motion. anyway, after the film, it was time for the sunset. it was cloudy however so the sunset wasn't great. i still took pictures though.
eventually, after messing around (including Terminator 3 pinball - "You'll be back") and seeing a very brief instance of the aurora borealis and talking to a crazy, old, bearded Estonian who has relatives in New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, etc, etc and after witnessing a young slightly drunk guy propose to his very drunk girlfriend, i went to sleep.
or, moreover, Porvoo, which is a small town about 50 km outside of Helsinki and is known because it has a good portion of old wooden buildings at its center. but i'm getting slightly ahead of myself.
POR VOUS? do you want a postcard? if you haven't already asked for one, now is the time to order one! it will be delivered straight to your doorstep, no payment necessary! all you need to do is let me know!
i started the day earlier than yesterday with the intention of going to Porvoo. after eating breakfast (mmm... banana, OJ, Alpen with milk), i headed off to the bus station. after some confusion as to which bus station, i ended up getting on the bus that never showed up... er.. i got on the bus that left 15 minutes after the one that i wanted to take didn't show up. after an hour and a half on the bus, i arrived in Porvoo and walked into the Old Town.
(all these old european towns and cities have "Old Towns", if you haven't already sensed that pattern.)
the Old Town felt a little like Cape Cod, because it was a lot of wood houses and sheds lining a river. up the hill just off the river is a nice big cathedral that i checked out, the cathedral which Tsar Alexander II attended upon granting Finland autonomy in the early 1800's. Porvoo is known because it has produced many famous Finnish artists of various forms - J.L. Runeberg, Finland's most famous poet; his son, W. Runeberg, a famous sculptor; V. Vallgren, another famous sculptor; and Albert Edelfelt, Finland's favorite painter.. there were others who came and went too.
upon arriving in Old Town, i searched out a small cafe and had a cappucino and a Runeberg tart, which was more or less a cylinder of honey cake with some ligonberry jam on top. after that, i walked all around the town - up to the cathedral, down to the river, across the river, along the river, back to the Town Hall square (where the cafe was) and into the Vallgren-Edelfelt museum. i love Vallgren's sculptures and Edelfelt, it turns out, is not my favorite Finnish painter. unfortunately, the museum only had a modicum of information in English, which surprised me immensely since i think a larger percentage of this country speaks English fluently than in the U.S. after that museum, i went to the Town Hall which is now a history museum dedicated to Porvoo. again, it was all in Swedish and Finnish. it was actually kinda nice, because i breezed through both museums in record time!
after that, i messed around Porvoo for about 30 minutes, walking to J.L. Runeberg's house but not touring the interior. why not? because i wanted to get back to Helsinki in time to actually see the Atheneum Museum of Finnish Art.
and i did. the museum has a special exhibition right now on Silho and Greta Sipila, a pair (in a wedlock sense) of Finnish painters from the late 1800's/early 1900's. their art is great and thankfully came at a time when realism was being washed away - i'm not a tremendous realism fan, obviously.
upstairs are the permanent exhibits of Finnish art and, as always, the art that impressed me the most... heh heh... was the work from the Impressionist era, even though they didn't refer to it as that here. to note, my favorite Finnish artist (and possibly favorite artist - not sure, though, because Monet is hard to top in my book) is A. Gallen-Kallela.
after the Atheneum closed, i went to the National Museum of Finland only to suffer burnout. the only display i made it through was random items from 20th-century Finnish life - including toys from my childhood (He-Man, NES, etc.) and a film reel composed of a lot of miscellaneous footage of events in Finland over the past century. it was interesting. but i couldn't do the rest of the museum, as i said, because i was burnt out.
i had dinner in a tractor-themed finnish restaurant. yeah, weird. the interior was like a barn, almost. and it's in central helsinki. i had a delicious salmon and cream soup, some baltic sea herring and the restaurants home brew to drink. it was a good meal. and now i'm here, but the library is about to close thus the ending of this update is
there are many places in this world to see and i consider myself fortunate to be able to do what i'm doing at this moment. and i'm loving it. i would love to have company, of course, but sometimes that isn't always possible...
so, yesterday, i did nothing significant really, except wander around Helsinki. with all museums being closed and not getting some errands out of the way fast enough, i was unable to leave helsinki for the few out-of-helsinki day-trips that are suggested...
what i did see:
Helsinki has two lakes just north of its 'center'. the lakes are side-by-side, east-west and my hostel (in the Olympic stadium) is just off the northwest corner of the western lake. so, to start my day (at 11-ish - i got into a discussion with a scottish bloke for awhile that delayed my already late start) i walked along the western shore of the lake, which is a park. it was a nice little walk and takes you directly into the center of Helsinki.
once in the center, i had some errands to run - 1) to buy another memory card for my ancient digital camera and 2) find out about ferries to Stockholm for Wednesday evening. the former errand was a bane because nobody in advanced civilization starks the miniscule (memory-wise) but large (size-wise) smartmedia cards anymore. so i ended up delivering my two filled ones to have cds made. this was not an idea that i relished because it allows me no control if something happens to the photos and they're lost. the other option was filling up my current memory card, which is inevitable, and not being able to take any more photos. this was not an idea i relished either, and it was the more of two evils, so i had a cd made and the earlier memory cards wiped. i did double check the cd before leaving though.
the second errand was simple and i got it over with quickly. thankfully, both of these errands were in the center of town anyway.
so, i started wandering as a tourist, initially walking down to the Esplanade, a park that runs between two major streets. in the park were many things, including a woman with trained cats (who looked absolutely unhappy and miserable) and one trained poodle.
i wandered through the open air market and up to 'Senate square', which is surrounded on all sides by excellent neo-classical buildings and lorded over, in particular, by a fantastic neo-classical cathedral.
some history about finland: it gained its independence only in 1917. before then it was ruled by both sweden (for some 800 years) and russia (for a much shorter time period, wherein it was granted autonomy anyway). the original capital of finland was turku and it was as such up until the russians gained control of finland in the early 1800's. however, the russians wanted the capital of finland closer, so they moved it to helsinki. and that is when the city began to grow... but helsinki (and it's surrounding suburbs and cities) didn't really start booming (population-wise) until after the second world war.
after Senate square (which was built only after the capital was relocated to Helsinki), i walked up to Uspenski Cathedral, which holds distinction not just because it lords over the harbors of Helsinki but also because it's the largest Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe. i peaked inside and then hiked back down the hill, back through the market and caught a tram to another religious building, the Temppeliaukio church.
the Temppeliaukio church is fantastic - the design is absolutely unreal. it's a Lutheran church and it's made out of rock. no, scratch that. it is made in a rock. you see, the church sits on the top of another hill, but instead of building the church on top of the hill, they built it into the hill, which was solid rock. the roof is not made of rock, but the walls are rock. and it feels a little like a cave with no roof and a lot of religious things lying around. it's evident that it's like a cave partially because there are grates lining the walls to catch the water that inevitably drips down the walls. (again, photos are forthcoming..) definitely the highlight of Helsinki for me so far.
after that, i headed back into the center of town. it was already getting late and most restaurants close early, not to mention that i decided to check out of tourism for awhile and see what turned out to be a quite mediocre film. i grabbed some all-you-can-eat pizza buffet food (at a restaurant named Rax - i have a story about the name, but it'll have to come later) and went to the film.
after the film, i went back to the hostel, read some, walked around some and turned in early with the intention of getting a jump start on my day today.
i have a feeling my updates will become more sporadic for the rest of my trip. today, i have time to post because there's little to do when all of the museums are closed. regardless, i just took a lot of time writing my update for yesterday so i'm not going to write one for today yet... especially since it's only 17:35.
i don't know how thorough i will be here, since i'm used to typing this the day things go down... so...
(yesterday,) i woke up and packed my bag. i got to the ferry terminal, lockered my backpack and bought a ticket for the ferry to Helsinki in the evening.
i then decided to start my museum tour of Tallinn. the first stop: the Marine Mine Museum. that's right. i decided to see a museum of old mines pulled from the Baltic Sea.
before i entered, however, i decided to buy a Tallinn pass, which would get me a free walking tour and entry to all museums (more or less). that required passing the museum, hiking into the center of the Old Town and buying the pass from the tourist office. so, i hiked through Old Town, passed a chocolate shop that smelled gooooood and headed for the tourist office. by the time i got there, however, i decided that the tour wasn't such a good idea and that was where a bulk of the money for the pass would go, so i decided to pass on the pass... which was all for the better, since the tourist office was closed, being sunday 'n' all. not to mention, most museums were also closed - if they hadn't been, i would've surely gone to the firefighter museum and the human health museum, which supposedly has some pretty graphic displays and photos designed to frighten children away from drugs (and probably sex as well). but they were closed... alas...
i circled around and ended up going to the chocolate shop for a coffee and an extremely rich piece of cake before going to the mine museum.
upon entering the small but filled-to-the-roof mine museum, the old caretaker got excited and started spurting out his limited knowledge of english. as i progressed through the small but filled-to-the-roof exhibit, he occasionally popped in on my browsing and offered some vague, very broken-english explanations of what i was looking at. it was an entertaining museum, to say the least.
i left the museum and headed towards Kiek in de Kök (or "Peak in the Kitchen"), a tower built in the 1400 and 1500's into the city walls. on the way, i stopped into an "antik" shop that is run by some russians. and russian it was, since it had a very large selection of soviet and nazi memorabilia. in a way, this was cheaper, faster and easier than going to Tallinn's occupation museum.
