Krakow

I arrived on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday afternoon Milena and Piotr and I gave our talk at the Academy of Fine Arts. The room held about 100 students and was completely full. One of the PhD students came to have tea with us and the Department Chair after the talk, and said "this was one of the most inspirational lectures I've ever heard." She is a linguist doing a project on the kinds of language designers use in talking about design, and has been working manually. I suggested that she meet Jan Rybicki and think about incorporating some principal component analysis.

LOT Airlines
The flight to Poland was arranged through Air Canada but was actually on LOT Airlines. I sometimes forget that different carriers each have a particular cultural identity. In this one, for instance, the safety videos were done as cartoons, and they had a second, fairly lengthy cartoon about doing exercises during the flight. The various passengers in the cartoon were inspired by the antics of a young woman to begin exercising too, until the plane resembled a flying gym or madhouse. Other entertainment options included vintage Disney cartoons like Chip 'n' Dale, who it turned out were both stage-door Johnnies secretly courting the same chipmunk nightclub entertainer, and Donald Duck, who had a surprise visit from a hungry cousin. There were nature videos, focusing primarily on small things eating each other or having sex, although there were some mommies with babies too.

Perhaps most unusual were the choices of sites that they identified on the world map. There were key cities like New York and London, combined with a few that just seemed highly improbable. They seemed to have been chosen by someone who was attracted to vowels. Lake Okeechobee in Florida was one. Another was Moosonee in northern Canada. We also apparently wanted to know where the plane was with respect to Timmins, Ontario, and Godtho, Greenland. The meals included turkey and cheese slices on white bread with the crusts cut off, a bowl of mixed canned fruit, and another bowl of tuna mixed with mayonnaise. To drink they served me black currant juice, which was delicious and is ubiquitous in Poland.

Eating in Poland
Wow. I have to say that despite the idiosyncrasies of the airline cuisine, they know a thing or two about eating in this country. Every meal we've had here has been great. Let me take breakfast buffets as an example. From Vienna-style eggs, which are cooked at the bottom of a shot glass, to an entire array of delicious breads and fresh cheeses, I haven't had such good breakfasts since Sigtuna. Time of day doesn't seem to be much of a factor, either. Milena and I realized at midnight one night that we were starving, and half a block away we found a pub that served us a pot of stew with fresh bread, potato pancakes with wild mushroom sauce, and two kinds of cake with whipped cream. I tried to order ice cream instead, but the waiter kindly said: "You don't like ice cream. Trust me." So I consoled myself with an espresso.

Captain Kloss
People in Poland have had a lot of emotional trouble since the Second War because so many of the concentration camps were here. Auschwitz is just a little distance from Krakow, and there are tours to go and look at the gas chambers and the ovens. I don't particularly want to go there, although I suppose if HH can go then I could too. It would be a place to do tong len. But in any case, one of the media outlets for this national anxiety was an immensely popular action-adventure series on television here in the sixties. The hero was a Polish James Bond character named Captain Kloss. He was a devilishly handsome secret agent who wore the uniform and pretended to be a Nazi officer and actually worked for the Polish resistance.

Pastry with Pope John Paul II
When I was a kid growing up in Balgonie, we used to have a series of phrases that were intended to suggest that something was obvious. "Is a bullfrog waterproof?" was one of them. Q: "Are you going in to town?" A: "Is a bullfrog waterproof?" Another of these responses, which I now think were probably intensely irritating rather than, as I believed at the time, witty, was "Is the Pope Polish?" Well, yes he was, and when he came home to Poland on a visit, he happened to mention that as a kid he had enjoyed a particular kind of pastry. It has layers of custard and cream between sheets of thin, hard pastry, with icing sugar liberally dumped on top. Piotr bought some today for Milena and me, after we'd eaten another delicious lunch of chicken breast and cucumber salad. We couldn't get our pastry from the particular small-town shop that John Paul II identified during his sermon, but it was still pretty good. The legend has it that the fortune of that chef was made that day.

Polish Poster Design
Poland is famous for its tradition of poster design. I think it is reasonable to say that posters here have been an art form for longer than I've been alive. Even the conditions of production are something like printmaking, with limited print runs and recognition of different levels of reproductive quality and so on. The famous contemporary poster designer Gorowski attended Milena's lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts before I arrived, and gave her a signed copy of one of his books. She's also been collecting posters from the local store, which I understand is one of the best of its kind in the country. http://www.cracowpostergallery.com/

