KISSES

This is apparently what happens when you, and by you I mean me, go hiking on the Polish borderlands with Michal: kisses from fat, topless drunk guys holding fish.

I guess I should have seen that coming.

We were in a minute speck of a village consisting primarily of train tracks (featuring exactly one train to and from Warsaw a day) and a hole-in-the-wall bar that dispensed serious booze for men who want to get drunk as cheaply as possible and stay that way for as much of the day as possible. I first visited this pleasant little establishment at the outset of my journey around 9:40 in the morning, by which time at least ten of the village's finest had gathered at the joint in order to drink vodka out of fist-sized glasses and exchange vague grumbles about, presumably, existential ennui. This visit ended fairly innocuously: I came, ate chicken-bowel soup and pizza slathered in ketchup (a Polish speciality), and went on my way without so much as a handshake from a fish-bearing fat topless man. I was not to be so fortunate during round two.

After the hiking trip came to a satisfactory close involving many hours of forcing our way through sparse forest and undergrowth along a beautiful river and occasionally being savaged by stinging nettles, Michal and I decided to kill the hour we had until the train arrived by joining the crowds of sweetness and light bustling in and out of the same dingy bar. Michal cunningly ordered a shot of "the worst stuff you've got," which as it turns out is pretty much the worst stuff that exists this side of lighter fluid mixed with actual death - I should perhaps mention that the shot cost about sixty cents and was steep at the price. We drank it with relish and not even remotely disguised coughing and retching, because we are two tough dudes. Having proven our credentials by navigating the rough seas of heinous vodka with manly aplomb, we were ready to join the bar flies in smoother seas and sat down at a table outside with rather more palatable alcohol and a heady sense of a job well done.

Michal first noticed our friend stumbling around on the street in front of the bar, and the sociologist in him discerned in the man's great drunken girth, ambling gait, and beached-whale exposure ample material for a work of photo-journalism on the faces of the Polish countryside. The man, for his part, spied Michal's half-empty shot glass from afar and discerned in it a chance to get ever so slightly drunker for free, with the result that in a few short moments he had joined us, flopping a fish (photographed above) down onto the table and exhorting us to partake of its bounty with him. As we did so, it came out that I was American, which led him to start a long monologue involving anecdotes about his time as a jet pilot in Iraq and his disdain for Ronald Reagan, who he thought was still president.

This was all well and good, but Michal decided it would be a shame to let our little piece of inter-cultural exchange escape undocumented, a sentiment heartily supported by our topless friend, so out came the camera, the photographs, and the kisses. The man had already planted a big Slavic present on the side of my head earlier in our conversation when some unknown theme in the conversation filled him with an intense love for humanity that simply could not be restrained any longer, but the fine specimen you see in the above photograph was the work of Michal, who suggested in Polish to the man that a mere smile would not be enough of a sign of international friendship, and after all what is a better sign of affection than a kiss? I do not have an answer to that question, and apparently neither did the man.

I guess the moral of the story is this: if you're ever traveling in the east of Poland along the border with Belarus and feel like what your life is missing is a big vodka-flavored kiss that subsumes most of the left side of your head, a trip to the local watering hole would not go amiss. Fish optional.

Warsaw, again

So I'm in Warsaw now at the apartment of my wonderful friends Michal and Paulina. After almost fourteen hours on the train, I'm more or less glad to be stationary, but the train journey felt surprisingly short for all that. I brought a bunch of cheese, bread, and candy with me to while away the hours, which I confess bears all the earmarks of total genius. The only problem is that I chose three cheeses more or less at random and one of the happened to be so pungent that I could not even open it on the train for fear of unleashing lederhosen-clad rage the likes of which the world has never seen, so it just sat in my backpack the whole time, quietly exuding cheese funk into all of my books and clothes. I spent most of the trip alternating between happily champing down gummy candies like a five-year-old and sleeping as if in the grip of a violent beast of oblivion. That is actually a pretty enjoyable set of options to vacillate between.

The morning will see me off on the train again, this time to some random villages in the east of Poland that Michal knows. Or maybe he doesn't know them? It's hard to tell sometimes. In any case, we will head to the middle of (or the eastern edge of) Nowhere, Poland, and tramp around there for a few days. I'll be back on Monday or Tuesday to Warsaw, but I highly doubt I will be able to post anything before then - something tells me these random little villages are not exactly crawling with cheap internet cafes.

