Polished Poland

We've been in Poland since last Saturday night, 5 days now, and it's growing on us. We came by train from affluent and burgeoning Berlin, where the architectural mistakes of the communist years are rapidly being replaced by adventurous and eye-popping creations, and we knew almost as soon as we crossed the border that we'd left the land where money grows on trees. The smooth whirrrr of the German rails was replaced by rattle-te-bump-te-bump-te-BUMP and my attempts at knitting grew futile. The farmhouses we saw in passing looked like they were standing up more out of habit than anything. Even Warsaw looked grubby in places.

But there are compensations in Poland. Sunday we explored Warsaw's historic centre, beautifully reconstructed from the mass of rubble left by the Nazis (Hitler wanted Warsaw eradicated after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising). We strolled through a lovely tree-filled park looking for an afternoon Chopin piano concert, and when we found it had a great time listening to the whole soundscape - thrushes, happy kids, passing traffic, and occasionally some tinkling from a piano. As musical art it was disappointing, but as an experience it was totally wonderful.

Sunday evening we happened upon Warsaw's greatest treasure, in our humble opinion: the Warsaw Chamber Opera and its Mozart festival. Over six weeks in June and July they present all of Mozart's stage works, every single one of them. Their theatre seats about 160 people, so it's like having the performers in your living room. And such performers. We saw The Abduction from the Seraglio, which turns out to be sort of a rough sketch for the Magic Flute - not a great work, but fun, and sung and performed beautifully and with great enthusiasm. We decided that the WCO deserves at least a Michelin two star rating: worth making a detour for if you're in the neighbourhood; when we're heading to Kiev for our Dniepr river cruse in July we'll go via Warsaw and catch the last two performances, Magic Flute and Don Giovanni.

We've been in Krakow since Monday. It's Poland's ancient capital and very lovely, having escaped destruction in the 20th century's wars. It's full of music; we've gone to a concert every night this week, of uneven quality - but wow! you can go to a concert every day! There are incredibly lovely old churches, and a castle, and burial mounds - all good stuff. We had a different sort of city tour yesterday: the Crazy Guide's Real Krakow Tour. Worth doing if you're ever here. We were taken around the city in an ancient Trabant, a product of communist East Germany with a two-stroke engine and 23 hp. This one was made in the 80s, although the design was from the 50s. Most of the time it needed to be pushed to get it started, although strategic hill parking could make that unnecessary. Our guide showed us things like a 19th-century burial mound from which we could view the whole city, the old Jewish area (there are now maybe 100 Jews in Krakow, but around 5 functioning synagogues), and Nowa Huta, a steel mill and associated town given by Stalin to this bourgeois city to try to bring some proletariat and support for the communist party into the area. Our guide was a young man studying sociology in the excellent university here, so we heard some thoughtful and knowledgeable meditations on Poland, communism, and this lovely city.

The day before we took a more normal tour of a salt mine that has been operating for at least 600 years - very interesting. And today we had the same type of tour to Auschwitz, just an hour away. It was a hard place to visit, but I thought I owed it to the people I've met in the past who had numbers tatooed on their arms. I can't begin to imagine what makes an ordinary person dream up such horrors, or cooperate with those who dream them up. Imagine gassing and cremating a few thousand people at work every day and then going home and kissing the wife and playing with the kids. And yet I know, given the right circumstances, that we could all do it. But why? And how did it make sense to do such things to other ordinary people, people who could have been next-door neighbours if the times had been different. I don't understand.

So when we got back I took a walk into the ordinary Krakovians' shopping area looking for a wool store. Found a couple, and also found that the excellent English we'd been treated to around here exists only in the tourist area. My Polish vocabulary is "thank you" and "hello" - very useful but limited. Nevertheless I found some nice sock wool and had my current project, a top-down summer cardigan, admired by the lady in the store. Knitting is fairly universal. It also keeps one sane when confronted with horrors like Auschwitz.

Tomorrow we head off to the mountains of Slovakia, buses and trains willing.

Rainy Monday in Dresden

We've been on the road for more than a week now and this is the first time we've had a chance to sit still and get an Internet fix. And I'm not sorry. It's been far too interesting to waste time in front of a computer.

We flew from Izmir to Istanbul and then Vienna a week ago yesterday. Ron had found us a nice little hotel a block or so outside the historic center of the city so we were able to walk to nearly everything of interest - if we'd had time. But the first evening we went to a concert in the Baroque summer palace at Schönbrunn (a nice little place where the Habsburg family could get away from things and relax with 2000 of their closest friends) - same room as Mozart and Salieri had their head-to-head competition (Salieri won, the movie Amadeus notwithstanding). The next day we had a bus tour around the old city and Schönbrunn, then scored some tickets to Verdi's opera Otello at the Staatsoper, which we toured in the afternoon. Most interesting to see the stage being set up for the show we watched that night. Our seats didn't have the best view - back of a box - but the music was magnificent and we could see well enough if we stood up. The opera house was destroyed in 1945 (by accident), and it says something about the Austrian people's set of priorities that it was one of the first things they restored.

Tuesday we had a most interesting bus tour into the countryside - a historic house, an old and beautiful (and growing!) monastery, and the second-largest underground lake in Europe. Loved it all. Beautiful cities full of historic buildings (which Vienna certainly is) are all very well, but the unique thing in any part of the world is the countryside.