i don't remember if i've posted this or not, but i am very torn by the iconography of both the soviet and nazi eras. on one hand, the actual items themselves are fantastic and one can understand why people were persuaded by the propagandistic elements of those respective systems. the medals and clothes were consistent and symetric and there is beauty in symmetry, not to mention the symbols evoke nostalgia in a way. this feeling, to me, is proof that the propaganda still works even though the systems are dead. on the other hand, the meanings and feelings associated which each of the movements/governments/regimes are so negative and so disconcertingly evil, i can't help being simulatneously appalled by my attraction to the icons.
growing up, i (an american) was exposed to much more biased history that was anti-nazi than i was anti-soviet, so it's much harder for me to distance myself from the iconography of the soviet-era. in a sense, the evil underlying that time is less powerful or motivating on me, which is sad. plus, the idea of a true communism (or socialism, moreover) still has limited appeal as well. it's just too bad that the communism espoused by the soviets (or any other communist country) is really not communism ideologically speaking.
anyway, after the antik shop, i moved on to Kiek in de Kök which is a large tower that was built to dwarf all of the other (some 30-some) towers along the city walls. whereas the earlier towers could hold up to 8 artillery weapons, Kiek could hold 32. a big difference, if you couldn't imagine, when it came to defense. the tower was refurbished a few times and still has 6 cannonballs embedded in the walls from one of the two attacks by Ivan IV (aka Ivan the Terrible).
the tower also houses a museum which documents the history of the tower (and a little bit on Tallinn, the city) and the Livonian War. there's also an interesting video presentation by an Estonian historian. awkwardly enough, even though my guide says that Russians are not particularly liked in Estonia to this day, the video was in Russian with English subtitles and not Estonian.
after that tour, i walked around the town a little bit more, had something to drink at the cafe in the Town Hall in the main square ("Town Hall Square", strangely enough) and headed for a restaurant. in the restaurant (African cuisine), i met a German living in Aachen and an American from New Orleans who, coincidentally, is moving to Prague to teach English... and, what's more, he'll be doing so at my old school. weird coincidence, indeed.
after dinner, it was time for my ferry... or, in reality, it wasn't. you see, my scheduled ferry was cancelled. so i either had to switch my ticket for the 21:30 one, which would get me to Helsinki way too late (23:00, when i was scheduled to be actually at my hostel) or i had to take another cruise line. which i did, but i had to hike around half the harbor not knowing if there would be room before it left.
the ferry was stupid. i'm used to ferries with open air decks, at least, which this one didn't have - so i could take no photos, even though there was a spectacular sunset. this one had seats and a set-up almost like an airplane, which was ridiculous and cramped. it was only an hour and a half trip and it wasn't even full. give me a break.
arriving in Helsinki, i walked the 3 or so kilometers (plus some, since i went the wrong way for a short time) to my hostel which is, by the by, in the Olympic stadium built for the 1952 (i think) games.
despite the title, i simply cannot afford to give you an update, so...
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
It's the country for me.
Verse: You're so near to Russia,
So far from Japan.
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I want to be,
Eating breakfast or dinner,
Or snack lunch in the hall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Verse: You're so sadly neglected,
And often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium,
When going abroad.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Repeat: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Fade: Finland has it all...
before i tell you about what i'm going to tell you about before i tell you about today, i should warn you that this is another long post.
before i tell you about my today, let me tell you about my yesteryesternight, when i had a great discussion. after i finished writing my blog update for the night (August 18th), i decided to write some postcards and send them off. i ended up in the lounge, talking to a Finnish guy from Helsinki for a short period. he wasn't very helpful, but i progressed to talking to two brits from brighton by the names of Robin and Kristina. Robin is a record producer and i, unfortunately, forgot what Kristina does. they are both very intelligent individuals and they were in Latvia (Riga) in part because Robin's father (and his extended family on that side) are from Latvia.
i related to you two nights ago about the soviet occupation in Latvia, what i neglected to mention was the wartime aspects of being a Latvian. whereas the Soviet's occupied Latvia in 1941, a resistance movement had already started. and then the Germans broke their non-aggression pact with the USSR and attacked the Baltic countries. in order to help "liberate" Latvia, many Latvians joined the Germans in the fight against the Soviets. as the Soviets retreated, all of the men they had forced into conscription in the Soviet army were forced to withdraw into the USSR as well. the Germans quickly pushed the Soviets out of the Baltic countries, since the Soviets were not prepared to fight a defensive battle and a lot of Latvians celebrated because they thought they would regain independence - it was liberation.
this, of course, was not to be. the Germans continued in much the same way as the Soviets, albeit they were less cruel to the average (non-Jewish) Latvian, since they were more particular with their persecution. so, many Latvians were in the German army. when the War turned against Germany and they were forced to fight against the Soviets again, many people fighting on BOTH sides were Latvian since the Soviets were advancing using the Latvian men they had forced into conscription. this meant that brothers were fighting brothers, friends fighting friends, etc.
so, Robin's father fought on one side and his father's brother fought on the other. they both survived, but being that Robin's father was fighting for the Germans and they were withdrawn to Germany "to defend Berlin" (which they avoided by running for the American line and surrendering instead), he ended up living in Western Europe. he had the opportunity to return to Latvia (and some Soviets certainly tried), but he knew that he would definitely be sent to a gulag if he did return, if not executed. so he chose to live in exile in one of the countries that offered it to him and he chose England.
anyway, again, just as meeting the young Venezuelan on the Auschwitz trip made my experience more personal, meeting Robin was enlightening and a personalizing experience for me. plus, he and Kristina were more helpful than the Finn about suggesting good places to go and see in Finland.
last night, i talked to a German from Chemnitz. he told me that the general German attitude towards the war is indifference because they are bombarded with reminders of it in their early education and every day in the media. German youth, so he said, is disconnecting from the experience because the politicians and the media are trying to instill guilt where there should be none - after all, modern youth or even middle-aged people were not responsible, let alone born, for the atrocities of WWII. anyway, that was another interesting discussion.
and finally, i can talk about today. i woke up late-ish because i needed to move hostels and be at the other one by noon. which meant that wandering around with my big travel bag would be necessary, if i were to leave before 11:30ish. so i opted to take my time this morning. not to mention that, due to all indoor museums being closed today because it's a holiday, my options for what to do today were somewhat limited.
quick note about the holiday, on August 20th 1991, Estonia declared independence (again) from the Soviet Union. for once, instead of reinforcing the communist leadership, the weakening USSR admitted defeat and a few days later recognized Estonia as an independent country. so, today is the day when Estonians celebrate their reestablishment of independence.
after dumping my stuff at my new place (a b&b) and checking my e-mail quickly to see if anybody else had requested a postcard (not so, although the offer is still out there), i bussed back into Old Town. i thought that i would do a combo walking tour today - half Soviet, half other random buildings of interest including a gorgeous palace a little ways out of the Old Town in a large park.
so, i started by going to the War memorial statue near Old Town. the memorial is insubstantial really, but it is Soviet-era architecture and originally it was dedicated to "the Russians who died in WWII". after independence, and the backlash against the Soviet mentality, the monument was changed to say that it's for everybody who died fighting in WWII. however, it still has a very Soviet hammer and sickle emblem embedded above the statue's head.
again, i've taken photos of all this and i'll post them when i get back to Praha and organize them.
i proceeded to walk to the next Soviet building. Riga and Warsaw both have monsterous "wedding-cake" Stalinist buildings that were the tallest buildings in their respective towns when they were built. Tallinn, luckily, escaped the trend but it got a residential monstrosity instead. irony of ironies, it's now a casino.
from there, i walked a long walk to Kadriorg park ("Kadri" is "Catherine" in Estonian) where Kadriorg Palace is. the palace is large and pink and has some carefully manicured gardens behind it - on the other side of the gardens, however, lies another building. but i'm getting ahead of myself.
the little history you need to know: why is it "Catherine"? Piotr the Great, the "Great" Russian tsar, ordered this palace be built in honor of his wife... that's right, Catherine. the thing that's surprising is that the palace looks like it belongs in France. it was built in the early 1700's and, lo and behold, it was designed by an Italian, so the Western European feeling is understandable by that. i can forsee a major Hollywood film production being filmed here (since it's cheaper) wherein the Palace substitutes for a French one; if this hasn't happened already, that is.
before the Palace was finished, however, Peter stayed in a small cabin which is located just up the road from the palace. so after walking around the grounds of Kadriorg Palace, i walked up to the cottage to take a look. as i did, i passed by the building at the opposite end of the gardens...
it's now the Presidential Palace. whaddaya know. at this point, i began to get really curious about the enormous crowds of people in the park. i imagined before i got there that, being a holiday the park would be slightly crowded. but i realized when i got there that it was very crowded, instead.
another minor detail about the gardens behind the palace, there are two levels to the garden which essentially makes it two different gardens - one for Kadriorg Palace and one for the Presidential Palace. the Presidential gardens were blocked off by gates at the top of the stairs connecting the two gardens when i got there and there were crowds gathering around them, listening to somebody singing inside the garden... or so i thought.
so i walked the short distance past the Presidential Palace to Peter's cottage. it is a suprisingly humble cottage and it is tiny. not what you would expect for a tsar.
after seeing the exterior of the cottage, i had nowhere to go but back. but this time as i passed the Presidential Palace, the garden in back had been opened and the public was flooding in en masse. so i went in.
