RWL  (January 1999)

I'm not all that superstitious, so it didn't bother me that I was traveling on Friday the thirteenth. But maybe it should have. The previous morning I must have been in a daze (this trip came together with a rush at the very last minute, as usual) and I left home without my Government ID badge. I stopped by my office, luggage in tow, to take care of a few last bits of business, but not having my ID meant that I had to bring everything in through the x-ray machine. As you might expect, the building security guards wanted to check out the largest, heaviest bag, and I had to mostly unpack it right then and there -- it was kind of embarrassing to be there amid stacks of clothes with people coming into the building gawking at it all. At any rate, the guards were satisfied when the mysterious x-ray shadow turned out to be a box of books. I was starting to be afraid they were going to demand a strip search!

Friday evening, November 13, 1998 (2nd of 2 cards)
And so this is Prague. If I have to be away from home for about a month on a business trip, Prague is the place to begin. I'm reminded of a line (paraphrased) from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark -- "We are just passing through history; this place is history." I can see part of that history from this hotel, in fact -- the tall ornate spires of the Church of Our Lady Under Týn, which dominates Prague's Old Town Square. It's my favorite building in the entire city. I'm thankful that it was a light day today, as business days go -- just two meetings and a business dinner. There were only a few times when I felt like I needed to tape my eyelids open.

There are, of course, lots of other wonderful buildings in the city. Some of them are on the castle hill across the river from Old Town, the most impressive being the Gothic cathedral St. Vitus. Besides the Týn church, the other tourist-collecting site in the Old Town Square is the famous Astronomical Clock. It is so popular with tourists, in fact, that you can't use the place as a meeting spot -- you'd never be able to locate the person you're planning to meet, a point that was made by a friend I met up with the following evening.

I should mention a little more about the walking tours. It turns out that they are all English-language, an indication of the large number of Anglophones who visit Prague (in fact, there are about 30,000 Americans who live in Prague). There were only six others on the tour -- two young ladies from South Africa, a couple from England, and another couple whose accent sounded Scandinavian. The tour was informative as well as visual -- I not only saw the house where Kafka was born and the theater where some of Czech president Vaclav Havel's plays were performed, I learned that Prague has a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower, but it was constructed on a hill such that the top of both it and its big brother in Paris are each the same altitude above sea level. Jana, the young lady who was our tour guide, also took pains to show sites important in recent Czech history, such as the spot where Russian tanks rolled in during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the building that had been the headquarters of the communist secret police. Many people, including a fellow playwright friend of Havel's, had been taken in there and had not come out alive. It was a sobering reminder that as little as a decade ago, I not only would not be taking that walking tour, I would not have been allowed into the country.

One thing that doesn't seem to have much of a language barrier is music -- Mozart pretty much sounds the same no matter where it's being performed. The only language barrier is just that -- determining where it's being performed. On Saturday, I'd headed out for what I'd expected would be a concert by a string quartet only to discover I was attending a performance by a wind ensemble. It's just an indication of the large number of musical events each evening in Prague. On my way back from the Castle tour, I even ran across a musical event that was happening during the afternoon -- on the pedestrian-only old Charles Bridge, the J.K. Novak Band was playing New Orleans jazz, complete with Czech-language lyrics. They are very good (I have both of their CDs), but don't look for them to be touring the United States any time soon. They don't even play clubs in Prague. I was surprised to find out that the Charles Bridge is the only place they perform.

Monday night, November 16, 1998
One more walking tour this evening, this one the most whimsical of all. It was the "Ghost Tour" of Old Town Prague, complete with tales of intrigue and mayhem, and even an appearance of a specter or two. The older fellow who was our tour guide ("Call me Mike!") led us on a one-hour walk while describing the Priest and the Prostitute, the Skeleton Who Wanted a Decent Burial, the Turk Who Was Too Late for His Own Wedding, and the Red-Haired Ax Murderer of Prague. The last two stories featured actual appearances of the ghosts of the Turk and the Ax Murderer (or someone who was channeling them, anyway) who jumped out of the shadows to scare us at the proper moments. After this, my walking tours of Washington are going to seem a bit humdrum!

