Day 2: Warsaw

Warsaw is at a latitude of 52.2 degrees north. It’s farther north than Calgary and Saskatoon. These are the things a person learns at 4:12 a.m. while trying to figure out why it’s so light outside.

It was a good day, albeit a long one. My mom, also awake at 4 a.m., wasn’t feeling well, and urged me and Evie to explore on our own.

We went to Old Town Warsaw, a district painstakingly rebuilt to its historic likeness after the Nazis bombed it to rubble.

These side streets reminded us of Diagon Alley.

The specter of war hangs over everything here. While admiring a magnificent chandelier in the Royal Castle, we’re told this is where the bombs crashed through the roof in September 1939. 

This was the room where the first explosions hit. 

The original throne-eagles were taken by Nazis as souvenirs.

Next to a charming outdoor café serving Italian food and ice cream, a stone planter of crimson geraniums pays homage to the spilled blood of 50 Poles who were shot on this spot. It’s not subtle.

Poland’s history is full of battles, defeats, invasions, partitions. It is also full of pride. Through all the wars, despite all of the redrawn borders, Poland survived: the language, the identity, the culture. From my limited impressions, I’d describe the Polish perspective as a mix of pragmatic pessimism and deep, full-hearted resilience. Nothing is easy, but we endure.

The Rynek, again a marketplace.

I'm an optimistic American who was born under a lucky star. My parents and I haven't always seen eye to eye.

In the afternoon, my mother felt well enough for an outing to her favorite bakery, which has a café on a fashionable street in Warsaw. 

Our new favorite place, A. Blikle.

They taste as good as they look.

We ate beautiful, traditional desserts, and we watched people pass by. Skinny women in skinny jeans, businessmen in suits, tattooed bikers, stumbling drunks, moms with babies and dogs in strollers, a surprising number of women with impossibly red hair.

Those were some big balloons.

It’s not easy for my mom to travel with a fractured foot. This is only the latest of the health problems that make her life, and this trip, a challenge. She would be so much more comfortable in her familiar, accessible condo in Fargo. I am so proud of her for coming here, for enduring the pain, and for showing up to moments like this one with her granddaughter.

They share a love of Blikle chocolate cake.

It’s not easy, but she is here. She is surviving. She is finding the good moments while unflinchingly staring into the face of the bad ones and acknowledging them, too.

She is Polish, after all.

Day 1: Warsaw

On the summer solstice, I flew above the north Atlantic, midnight sun glowing outside the airplane window, illuminating the clouds below us in a suspension that melted from violet dusk into pink dawn without ever touching the dark shades in between.

It was a night without a star, except for that insistent sun. As I dipped in and out of a shallow sleep, I picked up my phone and iPad, puzzling at the hours that they displayed. When did they last connect to a signal? Was 11:37 the time in Minneapolis, in Toronto, or wherever we were? Where were we?

I did mundane things, like reading a novel and watching Bridget Jones’ Baby. I did remarkable things, like looking down at the shimmering islands of Denmark and trying to discern land from ocean from clouds from the shadows of clouds passing over.

This is why I insist on window seats.

What I didn’t do much of was sleep.

We arrived in Warsaw in a hazy dream state, and I began a series of small, challenging tasks: Asking a gate agent, in Polish, for wheelchair assistance for my mother. Fitting 6 bags and 3 people into a Skoda station wagon. Figuring out how to get said car into reverse (push down on the stick shift), out of a tiny parking garage, and along the narrow city streets to our hotel.

Our hotel, across the street from a 24-hour liquor shed.

When the hotel wouldn’t let us check in until noon, I said “That’s OK – We’ll go for a drive!” and I pointed the car in the direction of the tall buildings on the horizon. My mother marveled at the skyscrapers and shops that had changed the face of the city in the past 20 years. Warsaw isn’t her hometown, but she’s spent enough time there to recognize that she hardly knows it at all anymore.

Driving is a little scary, with the kilometers and the manual transmission and the bold bicyclists zooming across the city streets, but I can do it. That said, it felt great to park the car in the hotel garage (tiny, of course) and curl up for a midday nap. But not before Evie talked me into trying this restaurant she spotted at the airport, and again near our hotel, which she simply had to try.