the crowd gathered around the back door to the palace (and around the beautiful fountain also in the garden). it was at the back door that some microphones and a piano had been set up. so, it turns out, the singer before was just testing the mics. and then people started coming out of the house, ushered over to one side of the crowd. then a very unassuming man with his stout wife walked out of the palace and everybody stood up and clapped. it was the President of Estonia, Arnold Rüütel.
a choir filled in behind him as he shook hands with the other people who had emerged from the Palace. the choir sang a song and then the President gave a speech in honor of independence - i only caught the word "August", but one can imagine, considering the holiday, what the speech was about. after him, the choir sang a few more songs and i felt that i had seen enough. (by the way, the Estonian Presidency is a mostly representative position, similar to that of the royalty in England, with little actual political function.) i didn't actually hobnob with the President, but i was darn close!
needing coffee, i headed for an old bakery/sweet shop that was started in the 1800's and is known for its marzipan. so i had some coffee and a piece of marzipan before...
i walked back to town and continued my architectural tour.
i followed some Hare Krishnas for a short time on my way to the next stop: the Cat Well, where the locals used to throw animals, mostly stray cats, as sacrifices in order to keep the water pure and drinkable. it's now boarded up, but that must've been a weird superstition to start, nonetheless maintain.
after the Cat Well, i headed for the shore where the Soviets erected what is best described, as the "Tallinn in Your Pocket" guide so accurately explains, as a combination of a parking garage and a flattened Mayan pyramid. it was indeed a fantastic structure made of much concrete (hence Soviet architecture) and it has a great view of the Baltic Sea and the surrounding coastline. it is, however, falling apart because the city is understandably reluctant to refurbish it. i stayed there for a good while, looking at the sea and marvelling at the young boys swimming beneath the helipad in a small sea encolosure, complete with fountains.
next, i continued back into Old Town to swing by the former KGB prison. similar to Vilnius, it was housed in a beautiful old building which completely heightens the effect of seeing its bricked-up basement windows.
i then went to see another Soviet architectural highlight, the former officers' club. the building was built for Soviet officers' extracurricular use, but does not conform to my usual idea of a soviet building, outside of the hammer and sickle way up on the top of the building.
then it was dinner time, so i headed into Old Town only to realize that i didn't want to eat in Old Town. i had passed a place with a significant chicken-dish selection. so that's where i went.
after dinner, i walked back into Old Town to take care of a few errands. and then headed for the bus back to my somewhat removed-from-center b&b, which i missed by two minutes and hence spent 25 minutes waiting for. i returned a little early because i knew i had a long update to write, not to mention that i was in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and it was getting dark and cold.
and that brings me to now, when i'm making more than good on my promise to write a more substantial update than yesterday. tomorrow, i will actually go into some museums before i catch a ferry to Helsinki and hunt down my hostel there.
yee ha!
my offer still stand re: postcards.
about today: i´m typing on a deadline. i have 7 minutes until this cafe closes.
so, i woke up this morning and hoofed it over to the Riga bus station. i got on the bus to Tallinn. on the bus i sat next to a friendly dutch girl by the name of Edith. i had some issues concerning stopping for a short time and not having time to change money and a certain lack of free restrooms in this area of the world...
after we arrived in Tallinn, i walked to my hostel and then walked into old town. i took many photos. i´m beginning to get the same sensations about renewal and renovation here as i did in Riga and Vilnius. i´m sure i´ll write more extensively about it next time. (as i will also tell you about the conversation i had last night that kept me up until 3...)
old town Tallinn is great. it's the only Old Town of the Baltic states that still has any portion of its city walls left. and it has a LOT of portions left. it's a beautiful city so far.
i just ate some indian food and my time is running out and i still need to check one more thing online... so that's it for today i'm afraid..
first, before i give the details of my day, i thought i'd make an offer: anybody who wants a postcard from me, send me your snail mail address to me, even if you know that i already have it. if you don't have my e-mail addy, send a message here, which is my spam account - that is i don't care if it gets spammed. anyway, on to the day:
i woke up, bought some cereal, consumed some of it and proceeded into the beautiful daylight. but it didn't last long...
...because i went to the occupation museum, which is in a soviet-era, ugly, old building (with no windows). and so i spent the first few hours of my active day walking around and reading the thorough descriptions of every aspect of life under occupation. the museum offered up detailed descriptions of the initial occupation of Latvia by the soviets in 1940. this occupation only lasted one year before the Germans broke their treaty with the USSR and occupied Latvia.
the Nazi occupation lasted three years, until 1944 when the German army was on the retreat and the soviets had the advantage and regained the baltic nations. what i didn't know before, but that i know now, was how complacent the West was. you see, the treaty signed at the end of the war gave sovereignty back to all nations who had it before the war... except those occupied by the soviets. we, the west, sorta turned a blind eye.
and sweden... SWEDEN, the "neutral" country, even returned some 300 refugees back to soviet controlled Latvia, knowing full well they'd go to the gulags and most likely be executed.
yeah, so the soviets reoccupied the Baltic states in 1944 as Germany collapsed. i had heard things about how stalin was worse than hitler, but i never really considered it. i imagined it to be true, but it never really weighed on me. certainly, the discrimination and extermination wasn't as racially motivated in the USSR as it was with the Nazis... but the exterminations and deportations were more numerous in the Baltics under Stalin than they were under the Nazis. yes, the Jews were virtually eradicated under the Nazis, but most other people in the Baltics were allowed to live - maybe they were moved, but they weren't annihalated. whereas, Stalin's soviet occupiers were ruthless.
what surprised me more was the amount that Khruschev relaxed in terms of internments and deportations. appartently, he had a secret meeting with the party wherein he condemned stalin's atrocities. but the party didn't like him overall and he was replaced by Brezhnev, who tightened the soviet authority again. it was under Brezhnev that the soviets attacked Czechoslovakia again in order to reassert their power. (the communists were already in power, but they needed to regain control and domination of the growing revolutionary spirit in the populace.)
there were some truly excellent chess sets on display in the museum as well. i know that's odd to say, but they were carved by prisoners in the gulags. one of them was a set wherein the board was painted on a suitcase, so as to make the set portable when the workers were moved around.
the museum also chronicled extensively the extent to which the party censored all forms of free speech, be they art or film or written pieces. i wrote this on some post cards i sent, but i am truly glad to have been raised in a democracy like america. yes, it has problems, but free speech has never been controlled. (that is, of course, a sometimes questionable assertion..)
after the occupation museum, i emerged into the bright daylight. knowing that i need to be in Tallinn, Estonia tomorrow, i made plans to get to the bus station and buy a ticket. on my way to the bus station, i went the wrong direction. twice.
the first time i went vertically instead of horizontally. just off of Town Hall square in Riga is St. Peter's Basilica which has a tower that was, at one point, the tallest building in Europe. the same tower collapsed or was destroyed quite a few times since it was initially constructed. it was made of wood until 1944, when it was destroyed during the Soviet's siege of Riga towards the end of WWII. it was rebuilt in the late-60's and early-70's (and finished in 1973) but it was rebuilt with copper, so it will take a little more effort to bring it down again. not that it will happen again.
the tower now has an elevator up to one of the top floors. this is something i took advantage of today. i went up and got a spectacular vista of Riga in all directions. it was also up here that my digi camera card finally ran out after taking some 300 pictures so far. luckily i was prepared with my spare, which has a somewhat more diminished capacity. (that diminished capacity, however, will not last me the rest of my trip, which is why i bought another enormous card way back in Krakow.)
after going up the tower, i decided to go for coffee somewhere excellent - as i've mentioned before, i've bought the "In Your Pocket" guide for Riga and i went to a bakery which supposedly had strong coffee and the most authentic French pastries in the Baltic. i won't argue either fact. but the catch was that the cafe was the opposite direction of the bus station and it was already late in the day...
but i didn't miss buying the bus ticket, since apparently i didn't need to do anything special to buy the ticket, unlike other cities (see Warsaw, cough cough).
that task was taken care of so quickly, i decided to do a tour of some Art Nouveau architecture. thankfully, a whole area of Riga survived the war that is stuffed full of Art Nouveau architecture, in particular that of Michal Eisenstein, a russian architect. the area is absolutely stunning and building after building, while not necessarily Eisenstein's, is spectacularly designed. the other thing that is apparent in the neighborhood is which buildings have undergone renovations since 1991, when the USSR acknowledged Latvia's independence. the difference is stunning and i will be able to illustrate the point when i post the pictures later. (i'm picturing a series of blog updates with photos on a city-by-city basis and individual image pages per city.)
after that, i headed back to the hostel to change into long pants (it was that warm today) and go to dinner. after wandering around trying to locate a decent place to eat dinner, i ended up going to the "Latvian" restaurant the hostel owner recommends (named "Lido"). it was decent food, although not tremendously different from any other skewer meal (i had basically a skewer of chicken), and accompanied by their homemade beer.
after that, knowing full well the taste of the Czech liqeur Becherovka (of which i've gifted upon some people who are probably reading this), i decided that i needed to taste the Latvian version, called Melnais Balzams (or "Black Balsam").
the more important thing was where to do it. i didn't want to do it alone in the darkness of the restaurant, so i wandered out into the streets. and i wandered across the street to a beer garden, where a band was playing late-70's rock hits from the states and the U.K. "Sweet Home Alabama", anyone? how about "Smoke on the Water", in both Latvian and English?! they were actually really good and after a break they came back and played some instrumentals with one of the two guitarists playing a violin instead.
as for the liqeur, the liqeur was much more syrupy and anise-flavored than Becherovka. (also, the color was much more opaque and black than the beige, transparent Becher...)