Mike told us that all the tales from the tour had their bases in actual historical events. The story about the Skeleton, for instance, mostly took place at the entrance to Karlov University on Zelezna Street. The head of the University's Medical College (or whatever its equivalent was way back then) admired the doorman who presided over the huge wooden-framed entrance to the college -- not for his appearance but for his size! The doorman, who was very tall, would make a fine specimen for dissection after he was dead, and the academian got the doorman to agree to this during one of the doorman's many drunken binges. It wasn't long after that when the doorman, in yet another alcoholic haze, misjudged the location of the college's entranceway and charged headlong into one of the very immovable wooden pillars that formed the doorway -- he was dead almost instantly. And not too long after that, his corpse was being happily dissembled on the autopsy table until all that remained was the skeleton, which was relegated to a corner of the room where it remained for decades. All of this was supposedly true; it was the retelling of the tale, time after time, that added embellishment after embellishment until the conclusion became as follows: And then, one cold and rainy night (like that evening was, in fact!) the skeleton began to move -- very slowly, at first, and then more coordinated until it left the building out into the street. Whenever it perceived a passer-by, it emerged from the shadows and, with a voice like the wind, asked for donations of money -- it needed the cash to pay for a formal burial, which would at last free the doorman's soul. Mike told it better than this, of course, and I'm paraphrasing it all as best as I can remember. But, you know, I've probably just added my own round of embellishments to the story. Gosh, maybe I've contributed my part to the legendry of the city!

Tuesday night, November 17, 1998
Tonight is my fifth and last night in Prague; tomorrow it's on to Slovakia. On trips like this, when I've been in one place for several days, I usually get the feeling that I ought to be moving on. It's been like that today, and the brisk snow that continued for much of the daytime seemed to accentuate it. Anyway, this last night in town seemed to call for a special event to say good-bye to the city, so tonight I went to a special kind of concert -- the music of Mozart, performed by a chamber orchestra, opera singers, and ballet dancers, all dressed in period costumes (reproductions) from the time of Mozart. It really was a special performance, and it also came with a special price -- it was one of the most expensive concerts I've been to outside the United States.

Even though the concert had been promoted all over the city (you couldn't miss the people in period costumes handing out information flyers), the turnout was only a few hundred. Most of us who did show up had purchased the least expensive tickets available, so it must have been a strange sight to the performers to see a nearly empty lower level and a crowd of people packed into the back balcony. The reason for this, of course, was the price structure of the tickets, which was more in line of what you'd expect for Washington, D.C., not Prague. As a result, the concert was solely a tourist event -- it was unaffordable for the locals. It must be kind of a cruel irony for the residents of Prague, to live in a city renown for its music and musical history and not being able to afford to see any of it.

The snow and the hotel were only two of the slightly surreal events of the day. The third was my presentation at the small energy-related technical conference here (the reason I was there at all, in fact). I hadn't offered to do a presentation as much as was volunteered to do one by one of the organizers (a friend to whom I owed a favor). My chosen topic, commercial use of energy technologies in Slovakia and ways of finding the project developer & necessary investment money, wasn't really much in line with the theme of the conference, coal chemistry & science and development of new coal-based technologies. Knowing this going in, I began my talk mentioning that I was going to make the presentation interactive, more of a discussion than a speech actually, and I was going to get some interesting questions from the audience if it killed me to do it (well...not exactly those words, but you get the idea). It didn't work. Every time I left it open for some audience comments ("...and perhaps one of you would have a comment on that?") all I got was an amphitheater of expressionless faces and dead silence, even after the translation. It was one of the most humiliating professional experiences I've ever had, and when it was over, I slunk off stage to a smattering of applause. Even that didn't help -- I'm not sure if they were finally giving me some sympathetic support, or else feeling relieved that I left before the guy with the hook showed up.

Thursday night, November 19, 1998
I'm in Prešov tonight, a city similar in character to Košice, though a bit smaller. I awoke this morning in Košice to find there had been a 10 centimeters snowfall from last night. It mostly melted away during the day, but not before it made for an exciting automobile ride up a narrow (and unplowed) mountain road, through switchback after switchback. The Slovak countryside, especially the deep woods, is truly spectacular under a blanket of snow. It was a winter wonderland that even had some natural wonders, including a geyser (the only one in Slovakia). But the curse of a fully-planned business trip is there's no time to stop for such things. Next time.

