Tag: Krakow

In Eastern Europe, a chain reaction

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

The free-market floodgates of post-communist Budapest have let in the Wicked Waste of the West, from Burger King and McDonald’s to Starbucks and KFC.

My genial young guide on the Budapest Jewish Quarter tour last week let slip his attitude about the tawdry chain invaders when we passed a Hard Rock Cafe and I made a snarky quip. “I won’t even talk about it,” he huffed with a wave of the hand, as if fanning away a stench.

This, of course, is nothing new in my travels, or even in our very own USA. There’s a festering resentment of western chains encroaching on native businesses with crass venality. 

On another tour in Budapest a few days ago, the guide took aim at Starbucks’ coffee, explaining proudly how inferior it is to almost any local cafe offering. (True. I tried some.)

Grumbling about foreign corporate chains is a vigorous sport among the educated classes in Europe, bashing them and their ostensibly shoddy, unhealthy, unethical food products, sold with such vulgar aggression. (Apple, Gap, Nike and other mega-retailers get a breezy pass. A Mac is hip; a Big Mac not so much.)

Traveling in two post-Nazi, post-communist countries in recent days — Hungary and Poland — I enjoyed the dissonance of Old East banging heads with Newish West. I’m a wuss, sort of taking both sides in the argument, leaning toward the European stance. (I happen to think most fast food is execrable poison.) 

Now, beyond carping about capitalism, here’s a few pictures from a wonderful journey to a slab of the world I find beautiful, fascinating and unfailingly friendly. The trip — filled with head-spinning history, humbling humanity and killer cuisine — was a knockout.

The most famous “ruin bar,” called Szimpla Kert, a huge, arty pre-war ruin in Budapest’s hip Jewish Quarter
Budapest’s iconic Parliament through the window of a Danube River cruise
The infamous gate at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland. Yes, some dolts took selfies there.
Main Market Square in Old Town, Krakow, Poland
Main Market Square, Krakow, from my hotel window, about 6:30 a.m.

Facing evil

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Let’s not get all down about it, but I’m reading “Survival in Auschwitz,” the slim and indelible account of life in the most notorious Nazi concentration camp by Primo Levi, an “Italian citizen of Jewish race.” Published in 1947, the pages bulge with terrible and inconceivable realities, much of it learned about in any decent schooling, yet far more personal and unsparingly granular. The horrors are shattering.

So I will spare you. I’m reading the book, an autobiographical classic, because of my upcoming visit to Auschwitz, just outside of Kraków, Poland. My trip, as I’ve oft-noted, takes me to Budapest, then Kraków, where I went years ago, including the day trip to the concentration camp, which is now a haunting al fresco museum that staggers with its bleak, blunt truths. Even the gift shop (yes, gift shop) is stained with gloom.

Why do we go to such places? I know someone who said he would skip Auschwitz if he went to Kraków, a fact I find astonishing. Few places throb with such recent history and so many fresh ghosts and has shaped so much of the modern era to now. It’s living history, inescapable. To duck it, inexcusable. 

That’s just me. Genocide is vital and we should be exposed to it as a reality check and cautionary device. Visiting Auschwitz (or Duchau, which I toured in Germany) is mind-expanding. It’s not a place for morbid curiosity or ogling. It’s a place for reflection and wonder. Like any potent museum, it works intellectual muscles and, more so, wrenches emotional ones. It’s as powerful as any Holocaust memorial or, similarly, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Its utter humanity rumbles, and humbles.

I have a strong stomach for dark and doom. I seek out shrines to deformity and mortality, like the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Forensic Medicine in Bangkok, freak shows and books about human oddities. I always make a solemn visit to Holocaust museums, be it in Amsterdam or Israel. Or, of course, Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

It’s not about luxuriating in morbidity or getting a “thrill” from death, like some sophomoric Goth, who gleans reality from graphic novels and zombie movies. It’s the opposite, being repelled by it while pondering the strength, the sheer fortitude, of the victims and acknowledging that it can’t happen again. The triteness of that statement is a reflection of its truth.

In “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi writes eloquently of struggle and endurance in the face of naked evil inside the death camp. His spirit is wounded but unbowed. Survival is paramount, and he carries on because it’s all he can do. 

He says: “Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable … Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called, in the one instance: hope.” 

Late summer litany

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

1.Late summer rain, lusty breezes, 70 degrees — paradise. Fall is knocking and I’m tripping over myself to answer the door. Of course more heat is brewing — it will hit 86 on Saturday — but the wind and wet is a heartening preview of the best season of all. Autumn is when I travel. It’s when I look for clothes — jackets, long sleeve shirts, shoes maybe. I recently bought a new watch and new glasses, both of them a shimmering blue, though any color coordination was strictly fortuitous. I’m not that fashionable. I consider the items fall purchases, as the watch is largely a travel accessory and the glasses signify renewal and optimism, things, perhaps counterintuitively, I associate with fall. (Plus, my prior glasses needed a new prescription and I never did like those old frumpy frames.) So summer’s in retreat. Cooler climes and shorter days are coming. And I’m getting all celebratory.  