I guess that's about it. I chatted a little with two girls who were sharing my hostel dorm room last night, and spent most of the time trying to convince them that their second cousin's German fiancee was a Soviet spy bent on spreading Communist propaganda through manipulation of the matrimonial bond. I think they were pretty convinced, which is understandable because the case was pretty iron-clad. I just finished reading The Bourne Identity two days ago, and now my head is all full of spies and kung-fu kicks, one of which I have learned is usually aimed at the other (the latter at the former, although sometimes the other way around). Robert Ludlum is a pretty trashy writer, but the book is still a lot of fun. His love scenes, which probably total up to no more than ten pages out of the book's 500-some pages, reek so horribly that they almost kill the whole work. The tend to work like this:

BOURNE: I have to leave you, because I don't remember who I am, and I don't want to get you killed.

BOURNE'S FINE LADY: But I love you.

BOURNE: But... I love you, too.

BFN: Then you have to stay. Because we love each other.

BOURNE: Touche (proceeds to kill a bus full of spies with his bare hands because he is so cool).

The worst part is that I'm not kidding about or exaggerating the italics. Ludlum should be legally prevented from writing with italics until the end of time. In fact, so should everybody.

The Cold Embrace of Cowardice

Yes, gentle readers, you are reading the words of a coward. These meager sentences are the fruit of a delicate mind that, when faced with the opportunity to feast on such traditional Munich/Bavarian fare as ox diaphragm, could barely suppress the desire to run and hide. Calf diaphragm? No, thanks again, though. Pork diaphragm? Still not doing it. When I noticed that one single dish promised a range of beef delicacies including heart, liver, kidneys, tongue, and I think stomach, I merely smiled weakly and turned to the sausages with the same sort of heavy heart that I can imagine weighted down Napoleon on Waterloo. The message was all too clear: You are not man enough for Bavaria. And it is true. Even the whimsical section titles of the English menu I received at the restaurant made me blanch and titter like a schoolgirl at a wrestling match: "The Best Part is the Offal," for instance, advertised about ten different dishes involving calf's head and the same number for calf hoof-based cuisine. I say "different" dishes, but really they all seemed to be calf head/hoof boiled in vinegar and onion "soup" and served with potatoes. I'm not quite sure that the addition or subtraction of something like parsely should really make it a new dish, but obviously the Weisses Brauhaus in Munich has other ideas.

Normally such food exotica would have exercised a powerful attraction, but frankly the two-fold fact of it being my last night in Munich and the fact that I was eating with an audience of one (being the Naipaul book I was reading, and therefore not very responsive) left me with the singular experience of being unwilling to put something that any random joker called food and charged money for into my mouth. I can't say I think this is a positive development.

At the same time, seeing what was actually on the menu made me feel a little better about my ability to decipher German. At every other restaurant, it had been easy enough to fumble my way through a variety of wursts, potato dishes, and the like, but after about ten minutes' hard staring at the menu last night, I was no more the wiser to its contents. When the waitress brought an English version and I saw that every item on the menu involved some complex interaction with bits of the alimentary canal and various internal organs of animals like the trusty ox, I felt somehow vindicated. This way I could be outraged - how on earth did my foolish professors think to omit crucial words from German 101/102 like "ox diaphragm"? Obviously it is an everyday word that even the simplest fool should be expected to know. I blame the Communists.