Prešov was mostly a positive experience (except for my electric razor dying, but that's another story). Both business meetings I had there led to the discovery of project opportunities (worth an cumulative US$43 million), which I took back to the States to promote to private sector project developers there. Trade promotion is actually quite interesting, and even fun to do -- you get to meet a lot of people, and it helps if you have a sense of adventure about it all. This trip was my longest ever, and the only real downside about it was that my luggage was very heavy. Wherever I go, I want to make sure the people I meet remember me, so I do things like bringing business cards translated into the local language (Slovak in this case) and taking lots of giveaways. One of the most effective giveaways has been the "Photographic Tour of the Smithsonian Institute" book (I pay for these out of my own pocket, by the way), and I usually present a copy to the managers of the companies I visit, especially if there's a business opportunity there. A four-week trip means lots of books (I'm not sure I'm physically able to do a five-week trip). But after Presov, I could feel the load start to get lighter. Either that, or all the lifting was having a healthful effect on me!

Slovakia's mountains are one of its two most prominent features that I keep telling people about. The other is all the castles. There are nearly 200 of them, in a country about the size of New Jersey -- so many that you'll see at least one of them on almost any highway trip you make in the country. The largest castle of them all is Spišský Hrad, which was featured in the movie Dragonheart. It's what's known as a "fallen castle," meaning that it's mostly a ruin. But that doesn't prevent it from being an impressive sight, on a rocky hilltop only about one kilometer from one of the major east-west highways in Slovakia. We drove past it on the way from Presov to Tatranská Lomnica; all the snow may have obscured the mountains, but it made the castle appear even more spectacular. It's no surprise that a Hollywood film production came all the way here to take advantage of it.

It was probably for the best that we didn't get up to the top of the rock; there's no telling how cold and windy it might have been up there. At any rate, I hadn't even brought the right clothes for those conditions; I had packed for "November" and what I'd gotten was "January." Nevertheless, it was a little disappointing not to be able to see the High Tatras from close-up -- they really are magnificent in winter. Back in the early spring of 1995, my first time there, the weather did allow a hike upslope to the lodge next to a high mountain lake, and the reward was unexpected and superb mountain vistas every so often when we'd break out of the woods into a clearing. One other thing I remember about that hike was how deep the snow was for late March; if you left the trail it was, in places, up to your hips. The combination of snow that deep and the end of winter produced another unexpected sight, though I heard it before I saw it. We had paused to admire one of those vistas and had turned back to the trail when there was what sounded like a freight train. It was an avalanche (a small one), coming down the face of the mountain across the valley from us. Before we began the hike, we'd seen the sign warning us that the lower trail was closed. Now we knew why!

I've not yet mentioned a local "hot topic" related to the High Tatras -- Slovakia's bid for the 2006 Winter Olympics. The headquarters city for the Games would be Poprad, about 12 km south (and a few hundred meters lower) than Tatranská Lomnica, but all the alpine events would be in the High Tatras. Tatranská Lomnica would certainly be a popular place for visitors to stay; there are about a dozen small and medium sized hotels situated around a village green (though for the Olympics I guess it would be more of a "village white"), and I can imagine that during the Games the town would be a non-stop party. If Slovakia was awarded the 2006 Games, it would bring some changes to the area, though, and that's where the controversy is. A bobsled and luge run would have to be constructed somewhere in the mountains. Developers would want to reconstruct hotels, or build new ones. Many of the roads, adequate now, might need "improvements." Not everyone wants all these changes and all the redevelopment just for a circus that would last only 16 days. The High Tatras are an environmentally sensitive area, and have been preserved as a national park. The Slovakians opposed to the Olympics bid want them to stay that way.

Monday evening, November 23, 1998
One more postcard from the Tatras, or at least from near them. I'm staying tonight at a "Penzion" in the village of Habovka, which is out in the middle of nowhere, about 4 km from the western edge of Tatra National Park. The accommodations here are quite nice -- satellite television, a comfortable & clean room, and a roaring fire in the wood stove downstairs. (My worries that I'd wind up in another Hotel Hutnik were quickly put to rest.) The day was an easy one, with only one business meeting (but an important one), so we had the afternoon to ourselves. On the way here we passed by a huge wonderfully-preserved castle (Orava Hrad), but we found that we couldn't go inside because there's an Italian movie being filmed there (lots of horses were in the production from the barnyard smell wafting down to us). But the big event of the afternoon was a trip to the nearby thermal springs. We spent an hour soaking in the hot water outdoor pool, while all around us there was 20 centimeters of snow on the ground. It would have been more surreal yet if it had actually snowed while we were there, but the skies were clear. The one day we actually wanted snow, we didn't get it!

