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.