Lublin Old Town and other locations

Wednesday was cool and clear, good weather for our last full day in Lublin. We had university business earlier. Here’s Gary striding purposefully to school . . .



. . . and standing beside the photo of Marie Curie-Sklodowska (as she is known here).

We prevailed on a passing student to take our picture by the statue. This might be our favorite portrait of the trip.


En route to the university we passed their tennis courts—indoor (sheltered by a plastic bubble), and red clay!

After the university business was finished—and Poland is still the land of bureaucracy--we took advantage of the late afternoon light to take some pictures of the pedestrian street and Old Town in Lublin. Gary has to have a physical, get enrolled into the Polish equivalent of the IRS, etc. He plans to pay union dues to get his Solidarity card—maybe they have a T-shirt?

As is the case in Warsaw, the street leading away from the Old Town is called Krakowskie Przedmiescie or Krakow suburbs, and in Lublin it’s lined with banks, fashion shops, and (especially) beer and coffee stands. It’s a good place to stroll in the evening.



The entrance to the Old Town proper is the Krakow gate, the base of which dates from the 13th century.

A little before the gate is a church, which (as many do) posts funeral notices, pieces of paper with thick black borders.


The main square in the Old Town is not open as is the case in Warsaw, but has a court building in the middle. Nonetheless, you can find brightly colored, recently renovated buildings, some of which have pubs and clubs and restaurants, next to buildings in bad need of renovation. To the right is the Jewish restaurant where we ate dinner Wed. night, one of the best meals we’ve had on the trip.


This view shows the Lublin cathedral spire.


This passage is the narrowest in Lublin, perhaps the narrowest in Poland. The picture shows the typical cobblestone streets.


The castle exterior was built in mid-19th-c. because of the wall’s disrepair. However, the castle itself is medieval, with splendid Byzantine mozaics inside. During the war the Gestapo took over the castle as its headquarters.





Two views of the plaza in front of the castle.




On our way back to the Old Town and the Mandragora Restaurant, we stopped by the ruins of St. Michael’s church to take note of the moon, two or three days short of full. A good place to leave our travels for the time being. Thursday we leave for Warsaw, Friday morning Wendy leaves for the US, and Gary starts his work at UMCS in Lublin.


Another view of the front.

Majdanek

Sept. 29
Tuesday was the only bad weather we have had for this whole two week trip. After glorious warm sunshine in Kazimierz Dolny on Monday, we stepped out of our unfortunately cold apartment into a steady rain shower, Wendy with her rain gear and me with my umbrella. The apartment is cold because, as we are told, our apartment is heated by a common system, and they do not turn on the heat until it has been 11 degrees C. (52 F.) or below at 6 p.m. for three consecutive nights. So we find ourselves rooting for continued cold weather—last night we qualified, at 10.5 degrees C.

The part here about Majdanek is pretty depressing stuff, so feel free to skim and skip.

The rain did not continue long, so after a visit to a local mall and some business at UMCS, we made our way to the concentration camp SE of Lublin (at the time), Majdanek. Majdanek was not on the scale of Birkenau – Auschwitz, with the death toll being 78,000. But the exhibit offers an effective illustration of the inhumanity nonetheless. It’s one thing to know about the Holocaust from articles and books, even the first-person narratives such as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and Drohobycz, Drohobycz, or the histories, the photos and web sites, and even the museums such as the Washington Holocaust Museum. It’s another thing to walk on the grounds themselves, to see the mausoleum built over the mountain of human ashes, to walk through the crematorium (we decided not to include that photo) and surviving barracks which housed 500-800 prisoners, to see the large grounds now occupied mostly by Polish crows with a few magpies and incongruous partridges, and to get some feel of the enormity of what went on here. Collective insanity. I hope.






The memorial built here in 1969 is based thematically on Dante’s Inferno—“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Better metaphor than the outright lie which greeted prisoners of Auschwitz, “Labor macht frei,” work makes [you] free. All the work done here kept human beings on starvation fare until typhoid or exhaustion or some kapo’s whim brought death, the last cash value of their bodies, and their bodies’ disposal. I can think of nothing more depressing than the cold texture of the concrete walls where so many were snuffed out. The memorial doesn’t show it at that distance, but it has something of the same crumbling stone texture.





We returned with relief via electric bus to the city and normal life. Maybe that’s all you can do, with the enormity of the war 65 years past, to return to ordinary life. We had the remains of a kebab sandwich with us, and gave that to a forlorn dog on the grounds. He seemed discouraged and didn’t show much interest in it.

Kazimierz Dolny

28 Sept.
Today we traveled by bus to Kazimierz Dolny, a town some 50 mi. from Lublin, on the Vistula River in the direction of Warsaw. Gary has been to Kazimierz several times in previous years, most recently last year with Irmina and Jarek, Andy and Ian. Previous visits were in the summer, when the town is crawling with tourists, artists, summer residents from Warsaw, and those employed to sell things to them. As we are now in late September, the town has about 1/10 of its summer peak population.