It turns out that a "Penzion" is about the same thing as a Bed & Breakfast, except that the Penzion provides dinner as well as breakfast in the cost of the room. There were several Penzions in Habovka, heaven knows why (unless it's the hot springs, but that was 15 km away). I was told the cost of this Penzion was a bit high by Slovakian standards -- 700 Sk per day. That didn't seem so much to me, and I was right -- when I converted it to U.S. dollars it worked out to not quite US$21 per day. For everything -- room, dinner, and breakfast (and the food was good!). I had to do the calculation twice before I could believe it. The surreal event of the day wasn't the hot springs amid all the snow -- it was this mind-boggling bit of information! Who says there are no bargains anymore?

This was my second trip to Zilina (actually my third if you count one other time, in 1996, when I was there for a grand total of three hours). It's a nice place to visit, with several large town squares and one smallish manor house type of castle. By the time we had settled into our hotel, it was almost 7pm and most everything was closed except the Tesco store. On the way there to buy some postcards, I walked through the Old Town Square just at the moment when the clocks were chiming seven times at the top of the hour. There's one clock, on what looks to be the town hall building, that does more than that, though. There are 14 different bells on the facade of the building, kind of an industrial-strength handbell choir, and the ensemble is programmed to play a tune after chiming out the hour of day. I didn't recognize the one that rang out, though I expect that it plays holiday tunes during Christmas season. Earlier in the day I'd noticed that it had been a whole week since the Prague Mozart concert, and much as I'd like to, there was no telling when I'd be able to attend another musical event. Well, my wish was fulfilled, but in a way different than I had expected!

After the meeting, on the drive from Zilina to Bratislava, we had stopped for lunch just across the river from the city of Trencin. I'd been through there before -- the central part of the city is dominated by a large castle fortress situated imposingly on a bluff high above the river. It turned out that one of my Slovak hosts had gone to high school in Trencin, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the country was firmly in the control of hard-line communists. I asked him what it was like back then, and the one thing he most remembered was the incident involving three older high school boys. One night, either as a prank or in an act of defiance, they snuck onto the grounds of the local communist party headquarters and removed a large red star that was attached to the building, in the process of doing so breaking it. They were caught, of course, and the punishment was severe. They were sentenced to death and were executed. The remainder of our trip to Bratislava was mostly quiet and subdued. Sometimes it's easy to overlook that, although Slovakia is now an open and free society, many people gave up a lot to make it that way.

Thursday, November 26, 1998 (Thanksgiving)
The most entertaining business meeting of the trip, so far, happened today. It took place during our day trip to the city of Topolcany, at the Topvar pivovar (brewery) there. Unfortunately, the business opportunity we uncovered is probably too small in value to promote (we'll let it "ferment" for a few months and check with them again in the spring), but at the end of the meeting we were provided a nice tour of their beer-making operations. They even gave me a handsome beer stein as a souvenir of the visit. We enjoyed ourselves so much on the tour, in fact, that we "beer-ly" had enough time to make it to our afternoon meeting an hour's drive away. It's a good thing there wasn't a tasting room, or we might still be there!

The other business meeting of the day was in Levice, and it was hosted by the mayor of the city. I found it interesting that even though he was up for re-election in just a few weeks, his main interest was the welfare of his city rather than his own personal standing. And he wasn't accompanied by the usual group of handlers and sycophants you see with U.S. politicians; it was just himself and two people from the city heat supply company. Apparently they do things refreshingly different in Slovakia. Anyway, I don't often get to meet politicians on my business trips -- it's happened only twice before (ignore what I claimed in the previous Postcard Diary). The first time was under similar circumstances, though the U.S. business delegation was a bit bigger -- ten people (myself included) instead of just one (myself). That one happened out in the middle of Siberia, in 1994, in the former "secret city" of Krasnoyarsk-26 (like this time, that meeting was hosted in the town hall by the city's mayor). The other time was in a perhaps equally unlikely place, a trade show in Delhi, India, in 1995. A group of people huddled around a tall stately-looking person cruised by the exhibit booth I was babysitting, and the tall guy turned out to be (then) Massachusetts governor William Weld. He came over and we talked for about a minute; I even have a photo as proof. (He needed to find some hangers-on who knew more about how to use a camera, though.)