2.The Little Rascals they’re not. But these kids have vim and spunk and initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit that fuels their gumption to holler at passing strangers who are easily a foot taller than them: “Lemonade! Get your lemonade right here!” These neighborhood urchins, some seven girls and boys, are tracing a wholesome tradition from way back — I’m thinking Tom Sawyer days. Times have changed: Their tangy beverage is displayed in bougie glass dispensers, from Ikea or West Elm. And they demand $2 per cup (in my day we charged a quarter!). It’s the last lap of summer, and here I come strolling under shade trees lining the hood’s main artery, a sitting duck. I’m buffeted by the blandishments of piping young voices touting their wares. But I am stuck. I’m carrying no cash, and evidently they don’t take Visa. All I can do is tell them this and walk on. It’s embarrassing, a little. But it beats what happened to me when I was hawking lemonade as a seven-year-old. “Lemonade!” I yelled at a passing car. The driver turned my way and flipped me off. Those were the days.

A stock photo, but look at that wad of cash!

3. Sometimes — no, almost always — a good, hard pop song is just the thing. I’ve been rediscovering two of the best power pop bands of the ‘90s, Jellyfish and The Posies, who prove a genius for the grooving, hair-tossing, sing-alongy pop hook. Plucking styles from a sequins rainbow of catchy, often ethereal influences — Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, ELO, Supertramp, Cheap Trick, with a pinch of psychedelia and a pound of Phil Spector — Jellyfish and The Posies layered sweet melodies atop bombastic rhythms and throbbing drums: sugar-coated hand grenades. Their greatest albums, Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk” and The Posies’ “Frosting on the Beater,” rock as hard as they pop. Lush melodies and harmonies reign. And, especially in the case of Jellyfish, their sound and look is consciously sui generis; Day-Glo and dapper, the group seems right out of Sid & Marty Krofft. Even now, the bands crackle with a big bubblegum snap. Hear them here and here. (What happened to them? Grunge happened.)

Jellyfish, working hard at being psycho-delic.

4.My trip to Budapest and Kraków is precisely two months away. I know, it seems like I’ve been gabbing about it for an eternity. That’s because I have. Vacations are like that: you plan them, book them, then hurry up and wait. For months. Two months left. Grueling, but at least summer (*#$&!) is almost over. I’m still fussing with some fine points of the trip, like booking an overnight sleeper train from Budapest to Kraków (they told me to wait till the end of the month). And netting a spot at a coveted restaurant in Budapest (they told me to wait till mid-September). See, I’m ahead of myself. I booked hotels and dinners and tours four months in advance. Question: Should I really pop 30 bucks for a 45-minute tour of the Hungarian Parliament, which is beautiful and jewel-encrusted? I’m chewing over that one. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Nope.

Budapest or bust

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

And so, just back from Scotland — beautiful, bracing, beer-soaked and brogue-y — I do what I always do when I return from a hearty journey: immediately plan the next one, high on the fumes of the one just completed. Travel intoxication: a hazard of the unquenchable wanderer. 

Friends obligatorily ask: “How was it?” 

And I fan away the question with this impertinent question: “Where to now?” 

My quasi-ADD manifests as a cockeyed restlessness that makes me want to pack my suitcase about six times a day, even if I’m not going anywhere for months. I consider what mini toothpaste I should take, how many extra razors, what and how many pairs of socks I’ll need. I’m certifiable, but goddam I’m efficient. 

When it comes time to actually pack for a weeklong trip, I can do it in 30 seconds flat. (I’m like Robert De Niro in the movie “Heat,” and if you get that reference I’m sending you a Christmas card.) 

I’ve been spending an unhealthy amount of time eyeing my scuffed carry-on suitcase since I returned from Scotland. That’s because within two days of the return, I knew where I was going this fall, something I figured out with a kind of crazed alacrity.

First I narrowed it down to places I haven’t been to. That list is endless, sorrily. Then I did some math ($$) and realized it would have to be some time down the line, and not excessively exotic.

And so, a place I’ve never been but have almost gone to: Budapest. Which I figure is good for four days. To fill a week, I chose a second Eastern Bloc location, Krakow, the medieval Polish city that knocked me out so many years ago. Late October is the date, Eastern Europe is the place, borscht and pierogis are the plates.

Like so much of the world, a historical shadow, a practical pall, hangs over Hungary and Poland. So there will be much about soul-crushing Communism, the collective Jewish plight, the Holocaust — Auschwitz-Birkenau is just outside of Krakow (I’ve been, and I’m going back) — not to mention the abhorrent  intolerances harbored by the current leaders of both nations, which echo America’s far-right reprobates. Travel is exploration and edification. I’ll provide a full report on any evident ugliness.

As far as mapping my journey, I’m (surprise, ha) frenzied. I have a bulging itinerary with wriggle room for spontaneity. Flights are booked, restaurants reserved, tours scheduled, free time sketched out, etc. 

Four months out and my brain is abuzz. So much so that I’m already scoping the trip after this for sometime in February. (I won’t tell you, but I’ll give you a hint: It’s near Italy and it starts with Sicily.)

Budapest