and as for tomorrow, i'm catching a bus to Tallinn, Estonia at 10:50 and will most likely be there sometime before 19:00, if i'm lucky. i'm scheduled to arrive at 16:50, but knowing my luck with the roads so far...
it seems to be a recurring theme, "infrastructure" does. first things first...
so: Uzopis is the Montmarte of Vilnius. Uzopis is the artistic area of the city. that and the river IS flooding. but that's old news. that's yesterday's news that i forgot to post.
again, today, i was affected by infrastructure - despite both Latvia and Lithuania's lack of toilets (as in toilets - there are holes, just nothing to sit on), these two countries are running at warp speed to catch up with the past they should have had and the future they will have.
they're redoing a lot of the bigger roads in between cities now. that means that time gets added to bus trips. like the one today, from Vilnius to Riga. we had two hours added onto a four hour trip today, do to weaving and waiting in construction.
and, along the way, we stopped at a rest area for about 20 minutes. it was not the average rest area. i mean, it was a restaurant. but... it was also a zoo. and there were ducks... and there were chickens... and... and there were miniature horses... and there were antelopes of some kind... and there were two bears. and one of them looked at me.
seriously though, it was one of the stranger and more unexpected things i've seen this trip.
i'm establishing a rhythm in my travels, too. the day i arrive, which so far has been in the middle to late afternoon, i usually walk around the parts of the city with substantial history. the next day, i focus on something specific. (for example, tomorrow i'm thinking i'll continue my occupation tour with a visit to the Latvian Occupation Museum, which is just next door to my hostel.)
today was no exception. i walked. and walked. and then i walked some more. i did a self-guided tour (with the assistance of "Riga in Your Pocket"). i then went and visited the most extravagant Soviet-era memorial i've yet seen. it's a giant monument in honor of the "liberation" of Latvia - but it was built in order to celebrate the establishment of a communist (hence soviet) government... hmmm... according to the "In Your Pocket" guide, some locals tried to "liberate" the city of it by blowing it up with dynamite. they were arrested before they could pull it off.
then i came back and explored my options for hosteling in scandanavia on the internet. i'm thinking now that if it's possible, i might just catch a night train from Stockholm to Oslo and not spend any time in Sweden, relatively speaking. maybe the day time hours.
today i woke up, read and went shopping. i bought my breakfast at the local supermarket chain (Iki). luckily, the branch closest to my hostel happens to be in the bus station... so while i was there i bought a bus ticket to Riga tomorrow at 10 a.m.
after that, i walked the length of Old Town Vilnius, stopping for a cappucino, on my way to finding the museum dedicated to the victims of both the Nazi and Soviet genocides. and finding it was tough. i read that the museum was in an old KGB prison. i lost my good (free) map of Vilnius yesterday, so i was relying on the map in the back of my Vilnius in Your Pocket Guide. the guide is good and the maps are good as well, because they label where various museums, restaurants, etc are... except they forgot to mark the KGB museum, which they also recommend. so i wandered around lost for awhile, even circling a still in use (and terrifying and old) prison. i eventually located the museum, which is in a deceptively nice building for an old KGB prison.
the museum is miserable. it's not badly designed. on the contrary, it's great. i chose to take an audio tour (via a Walkman) of the basement, where the old prison has been left in the same state it was in 1991, when the KGB finally vacated the building. on the tour, i saw (amongst other rooms): solitary confinement cells - again, only a few square meters; water torture cells - people would either stand in ice cold water all day or, alternatively, they were left standing on a small platform in the middle of an ice cold pool of water and when they were drowsy, they'd fall in. oh, and they were naked and the room was unheated, so in winter the water would freeze and the prisoners would freeze; a padded room which looked horrifying. what these people struggled through is incredible. i cannot imagine living in a soviet state. thank goodness their repression is over.
on the ground floor of the museum, there are two exhibitions: one is a multi-room exhibition dedicated to the resistance forces who fought against the soviet occupation from 1944 until 1952, the other exhibition was a single room temporary exhibition dedicated to the Armenian genocide of 1914 and 1915.
i didn't know anything and had never even heard of the Lithuania resistance against the occupation. i mean, i knew there inevitably had to be one, but the Lithuanian movement was enormous and extremely well organized. it lasted a long time, but eventually succumbed to both the Soviet's overwhelming numbers and the West's indifference. the movement relied heavily on the West starting a war against the Soviet Union.. but as we know, the Cold War wasn't a traditional war and never involved direct engagement.. which helped cripple the movement, because no help ever came.
if you're interested, i suggest reading that link, since it offers up a good summary of what was described in the museum.
amongst the things on display were badges and photos of the resistance, and likewise the soviet occupation forces. there was also a staged film of some soviet troops capturing some resistance fighters. there were also several photos of executed resistance fighters, whose bodies had been placed on public display in towns known to be resistant to the occupation. it was chilling.
they also stated that Lithuanians suffered the worst out of all ethnic and national groups under the soviets. this is easy to understand, because simply walking around here one gets a sense of a heavy nationalistic streak in the local population.
all soviet territories suffered. but one gets the sense that the Lithuanians are much more vocal about their troubled past. i love prague and czech people are excellent people, but they seem so caught up in the whirlwind of the present that the past seems to have almost evaporated. at least, in prague. (it's quite likely, however, is that i just haven't gone to the right places and spoken to the right people in prague...)
and then there was the Armenian genocide exhibition. it was jaw-dropping. it was one room with nothing but photos and descriptions. but, considering that i had never heard of it before today... it's unbelievable that these things ever happen. but the photos alone are humbling and drive the cold spike of reality through your eyelids. millions of armenians were killed just prior to the first world war in a purely genocidal campaign carried out by the Ottoman turks.
another day, another mind-boggling glance into the depths of evil.
after that museum, i hiked back to old town and headed to the Applied Arts Museum, housed in the former arsenal of the Vilnius Royal Palace. it actually had very little in the way of applied art. it was more an exhibition of religious art and relics and/or items they've found while excavating and preparing to rebuild the Palace.
i was underwhelmed.
to add on to the dynamics of Vilnius that i mentioned yesterday, i thought that i would mention how weird it is to walk past countless old buildings and occasionally being able to glance into the courtyard and seeing a dirt road and old wooden shacks/sheds. it's an awkward experience. even some of the recently renovated buildings have their driveway doors open and when you glance back into them, you see the wood sheds. it's awkward but also gives you the complete sense of where the city is coming from and where it's going.
and so, now i will head off for some dinner and to pack and to shop for my breakfast and to read some more and to sleep. and then tomorrow, i will go to Riga, Latvia, from where i will be typing my next update.
i'll start this post by once again asking for help.. anybody who knows anybody in Stockholm or Copenhagen who might be willing to put me up for a few nights, i'd appreciate it immensely! (August 24th through 26th and 27th through 28th or 29th, respectively)
as for today, i started late and later. i stayed in a hotel last night, which of course is not the cheapest way to sleep. i also slept through breakfast, which was until 10. you see, something i forgot to realize when i came here is that in between Poland and Lithuania, there's a time zone line. i ate dinner at 10:30 last night. or, at least, what is 10:30 in Lithuania. so i was caught in a struggle between the time zones. not to mention that the privacy and quiet of a hotel room, especially one with a nice, thick curtain to block out almost all light, will make sleeping late inevitable. i was tired when i went to sleep and waking up at 10:20 i was astounded. suffice it to say, i missed the breakfast that was included in my bill.
i finished reading Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, took a leisurely shower (in a bathroom with heated tile floors!) and headed out the door at noon. i already knew that i had booked myself two more nights in Vilnius and knowing that it is a small city, i figured that i could afford to be leisurely and take my time between the two days. today was the walking/photo day. i walked everywhere, back and forth, sometimes circling back to where i had already been, and took many photos along the way.
the things i noticed along the way:
i wrote yesterday that the city is changing and under massive reconstruction. this reconstruction is simulatnaeously distracting (and annoying) and also invigorating. the city is pulsing with change and life, and that's a great feeling. i was smiling just from the energy all yesterday and frequently today i felt so energized that i smiled yet some more. it's interesting to be in a city with so much history of outsider control (almost 200 years of Russian - be it tsarist or soviet union - control) that the city seems to be consistently increasing the dynamic between the new (since independence), the old (the years of occupation) and the older (pre-occupation) eras. they're digging up ruins of pre-occupation time often. and they're refurbishing (or even rebuilding) buildings damaged by years of soviet control. of note, they are rebuilding a palace that has not existed in any form for at least 60-odd years. and they're rebuilding in the form of the original, which means somewhere between gothic and renaissance architecture. of course, i imagine it will be slightly modernized, just as the palace in Warsaw was.
i should clarify that there is a big difference between Warsaw and Vilnius in the way that the reconstruction feels. the reconstruction in Warsaw was from scratch and the refurbishment since Poland's liberation from Soviet control has resulted in a lot of brightly painted buildings. here, the refurbishment is lower key. there are some buildings that seem like modern interpretations of older buildings and these buildings do have the same feel as Warsaw. but there has been limited rebuilding here, mostly just refurbishment. and it looks and feels good.
where i went today: i started from my hotel, checked into my hostel nearby and headed into Vilnius' Old Town with my primary goal being to get to the top of the High Castle's Tower. i did that, but had to stop for food on the way.
and then i walked on. i walked and walked and walked. it would be fruitless to describe what and where i walked without one knowing the town, so you'll just have to wait until i have the photos up.