Broken Glass for Breakfast
On our second day here, Milena and I went to have a buffet breakfast at a local hotel. We'd had good luck the previous day at a different place, where the buffet itself was various and good, and you could also order items from a menu, such as an omelet made with wild mushrooms, all at a reasonable price. This is completely unlike North American hotels, where generally speaking you are better off to go out somewhere else for breakfast. But here even the interiors were gorgeous. In any case, on this second day we were just finishing up our delicious meal by sharing a small glass of lemon mousse, when I noticed a quarter-inch strip of hard sugar on my tongue. I took it out and found only at that point that it was in fact a piece of hard glass that had broken from the rim of the glass and become embedded in the mousse. We mentioned it to the waitress, who expressed chagrin. When Milena went to pay the bill, no one said anything, so she pointed out that this had happened and broadly hinted that it would be normal to expect some kind of reduction in the cost of the breakfast. The Manager was called, and they took 15% off the price. It amounted to about 80 Canadian cents. So now we know, Milena tells me, what the going rate is for my life.

Diplomatic Meetings
One of Milena's goals while here is to help negotiate an institutional relationship between the Academy of Fine Arts and Mount Royal College. She'd like to have exchanges of faculty and students, and joint research programs, and so on. So we've been meeting with a series of people that Piotr has lined up for us. We met the president of the Academy, for instance, and the Dean of Piotr's Faculty, and at least half a dozen professors. The organizational structure is somewhat different from what we have in Canada. It is not uncommon for a department here to have one professor. So there is a Department of Visual Fundamentals, a Department of Visual Communication Design, and so on, each with at most a couple of profs. Of course now I want to come here and start a Department of Humanities Visualization. My favourite so far has been a friend of Jan's, who runs the Department of Philosophy of Mining. Piotr says the slogan should be "Dig. Dig Deeper."

[I note that Piotr and Monika made a noble effort to correct my misunderstanding here. It has to do of course with translation of the terminology. In fact, in Poland a Department is more like a Canadian research lab, and a Faculty is more like a Department.]

Nowa Huta
Today, Piotr drove us to see where he grew up, and along the way he gave me a brief synopsis of local Polish history. Krakow is a city of a million people, and is roughly divided into the old town, and Nowa Huta--the new town. The Russians after the war took a farming area of meadows and small villages, and built a city there for workers to run the steel industry. The workers would balance the influence of the educated population in the old town, which worked for a while, until by 1980 it was no longer possible to truck in gangs of workers to fistfight students on campus, and instead they joined forces in the solidarity movement. The steel works has always been one of the largest in the country and it still operates, although since 1989 it has been downsized and sold piecemeal to foreign investors to raise funds for upgrading. Workers were laid off with compensation, in part because they have always been a strong force in political lobbying. "When the nurses strike," Piotr says, "people don't pay that much attention." The steel factory has a massive footprint, but we couldn't enter the grounds without a proper authorization. We did go to a local park nearby, where the ground between the trees is layers thick with beer bottle caps as the workers stand in small groups and talk about things. Nowa Huta has various sections, most of which consist primarily of massive housing units. Some of these are quite handsome buildings of brick and concrete, five or six storeys, while others seem to be more like cheaper Projects-style buildings, dozens of storeys high. People during the Communist era could apply for an apartment, but the wait was typically in the decades and everyone was crowded. Subsequently people were encouraged to buy the place they lived, at quite a low price, but the result has been that obtaining a new place is again almost impossible and people tend to inherit apartments. We saw where a giant statue of Lenin used to stand in the centre of one housing area. At one point someone placed a bomb between his feet and blew out everyone's windows in the surrounding square, although the only damage to the bronze statue was in one ankle. Afterward they placed a police guard box with someone to watch the statue.

Gangs of Young Women
In Krakow, it is not uncommon to come across a group of maybe five or ten young women who have clearly just walked off a fashion runway in Paris and are now out on the town, perhaps walking along the street or else sitting down together to have a drink and a cigarette. They seem lively and animated and full of fun. Some of them have a captive man or two in their midst, but often as not it is just the women. On the subject of how they are dressed, Milena's Mom says "there are no ugly shoes in Poland." I recall seeing similar crowds in Coventry a few years ago, where they seemed to prefer high heels and micro-mini skirts. In contrast, the women in Sweden who have just walked off the fashion runway seem to prefer to walk alone, or occasionally in pairs.

