Multikrakówlturalism

August 2015

“I. Am. A. Bear!” the brawny British voice bawls from the table to my left, hacking a brutal hole in the cosy twilight envelope of a peaceful Kraków bar’s fairy-lit courtyard.

With a resigned fingertip I bookmark the partially digested paragraph of my book, knowing the lone digit is predestined to the frequent fate for an unfocused mind: a quick slide across the yellowy page and into oblivion.

“No, you’re a wolverine.”

A clarification from his local-accented companion, in anthropomorphic endorsement.

I visualise the fusion wolf pack stalking an historic path through a warm afternoon in Kraków’s old Kazimierz quarter.

“No, I’m affectionately known just as ‘The Bear’.”

Encouraged, the voice booms louder into the eager, open faces of his captive audience of three, huddling in the looming shadow of his ever-aggrandising soapbox. An involuntary audience of many more catches the collateral soundwaves.

I inspect my drink. Maybe beer would have been better; I should look up the hallucinogenic properties of szarlotka, the local cocktail specialty. Sure, it tastes like apple pie, but that didn’t turn out so well for Hansel and Gretel, did it?

“But I also have a shark-like mouth.”

Rising off his gloss-white, wrought iron throne, he circles the table, an inadvertent dramatic oomph added by the crunch-crunch-crunch percussion of round milky pebbles underfoot. The fairy lights writhe in a sinister, tessellated dance across his face.

You’ve certainly got a mouth. A churlish mutter within my head.

Is this how a night begins at one of those infamous British university dining clubs? Having spent the odd Saturday night in the stale basement of a few frat houses at college, it’s the only tangential comparison I can bring to mind.

I try to drown the baying by crushing an ice cube between my teeth. The sharp claws of brain freeze and reverberating icy cracks are no match for the mythical hirsute shark gnashing at my periphery.

“Gatsby, it’s a pleasure to sit next to you while surrounded by so many poor people who chose our company tonight,” he bellows to his decidedly un-Gatsby-like seatmate, as the conversation shifts from the animal kingdom.

Surprisingly insightful. Another internal snipe.

I’ve cast my reading aside, bookmark hand redirected to filling my notebook with transcriptions. Eavesdropping—though is it, when done under duress?—is a generous benefactor.

Another handful of distracted minutes later my stomach wins out over wolverines and sharks and bears, oh my. I shatter a few final frosty cubes in sub-zero resignation and wander across the street to revisit a menu I’d eyed earlier.

Spruiking the promise of Polish classics with a contemporary twist, intrigue lures me inside.

As Bob Marley reassures me over the speakers that ‘no woman no cry’ over my choice of dishes, I contemplate Polish escargot, local trout and involtini, among other border-traversing options. Italian wines and German beer provide European Union palate-whetting.

At the very least it seems emblematic of this neighbourhood of Poland’s second city. Wearing the heavy history of centuries of Catholic and Jewish co-occupancy, synagogues and steeples alternate their stony footprints over jagged slices of real estate carved into the zigzagging streets.

It’s the peak of tourist season, and crowds as diverse as my evening’s menu hover around the main square. After dinner I join a quilt of inter-stitched languages—less intrusive than my earlier ursine courtyard dweller—threading itself where so much division once lived. There’s no ice crushing needed here. My ears enjoy themselves.

* * *

* * *

The next morning, a couple short intersections and a left-hand turn farther west, the scene changes.

I walk into the simplicity of a bar mleczny—directly translated, a ‘milk bar’, and more accurately a blue-collar workers’ cafeteria—a carryover from last century’s socialist and communist era conditions of food rationing and economic depression. A staple for locals, this type of frill-free spot continues to offer affordable, tasty meals.

It’s all gridded geometry. From the black, cream and rust-coloured floor tiles, to the dozen square tables clothed in red-and-white checkerboard plastic and topped with paper doilies, the parallel and perpendicular reign. An extensive handwritten menu, black ink on white Perspex between neatly ruled lines like a yearly planner, stretches nearly two metres in each direction on the wall.