Crossing the town square after leaving the bus, the first thing we saw was a fire truck with a camera crew on top, a man giving instructions to about 20 young people under a large shade, and a number of (fellow) gawkers. We found out a little later that they were shooting a commercial that day. Hard to tell what the product was, but we did see a young couple (stars of the commercial) in wedding dress.

Our visit was divided between having some ice cream and coffee, browsing souvenir stands, walking up the hlll to the castle ruins and tower, visiting the parish church in K. of St. John the Baptist and St. Bartholomew, having a bit of lunch at a deserted, upscale restaurant, strolling for a bit along the river, and then catching the bus back to Lublin. Our trip to K. was on one of the local minibuses, packed and rather bouncy; the return was on a regular bus, smoother but quite hot—Wendy said I’d promised her a sauna on this trip.

Pictures:

Views of the Vistula River and the town from the tower







Here we are at the tower’s top (long climb) and on top of the castle ruins







Wendy in her Viking helmet, prepared to defend the castle



Gary relaxing at lunch, the church and castle in the background



Exterior and interior views of the church. A sign noted that the organ is the oldest in Poland

Warsaw

Images from Warsaw. We will add commentary when we can, probably not until Sat. 26 Sept.

Actually, today is Sunday 27 Sept. The pix here date from Thursday, when we went to Wilanow, the summer residence of the 18th-c. kings. Very neo-classical, as you can see. We did a quick tour of the interior, then walked about the grounds a bit.



Two silhouettes . . . some spectacular flowers hereabouts.









After Wilanow, we returned to the old town. Here is Zygmunt's column near the royal castle. To the right of the picture is our hotel, the Castle Inn.



Wendy was tempted by some of the watercolors of Warsaw scenes.



Pigeons are a constant feature hereabouts, competing with the European crows for the odd bit of food.



Friday morning we walked down by the river Wisla (Vistula). The symbol on the wall here is the WWII vintage Polska Walczaza *have to check my Polish here*, meaning Poland fighting. During Solidarity it was adapted to have a letter S and anchor points incorporated.



View of the Old Town in the morning.



Gary taking a bit of the local pastry . . .



Image from Wilanow which we thought interesting--the statue seems to be shading its eyes from the sun.



We came to Lublin on Friday afternoon, and are now comfortably set up in Anna and Tomasz Dadlez's apartment. We will catch up later in the week.

Catching up

Not having internet reliably in Copenhagen has slowed down the blogging a bit. The images in this post are from Monday afternoon and Tuesday, but as of now it's Wed. afternoon and we are in Warsaw.

Seeing that Copenhagen is very oriented to bicycle traffic--as you can see from the photo below from outside the central train station--we decided to rent bikes ourselves and tour a bit.



The bikes tend to be basic and sturdy, and come with handy little locking devices which hold the rear wheel in place, thus discouraging theft. Sven the waiter told us that there is a bicycle theft in Copenhagen 2X per hour. With as many bikes as there are, I'm surprised it's not 2X per minute.

One of the areas we toured which is most photogenic is the area near one of the canals (or lakes? They don't seem to join up with the sea).





Later in the day we rode beside another such lake or canal.



There's a long pedestrian shopping area called the Stroget which we explored quite a bit. Tuesday night we explored it to excess, looking for the perfect shawarma stand . . . eventually having to settle for a less-than-perfect one. Plenty of miles on our shoes so far.

Nearby streets have shopkeepers at work maintaining their stands, as with this man.



Later in the day we went to Helsingor, a.k.a. Elsinore from Hamlet. Here's an exterior view of the castle:



The castle's bastions are quite impressive. We took the casement tour underneath this bastion, which was like a large, dank, dark, unpleasant cave. That's where the soldiers stayed in time of war or for punishment. On the tour our guide had to relight a dozen or so kerosene lamps which some young scamps had turned off. We suggested they be imprisoned in the casement for a while as punishment . . .



Here's the castle's courtyard:


Two interior shots, one of the room where the kings met with military officers, one of a fireplace with Wendy and a guide. Kronborg was a real money-maker beginning with Erik of Pomerania, who began charging ships a fee allegedly for protection from pirates. The fee initially was a single gold coin roughly equivalent in worth to a cow; a later king raised the price to 1.1% of the cargo and first rights to buy the cargo itself. Eventually in the mid-19th c. Denmark was paid an enormous sum of money to stop charging tolls.





Here's a shot of one side of the pulpit in the Kronborg chapel.



The better of our two guides--she was very well-informed and helpful about the castle's history--not about its art--and as you can see, she has a very nice smile.




We prevailed on some fellow tourists to take our picture by the cannons.




Dinner at Restaurant Dubrovnik Mon. night. We ate a little late, but it was fairly empty. Dinner here is expensive—a bit of sticker shock is setting in, when you spend $90 on a fairly ordinary, but good, meal, with limited alcohol. Intended to walk through Tivoli after dinner, but we discovered the admission price of 240 DK or $48 US each, which is pretty steep for what we wanted to do (i.e., not ride rides or attend a concert or anything).

Wed. lunch in Warsaw at Restauracja Slowianska--better meal, for my taste, at perhaps 1/3 the cost of the Dubrovnik dinner. It's a measure of the relative economy in both cities.