Blutwurst, or How I Went to Heaven without All the Hassle of Dying

Ever since my tender years when I read Patrick McManus describe the process of making blood sausage, an unshakeable certainty lodged itself in my mind that any food product made by killing a pig, draining it of blood, gutting it, then pouring the blood back into the guts again had to be a taste extravaganza of divine proportions.
Today I learned anew how feeble the imagination of man is in comparison to the wonders of God, for if blood sausage was not made specially by God at the very moment of Creation, I have no idea where it could have come from.
I should have known I was in for a treat when I saw that the name of the dish at the biergarten where I was making my evening repast was "Himmel und Äd," the latter being a word which escapes my feeble German but surely means something suitably Germanic, like "The being-in-itself-ness of deliciousness." The sun shone ever so slightly sunnier the moment the order passed my lips, and I swear I heard choirs of angels take up their places in the wings, clearing their throats and humming softly to keep themselves in tune. I, foolish mortal, paid little attention to these signs and turned back to my book and beer, quietly sipping (the beer, that is) and reading (the book, mostly) as I waited.
Presently I noticed something was astir when celestial trumpets blew and the angels let off their hemming and hawing to burst into full-throated song as they formed with their bodies a shining corridor for the small old German waiter and his precious burden on his way to my table.
On the table before me lay a sizable sausage that had been split into two halves, fried, and nestled into the warm embrace of golden mashed potatoes. The sausage was extremely black along its surface, barring little white lumps of fat that dotted its surface like gems on a medieval sword.
Time seemed to contort strangely around the sausage, filling my head with visions of all that is good and beautiful in the past and future. Ignoring such oddities, I took a bite.
The Cathedral in Cologne is a sprawling masterwork of Gothic architecture, with twin spires rising over 450 feet into the heavens, untold numbers of statues, and hundreds of delicately crafted stained glass scenes. The interior is just as impressive, from the quiet peace of the underground crypt to the near-infinite heights of the soaring arched ceiling. The entire building was created to be a monument to the goodness of God, proclaiming the glory of Creation through the perfect harmonizing of mundane physical elements. Space, shape, line, and perspective collude with the senses to overwhelm the mind with unimagined beauties.

This was like that, only located comfortably between my tongue and teeth.

Mere words cannot explain what it is like to have a mouthful containing the sum total of all that is good in the world working its way around your tastebuds while you have a whole plate of the stuff smiling beatifically up at you from a foot and a half away. All I can say is that you will not regret it if, upon reading this, you quit your job, sell everything you own, fly to Cologne, and make a living eating blood sausage before crowds of amazed onlookers. I practically guarantee it.

Amsterdam also exists

Yesterday I went to Amsterdam to visit a couple of friends and to see the Van Gogh museum. These two goals were achieved quite to my satisfaction, along with another that the previous post may have led you to expect: Lizbeth, who decided to take me on a wonderful little walking tour of the old city, included a substantial walk through the surprisingly beautiful Red Light District of Amsterdam. Mostly the place was pretty innocuous at 11:00 in the morning, although the ubiquitous presence of sex shops was a little out of place with the quiet streets and old-world charm of the area. Also incongruous with the reputation of the district was this amazing museum consisting of a 17th-century merchant house that is perfectly preserved with original decorations, furnishings, and the lot. The house looks like a normal private residence from the outside, and it is just that until you get to the third floor - that floor, however, is a complete and fully appointed Catholic church, with seating for at least a hundred people. It was built in the time of the high Dutch painting boom, too, so all the church decorations just so happen to be excellent works of art in that highly recognizable Dutch style. Apparently the deal with the church is that it was illegal at that time and for many years afterward for Catholic churches to operate openly, meaning that any church that was visible from the street would be torn down. In order to continue practicing their faith, then, wealthy merchants all over Amsterdam would turn the top floor of their homes into beautiful churches that still looked from the outside like normal private homes. The way Dutch persecution of Catholicism worked meant that there was no need for the fact that a church was present and operating in a given location to be kept secret; it was fine if everyone knew that a given home actually contained a church, as long as you couldn't actually tell by looking at it that it was in fact a den of papist devilry. Awesome.

The Van Gogh museum is also quite excellent, which is obvious enough. I saw a lovely painting of his with three brightly colored boats beached on a shore that I had first seen in May at the Neue Gallerie in New York, which marks the official first time that I have seen the same painting in person in two different countries. I am so cosmopolitan I can hardly stand it. Don't even waste your time being jealous, as this level of international hipsterism is not intended for ordinarily mortals.

Tomorrow: Cologne!

The Day after Tomorrow: Deodorant! (and worldwide destruction wrought by global warming)

ROXAAAAAAAANNE!

PUT ON A RED LIGHT!


ROXAAAAAAAAAAANNE!


PUT ON A RED LIGHT!


ROXAAAAAAAAAAANNE!