however, i would like to talk about two things:
the first is that the river (Vilnia) that runs through Vilnius is uncommonly high. it's not anywhere near the horrible flooding stages of Prague in 2002, but it is high. the sidewalks that normally crawl along the riveredge are under about a half-foot of water at the moment.
the other thing worth mentioning is Uzupis. Uzupis, if i understand it correctly, is a "breakaway" republic in the middle of Vilnius. it is absurd. they posted a constitution in three languages (French, English and Lithuania) which includes such rights as "Every dog has the right to be a dog" and "Every cat has the right to not love its owner, except in times of need". Very weird indeed. i need to do more research on it, but it is an absolutely crazy area and includes a bicycle lane painted up the side of a building. very weird indeed.
tomorrow, i plan on visiting the KGB museum, which honors the victims of the genocides (both Nazi and Russian), amongst other things.
first, before i forget, i'm going to enlist help if anybody who reads this can help me. i'm looking to stay in Stockholm, Sweden on the nights of August 25th and 26th but it seems any hostels i can locate on the internet are booked solid. so, if anybody has anybody has any friends in Stockholm who might be willing to put me up for those two nights, please let me know ASAP! i'll owe you something big. otherwise, i'm sleeping in a bus shelter.
anyway, onto my small update for today. i got on the bus in Warsaw at 9:30 this morning, heading for Vilnius, Lithuania. there was nothing really remarkable about the bus ride except the difference in infrastructure between Poland and Lithuania. Poland's infrastructure is behind the Czech Republic simply due to its size, i think. in both Krakow and Warsaw, i was told not to drink the tap water. it's fine in Praha. (and, i've since learned it's not-so-fine in Vilnius.) but the difference between Lithuania and Poland is apparent enough, just in the road system.
before i talk about the roads, i thought i'd also address the issue of passport stamps. i have roughly 20 stamps from my meanderings in and out of the Czech Republic. the difference you'd notice is that after the CR joined the EU in May 2004, they adopted a similar patterned stamp as that of the other (western) EU countries. it's a black, rectangular stamp with the EU star motif (see also "circle of stars") in the top left corner and the countries initials inside the stars. i didn't get a stamp upon entering Poland, unfortunately, but upon entering Lithuania (which joined the EU at the same time as the CR), i did get a stamp. but it's still in the pre-EU style of longer, thinner rectangle in blotchy blue or red ink. i don't know how interesting that info will be for ya'll, but i find it interesting enough..
anyway, the roads in Lithuania are thinner and less developed than Poland. as you drive through the countryside, you also notice that the houses look older and more worn down than Poland. the country is poorer, just by the nature of being smaller than Poland (significantly smaller - Warsaw, i think, is probably as big as the entire country of Lithuania).
however, you can tell that things are beginning to happen here and Vilnius in particular. Vilnius is kinda messy right now. the Old Town is undergoing major reconstruction, which is being done to improve the infrastructure. and you can feel things changing. (i'm saying this and i've only been here 4 hours...) the new money flowing in, whether it's from new foreign investments on the business side or the tourist side or from the EU, is contributing to major refurbishing projects. side-by-side, you might see a really dilapidated old building and a newly refurbished building. but it's a trend that's going around. the construction companies here must be raking it in.
on a different note, it's an increasingly popular place to go for tourists. i showed up with no hostel renovation and it's costing me, because all hostels here are booked solid tonight. i've already reserved a spot in a hostel here for the next two nights, but tonight i'm staying in a not-so-cheap hotel.
now, if i can just book a hostel in Stockholm and Copenhagen... heh heh...
today started off slowly. i figured that i had the time to move slowly today. being mostly underwhelmed by the city, i decided that i would see the interiors of the restored palace today, but only after i finalized my movement for tomorrow.
so i woke up late - considering that i went to bed at 4-ish after "clubbing". i went to the Central Train Station to find out about transportation to Vilnius. (for those who have never heard of Vilnius, it is the capital of Lithuania.) the sticky part about transport between Warsaw and Vilnius is that the stretch of land that Poland and Lithuania share as a border is small and is surrounded by a small piece of Russia on one side and Belarus on the other. both of those countries require visas on my part, so i needed to make sure that my transit did NOT involve those two countries.
and then it also boiled down to time and money. if i wanted to take a train to Vilnius, the only way to get there NOT via Belarus is to go to the Lithuanian town of Kaunas and transfer. just going to Kaunas is 8.5 hours and i'm sure the rail infrastructure in Lithuania, being not so hot, would only make it another 5 hours between Kaunas and Vilnius (i'm guesstimating). whereas taking a bus straight to Vilnius and NOT going through Belarus takes 10 hours. hmm.. i chose to buy a bus ticket. BUT the bus leaves from a different station, so i had to go to the other station to buy the ticket.
after buying the ticket, i made my way to the old restored palace at the bottom of Old Town, a palace which was almost completely destroyed following the Nazi occupation. touring around the castle, one can't help but feel displaced. it looks old because they tried to match the interiors to pre-war pictures. unfortunately, it feels brand new. and then destroys the illusion. the plaques in each room describing the room's prior use and the objects within kept referring to the rooms as if they existed before. but the feeling of newness is just too overwhelming and it gives the whole visit a weird tinge. it doesn't go down well. and that's troubling. it's sad. and it really drives home the feeling of loss and devastation that WWII created. i wasn't around, yes, but i can only but feel the profundity of the destruction.
thankfully, many locals stole a lot of the priceless art pieces and furnishings away from the castle before it all crumbled, and they returned them upon its reconstruction. so the items inside are authentic, but the building itiself just doesn't fit, in my opinion. again, it's sort of a Disneyland. not to mention, immediately outside the castle in plac Zamkowy (Castle Square), there are countless numbers of clowns running around making balloon animals for the children that are passing through. it's an extremely surreal experience.
i decided to follow the palace with a restaurant across the square. my meal consisted of another cup of borsch and some particular poultry: one of my favorite traditional Czech dishes (and pretty much the only one that works with my limited, no-beef-no-pork diet) is roast Duck with warm cabbage and dumplings. i decided to match it with the Polish version, which replaces the cabbage with apples and cranberries. it was delicious and tasted more like thanksgiving, due to the cranberries.
after the duck, i decided that i would call it an early evening, since i didn't have much energy and i wanted to (and still need to) use the internet to check out hostels in Vilnius and elsewhere. on the way, however, i decided to check out a very nice statue of Chopin (i finally got back to him) that resides in the same park as the Castle on Water (see the Day 5 update).
and so here i am, writing this entry and preparing to go hostel hunting. and mentally (and i suppose physically) preparing myself for the 10 hour bus ride. (minimal fluids come morning, i know.)
i suspect tomorrow's update will be negligible, if at all, since i'll be on the bus until 19:30 tomorrow. sigh. i much prefer trains.
i suppose it was inevitable. i missed a post yesterday. and so i'm writing a post now (the day after) about what i did yesterday.
i woke up at 9 a.m.-ish, had myself some Multi-grain Cheerios - you can get them here, unlike the Czech Republic - and left the hostel. my plan was to do a Chopin tour - Chopin, for those who don't know, was born in Warsaw and only moved to Paris when he was in his 30's. alas, this plan was not to be.
first things first, i decided i would swing by a park to get a photo of the "palace on water", proper name "Palac na Wyspie", on my way to the Chopin museum. it was going to be another walking day. i walked to the pond at the foot of the palace and took a picture and headed towards the city center, where the Chopin Museum awaited me, stopping to look at a photograph display of Poland from overhead that was hanging on a fence in the park.
after meandering through another park, passing a few embassies (including my own), i finally arrived at the Chopin Museum...
only to find out that it was closed from mid-July until October. what an absurd notion, closing a museum for renovations during peak tourist season... so my Chopin tour bit the dust instantaneously. it was to have included some other things, like the Church of the Holy Cross, where his heart is interred (not his body, though) and what is now the Presidential Palace, where he gave his first public performance.
merely by walking straight towards the Old Town (Stare Miasto), i wandered by said Presidential Palace anyway and learned that for a select few days during the summer (Fridays and Saturdays) i could actually see the Palaces gardens... and it just happened to be Friday. so i found the line, which was around the block and down some stairs, and waited for 15 minutes, only to not be let in because they only let 40 people in at a time. rather than wait another 30 to 60 minutes, i decided to continue trekking north towards the Old Town.
i passed many statues - this city should be nicknamed "Monument City", there are so many statues to famous Poles or miscellaneous War and Uprising related memorials - and whatnot on my way to Old Town. one park had a statue made by Jan Kaminski that was designed in 1939 but not unveiled until 1986.
i finally arrived to find a very nice, new "Old Town". as many people i'm sure are aware, Warsaw was completely destroyed by the Nazis on their way out the door, following a failed uprising by the cities population. so, after the destruction, and during the Cold War, they rebuilt their Old Town.
recently, having emerged from Communism and being besieged by tourists (and, likewise, capitalism and the EU), they've been repainting and refurbishing many of the new Old Town buildings. which, in turn, gives the Old Town a very carnival-esque feel and, really, makes it very surreal. it's like a Disney version of Old Town Europe. there are many street performers. there are sidewalk cafes. there is a fountain of a mermaid in the center of the Old Town. etc etc. it's unreal.
after having some fish and red beet soup (borsch) for lunch, i walked around Old Town a bit more. it's a small Old Town, in comparison to the likes of Krakow or, better yet, Prague and one can walk from one end to the other in about 5 to 10 minutes. i took some photos and decided that i would do a WWII (and, hence, Uprising and holocaust) monument tour.