Bratislava didn't look to have changed all that much since the previous time I was there, about eight months earlier. There was still reconstruction of some of the older buildings going on (the Hotel Carleton will be fabulous when its re-hab is finally finished), but the Old Town seemed mostly revitalized -- there's now plenty of night life, and musical events such as chamber music concerts are fairly common. This is in great contrast to the first time I was there, in March 1995; back then the Old Town consisted mostly of abandoned buildings with broken or missing windows and crumbling masonry. Hardly anyone went there during the day, while at night you didn't feel completely safe there. The turnaround began a couple of years ago when the city finally decided to rid itself of the problem the same way Slovakia is divesting itself of state-owned enterprises -- the buildings are being privatized. They were sold, I think, for one Slovak Koruna each to businesses wanting them for their Bratislava headquarters operations (and there were a lot of them). Part of the agreement was that the purchasers were responsible for the necessary improvements before these historic old buildings would be habitable. I'd been following the reconstruction of one of them; it wasn't a particularly notable building and I have no idea what its history is. But I noticed it way back in 1995 when it was just a shell; in my mind's eye I could picture what it would look like (and perhaps what it once did look like) in better times. During my trip to Bratislava eight months ago I saw that the re-hab of the building had started; now it's finished. The change from when I first saw it is amazing (even if the lower part of it is now a bank); it's as if the building had located an architectural fountain of youth. It made me feel vicariously satisfied, and perhaps even a bit younger myself.

Actually, I did more on that Saturday than just wander around. My Slovak hosts had provided a concert ticket for the evening, for a performance by the Slovak National Philharmonic Orchestra. Or so they had thought. Instead, it turned out to be a benefit concert for Slovakia's equivalent to the United Way, complete with children's choirs, a popular (from the way he was greeted, at least) local opera tenor, and even a Celine Dion knockoff. (As well as long, interminable Slovak-language interviews of local notables, in between the music, who were no doubt getting their 15 minutes of fame.) It was all being recorded for later broadcast on one of Slovakia's two state-owned television networks, and there's where the problem was for me. I was already more than a bit disappointed that the show wasn't at all what I'd been told it would be, and then I found that the presence of all the television cameras required that the audience be kept bathed in very bright, hot lights throughout the event. It was unpleasant, and the only thing that prevented me from walking out after about the first ten minutes was that I'd been accompanied by one of my Slovak hosts, and I didn't want to cause any embarrassment. But there's more -- after I returned to my room in the Penzion, I turned on the radio and was greeted by an excellent BBC radio adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times (one of the voice actors was Tom Baker). So maybe it all worked out in the end -- I'd expected a memorable performance that evening, and I got it. Just not in the way I'd imagined.

Sunday night, November 29, 1998
It was my last free day in Slovakia, and I spent part of the evening with my friend Peter. He used to work for the Power Research Institute where my Slovak hosts are employed, and had been on one of their earlier trips to the U.S., in fact (in 1996). About a year ago, he moved on to work for a software development company that makes object-oriented programs for the energy services and banking sectors. In the past year, his company was mostly acquired by a Swiss company, so lately he's been spending a lot of his time in Geneva (where he's going tomorrow morning). He's a good guide to the city; even though I'm getting to know Bratislava pretty well, he obviously knows it a lot better. We used his expertise to locate a nice restaurant I hadn't known about in one of Old Town's recently reconstructed buildings, and a small, quiet bar I hadn't noticed in a little hole-in-the-wall gallery off one of the streets leading into the Old Town Square. Ah, the value of local talent!

Some of the things you don't need a guide to see in Bratislava's Old Town are the amusing life-size metal sculptures of caracturized people, placed here and there to lighten your day as you pass by them. There's "The Commodore" (my name for him), for instance, who is leaning against the back of one of the park benches in Old Town Square, propping himself up with his elbows. Just down one of the nearby streets is "Mr. Top Hat" (based on an actual resident of Bratislava), who beckons with outstretched arm, top hat in hand, at the building where his real self once resided. And there's "The Miner," emerging from underground through an actual manhole in one of Old Town's pedestrian-only streets. Peter showed me where two others were, in a pedestrian arcade -- a young lady leaning against a (very real) tree in a café area of the arcade and a worried businessman looking with alarm at his wristwatch, near the entrance to a bank. I look forward to seeing these everytime I'm in the city (even more so, now that I know there's five of them instead of just three); they're stress-relievers that always bring a smile, especially on days where not much positive has happened. They're popular with residents of the city, too, especially the ones under age five. But I've no idea who should be congratulated for these combinations of art and humor; none of them have any identification whatsoever.