It was a little different: high tech ordering kiosks, fried broccoli, Emmental cheese

Evie and I took an evening outing while my mother rested. With no plans, we hopped onto a train and rode it until Evie saw a neighborhood that looked nice.

Evie liked the look of this guy.

We walked through a park and a residential neighborhood dotted with tiny shops and 20-story apartment buildings with pots of geraniums on their balconies. We smiled at Polish toddlers and people walking small dogs. We ate Italian food in a sidewalk café. Evie found a 10 Zloty bill on the street, declared it lucky, and left it for our server because you have to pay good luck forward.

 

Italian pizza in Poland: highly recommend

Tomorrow, we’ll visit some tourist sites. We’ll eat something Polish. And we’ll gear up for the big adventure, the heart of our trip, the journey south to Krakow. Czesc, Polska. I can’t wait to get to know you better.

Chaos and cabbages: 5 days until Poland

For 18 months, I’ve dreamed of visiting Poland to research my family’s history and to share it with my daughter. Last fall, I booked the flights. I persuaded my mother to join us. Three generations of women are going to explore our ancestral homeland.

When it was far away, the Poland project looked like a grand adventure, cinematic in scope, with a novel and film as inevitable outcomes.

A few weeks ago, as the date approached, it began to feel like something else.

I was walking in downtown Minneapolis, hurrying to a meeting I was late for, when it dawned on me: I didn’t have an international driver’s permit. These things have a way of popping into my head when I can’t do a thing about them. My trip was a month away. The website said to allow 4-6 weeks processing time for the permit. I felt like I was falling. That night, I learned that the AAA office could issue a permit on the spot. It was the feeling of falling quickly, then being swept up to safety just before I hit the ground.

It’s a feeling I know all too well.

I felt it again last week, when I was looking at my flight itinerary and realized that there was a full day between my connecting flights, a 28-hour Toronto layover that threw our whole schedule into disarray. The free fall lasted 40 minutes on hold with Air Canada, and the upsweep arrived when a friendly ticketing agent said it was no problem at all to adjust the dates.

I am not an organized person. In my professional life, I rely on conscientious teammates and forgiving bosses. Sam plans our family vacations down to Excel spreadsheets with packing lists. My job is to show up, be fun, and write about the adventure.

The Poland Project wasn’t supposed to be like this. My sweeping vista of cultural and historical discovery had morphed into a to-do list, a set of tasks, a million details. It coincided with a major work project that involved 4 trips in 6 weeks, the end of the kids’ school year, soccer season, and too many volunteer commitments.

Friends asked how excited I was for Poland, and I replied with an exasperated sigh and a list of all the things undone. I didn’t have plans with my cousins or a rental car or any clue how to charge my iPhone on European voltage. The Poland project felt like a term paper I had left until the last minute, and I was living the middle-aged version of a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in the campus computer lab.

Last week, I flew to Seattle for work, on a plane without WiFi. Those lost hours of productivity filled me with panic: The unread emails! The texts languishing in the ether! The lost productivity!

On that flight, I did something so old-fashioned that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it already: I read a travel guide about Poland. I savored the pictures and reminded myself that Poland wasn’t just another chore left undone: it was also cobbled streets, old churches, busy marketplaces, cheerfully painted cottages dotting verdant hillsides.

This was the page that changed everything.

The simple, hearty foods of Poland. The knots of pretzeled bread and the varied salty meats. I read the Polish names in my head, and they harkened back to my childhood and my mother boiling cabbage on the stove, pounding chicken cutlets at the kitchen counter. I thought of my daughter and how much she loves the kabanosy sausages from the Eastern European deli in Minneapolis.

Food brings us home.

Pictures of food in a book reminded me that I’m going home, not to Fargo, but to a home that’s generations deeper, at once familiar and full of surprises.

The details will be sorted out. They always are. Yesterday, I did the one thing that has always been so helpful and so hard for a disorganized overachiever like me: I asked for help.

Sam and I are making a spreadsheet.

And I will show up. I will be in the moment. I will write about it.