so i walked northwest of Old Town. i saw the Uprising memorial, which is enormous and beautifully done. (by the way, in case you're wondering, i have photos of most of what i'm talking about, i just don't have the ability to upload them at the moment. expect a massive image page update when i finally get back to Prague and have time to organize them.) i then continued Northwest to pass the location of the uprising headquarters and the memorial to the jews who were deported from Warsaw via the Umschlagplatz, a train platform and building where an organized deportation of 200,000 jewish Varsovians was carried out.
the single most depressing and unsettling thing about this walk, however, was the complete lack of a Jewish Quarter, which was destroyed by the Nazis as well, of course. you must understand, coming from Prague, where the Jewish quarter is enormous and mostly untouched, and even Krakow that still has a small Jewish quarter, i expected to see some small, winding streets and alleyways. what i did see instead were enormous soviet-era housing blocks that were so foreboding and uninteresting that my eyes started to water. there was absolutely no sign of heritage in the area except for the memorials. it was a very humbling experience, indeed.
after the Jewish quarter, i headed back to the hostel for some R&R. when i got back, my two italian roommates were hanging out and the two french guys from next door (and with whom we share a bathroom) joined in. eventually, after reading for awhile, i got sucked in as well.
and this is why i did not post last night. you see, one of the two french guys - we'll call him Jean - was the most stereotypically arrogant French man possible. the other French guy (Adrian) was very genial and very friendly. anyway, Jean was a sexist prick who insisted on talking about and degrading women for the entire evening. i also found myself being pulled along on a hunt for a disco named "Ground Zero" (about which Jean made a very tasteless hand motion indicating the twin towers). by this point, Jean had decided that it would be a competition about who (and which nationality) could find a woman the fastest.
why did i go along with them, you're probably asking yourself. outside of Jean, everybody else is super cool and i hadn't been to a club in awhile... as a matter of fact, i typically find italians to be excessively noisy and obnoxious, but my two roommates are very cool and very respectful of me. i guess it's just a matter of perspective, really... and who you happen to meet at any given time. so i went, albeit i had that nagging feeling that it wouldn't be so fun from the moment it was proposed.
and it really wasn't that fun. it took about an hour for the others, Jean in particular, to get ready to go. it then took an hour to find the place. i stayed for about an hour before getting so bored that i wanted to leave. and so i left, walked back to the hostel and read some before i went to sleep.
pardon me, but this story will be a little colorful in terms of my descriptions of my digestive processes.
i am now at the Strawberry Hostel in Warszawa (aka Warsaw). but today started at a somewhat different Strawberry Hostel.
i'll come back to that, though.
the day started with me waking up at 8:30. i had to check out from the Strawberry Hostel - Krakow by 10 and i wanted to actually see Wawel Palace today, so i needed a head start. so i woke up at 8:30.
i showered and then i packed my bag. as i was packing, i realized that i didn't want to carry any extra food around with me. so i ate and drank what i had left. (you can probably tell where this is going. it's a story everybody knows in some way...)
unfortunately, that included about a liter of water. most people that know me know that i can be a complete pain in the ass when it comes to road trips if i happen to drink anything along the way. and i mean anything. it could be something like coffee or a diet coke, needed to stay awake, or it could be something simple like water, or it could be something weird, like a yogurt drink... the problem with liquids and me is that my bladder is about the size of a peanut and i think my kidneys process liquids at a superhuman rate. i think they even produce twice the quantity of what i put in. regardless, what happens is that i have to use the bathroom relatively soon after drinking it. and then again. and again. and possibly again. i usually try to hold it, but it can get pretty uncomfortable. and this... THIS is why i try to avoid drinking anything for an hour or two before hitting the road.
this morning i drank a liter of water - i didn't want to carry that huge water bottle around, after all. talk about unnecessary weight. anyway, i also really wanted to see the castle. Wawel Castle has many areas available to see - there is: the Royal Apartments, the Royal Chambers, the Treasury and Armory, a temporary exhibition that changes every few months, "the Dragon Cave", an archaelogical dig (entitled "The Lost Wawel" or something akin) in the basement of one section of the castle and an Oriental Art exhibit. (yeah, i can see your eyebrow raising from here..) of those, the Oriental Art exhibit is temporarily closed and i think the Royal Apartments must be reserved weeks in advance, because even though i got there quite early, i still couldn't get a ticket for them. and they're supposed to be the best part.
anyway, so i packed my bag and stuffed my face. i walked all the way to the castle. and then i got in line to buy tickets. my kidneys, not liking a lot of movement followed by an almost stationary position, decided to kick into hyperdrive. but i didn't want to leave the line. NO. i missed out yesterday, due to arriving too late. i didn't want to be too late again today. i arrived at the line at 9:50. i needed to use the bathroom at that point, but i was already in line. i reached the front of the line at 10:50. you can imagine my agony, since i know everybody has gone through this at some point in their life. not to mention the fact that for about half of that time there was a couple directly in front of me doing some fairly obvious, um, PDA in a very public place.
since they limit the tickets that they sell for the Chambers and Treasury/Armory exhibits, they also give each ticket a specific entry-time. i bought my ticket at 10:50. my first assigned entry time was for the Chambers at 13:05. additionally, they also write an order that one should follow in terms of seeing the exhibits. first they say to see the "Lost Wawel". it was interesting seeing the dig and the history of the place... if only i could understand polish. in other words, the signs throughout the entire palace were sporadically not translated. most of them were, but some of the critical signs were not. so i didn't understand what i was looking at when i saw the dig. it did include some fascinating artifacts (like coins and busts and whatnot) discovered in the dig, but it was also a relatively short exhibit and took about 5 to 10 minutes to go through. so it happened that i then had 1 hour, because the next place in my progression was the Chambers, which had the assigned time.
and so i had a coffee.
which was a mistake. because i walked away from the castle.
(i should note that i had checked my bag in the baggage room before entering the previous exhibit and i wanted to get my camera from my bag, but the attendant insisted that i take my bag for the 1 hour i had in between, which was annoying.)
anyway, i had seen a bridge from the castle hill and decided that i wanted to walk there and take a picture of the palace from up-river (the "Vistula river" in English, or Wisla in Polish). it only took me about 5 minutes to get down from the castle and get to the bridge. i took a photo or two. and looked at my watch. uh oh. i still had almost an hour until i had to be at the Chambers entrance.
so i decided i would walk along the opposing bank until the next bridge, down-river of the palace, and back across. along the way, i stopped to write in my poem journal (which i only had with me because the lady at the bag check, who couldn't speak any english, made me take my bag), at which point i still had 40 minutes left.
and then i needed to use the bathroom again - thanks, coffee. but there were no bathrooms on the far side of the river. in the Czech Republic, it's perfectly acceptable to hide yourself behind a tree, but Poland is a much more conservative country and it seems as if that is unacceptable. so i had to hightail it back across the river. by the time i got back to the castle (having stopped along the way, ahem), i think i only had a few minutes to kill.
i rechecked my bag and i ended up getting the claim ticket number 79. number 79 is my jersey number for my ultimate jerseys, so i thought that was kinda cool and i wasn't so annoyed with having to recheck my bag in the end. (by the way, dave has updated my frisbee club's homepage, for those who are interested.)
i went through the Chambers, which contained some beautiful tapestries and wood work. the wall paper in a lot of the rooms was made of cordovan and was absolutely stunning. it's kinda weird to say that it was my favorite part, but it really was. there were some other cool things, like the ceilings - one of which had a series of sculpted heads in square nooks. hard to describe, but amazing to see. there were some great paintings as well - one of which was a family portrait, but the patriarch of the family was represented by a painting within the painting and one of the kids is pointing at it jokingly... it looked like a modern photo, in that sense, while simulatneously being a 17th century artwork.
after that tour, i took a short nap in the courtyard of the castle since i still had 20 minutes before i could see the Treasury/Armory. the Armory was impressive, with every type of weapon imaginable including a few models of sword-guns (i'm NOT talking about a gun with a bayonet, these were more swords than guns, actually) and an ax-gun (as before). there were also quite a few helmets that looked roman, even though they were 16th and 17th century helmets, and some that looked arabic in origin. there were many different types of two-handed swords and with each one i could only think how painful it would be to be stabbed by one, especially the ones that had ridges or were notched... *shudder* and then there was the cannon that, according to the plaque next to it, was commissioned and named "Lobster". i don't know if that was a mistranslation, but it certainly seems odd to name a cannon "Lobster".
i followed the Treasury/Armory with the unexciting temporary exhibition, which was a small collection of paintings, dated between the 17th and 20th centuries, featuring Wawel Castle in the background or foreground. and crypts and whatnot associated with the castle.
i meant to go to the dragon cave after that, but forgot and ended up walking to the Jewish quarter just to take a look. i knew i didn't have time to actually see their interiors, because i wanted to, ideally, catch a train at 17:30 or 18:30 to Warsaw, but i wanted to have a look anyway. the Jewish quarter in Krakow is not nearly as nice as that of Prague.
on the way back to the hostel, i had to pass the Castle again, at which point i realized i had failed to go through the Dragon Cave. i went to the exit first, which was at the base of the hill, thinking that it was the entrance. so then i had to go back up the hill to get to the entrance. i had heard there was some Polish fairy tale about a dragon, so i hoped that the Cave might illuminate it. but it was just a cave. which was fun. but there was absolutely nothing in it except some lights that lit the nooks and crannies.