Monday night, November 30, 1998
It's the end of November, and also the end of my stay in Slovakia. Tomorrow night at this time I'll be in Katowice, Poland. There's getting to be a tradition for each of my trips here that on my last night in Slovakia, my friends at the Power Research Institute take me out on a pub crawl. We did it again this trip, as long in duration as usual (six hours!) but to fewer bars and restaurants than we ordinarily visit. This year's hit list included a fine little restaurant in the middle of Bratislava's Old Town, a nondescript watering hole out on the northwest edge of town, and even a Harley Davidson biker bar (in theme, anyway) in the southern industrial area of the city. I've no way of knowing if there actually are that many Harleys in the country, but the atmosphere inside seemed authentic enough.

I should mention that there are some mighty fine beers in Eastern Europe. The one probably most familiar to North Americans is Pilsner Urquell, which comes from the western part of the Czech Republic. As the name indicates, it's a moderately light pilsner type of beer, and the description "pilsner" even derives from the city where it's brewed (Plzen). All the good Slovak beers are similar in taste to Pilsner Urquell, and at least two of them, Zlaty Bazant and Topvar, are better. My hosts were way too kind to me; I was originally going to limit myself to just two or three small ("maly") beers for the evening, but as time wound on, I noticed there always seemed to be a large full glass of the golden stuff sitting in front of me -- it was like magic! One other thing that happened as the night went on (and after our translator went home) was that the language barrier started to drop, especially for me -- the more I drank, the easier it was to pick up on a few Slovak words and phrases. By the time the evening came to a close, we were all half-looped and understanding each other perfectly. Or so it seemed, anyway. Maybe I've discovered a new method of learning languages!

Tuesday night, December 1, 1998
This is my first night in Poland and also my first and last night in Katowice, a medium-size city located in the industrial heart of the Silesia region of the country. To be honest, this doesn't seem to be a city with a lot of character. The only really noticeable structure in the entire city is the sports arena, which, I swear to God, is what you'd imagine the mother ship from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind to look like if it had come in for a pit stop. I walked all the way from my hotel to the train station tonight looking for some signs of life, but it was mostly quiet. Of course, the breezy minus 5 degrees C weather may have had something to do with it!

The train ride from Bratislava to Katowice took about five hours, during which I saw the ground get whiter and whiter with snow the farther north I went. Most of the ride was through the eastern part of the Czech Republic, but even before we'd left Slovakia the most memorable moment of the entire trip occurred -- in this land of castles, I got to be a knight in shining armor. Just as the train was leaving Bratislava, I noticed an elderly lady standing in the aisle of the rail car I was in, tearfully talking to one of the conductors who was shaking his head at her. There was obviously some kind of problem, but I didn't discover what it was until I spotted her ticket and saw she'd only purchased a fare to the first stop, at the Czech-Slovak border. She obviously needed to go farther than that (to Breclav, it turned out, the next stop after that) but didn't have enough money for the conductor to do an upgrade. I'd been unable to spend all of my Slovak money the night before (nobody would let me buy anything), so I gave her 150 koruna (not really all that much, about US$5) which solved the problem. She was so grateful that she forced me to share her lunch with her (roasted chicken breast, pretty good) and she was all smiles after that. I wonder if I should add a new title to my business card -- "good samaritan." The reason I was in Eastern Europe, my trade promotion initiative, was also designed to be kind of a "good samaritan" activity -- to bring investment help to companies that really need it. Now I can say that the initiative works, even at a much smaller and more personal level.