A Man and His Belt
Piotr and Monika and Milena and I went out to a local night club that was built internally like a warren of small rooms. The thresholds from one room to another were uneven, and the walls had been roughly plastered and painted sixty years ago. There were images lacquered into the paint; there were bench tables, and white peeling wooden side tables that were probably new in the 19th century. It was really a fantastic kind of place. On one wall of the room where we sat there was a buffet and hutch with religious icons in it, and another wall had a closet of shelves full of suitcases. Monika explained that a particular club had started the fashion many years ago by using tables made from old Singer sewing machines. We stopped in briefly there on the way home, to look at the angled mirrors and red plush wallpaper. It made me think of Grushenka in The Brother's Karamazov, calling for a party with gypsies. Afterward as we walked, we passed a little man who I would say at a conservative guess had been drinking steadily for the past fifty years. Our paths coincided briefly, and during that passage, I noticed that he slipped off his belt, which was a broad leather one with a heavy buckle. He draped it around his neck. "This looks like trouble," I thought, and kept an eye on Piotr, who was walking closest to the man. But suddenly, rather than swinging his belt at Piotr, the man turned and swung it against the upright of a scaffold. He swung it as hard as he could, and the buckle broke and rang clattering into the street. We just kept walking without comment. Not a word was spoken by anyone. Several blocks later I broached the topic with Piotr by describing what had happened, and he agreed. "You have to be a bit careful at night," he said. "But Monika and I know how to behave, so it is okay."

Pieskowa Skala
I should point out that there is a slight problem with the name of the castle in the heading of this post. Pieskowa Skala really doesn’t have an “l” in it. Instead, there’s a Polish L, which has a crossbar like a “t” except with a “t” it is at right angles and the Polish L has a crossbar at a 45 degree angle. You pronounce it like a “woo” sound, unless you are from a particular part of the country or are a sophisticated Krakow actor in the sixties, in which case it is further back in your throat, more like a “wau.” Originally they were all variations on L but I don’t detect any contact between the tongue and teeth, which to my mind suggests it has moved into being a kind of vowel rather than a consonant.

In any case, Poland is littered with castles, both for and against the locals, all of which were nationalized under communism and the interiors were stripped. But they are slowly finding their way back into a public life as museums, and some of the artifacts are drifting back to the original families who owned them. Piotr and Milena and I drove an hour out of the city to see this one today, after Jan kindly made a phone call to a childhood friend who it turns out is the curator of the place. It was amazing. The staff had all been informed to watch for our arrival and notify him immediately, and he took us first on a tour of the public collection, then to three other areas that are closed to the public. I’ve never had a tour guide who could literally open closed doors and handle the items in the collection, opening secret doors in the carved cabinets and showing us behind the Medieval wooden saints, who all turned out to be hollowed out in behind to make them easier to handle and to mount near the altars. One of them had a lid in her back that lifted off so they could keep the altar relics inside. They had an early carving of St Agnes of Egypt, who is conventionally fully covered in curly hair, since they wanted to parade her naked through the streets and so God gave her hair for modesty. The story may also have something to do with her name, which could be seen as a reference to sheep, or perhaps one of God's lambs. Another set of panels told the story of the Polish St Stan, who objected when the king harshly punished the women of the country. They consequently dismembered the poor Archbishop, but white eagles reassembled the body over night so that he could be buried whole. It is a story of Polish reunification in the 16th century.

One of the closed doors led to a kind of covered stone balcony that looked out over the gardens and ponds and the gorgeous valley. The castle, Jan’s friend said, was built to protect the road. But this balcony was added later, to look at the beauty of the valley, and as a place for wine, women, and song. The other parts we got to see included the crypt, a library, and an exhibition. The crypt held two elaborate tin coffins of a particular noble family. On one of the coffins there was a skull who was wearing an hourglass as a hat. The library was the private library of the Prince from another castle, which was unusually preserved entire after being confiscated, rather than being distributed in pieces around the country. It contained materials in all kinds of languages and from several centuries. They had a 16th-century Bible in Polish. The exhibition was a display of 18th century botanical prints which Susan would have loved. It had recently closed, but hadn’t yet been unmounted. There is another castle in Krakow, which is the source collection for many of the displays we say today, so we’ll need to make an effort to see that too before we leave.

The Small Square and the Big Square
The heart of Krakow is a central square in a circular area that has a park completely surrounding it. The park is where the medieval walls would have been before they were stripped for building materials. We are staying right in this heart of the city, half a block from the central square, and a block away from the smaller one. These areas are paved in square cobble stones, and there are Catholic churches involved, but the main attractions are the crowds of people who come there to talk and listen to the musicians and so on. The place is always busy. As in a few other places I’ve seen now—Honolulu is an example—one of the popular busking activities consists of young people painted as though they are sculptures. We saw an 8-foot green alien in beautiful long robes with another head on a staff, and the other day a bronze worker with a wheelbarrow passed us on the way to his post in the square. It was shocking to see such a perfect statue off the plinth and stalking along with his tools. “He is a student in Philosophy of Mining,” Piotr joked.