after that underwhelming experience, i hoofed it back to the hostel to pick up my bag and get to the train station. i ended up catching the 19:00 train (the Dragon Cave had made me miss the earlier train at 18:00 - i had the times wrong in my head all day, thinking that they ran on the half hour, so i ended up waiting in the train station for awhile).
on the way out of Krakow, i saw a very tubular building. it was a big tube. circular buildings are not rare, but usually they have some square/cornered sections attached. this was just a 15-or-so story high cylinder. very weird.
after three hours on the train, i spent about 30 minutes in Warsaw's Central train station confused because there was no tourist housing service like most other stations in europe. there was a sign for one, which took me about 30 minutes to locate, only to find that it was closed. so i decided to walk to the only one that was advertising in the whole place. and it was booked full. but they pointed me here, the Strawberry Hostel - Warsaw.
of note, the Strawberry Hostels are temporary hostels as they just convert student dorms to hostels during the summer. the one in Krakow was like an older American dorm. this one is more like a 1970's dorm. it's kinda freaky. for you Carls reading this, Krakow was Sevy or Evans and Warsaw is more like Watson. it's kinda nostalgically frightening.
tomorrow, the world... er.. Warsaw. good night.
oh, and both Strawberry Hostels have provided bedsheets that are about half as long as the bed. kinda entertainingly funny, actually.
congratulations to jen, the person who posted the 100th comment on my blog!
i woke up late today. er. as late as late would allow. 9:30. i had set my alarm for 8:30. but i just couldn´t manage it. and so i slept. i took a shower. i walked down to the local mini-mart. bought some yogurt to mix with the mueslix i bought the day before. and i ate. and then i read. and read. and finished my book (¨The Curious Incidident of the Dog at Night-time¨) because i was just too close to not finish it. (excellent book, by the way.)
and at 11:40 i headed out into the city. i first headed to the castle. the castle where i couldn´t get in, even though i had planned the early part of my day around it. i couldn´t get in because apparently they only sell a limited number of tickets to the various parts per day. and so i lost out...
but i met a really nice married couple who live somewhere in between Munich and Prague. he was American (named Tom) and she was Czech (named Lenka) and i spent the rest of the early part of my day with them. first, we walked around the cathedral in the castle, the cathedral where JPII reigned as Archbishop before being promoted to being Il Papa. and we saw the Sigismund bell in the chapel´s tallest tower. and we saw the crypts filled with the coffins of people of whom i didn´t know.
after that, Tom, Lenka and I grabbed some lunch at a small cafe. unfortunately, we had to part ways after that as i had to haul ass back to the hostel, for i had prebought a spot on a bus to visit the Salt Mines in Wieliczka (Vee-eh-leech-ka). the Salt Mines were incredible.
in peak tourist season, they zoom through 7000 tourists a day. at first, we walked down some 400 steps. (trust me, looking down the middle of those steps is vertigo-inducing, since there were only 7 individual steps before a switchback. it was a lot of turning and dizziness.) after awhile, we emerged into a long corridor. it was a mine. whoop-de-doo. but then we emerged into a cavern where some ambitious miners had carved a scultpure out of rock salt. and then it continued. cavern after cavern was filled with rock salt statues. one of them is a magnificent cathedral, made in honor of St. Kinga, patron saint of miners. at first, the cathedral seemed like a grand ballroom - kinda like the one created for Disney´s animated version of Beauty and the Beast. but then i saw the religious sculptures. one of them was a replica of Da Vinci´s ¨Last Supper¨. it was incredible. i´m using that word because it fits so well. and to see these mines is another world.
there were underground lakes - the first of which reminded me of my mental images of Bilbo´s first encounter with Gollum in Tolkien´s The Hobbit. it was possible to lick the walls and taste salt, for those brave enough... i had some salt. that´s all i´ll say.
of note, there were some really surprising statues inside. there was a statue of Goethe, who was the German minister of Science or Geology or some such equivalent during his life. the very first statue was of Nikola Kopernika (aka Copernicus). there were also a few gnomes/dwarves here and there. one room was constructed especially for the tourist children and featured dwarves. the guide mentioned Snow White, but there were 8 dwarves. EIGHT DWARVES. was there a sequel that i wasn´t told about?! (ha ha. joke.) there was also, of course, a statue of Karol Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II) who apparently visited the mines 3 times in his life, but never as pope.
there was also a statue (not of salt rock, surprisingly) of a horse. yes, they used horses in the mines. and after they got them down there, they were there until they died. cruel, yes. but as cruel as raising them up and down on a day to day basis? probably not.
and after it all, there was the elevator ride. a multi-story elevator wherein they stuff nine people per level and then you zoom upwards through a darkened shaft. you are in pitch black for about 45 seconds. it was a lot of fun and reminded me of Sp*c* M**nt**n at D*sn*y W*rld.
after that, we returned to the hostel. by the time we returned it was almost 21:00. which means that it was dinnertime. so two dutch kids from the trip and i headed out into central krakow in search of food. we had what amounts to a highly inaccurate interpretation of mexican food (i´ll just call it polish food wrapped in a tortilla) and followed it by some beers. i left them since i know that i need to wake up early-ish tomorrow. on the way i listened to (and occasionally sang along with) the Magnetic Fields´ 69 Love Songs. and now i´m here. back in the hostel and thinking about tomorrow.
a few options for tomorrow, one definite -
i will see the castle. i´m waking up and will not be delayed in getting to the castle. i will see it. then, depending on what i learn after i post this, i will either visit the jewish quarter and catch a train. or i will merely catch a train to warsaw. or i will spend another night in krakow and catch a train to warsaw in the morning.
today was an excellent day. an informative day. an awestruck, dumbstruck, dumbfounded, confounded, conscious day. i say ¨conscious¨ day because i was very alert... er... at least, once i woke up. which was not when i really woke up.
i ¨woke up¨ at 7:30. i woke up at 10:00 when we arrived at Auschwitz I.
the things we take for granted:
- food
- shelter
- relaxation
- oxygen
- sleeping
- freedom
- comfort
all of those things were deprived from the people interned and slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. it´s amazing how little details can utterly destroy you.
i slept on and off while on the on and off road to Auschwitz. the bumps. the infrastructure in Poland is much worse than the Czech Republic. or, at least, the parts of the CR that i am familiar with. at one point, we were driving on slabs (panels, really) of concrete, roughly put together to (sorta) resemble a road.
and then we were in a town. we were driving casually through another polish town. i was asleep when we entered. or, at least, attempting to sleep. and then there was a sign.
Auschwitz Museum <-
we turned in. we got out. i popped into the cafe for an espresso (it was sorely needed) while one of the drivers arranged for a guide.
i warn you, what is to come may not be easy to read.
the tour was in two parts. first part: Auschwitz I. second part: Auschwitz II - Birkenau. you see, most of us americans have heard of Auschwitz. it was a concentration camp. most of us young americans and probably some older ones don´t know that it was actually a series of concentraion camps in a 40-square-kilometer area. Auschwitz I was a former Polish Army Base. the facilities were in place. the Nazis turned them into prisoner barracks, initially for Polish Political Prisoners. and then they started bringing in POWs. and then they started to bring in Jews, Roma, disabled people and countless other people - however, the only racial prisoners were the Jews and Roma.
Auschwitz I was a testing ground. initially, the slaughter was carried out on an individual basis via a firing squad located in between buildings 10 and 11 (out of 26 or 28, i think). they used Cyclone B, initially, to kill the insects that inhabited the barracks. the guide speculated that, perhaps, they realized it could be used on humans when somebody died spraying the barracks.
and so it began.
initially, they started by gasing a few people in the basement of number 11. (i´ll come back to number 11 later.) and then they moved into the crematorium on the Auschwitz I grounds. as most of you probably know, they designed the gas chambers so that they looked like honest to goodness bathrooms, with shower heads and whatnot. they informed the prisoners upon entering that they were going to take a shower or be disinfected.
and then the gas came instead.
and now, as you walk around Auschwitz I, the first thing you will probably do is go to the museum, located in one of the barracks. in this museum, you will be presented with room after room filled with piles of belongings. it starts slowly. the first room has a small pile of glasses. after that and in no particular order, one room has a pit filled with pots and pans. another room contains nothing but shoes on two sides of you - including the wooden shoes (the stereotypical ¨dutch¨ clog) that the workers made and wore. another room contains nothing but brushes - they seperated the combs from the brushes and the toothbrushes from the hair brushes. another room has nothing but suitcases, labels with peoples names and birthdays. it´s frightening. it´s absolutely horrifying. the emotions that flood through you are incredibly intense. i saw the word ¨Praga¨ written on one and the name Petr. this hit home. i know a Petr. i know how real it was.
you also see a room filled with empty Cyclone B gas canisters. 5 of them could kill 2000 people. but there were at least 100 cannisters in the little display that actually housed them.
and then there is the worst room. 2 tons of hair. 2 TONS of hair. and those 2 represent just 1/4th of the amount they found when they liberated Auschwitz. and next to the room filled with hair is a small case. in that case is a nice roll of fabric. until you realize that that fabric is made out of human hair. your gut sinks. you want to cry. you want to vomit.
and it´s still the little things. as you move back downstairs, you realize how worn the stairs are on two sides. how many people have climbed these stairs? yes, the stairs are new/remodeled. but why should that many people have to climb the stairs? WHY should this museum have to exist?
and then you walk out into the sparkling daylight. and it´s overwhelming. the contrast. horror after horror inside. a beautiful day that those people never had the opportunity to enjoy. it´s heartbreaking.