In traveling through Eastern Europe by car, one of the things you'll notice fairly quickly is the large number of beautiful churches and cathedrals in the region. Even relatively small towns have them, and many of these places of worship date back to before the time when the United States was an independent nation. All these churches are still in very active use, and not just on weekends. Almost every evening during the week there are services held, and if you drive through one of these small towns just as the service is letting out it's an instant traffic jam, as the narrow streets are filled with vehicles, bicycles, and people on foot. As we passed by Czestachowa, the spire of one of the largest cathedrals in Poland was visible off in the distance -- the home of the most sacred religious icon in the country. It's called the "Black Madonna," and it's a painting depicting Madonna and Child that dates back centuries, now darkened by age (hence its name). It's not kept on constant display like works of old masters at an art museum; instead, it's shown to gatherings of religious pilgrims two or three times a day. I was present (unobtrusively) at one of these unveilings, back on my first trip to Poland, in 1992. I'm not a particularly religious person, but even so it was a moving experience. There was a sudden hush that spread across the room and all the people, hundreds of them, fell to their knees. Tears came to their eyes. The most interesting aspect of the whole experience was that almost all of the people present were very youthful, of college age or even younger. Throughout its history, Poland has had to endure some hard times, not the least of which was 40+ years of communism which had ended only three years prior to my first trip there. The conviction of faith, and the painting that is its manifestation (especially with the youth), must be a powerful force, indeed.

Thursday night, December 3, 1998
Warsaw seems to have become the city of light. At least, during Christmas season it is. There are some really impressive holiday light displays on many of the taller buildings here in the city centrum -- falling snowflakes, Christmas trees, Santa-in-sleigh -- all done at a very large scale and in multicolor. And amid it all is the Palace of Culture and Science, looking very foreboding -- kind of appropriate on a cold wintery night like tonight.

Besides being a city of light, Warsaw was also a city of cold. It was more frigid in Warsaw (minus 11 degrees C) than even in the High Tatras of Slovakia -- so not-nice out on the streets that it prevented me from venturing very far on foot from the hotel. Desperate times called for desperate measures, so I bought a knit hat and a woolen scarf from a street vendor (for a total cost of about US$8). Those street vendors must be made from some tough stuff to be out there all day. And there were dozens of them, each with their own sidewalk tables and bins. Private enterprise is alive and well in Poland, even in the least hospitable of conditions.

Part of the reason there was a problem at all was the difficulty I'd been having staying in touch with the outside world. An e-mail message warning about the situation had been sent to me a few days earlier, but by the time I'd found a way to access my office e-mail account it was almost too late to do anything about it. What saved me was the existence of so-called "internet cafés" that now exist in some of the cities in Eastern Europe. Earlier in the trip, I'd found them in Prague and Bratislava, but it took some effort to dig out the location of one of them in Warsaw. Turns out it was only two blocks from the hotel I was in, and I'd walked past it at least twice without noticing it. To find it, you had to go into a foreboding little courtyard area and look for a hand-painted sign you could easily mistake for graffiti. The arrow next to the sign pointed down a flight of crumbling concrete stairs into the cellar area of one of the courtyard buildings, but when you got there, all there was to see was an empty dank-smelling area, the only occupant being an old lady feeding meat scraps to a couple of stray cats. But wait! Just beyond her was this door (without any sign), and when you opened it, voilà! -- the public access internet provider. I'm apparently not the only one who had trouble locating the place; there was only one other customer there the whole hour I was online reading my e-mail, and he was playing some kind of online computer adventure game. But as far as I was concerned, just getting to the place seemed like it was part of a computer adventure game. Only this time, instead of rescuing some digitized lady in distress, I rescued the remainder of my business trip!

We didn't stay in Gdansk all that long -- just a couple of hours to look around the city and then it was back to the train station to catch the "local" to Wejherovo (22 stops in 44 kilometers!) where we were met at the station and brought to NordCon. Earlier, I'd been told about NordCon by the friend who was with me, and I'd expressed an interest in attending. It's a science fiction convention, informally organized with discussion events with various writers and editors, some strange contests and competitions that I still haven't figured out yet, and a free-for-all party area with lots of loud music that went on well into the early morning hours. I was the only person there who didn't speak Polish, but that didn't prevent me from talking with people. As I expected, once everyone realized I was from the United States, they came up to me to try out their English on me; it was truly a rewarding experience to be there. For me, NordCon was as much a cultural event as all the concerts and tours of Prague earlier in the trip. Just a different sort of culture!

The train ride back to Warsaw was almost a mini-convention in itself. There was another science fiction fan sharing the compartment with me and my friend, and also one of Poland's better-known science fiction writers (Konrad Lewandowski) and his young daughter. I never did learn much about what Mr. Lewandowski had written (although I did find out he was an engineer by academic training -- same as me -- and was working as a journalist); his little girl, though, entertained us all with some of her pencil drawings. I had no trouble recognizing the lakefront vista of the hotel where NordCon had been held and the stylized zodiac figures from the ceiling of the train station in Gdynia. She has a real talent for art, even at age 6. If she stays with it, there's no telling how good she can get by the time she's finished schooling. We may have discovered the next Michael Whelan!