Dirty Babas
This is Jan’s phrase for the people, often old women, who are street vendors. They typically have little glassed-in carts with a tarp over the back so they are a bit sheltered from the weather. They sell cigarettes and juice boxes, but their main item is a kind of giant round pretzel, and there are different coatings available—poppy seeds, sesame seeds, plain ones, and so on. I haven’t been able to convince anyone to stop and get one of these pretzels yet, I think in part because Jan’s descriptive adjective is a bit too effective.

[I note from Prague that in fact I had this wrong, and that the people selling pretzels in Krakow are largely exempt from the dirty Baba category. Both Jan and his daughter have explained this to me, and I look forward to the day when I am allowed to go back and try one of these giant pretzels.]

Schindler’s Factory
On the way to the castle in the country, Piotr stopped to show us the famous factory where Schindler saved Jewish people by having them work. Poles aren’t as thrilled with Spielberg’s movie as they might have been, since the only time the locals show up is when they are conveying a powerful anti-Semitism. Piotr seemed a bit hurt when he talked about it. Certainly, he says, there was anti-Semitism here, but there were also Poles who risked their lives and lost them too in order to help Jewish people. The factory was in a shabby part of the city, but Piotr feels it will not be long before it is revitalized. He and Monika were recently at a concert that was held in one of the buildings at Schindler’s factory. He also showed us a drug store that is now a museum. It served as a secret centre for the resistance. Nearby is the square where Jewish people waited to be transported to the camps. The entire area is a monument, consisting of dozens of giant bronze replicas of wooden chairs, each one empty.

You're in the Army Now
There is compulsory military service in Poland for men, unless you are a university student. You can be a student for free here, but you have to have good grades, and there is also quite a tough entrance exam. For all the other young men, there's a year in the army. When they get out, they have a little parade. They paint their faces bright blue, and wear a kind of cape that they've sewn, which has various figurative decorations in the middle and pom-poms around the perimeter. On the day they are released, platoons of these young men get drunk together and wander the streets, singing songs in loud voices. Milena says one of the songs has in it the words "Whore, whore, whore." At first I thought they might be soccer fans, but Jan set me straight. Nobody minds them, he said, and in fact many people look on it as the rite of passage into manhood. If someone wanted to get married before they'd paraded around the city, drunk and wearing a blue cape of their own devising, people would have to think twice. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry someone who hadn't gone through the rite of passage.

Fresh Mushrooms from the Market
Today we walked through the market area, looking at everything you'd expect in these kinds of places, from fresh fruit to handmade soap to a wide range of clothes and hats. One thing they also have here is big bins of all kinds of fresh mushrooms. There are chanterelles, boletes, and so on. Jan poo-pooed them as not being as fresh as they could be, and I laughed out loud. "I've never even seen an actual one of these before," I said. "Not in real life. There's no way I can distinguish a fresh one from the ones that aren't entirely fresh." Milena bought a big basket of what she calls "Rydze." The "y" is short and you pronounce the "e." I have no idea what they are. They are a flat-topped gilled mushroom with an orange colour, but not inverted like a chanterelle. The aroma is very good. She says you cook them with the top side down, so that the moisture gathers in the bowl of the cap. Then you stop before the moisture is reabsorbed.

Gorowski 25-year Retrospective
Milena and I went today to see the poster display of Gorowski’s work. It filled four large rooms and included not only the posters but also some of the original paintings from which the posters were made, as well as some sculptural and mixed media work. We thought of our friend Alejandro in Mexico City, who doesn’t paint so much as sculpt and then take a photo for use in the poster, but we could definitely see that he had been thinking about the Polish tradition. Gorowski has a number of recurring motifs, including the use of eggs and human fingers, although not necessarily together. I might also mention that Milena already has several of the Gorowski posters in her personal collection, although it remains of course to get them back to Canada in one piece.

A Bull in Disguise
Yesterday, I made my first investment in a Polish poster, in the form of a giant red background on which stands prominently a blue bull. What is interesting about this bull is that he is wearing a mask. What he wants to pretend to be, apparently, is a rhinoceros. I thought it was hilarious and it got me thinking of all the other unlikely things that a bull might want to pretend to be. Perhaps, for instance, a timid little puppy. Or maybe a flower. Disguising a bull, however, is not as easy as you’d think. I have friends, of course, whose disguises are equally unlikely and amusing.

A $650 Hoodie
We spotted today what we thought would be an ideal gift for Susan. It was a blue hoodie with very wide sleeves. So we went into the Diesel store and looked at it. It turned out to be worth 650 zloty, which is $240 Canadian. That’s a bit expensive for a hoodie, by anyone’s standards, but what the heck, how often are you in Krakow? So I took it to the counter, and the guy rang it up. “That’ll be 1,650 zloty,” he says. My eyes bug out, and I ask for him to repeat that again. He looks a bit sheepish. “Well,” he says, “it’s a limited edition. Off the fashion runway.” He gestures towards a particular rack of the kinds of clothes worn by hard-drinking heiresses. I ask him to do the conversion, and the total comes to $650 Canadian. “That’s more,” Milena says, “than I paid for my wedding dress.” So the search for a gift for Susan continues.

