Poland VI: The End
May. 23rd, 2009 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBack in Bamberg (and tomorrow off to Munich), after an incredible week. Yesterday, aka the working day which justified my going to Krakow, went well, and I did not sound like the Pope, and today our drive back to Bamberg, with one stop in between, went smoothly as well. So I can leave you with one last Polish pic spam which sums up different sides of my week in Poland for me: the people, the magnificent architecture, and some of the history.
History first: before I went to my day of meetings, debates and speeches, the APs & self walked to a Krakow suburb to pay homage to one of the few good stories of the past the worst of which we had visited on Tuesday.
There is a small one room exhibition inside dedicated to Schindler, the story of the factory and the story of the Krakow Ghetto, and they're working on converting the old office into a genuine museum, but it's not finished yet. An old run-down industrial building like many other, and yet one of the few physical reminders that you could save instead of kill, that you could do this even as a member of the party who originally had just been interested in making some cash, that you could apply all your courage and skills and save over a thousand people only fifty kilometres away from Auschwitz.
We walked back to the city centre - which takes about twenty minutes, I spent the rest of the day working, and this was the last but one place we visited in Poland (excepting conference halls. The last one was Czestochowa, where the monestary Jana Gora is something like Lourdes in France, one of the main destinations for pilgrims. About four million a year, and so naturally there were quite a lot of them on any given day of the week, including the one we picked for visiting. Which we had expected. What we hadn't expected was that many of the people were girls and boys in their first communion dresses. (In Germany, the boys usually wear blue suits and the girls white dresses; here the boys wore what looked like white monk's robes.) Now May is the month for first communion, of course, but still, it wasn't Sunday, so we were a tad confused, and then learned that what happens is that one year after first communion, you make a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna at Czestochowa wearing your dress and 'robe respectively for the anniversary, which is what these boys and girls were doing. Luckily for visitors, the fact their parents came armed with cameras made us feel not guilty for taking pictures as well. From the sidelines; as a non-pilgrim, you're rushed through on the sidelines of the main church while the children and parents are in the centre, as they should. Hence only photos of parts, as I wasn't able to stay anywhere long enough to make one of the entirety. But I think they render something of the fervency of the place.
Lastly, I need to go a day back to Friday again. In between talking literature and cultural exchange, we had a late lunch at a lovely restaurant in one of the courtyards behind the houses, which looked like this:
There were two canaries around which at times sang so loudly we had trouble hearing ourselves, and I marvelled at the body-volume of voice relation, which could never be matched by a human singer. It was one more note in a very agreeable Polish-German chit chat, debating everything under the sun from the Andrej Wajda's Oscar now donated to to the Collegium Caius to world policy to why you shouldn't eat one particular type of sausage outside of Bavaria. In short, it was fun, and if I hadn't already decided that I must come back to Poland, I would have during that hospitable lunch. Until then, do widzenia, auf Wiedersehen, beautiful country:
Dziekuje.
History first: before I went to my day of meetings, debates and speeches, the APs & self walked to a Krakow suburb to pay homage to one of the few good stories of the past the worst of which we had visited on Tuesday.
There is a small one room exhibition inside dedicated to Schindler, the story of the factory and the story of the Krakow Ghetto, and they're working on converting the old office into a genuine museum, but it's not finished yet. An old run-down industrial building like many other, and yet one of the few physical reminders that you could save instead of kill, that you could do this even as a member of the party who originally had just been interested in making some cash, that you could apply all your courage and skills and save over a thousand people only fifty kilometres away from Auschwitz.
We walked back to the city centre - which takes about twenty minutes, I spent the rest of the day working, and this was the last but one place we visited in Poland (excepting conference halls. The last one was Czestochowa, where the monestary Jana Gora is something like Lourdes in France, one of the main destinations for pilgrims. About four million a year, and so naturally there were quite a lot of them on any given day of the week, including the one we picked for visiting. Which we had expected. What we hadn't expected was that many of the people were girls and boys in their first communion dresses. (In Germany, the boys usually wear blue suits and the girls white dresses; here the boys wore what looked like white monk's robes.) Now May is the month for first communion, of course, but still, it wasn't Sunday, so we were a tad confused, and then learned that what happens is that one year after first communion, you make a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna at Czestochowa wearing your dress and 'robe respectively for the anniversary, which is what these boys and girls were doing. Luckily for visitors, the fact their parents came armed with cameras made us feel not guilty for taking pictures as well. From the sidelines; as a non-pilgrim, you're rushed through on the sidelines of the main church while the children and parents are in the centre, as they should. Hence only photos of parts, as I wasn't able to stay anywhere long enough to make one of the entirety. But I think they render something of the fervency of the place.
Lastly, I need to go a day back to Friday again. In between talking literature and cultural exchange, we had a late lunch at a lovely restaurant in one of the courtyards behind the houses, which looked like this:
There were two canaries around which at times sang so loudly we had trouble hearing ourselves, and I marvelled at the body-volume of voice relation, which could never be matched by a human singer. It was one more note in a very agreeable Polish-German chit chat, debating everything under the sun from the Andrej Wajda's Oscar now donated to to the Collegium Caius to world policy to why you shouldn't eat one particular type of sausage outside of Bavaria. In short, it was fun, and if I hadn't already decided that I must come back to Poland, I would have during that hospitable lunch. Until then, do widzenia, auf Wiedersehen, beautiful country:
Dziekuje.