Monday night, December 7, 1998
I arrived in cold and snowy Romania earlier today, and I guess I'm not really sure what to make of Bucharest yet. It's a lot more spread-out than Prague or Warsaw, without a well-defined centrum or a visible Old Town, but with many palacial government buildings (the legacy of the socialist Ceaucescu era) scattered throughout the city. Anyway, I was out on the streets for about an hour this evening looking for some interesting sights, and I did find a few. There was a five-piece brass ensemble, all dressed in Santa costumes, playing jazzed-up holiday music for passers-by. And there was also some guy sitting on a chair out on the cold sidewalk, with a bathroom scales on the ground in front of him. Not sure what that was all about, but I'm guessing it means I've got a lot to learn about things here!

All those government "palaces" in Bucharest are probably the most visible evidence of why Ceaucescu was taken down in 1989 -- Romania had been going down the tubes economically for many years, and here he was spending large amounts of money on all these huge monuments to himself, as if he was an emperor. When it all finally boiled over, it's no wonder he was taken out and shot. At any rate, all these large and pretentious buildings (with the broad avenues that go with them) do set Bucharest apart from other Eastern Europe cities. But the culture and even the language are very different, too. Romanian is not a slavic-family language like Polish, Czech, and Slovak -- not even close. It's actually a "romance" language, very similar, actually, to Latin (I've been told that Romanian is the language that Latin has evolved into). The Romanian culture (at first glance, anyway) seems to be somewhat derived from the French -- French used to be Romania's language of business (it's being supplanted by English), and many of the restaurants and bistros have a pseudo-French cuisine. There's even an Arc de Triumph in Bucharest; it's in the middle of a traffic circle on the way from the airport to the city center. About the only thing that seems to be missing here is a month-long bicycle race!

One source of constant amazement for me all during this trip was the weather -- not because of all the snow and cold where I was, but all the news reports about the heat wave that North America was experiencing. It was as if winter had begun a month early in Eastern Europe and summer had never ended in the United States. And yet, I kind of enjoyed experiencing a real winter again. I now live in Maryland, which is too far south and too close to the ocean to get very much snow during the winter, but I grew up in far northern New York State, in one of the so-called "snow belt" regions where it wasn't unusual to have "White Thanksgivings" or even a "White Halloween." It's been a long time, but I can still remember (with a bit of nostalgia) all the days when school was cancelled due to a blizzard blowing in off the lake, and thise clear crisp mornings when the outside temperature was minus 30 degrees C. Well, maybe nostalgia isn't quite the right word to describe it!

Maybe part of the reason I wasn't spending very much money in Romania was because of the money itself. There are just too many zeroes on all the banknotes (the exchange rate is now more than 10,000 Lei to the U.S. dollar) which made it easy to get a distorted idea of what was expensive and what wasn't. Anyway, I saw there was a symphony performance that last evening in Bucharest, and it looked like an opportunity to use up most of my remaining Lei. Or so I thought. When I arrived at the symphony hall, I was surprised to find that there wasn't a box office there. I tried to explain to the person at the door that I needed to purchase a ticket for the performance, but he had even less English than I had Romanian, and pointed me toward the coat check area. I thought I was doing a little better with the lady there, especially when she motioned me toward a staircase up to the next level, but when I got to the top, a door opened into the back of the concert hall. One last try, with the lady usher there: "Excuse me, I need to purchase ticket for this performance. Can you help?" She pointed me toward a vacant seat at the back of the hall. At that point, I gave in, realizing that it was my karma not to be able to spend any money in Romania. The concert was a good one, though, with performances of the "Tragic Overture" by Brahms, a melodic violin concerto by Wieniawski, and Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 2. It was a very fine (if somewhat surreal) end to my short stay in Romania.

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Check out Richard's other travel adventures:

Russia (summer 1994) Eastern Europe (spring 1998) Eastern Europe (autumn 1999) Eastern Europe (spring 2001)

Eastern Europe (autumn 1997) Eastern Europe (spring 1999) Eastern Europe (spring 2000) Eastern Europe (spring 2002)