One of the Seven Chakras of the Earth
Wawel castle in Krakow is renowned for its museum collection of furniture, art, glassware, ceramics, tapestries, and so on. The collection is shared with Pieskowa Skala, so we had a chance to see several centuries of it while we were there. But what Wawel castle also has is the site of one of the earth's charkas, or energy centres. Some people attribute Krakow's relatively undamaged condition, despite centuries of warfare, to the presence of this energy centre here. One of the previous castle curators didn't think much of this legend, and fenced off the area to prevent people from going and leaning on the wall beside the chakra to soak up some positive energy. Academics. We didn't see any fence when we were there, but then we also forgot to go lean on the wall. I think we might try to go back. I need all the positive energy I can soak up.

The Sarcophagus of St Stan, and three bells
One of the highlights at Wawel castle is the altar in the cathedral, which has a large silver sarcophagus containing the remains of the patron saint of Poland. You will remember him from the story of the knights, who complained to the king when they returned after several years away at the wars, to find their wives with recent babies. The king's solution was to have the women nurse puppies instead, and to have the dogs nurse their children. This struck St Stan as the last word in ghastliness, and you can see him shaking his finger at the king in the painting at Pieskowa Skala. His sarcophagus is being held up by four angels, who frankly looked like it took a bit of an effort. Speaking of which, on leaving the cathedral, the discerning guest has the option of climbing a set of narrow wooden stairs to the bell tower. The ascent is somewhat easier if you happen to be four feet tall, since many of the sections pass under low beams and through A-frames and so on. I speak as someone with experience. "There's an important bell up here," Milena says. "I don't remember why." So we begin climbing. Sure enough, we come across a giant bell. "This isn't it," she says, and we climb some more. Lo and behold, another bell. "Still not the one," she tells me, and we continue. Finally we hit the highest chamber in the bell tower, with the all-important third bell. I offer to ring it, but Milena says that's probably only a good idea if my goal is to see the inside of a Polish prison. Later in the evening, Piotr mentioned that it is only rung for significant national events, such as the death of the Polish Pope. "If you rang it," he says, "someone important might have to die."

The Dragon's Den
When you go to Wawel castle, you can walk the grounds for free. But if you want to go into any of the buildings, you have to buy a ticket. There's a timestamp on the ticket, and you only have a window of ten minutes to get in, or you have to get a new ticket. There are about seven or eight different things you can buy tickets for. We bought ours for the State Rooms, the Cathedral, and the Dragon's Den, which is near the exit. We handed our tickets to the person sitting on the stool at the entrance, and started down a spiral staircase. I had to stoop, since the ceilings were too low. After roughly 172 stairs, I paused for a breather. "I think I recognize this," I said. "We've bought tickets to see the famous Egress." "Hang in there," says Milena, and a nearby castle guide sitting in the shadows tells her something. "There are 344 stairs," Milena says. "We're halfway there." Great. So down we go. Then what should happen but at the bottom we come out into a series of really very nice caves. We are able to take our time looking at them, and Milena shoots a video. Outside the door is a big statue of a six-armed dragon rampant, which I recognize from the postcards sold by the dirty Babas. The cost was six zloty. "I'd have paid seven," I said, "for an elevator."

A Jazz Concert in the Salt Mine
The Polish people seem to love to take some unlikely place and turn it into a cultural institution. The KGB headquarters, for example, with the torture chambers in the basement, is now a museum. Piotr and Monika attended a John Cage concert in Schindler's Factory. Tonight we drove out of town to the salt mines, rode the worker's elevator 130 meters below ground, and followed the rail-cart tracks into one of the most fantastical concert halls imaginable. It was cut from the stone, so that these massive blocks were above our heads, and they'd constructed whimsical features, such as several large chandeliers and a decorative crest on the rear wall, from pieces of salt. For three hours we sat, breathing the healthy dry salty air, and listening to a series of jazz performances. This was the 52nd festival--part of the longest-running jazz festival in the country, although Piotr explained that it had been going for longer than 52 years. They lost a few under communism, because jazz was too decadent. At the intermission we had tea and a bismarck doughnut.