Behind a counter, dwarfed by the spindly capital letters of many dozens of dishes I can’t decipher, stands a woman. Alongside her is another grid, a steaming three-by-three bain-marie of soups, unidentifiable save for the crimson fluorescence of borscht. Her navy blue apron vest is speckled with a similar rouged glow.

A narrow window and doorway over her left shoulder offer fractured views into the kitchen. Gruffly raised voices of several other women slingshot back and forth from within like a frenzied ping-pong battle.

The woman digs into a crowded drawer and extracts a plastic sleeve bulging with a wad of stapled pages: an English menu. She waits expectantly as I read.

A gentleman in his seventies appears next to me. He swaps greetings with the woman, then peers at me and the menu.

“Deutsch?”

“No,” I respond. “Do you speak English?”

“Only a little…”

We limp through a broken conversation on a mutual crutch of French-English. More fusion.

She hands him a foam box.

“My brother’s lunch. I collect it for him.” He waves the box at me.

“What’s good?” The English menu still holds a few secrets.

“All of it!” he grins back unselfconsciously.

He gently presses the tab on the box lid, unlocking a rolling cloud of steam and, like the great reveal of a magician, a half-second later an explosion of rich gravy wafts from a pile of sliced veal and rough chunks of boiled potatoes.

“Traditional,” he shrugs.

Together we survey the expanse of soups and I ask about the front left vat that looks particularly interesting.

“Tripe soup.” Matter-of-fact, no caution.

Suddenly less interesting.

Instead, cheese and spinach pierogi and borscht with potatoes—semi-submerged, crumbling icebergs in a glassy, rose-coloured psychedelic ocean—form a welcome and vibrant brunch against the patchwork tablecloth. Out of synch with the time of day, nobody bats an eyelid. Culinary curiosity knows no clock restrictions.

The vinegary broth flicks on my tongue as I watch a steady flow of locals pin down the tablecloths with wrinkled elbows. Bulging string shopping bags sag with relief on the tiled floor as their handlers pause for a knowing bowl of this and a sustaining plate of that. None linger longer than to scrape plates into a bin and add to the pile of gravy-slicked ceramics towering in the narrow window with a procedural nous that seems nearly hereditary.

It’s a nourishing start to the day.

* * *

* * *

On a guided walking tour that afternoon, the area’s jig-sawed history is unveiled in more depth. Working around a little too much detail on Steven Spielberg’s favourite film locations for Schindler’s List, our guide is a master storyteller. His knack for entangling humour and history is underpinned by both sadness and hope.

“It’s what’s inside that counts, right ladies? I mean, look at my face… but my heart? And my way with words?” He chuckles, describing the contrast between the visibly striking Catholic churches, and the muted synagogue exteriors that hide beautiful internal chambers.

“There are only about 430 practicing Jews living in Kraków now,” he tells us, as we stand outside the Jewish Community Centre of Kraków, which tracks these staggering statistics.

“So many never wanted to return, never felt they would be welcomed or at home here again…”

It’s engrossing but also disconcerting to be walking these vibrant streets that once defined the 1940s Jewish ghetto, the grim, brief home to nearly 20,000 displaced Polish Jews.

* * *

* * *

The next evening I’m back at the bar mleczny for strawberry pierogi, the first dish in what becomes a four-stop, rolling dinner. My friend behind the counter smiles in recognition as I order dessert as an appetiser. No rules, just opaque, doughy shells floating in a bath of sugary cream, the colour combination again matching the tablecloth. I smile back.

A bowl of chilled cucumber soup, a dill pickle and a cabbage-stuffed sweet pepper later—two more pauses at curbside eateries around the main square—and the sunlight fades, replaced by the glow of halogen lamps. With it comes a swell of happy faces. The bars hum in the warm air.

The stomach wants what the stomach wants. And even when it doesn’t really, sitting in the square at 11pm once more surrounded by the murmur of foreign tongues, a foot-long pizza baguette—local, via Italy?—and a horseradish vodka nightcap can’t be refused. Just for the challenge and the chance to linger a little longer.

And in the haze of food and playful energy around me, the possibilities seem limitless.