but you continue with the tour. the next place you go is the space in between barracks 10 and 11. which have a rebuilt wall, used as a backdrop for numerous murders. they´d line the people up, naked, and shoot one. remove the body. move the next person in. shoot them.
in the same courtyard, there were some posts with rings. they would twist a prisoner´s arms behind their back and hang them by their wrists from the posts. i can´t even imagine how painful that could be.
and then you continue into barracks 11. number 11 was the experimentation building. this is where the most atrocious scientific testing went on. the sterilization tests. the gas tests. the deprivation tests. the absolute pinnacle of sadism and atrocity. in the basement are the containment rooms. one room was used for sleep and food deprivation. another had no windows and no spaces in the doors and was used for oxygen deprivation, not to mention light. and it was a sizable room. not big. not enough to starve to death before running out of oxygen.
and there is a series of four rooms, with really low doors - they had to crawl through them, that are about 2 metres by 2 metres wide. and they would squeeze 4 people into them. of course, they would have to stand. and they´d be there all night. and then they would have them work the next day. and then they would put them back in the standing rooms. many people died of exhaustion in there. many people died of sleep deprivation. many people died of oxygen deprivation.
and it´s still the little things. it´s the clang of a metal plate in the basement of building 11. how many people, how many prisoners walked over that plate and made that same noise? maybe it wasn´t loose in the early 1940´s. but it was there. how many people walked over it with barefeet and noticed it´s coldness?
and it´s still the little things. it´s the smell of wood that eminates from the officers quarters in building 11. the same smell that you associate with a log cabin and the warm fire glowing inside. the same smell you associate with wilderness and roughness and the beauty of nature. and then you reapply it to horror and your mind breaks down. and you go numb. and you can´t talk. and you can´t feel anything but terror and sadness and utter helplessness. you want water, but you take it for granted. you want food, but you feel bad because you can have food any time you want it. so then you aren´t hungry any longer.
and then you go to the only existing crematorium. the one at Auschwitz I is still there. they had to rebuild the furnaces after the war because they had been dismantled. but the gas chamber is still there. the same gas chamber which could kill only 700 people in one fell swoop. they would then spend 2 days incinerating the bodies of one gasing. it simply wasn´t efficient enough.
so they built Auschwitz II - Birkenau. designed explicitly for mass extermination.
Auschwitz II is evil. you feel it when you walk around there. it´s in the ground. it´s in the water in the contamination ponds, still gray with people´s ashes - the ashes of the people burned in the same spot (outdoors) when the furnaces just couldn´t incinerate at the rate you were producing corpses.
when we first arrived. we pulled up at the back. not the main gate, which the railroad cars came through. on the particular side where we arrived were the brick barracks. or what remained of some of the brick barracks.
and still it´s the small things. it´s the fragile little bird, perching on one of the countless rows of barbed wire that surround the camp.
and around the back, there are the crematoriums. i said ¨only 700¨ before, because these monstrosities - there were two, side by side - could kill 2000 people at once. but they´re ruins now because the SS didn´t want them to be around after they withdrew.
and there´s the monument, built in the 1960´s, enormous and black and built to honor those who struggled through or suffered ultimately at the hands of merciless, inhuman people.
and then there are the railroad tracks. four rows of railroad tracks. designed to ferry unsuspecting people to their deaths. there´s a famous photo of the selection process where an SS officer is flipping his thumb left (for ¨to the chambers¨) or right (for ¨to work¨) presented that makes you ill. and as you stand looking at the photo, you realize the barrack in the background of the photo is the one that is standing behind the photograph.
and you shiver and shake. and you remember all the photos you´ve seen of crowds of people being ushered to their deaths. and you are there. YOU ARE THERE.
and you see the wooden barracks, that were originally meant to be stables. that they converted into bunk houses. where you were forced to live in quarantine. and you were frightened into submission. and many people were dying around you from illnesses like thyphoid and diphtheria. and the toilets aren´t private. and in summer they stink and rot as the building fills up with the stench of many peoples feces which will not empty into the sewers because, lo and behold, the toilets might look like they go to the sewers, but they really don´t.
the guide tells you no one person was allowed to stay in those barracks for more than three months. it was against SS rules. after three months, it was extermination for you.
and you notice the rows and rows of demolished wooden barracks. and you think about how many people were housed there. how many people survived? 200 people escaped. successfully. from Auschwitz (the complete area) and mostly when they were out of the camps working on farms or in factories. 1.5 million people were killed.
and you talk to the Venezuelan kid (and his friends) who kept asking about ¨where sector B was¨. and he tells you, ¨my grandmother was in sector B. she´s hungarian.¨ so she survived? yes, and she moved to Venezuela after Chile didn´t work. does she have a number on her arm? no, she doesn´t. (only Auschwitz camp prisoners were tattooed with numbers. other camps didn´t have them.)
and you return to Krakow. your mind lost in the surreal thought that, actually, it was all real. you knew it was real before. but now you have seen the places. you´ve seen the pictures. and you have a connection to it. and it´s a part of you. and you think to yourself, why aren´t we doing ANYTHING about Darfur?! it´s not as organized. but in a way, it´s worse. it´s chaotic. it´s slaughter. and there´s rape, of which there wasn´t much during WWII because it was a crime to contaminate the race that way. why aren´t we stopping the genocide? the west is complacent. the west cares, but only in a superficial, unhelpful way. let´s pass some legislation calling it genocide and condemn it and blah blah blah and call it a day. i feel like coffee.
and so, i returned to Krakow and took a long walk around the central city. it´s quite beautiful. the old town square (the largest in Europe) is beautiful. i went up the tower of St. Mary´s cathedral after i saw the interior. you get a great view of the square from such a great height.
and i walked the entire length of the park that surrounds the stare miasto (old town). it rings it and makes for a lovely walk.
i stopped for some cottage cheese and cabbage pierogi and beetroot soup for dinner. they were good. but substantively lacking.
and then i walked back to my hostel. tired from an exhausting day.
tomorrow, i plan on seeing the castle (Wawel) and going to the salt mines (a cavernous cathedral carved into some salt mines some ways outside of Krakow).
Welcome to the 8th of August, the day after my birthday, and the day Iigot on a train from Prague to Ostrava (NE Czech Republic), where i then changed to a train bound for Katowice, Poland, where i then changed to a train bound for Krakow, where i am now sitting in a hostel typing what i hope to be the first entry in a trip diary. a trip that is anomolous in form. i´m going day by day here and doing minimal planning.
i´m staying in Strawberry Hostel just outside of the old town. and tomorrow morning i´m waking up bright and early to not see the city. instead, i will be starting with Auschwitz-Birkenau. a nice light beginning to what will inevitably be an exciting trip...
as for the train ride, the things i shall remember:
from Praha to Ostrava
- the girl sitting across from me who reminded me of a girl from Carleton. her name was Bree. the carleton girl, that is.
- reading. and reading. i´m reading a book entitled ¨The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night¨. it´s excellent so far.
the Ostrava train station
- i was standing alone, wondering whether or not the station was used by the Nazis during the war. WWII and the holocaust was on my mind because i was and am planning/going to Auschwitz. and so things were kinda dark (mentally) at that point.
from Ostrava to Katowice
- the only way i knew i was in poland was because my mobile told me via an SMS. no border marks at all. and i didn´t get a stamp when they checked my passport. grrr...
- i found a place to stay tonight on the train. that is to say that the Strawberry Hostel people hire people out to roam the trains and provide information to tourists heading to Krakow. if they ask about hostels, they immediately suggest Strawberry Hostel. an ingenious thing to do, really. and it´s only costing me 33 zloty a night, which is roughly 33 zloty, which is roughly $10.
- i had the compartment to myself, so i got to put my feet up.
- it was this train where i realized that, despite my limited knowledge of czech, i won´t be able to understand a lick of Polish. oh well.
from Katowice to Krakow
- again, the compartment to myself. very nice.
- as we were humming along, i looked out and saw a brilliant, pastel pink reflecting off of a passing building.. (heh heh.. a passing building...) so i got up and looked to the rear of the train and saw a very obscured and brief glimpse of the most picture perfect pastel sunset i´ve ever seen.
in Krakow
- a big red van picked me and other passengers up from the train stations. it was like a strawberry, heh.
- i´m sharing a room with a dutch guy and a sri lankan who lives (and has been living for a long time) just outside of stockholm, sweden.
- i withdrew 500 zloty from the bankomat before setting foot in my hostel. and i booked my Auschwitz trip first thing, as it is sponsored by the hostel.
and now i´m using the hostels free internet to tell you all about today. expect day 2 tomorrow, since it´s free.
TODAY is the day before August 8th.
TODAY i want to thank my parents for the trip to Scotland (and miscellaneous additions to my kilt outfit).
TODAY i want to thank agi for the book. it will definitely be read on my upcoming trip.
TODAY i want to thank dave and gabi for taking me to dinner last night.
TODAY i want to thank libby for buying me beer on friday night.
TODAY i want to thank andrew and julie for the dvds and jacket and whatnot. the former will surely be watched and the latter will surely be worn.
TODAY i want to thank grammy for the contribution towards my upcoming trip.
TODAY is the day after August 6th.
so, i'm celebrating.
i guess i only have numbers divisible by 10 to look forward to now. and i suppose social security, which i will hopefully not really rely on when it comes around.
hope all is well in everybody's respective corners of the world!
...missing something.
i'm listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds most recent album(s) (Abattoir Blues and Lyre o