Mozart's Requiem
No tour of a cultural capital would be complete without a classical concert in a Cathedral. Piotr and Monika kindly arranged tickets for us to an evening performance of Mozart's Requiem at St Catherine's Cathedral, which is a beautiful Gothic building with a towering baroque altar. There was also a chandelier that rotated slowly back and forth, like a torsion pendulum, throughout the evening. I wondered if someone had accidentally got it started in setting up the lights for the concert, or if it had been winding and unwinding since the Middle Ages. Since it was an electric light, I admit that the latter does seem a bit unlikely. The performance was fantastic, and we convinced them to give us one encore. We sat close to the altar, which is to say at the back of the concert hall, since the musicians were out in the entrance where choirs belong. Our seats were the raised ones built into the wall, which meant we were sideways to the music. Facing me across a sea of faces in profile between us was the look-a-like contest winner in the category for Rasputin, a bald giant of a man with eyebrows out to here and a red beard. I couldn't really tell whether or not he enjoyed the concert.

A Visit to a Cemetery
All day on November first in Poland is when families make an extra effort to visit their dead. Jan and his lovely family kindly invited Milena and me to come along and participate in their visit, and it was an amazing experience. The graveyard where we arrived at dusk is centuries old and spreads for kilometers in every direction. As far as you can see there are huge trees and graves, many of them at knee height with a large flat surface, where people have set chrysanthemums and candles burning in colourful glass jars with ventilated metal lids. The effect is spectacular. Here are hundreds of thousands of candles that only burn for a day, all burning at one time in one place. It is a monumental effort. We bought our candles, half a dozen each, from Jan's teenage daughter, since her scout troop joins many others in using the occasion to raise funds. She explained that the people start early in the morning and visit throughout the day, with the cemetery closing its gates at 10:30 p.m. We visited several of Jan's relatives, including the one he jokingly refers to as having shot at Hemingway, since they were on opposites sides of the same action where Hemingway was wounded, and the one who was a nuclear physicist at a time when that profession meant something to the military. There were some amazing public sites too, with a carpet of burning candles in front of them. One that I remember was to commemorate victims of communism. We also had a map that Piotr had provided that gave the locations of famous Polish graves, so we were able to visit, for instance, the grave of the professor who founded his college, and also a Victorian Radzikowski who wrote travelogues. I only came across one ghost, when I tripped myself to avoid stepping on a child who wasn't actually there. "It's a good day for the ghosts of children," Milena explained. "The candles are so pretty."

Chrysanthemums: the Polish curse
One side effect of the Nov 1st activity is that there is a strong association in Poland between chrysanthemums of all sizes and colours, and death. "Now I know why my Mom said I was forbidden to have chrysanthemums in my wedding bouquet," Milena said. "Ah, yes," said Jan. "Give someone chrysanthemums and you are basically telling them to go and get themselves a grave."

The Madonna of Good Grades
In Czestohowa, there is a famous painting of the Madonna and Child. She has two cuts on her right cheek, which legend tells us were put there by the impious sword of a medieval Swedish soldier. The painting miraculously bled, and the cuts have grown longer over the years, lengthening toward some apocalyptic future. What's important about this painting is that it is the subject of devotion of Polish high school students, who pray for intercession in the matter of their final exams. The shrine has decades, perhaps centuries, of little scraps of paper with notes on them, and medallions offered to the Virgin. The most zealous procedure involves circumambulating the church on your knees. Milena's comment: "They should be studying, instead of doing that crap."

My Dragons Are Killing Me
In looking at all the mortuary statues of royalty two summers ago in the Louvre, I was struck by how many of the dead kings and queens had dogs lying against the soles of their feet. Unlike the royals, the dogs are carved as though they are alive. Some were little lapdogs and some were greyhounds or perhaps whippets, but almost no one had to lie in stone perpetuity unaccompanied by their dogs. In Poland, however, at Pieskowa Skala, we saw some variations on the theme. One king, for instance, had his feet resting on stone tigers. Another had his feet on a dragon, and for a pillow he was using a live lion. "Now that," I said to myself, "is royalty."

Polish Signs
When Piotr drove us out to Pieskowa Skala, I had a chance to see some of the highway signs. Polish signage has an on/off convention which helps to simplify things once you realize it’s there. One of the first signs I noticed was a long horizontal silhouette of buildings, with a red line crossing it out. “Hmm,” I thought. “No villages allowed on this highway.” But of course it meant we were leaving a village zone. There would have been one at the entrance without the red line through it. They also have some nice warning signs. There’s a regular walking person on a blue background at crosswalks. Outside crosswalks, you will sometimes see a yellow warning sign with two people running. It is there, Piotr explained, to let drivers know that this is a place where people might jump out in front of the car. It reminded me of the ones we have for deer in Canada. They had a similar one showing a little girl marching along with a large red balloon or perhaps lollipop. In any case, the red circle was on a stick and had fins out to the sides.