I crunch on my baguette.

Bus-ting for a break

August 2015

6:34am. Sunday morning. Budapest.

“Why the hell am I up?” my brain synaptically screams as I haphazardly pirouette in the middle of the implausibly busy bus station.

“And where’s the fucking bus to Krakow?” I curse the necessity of catching the once-a-day service.

After stopping for a caffeine hit that could have cleaned a blocked drain – locating logic, not just the bus, requires such stimulants during semi-conscious-mini-crises – I find an information booth.

Frizzle, meet frazzle. A staffer, her cinnamon-hued hair deranged like mine, a look of bored vacancy, unlike mine, stares back in a disjointed mirror image.

All that’s missing is a big balloon of bubble gum nonchalantly inching its rubbery diameter towards the glossy glass separating our two worlds.

No, the Krakow bus leaves from outside and across the street, I learn. This station is for the national bus line only.

My own bubble popped, I hightail it out to where, shimmering like an oasis on the other side of an endlessly wide asphalt abyss, a shiny white coach beckons.

6:51am. Whew. Made it.

“Is this the bus to Krakow?” I ask a similarly confused crowd of backpack-shackled sleepwalkers.

“Vienna. Krakow is behind this one.”

‘Behind’ proves appropriate for more than just a directional definition.

Like an old man on oxygen, a bus from several eons long past wheezes what may well be its final breaths.

It’s a first impression alright. Paint peeling. Aluminium siding grimly dented and mauled. Window frames short a few rivets and filled with a dust that seems to have codified into some glass-imitating material that hides the dark, lurid interior.

Two gentlemen whom I can’t help but suspect may have less than desirable ‘business’ connections stand disinterestedly on the curb.

Sweat is already leaving its muggy fingerprints on their thin cotton button-downs, unbuttoned down to their lower ribs and barely containing eruptions of speckled chest hair like fading newsprint.

Thick moustaches caterpillar their way above dangling cigarettes, possibly burning since eternity.

One marks off names on a printed passenger list and grunts with a matching head flick in the direction of the bus door. His doppelganger looks on, finally exterminating his flame in the gutter while simultaneously lighting another.

I wish my bag good luck, hurl it into the gaping belly of the gasping beast and climb aboard for what’s advertised as a 6.5-hour trip.

I’m sitting across the aisle from three of my countrymen, who confess they last slept yesterday before promptly passing out in a tangled heap as the bus lurches off the curb and into the Sunday sunrise spreading its humid hues over suburban Budapest.

I drift off not long after. So too does the second in command, splayed across the front row of seats with his legs hanging into the aisle like his earlier cigarette, the only part of him visible down the oesophagus of the mass mover.

I awake an hour or so later as we grind to a sharp halt on a gravel shoulder near the skeleton of what was once a town: it’s the Slovakian border. A café, border checkpoint office, tourist bureau and houses all stand empty in decay. It’s rather fitting for a busload of zombies.

Our two drivers wordlessly disappear into a distant building – perhaps not so abandoned after all – leaving their groggy wards to stare out the grimy windows.

A handful of us tumble out for a toilet break behind the nearest empty brick shell; there’s no restroom in sight.

Fifteen unexplained minutes later our fearless leaders return and, after a quick head count, we’re ploughing full speed into Slovakia.

The blacktop harvest doesn’t last long, for five minutes into the new country we pull up at a fully serviced petrol station, replete with food and toilets, and the door swings open again.

“Ten-minute toilet break!” the driver growls.

I take solace in having emptied my bladder several kilometres behind us, and instead spend my toilet entry fee on a packet of paprika chips and some strange strawberry shortcake flavoured chocolate.

It’s a small victory.

The wheels roll an hour of indeterminate distance further into the Slovakian countryside before another petrol station lures us in with the promise of a clean bathroom and snack.

I look at my watch. The rapid approach of 11:00am, once so far away on the clock, magnifies the distance yet to travel, and I wonder whether the 1:30pm arrival time I’d given my expectant Krakow host was a gross miscalculation.

The eastern European petrol station tour continues languidly.