Wednesday we headed off to Prague by train, which is really the only sensible way to travel in Europe, fast and comfortable and environmentally friendly. But it is slower than plane, so we had only a short time to walk around after settling into our apartment-like hotel suite. Again we were in the middle of everything. Prague made a great impression. It's less uniform in style than Vienna. Not being the capital of the empire means the city doesn't get remodelled every time fashions change, so Prague is a delightful mix of medieval, baroque, classical and modern styles (Frank Geary did a great building there that I hope I have a picture of - looks like a couple dancing). The language took some getting used to, and I never got used to feeling illiterate there, but many Czechs speak fine English.

We got a trip out into the country there, too, on Saturday - a bus tour to the brewery at Pilsen. That was nice, especially the old parts, but one factory is very much like another. The best part for me was the tour of a vast cave system in the limestone area near Pilsen. It had been used by coin forgers in the 15th century and then forgotton until the limestone diggings nearby hit it. It has some wonderful stone formations and was fun to visit. The beer in Pilsen was great, too, and helped us continue our eponymous degustation tour: Pilsner in Pilsen (and wieners and wiener schnitzel in Vienna).

So now we're in Dresden. We got here yesterday by train to a border town, paddlewheel steamer along the Elbe river to a town on the outskirts, and train into the city. What a spectacularly beautiful area the Elbe flows through! And we were the only English speakers on the boat - the tourist industry hasn't discovered this part of Germany yet. The Black Forest is nothing compared to the Elbe. Come before it's ruined by tourists.

We're staying right in the centre of Dresden, the part that was fire-bombed into oblivion. There wasn't much restoration done during the communist times. They just built cement monstrosities, which are gradually being knocked down and replaced by something closer to what the city used to have. And the only people who speak much English are the under-30s, although I'm sure the older ones are fluent in Russian. It's very different from other parts of Germany we've seen, but worth a visit - if only for the Saxony wines, unknown and underrated in the rest of the world.

Time's running out but that's it for the most part. We're still able to walk. My broken wrist is healing little by little. We're at a comfy, warm and dry Internet cafe. What more can we want? (Just a kezboard that has the z and y where I expect them instead of switched. grmp.)

Cheers, y'all.

Time out in Bodrum

Ron's been busy planning our next major excursion, to Eastern Europe and thereabouts, for some time, and we didn't think we needed much more travelling than that. But things have been getting a little noisy in Üçyol recently with the natural gas coming to this part of the city, and it has been unreasonably hot. We needed a break from the jackhammers and the sweat. So I went onto Trip Advisor and looked for an inexpensive, quiet hotel near Bodrum.
Bodrum had never been high on our to-see list. It's supposed to be a noisy tourist trap. But it's a part of Turkey many people see and we thought we should, too.

And it was a delightful surprise.

The summer season doesn't really start here for another week, and Bodrum was only maybe 1/4 full of visitors - many of them Turkish. And our hotel wasn't in the town but along the coast 20 km or so in a quiet little village. The Sunny Garden Nilufer is quite a large place, but there were only maybe a dozen guests there in this quiet part of the season. And what a pleasant group of people they were! All English except for us and two Irish girls (who immediately captured the heart of the barman). We enjoyed the company of all the other guests and ended up hanging around the breakfast or dinner table far later than we'd planned.

Usually I'm upset to see rampant tourist developments taking over an area, but the Bodrum peninsula is different. For whatever reason the land seems barren and desolate - recently volcanic, probably, and very dry and rocky. There's not much agriculture possible, and fishing isn't providing a very good living these days either. It looks like tourism is the best possible use of the land. And the sea is so warm and clear, and the people so warm and hospitable - it's a perfect place to holiday. We were surprised, too, to see how much real Turkish life still goes on around there. A tourist with eyes to see can learn quite a bit about Turkey hanging out here. It's not a bad place at all. And places like this give young Turks a reason to learn English - many of the people you meet there are able to make a good effort in at least a couple of European languages, which is not normal in Turkey. I suspect anyone who manages to learn a bit of English heads there to work for the summer. Maybe that's why you can't find English speakers in Izmir.

Anyway, it was worth doing and we'd recommend the Sunny Garden Nilufer to anyone. Now we're back among the jackhammers of Izmir looking forward to the peace and quiet of Vienna in a couple of days.

Disappearing history

My Google alert on Turkey picked up this article the other day, talking about the house in İzmir that might be the home of the 17th-century Jewish "false messiah" Shabbatai Tzvi. The address it mentions, "920 Agora Girisi", doesn't exist, but there's a 920 Sokak beside the ancient Greco-Roman Agora, so we went there to look. This picture shows what we found.

The ancient brick-and-stone house seems to have had a modern cement block wing added. The wall you can see at the right marks the edge of the Agora excavations. The whole block to the west of the Agora seems to be being cleared, maybe for expanded excavations, or maybe because the whole area is an eyesore begging to be torn down.

But it doesn't have to be that way. On our travels this year we've spent lots of good tourist dollars in restored medieval cities. It's all the rage to fix up your old neighbourhoods and offer tourists places to stay in atmospheric pensions. To some extent Antalya in the south of Turkey has done that, too. But not İzmir. Here the oldest, most history-filled part of town is collapsing about the ears of the Kurds and Gypsies who are the only ones desperate and brave enough to live there. And any tourist who may stray into the Agora is in danger of being attacked by hordes of pestering children and pickpockets. No wonder the tourist books say there's nothing to see in İzmir.

I wish there was some far-sighted generous benefactor here who would restore this incredibly beautiful and historically valuable part of town before it's all lost. Anyone have a spare couple of million lira lying around they'd like to invest in a city's past and future?

This just in (June 9)
This story tells us that Izmir plans to renovate the areas from the ancient castle of Kadifekale through the Agora to the Kemeraltı market. Good work, guys!