Montreal

Milena and I arrived last night from Hamilton, and checked in to the Chateau Versaille. It's a beautiful old hotel that has been updated with orange walls and contemporary art. In 2005 the Conde Nast Traveller magazine named it the best hotel in Montreal. There are bronze lions guarding the door and art nouveau lamps on the landing. Our colleagues here chose it for the delegates to the research meeting.

Unfortunately, as with all revised old places to stay, I find the scale a bit hard to manage. I stand in my shower and the shower curtain is stuck to one shoulder while the safety bar presses into my leg on the other side. The hanging lamps in the hallway don't quite hit my head. I don't quite hang over the end of the bed.

Last night we ate across the street at a fabulous restaurant called Bronte (www.bronterestaurant.com). We had an eight course tasting meal. Each course would fit in the palm of your hand and was tastefully plated on a giant white plate--each course had one with a different shape. In true French fashion, almost everything had a frothy reduction of some kind. There was white chocolate foam, for instance, on the pate. It was, I think, the most expensive meal I've ever eaten. I guess that may not be saying much, given my culinary past, but there it is. In 2004, they were named Canada's best new restaurant by En Route magazine.

Today it was a trip to Old Montreal. We had a brief moment of thinking the artistic autopsy exhibit might be in town, but alas when we reached the counter they were only opening in May. I pointed out to Milena that they were in Chicago when I was there, so that may still be the case when she goes to Chicago in early June. She accepted the disappointment with grace, I thought, and consoled herself with some digital photos of dark shabby alleys.

Walking up and down Rue St Catherine is always a pleasure, and we did a lot of this walking. Unlike for instance Whyte Ave in Edmonton, there's enough road that there are different sections, each with its own character and denizens. Milena remarked the number of homeless people who have pets with them. She seemed to think the pets were an indication of warmheartedness on the part of the people. The young man regaling his friends with tales of busting caps and splitting wigs, on the other hand, had no pet in sight.

Chicago

I'm at the Hyatt Regency, which is a gi-normous and beautiful hotel overlooking the Chicago river. I'm on the 27th floor with two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city. On my first day I had three adventures.

In the morning, I went over the Michigan St bridge and found a Kenneth Cole store, where I spent nearly a thousand dollars that I don't have on several large bags worth of stuff: a pair of shoes, two pairs of boots, and a briefcase. I arrived in Chicago wearing a pair of used cowboy boots and now I have a blister. The strap fell off my old briefcase last summer. It was a shocking experience to have a choice of good-looking shoes that fit. Usually there are none, or if there is a pair, it's only one pair. Maybe I didn't handle the decision so well.

When I came back to the hotel, about half a block away, a big black man named something like Leoni conned me out of eight dollars by rubbing hand lotion on my sneakers. So I gave him ten and said he could keep the change. It was a surreal experience, my hands full of Kenneth Cole bags and this person insisting I put my foot on his knee so he could rub goop on my shoe. He said he thought it was better than begging for money, and I guess he gets to say.

In the afternoon, I took a taxi and went to the Contemporary Art Institute of Chicago, mistakenly believing it was the Art Institute of Chicago. The latter has a world-class collection of impressionists. The former had a display of Rudolf Stingel, including some giant photo-realist paintings, some things that weren't supposed to be paintings per se, made of styrofoam and I think it was rubber cement, and a room with an orange carpet, which was the art object. The foyer was lined with the kind of insulation that has an aluminum foil cover, and you were allowed to contribute to the project by marking it somehow. I thought about writing a quote from the Hong Kong movie 2002. It's what a little old Chinese woman harangues the hero with: "Work hard. Respect your parents." But I decided not to do that.

On the upper floors there was an exhibition of artists' books, which I liked very much, in part because they reminded me of Peter Bartl. I made a note of a chart in a book by Edward Hall and George Trager called Systems of Culture. I think it was this exhibition that made me think I should try out this blog. I thought of getting a book to write about my adventures, since somehow they aren't very reified for me if I only have them, and I wondered if they might be more solid if they were also recorded somehow.

Another thing I liked were a series of photos of seascapes, by Hiroshi Sugimoto. He had maybe 15 or 20 0f them, all a b&w flat horizon of water and sky; they varied largely in terms of how much fog there was. They might have been all the same seascape at different times of day, for instance, only in fact they were each of a completely different body of water. Arranged as they were, side by side along a white wall, they had somehow the emotional effect of looking at a seascape. It was very nice.

Finally, in the basement they had half a dozen charming carp, lazing around in a little wedge-shaped pool.

Chicago Day 2
I'd like to commend Milena for choosing a wonderful hotel. It is close to everything. The greater Chicago area has about 7 milliion people. The city proper has about 3 million. In the city there is a downtown area called the loop, because it is within a circle created by the elevated train. The Hyatt I'm in is at the edge of the loop, which means a lot of great things are within walking distance, or, as I'm beginning to think of it, blistering distance.