Slovakian skies.

In between naps, I take in steep, forest-covered peaks and terracotta-tiled towns wedged around our twisting route north, their stuccoed belfries marking their place on the highway periphery.

Somewhere north of the ancient town of Banska Bystrica, a voice carries from somewhere deep behind me.

“A toilet please! Can we stop for a toilet please?”

Non-acknowledgement echoes from the driver’s seat until the bus veers unexpectedly into the narrow entrance of our third petrol station in two hours.

Halfway in, the driver realises his misjudgement: the bus won’t fit. He sardines the bus diagonally between a row of parked cars on our left and a curb on the right.

What follows is the awkward first dance at a debutant ball, as he attempts what may be automotive history’s pioneering 27-point turn.

He wrenches the gearstick into reverse and laboriously launches a left on the wheel. We inch back a couple feet and just as quickly slam to a quivering stop. He flings the wheel the opposite way and the process repeats. A seesawing battle of increments ensues, as the nose of the sinking ship swings right, painful inch by painful inch.

Meanwhile, to our left, a handful of spectators emerge from their parked cars. To orientate, to berate, to gesticulate, I can’t tell, as one man pops his head up outside the driver’s window and begins to yell.

The driver lets the wayward words ricochet like raindrops off the glass and continues to wage war on the wheel.

With an abrupt, metallic thump, the bus’s right side wears the brutal left hook of an unsuspecting and unseen parking sign.

People on board scream.

I hear laughter. It’s my own.

I meet the eyes of my neighbour in the seat behind, and we exchange matching looks, united in alarmed bemusement.

The driver’s manipulation of the wheel becomes more desperate until finally, wearing dual bruises – ego and vehicular – we speed from the car park like a gazelle trying to outrun feeding hour on the tundra, our proverbial head between our tailpipe.

We make it a few hundred metres along the highway to a more mass-transit-friendly petrol station (what else?) to lick our wounds.

If we were playing bus bingo, someone surely would have won by now.

It’s 1:30pm. Krakow remains a border and untold hours into the hazy future.

Forty-five minutes more, and we hit another snag.

The gears suddenly seem to resist five hours of violent manoeuvring by the man behind the fading, sun-perished plastic helm. The bus shudders, audibly groans and starts to subtly sway down the lane. Our driver isn’t a lead foot; cars sizzling past at well above 120 kilometres an hour indicate that. But it’s still rather concerning.

My neighbour and I swap another furtive glance and begin to chat about our choice of transport. I wonder if this will be my last-ever conversation before I’m swallowed up into Slovakian folklore.

But miraculously the gears quiet their discontent as we pass the Polish border, just in time to drop five zloty on a cross-border toilet comparison.

The topography softens, and out either window, rolling felt-like hills are draped with dishevelled smatterings of houses. It’s pretty and benign – unlike the tin tube of terror transecting the rural slumber.

The long road ahead.

My neighbour and I continue to whittle away the time in conversation.

Half an hour passes along with a couple more “sorry I’m still not within a pierogi’s throw of Krakow” text messages to my host.

We pause again.

Not a petrol station this time, but a daubed log cabin nestled under a crumbling canopy of dense foliage overlooking vibrant farmland. Whose woods these are I know not, but Robert Frost’s gravelly drawl improbably comes to mind as I ponder the miles to go before I sleep.

Our dubious duo disappears unannounced once more.

“What the fuck?!” booms from the back.

“Can we please get some air back here?” desperately squeezes its way through the stifling cabin.

“Why can’t we keep going? What’s happening?”

My over-imaginative mind wonders what my kidneys and liver would fetch on the eastern European black market.

At 4:30pm – only three hours behind schedule – we roll into Krakow. Waiting on the curb at the bus station is a huddled mass of irritated faces, surrounded by piles of luggage.

I finally realise why we had two drivers, and I briefly speculate on which petrol stations will receive the hapless return trippers during the long road back to Budapest as the evening is swallowed up somewhere in the distant Slovakian sunset.

But for now it’s time to shun the tarmac and find familiar unfamiliarity in a new city.

This time on foot.