I really enjoyed my lunch. I went to what I later realized is a chain called The Corner Bakery Cafe. I loved their slogan: "Feed the Day." The one I ate at was across the street from a sign that said it was the end of the legendary Route 66. The cafe also had an innovation that impressed me. At each table was a little metal clip standing eighteen inches above the salt and pepper shakers. When you placed your order, they gave you a big plastic piece with a number on it, and you clipped it at your table so they could find you. People were coming and going like crazy, but it never got lined up at the counter more than two or three deep.

After lunch I went to look at all the great stuff at the Art Institute of Chicago. (http://www.artic.edu/artexplorer/ but I'm pretty sure they only have a small portion of it digitized). I was fortunate to arrive during the February Free days, which saved me twelve bucks. In fact, today was the last day of the promotion. As in any large gallery, there is far too much to summarize, and I saw most of it.

I also realized something today, as I limped up and down the marble stairs. One of the things I like about art galleries is the rules there tend to restrict unseemly behaviour. If you stay quiet and don't get too close to the art, everyone leaves you pretty much alone. Other patrons will even give you elbow room if you stand directly in front of something.

Some of the highlights of this collection are:
- Van Gogh's self-portrait
- American Gothic
- Nighthawks
- At the Moulin Rouge

I also enjoyed looking at:
- several classy suits of armour.
- lots of Monet, including every painting he ever made of a haystack. This was several more than I would have expected.
- a surprising amount of Georgia O'Keefe.
- Ivan Albright's shocking 1943 lifesize portrait of Dorian Gray, painted for the movie.

There were some very nice Buddhas, boddhisattvas, and dakinis, so I hung around with them for a while. There was also a nice little Chinese guardian creature that appeared to combine a dragon, lion, and dog. I felt safer just looking at him.

On the way there, and again on the way back, I walked by the Millenium Park, which has among other things a music pavilion that Frank Gehry designed on a good day. People were skating at an outdoor rink at the park. They seemed to be having fun, falling down in front of their friends' video cameras and holding hands and laughing.

I came back to the hotel to shower and change my shoes, then took a nap before going on another forced march, this time along Wacker St. The Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness book I bought at the Northwestern University bookstore yesterday recommended it. There were plenty of Chicago's great buildings and bridges, and then dinner at what I can only describe as a character-rich Italian restaurant, Buca di Beppo. The walls were plastered with vintage photos of starlets getting out of cars, contortionists contorting, people kissing while driving Vespas, and so on. On the way to your table they make a point of walking you through the kitchen. They have to make special arrangements for people dining alone, since the menu only contains two sizes of items: small (for 2-3 people) and large (for more). I had lemon chicken with capers and fettucini, and my gosh it was great.

Chicago to Evanston
What a lovely day I had today. I started out by taking Piotr's advice and going over to the Prairie Avenue Bookshop on South Wabash. At first I thought it was all architecture books all the time, but in fact there turned out to be about, well, fifteen design books that I wanted. They graciously offered to ship them for me. I feel like one of those upper-class Victorian women from the States who used to make an annual pilgrimage to Paris to shop for the year. But wait till you see what I bought. Robin Kinross. Emil Ruder. Tufte's latest. All very nice.

The man at the bookshop was also kind enough to direct me to a bookish coffee shop, called The Gourmand, which was an appropriate name because I was starving. They serve, I believe, a brand of coffee called Intelligentsia, which was in any case very good, and so was the spinach and feta omelette.

Back to the hotel, where I stuffed my old abandoned briefcase into the garbage under the desk and caught a taxi north to the Homestead Inn in Evanston. I wasn't sure what to make of it. At first I thought it was quite Oxford-like, sort of ancient and tweedy, but after I walked around a bit it seems significantly more modern. There are probably a dozen restaurants and three or four coffee shops within five blocks. I spent most of the afternoon napping, taking a brief walk to find another latte and a cinnamon bun, and writing an abstract for the Prague Design conference in November. The topic is lists, and I'm pitching our dynamic table of contents project. Sometimes I get so busy I forget how much I enjoy writing. I really become a five about it for a brief time.

Come evening I headed downstairs to find a table full of colleagues in various stages of eating dinner. I joined them, and the food was great. I had a bowl of clam chowder that started out just as a bowl of clams in their shells, and the waiter brought along a jug of chowder that he poured on top. I once again was struck, after these past days of being largely alone, by how much I enjoy the company of my colleagues. I couldn't get enough of them. Now tomorrow we meet all day to talk about what we're going to do together for the next couple of years. John tells me one of the likely outcomes is that we'll meet regularly for hackfests. I couldn't be tickled pinker.