They said, English is a bit of everything these days, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s all mixed up for sure.

Do you worry that the Poles are here to take over? one asks, in good humour. No, I don’t. ‘Poles simply work harder’. I do worry about young people being zombies. Not the chasing after you eating you type, but in the sense of the old fashioned sombulant unconscious trance. But maybe things are about to change. We talk about rock’n’roll and then defining national characteristics and stereotypes and he says how annoyed he was to get an election leaflet though his door from the BNP which opposed ‘mass immigration’ and which, to illustrate the British fighting spirit, showed a picture of a Second World War Spitfire. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at it and realised this particular plane was from a Polish Squadron, flown by a pilot who was Polish. The plane was from 303 Squadron of the RAF. During the Battle of Britain Polish fighter pilots shot down 203 Luftwaffe aircraft – around 12 per cent of total German losses. This annoyed him no end. Come on, he said, Can’t these people get even basic facts right? “It’s not a question of disliking the Polish people,” a BNP spokesman had said when questioned on this, “it’s just a question of economics.”

We then talk about the older expatriate community who, it seems, don’t take too kindly to the newcomers. For years they’ve sent money back to help Mother Poland survive and the moment they’re free and join the EU they come over here. You know, this is first generation to be able to freely express themselves, who can travel across borders without the memory of those times. Those tainted times of Five Year Plans and queuing. Now young Poles have the ability to say what they think, travel, work, and enjoy the same freedoms as ‘The West’.

He tells me about a local recipe for homemade, which apparently dates from the Grunwald Battle of 1410. He’s never tried it though. He also suggests I try coffee vodka. I know that some people from north of Poland what they do with normal vodka is that you take some coffee grains and put it inside a full bottle and leave it for around a week. Then the alcohol taste is killed and you have something like a coffee vodka…

Later I find myself dreaming of a different country, or rather two, where elements of Poland and the UK are irrevocably mixed up, a science fiction scenario that could be from a Stanisław Lem story. Maybe it’s the full moon, maybe it’s the shower of Perseids above…

Here, my ex-girlfriend is proudly showing me round one city, which has Spaghetti Junction traversing the Vistula in ever widening spirals. Here Polglish is spoken – and quite eloquently. It seems the Promised Land. Everywhere is a hive of activity. Old warehouses from Łódź  are jammed up against warehouses in Digbeth, a hive of technological and creative activity encased in 19th century brick and mortar. And beyond, you can see the gleaming shopping centres of downtown. This is Cosmopolitania, a shining new social democratic state, preferably with high mountains, where people work hard and play hard, where we find stubbornness, enterprise, individualism, a distrust of authority and a love of freedom, a land of chilled music festivals and mash up culture. On the large plasma screens in the city centre we listen to the implausibly gleaming model mother glowing on the television. ‘Rutinoscorbin is like the sixth member of our family!’  she says happily. Here glossy commercials for health products beam at all from the billboards, draped down the side of skyscrapers,  interspersed with private insurance schemes and endorsements from television celebrities. People talk endlessly of their management and economic degrees and the new elite dresses up for the party, talking about money and their future dreamed social positions. Here there are optimistic teenagers listening to Crashed Disco Balls with only a hint of melancholy, fringe theatre festivals are popular, there are beaches with sand, fresh fish and fresh fruit.

In the other country, Polgland, which is largely rural and unproductive, conspiracy theories are the main source of media entertainment, along with and repetitive talent shows. The paranoias of the Law and Justice Party and those further right have found their home here. Teenagers are pessimistic, lack lustre and jobless The old times are revered, reinstated even, where the clock is turned back, Orwellian spun via Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ or ‘The Black Dossier’. In high stone letters the slogan Why, Mother Knows Best is emblazoned above the entrance to the city hall. The churches and pubs are full, the football hooligans are in place, the League of Families gather in solidarity. The deeply conservative and eternally aggrieved live here, spread out across ramshackle housing estates that stretch out far across the plain. And there is still an underclass – for there must be a scapegoat – those Islamists and former members of the colonies, who work at night and clear away the refuse and recycle what they can, copper or tin. Here, a hefty dose of narcissism in the nationalist martyrology is welded onto a mournful reverence of the time when Brittannia ruled the waves. Here there are beaches with stones, New Brightons, cornettos, grease laden fish and chips, everyone size 16, too many TV reality shows about nothing in particular, and the deeply engrained pornification opium of the masses.

In both these future lands, there is one common problem: What to do with the Chechens?

No vodka was consumed during the writing of this post, though there is surely time yet. Alternatively, I’ll run through this blog about an expatriate living in Wrocław.

Before any long weekend can stretch before me, I need to catch up on some morning sleep in Praga. Yes, you’ll need to store it, I am firmly told. It’s after midday and walking past the woman selling watermelons round the corner of Kępna onto the main street where the trams are on Targowa and there’s an artist waiting at a bus stop. She wears a combination of bright blue clothes and a severe haircut that that only an artist would have. Recently she was part of an exchange in Birmingham with the Polish Expatriates Association there. She had been filing her taxes, as everyone else is on this particular day. The smell from the bread shop nearby makes me feel hungry and distracted. There was no food in the flat, simply an untouched bottle of vodka in the fridge.

She had just returned from her own long weekend near Sejny where her father had a country house. I’ve been digging a piece of ground for carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, radish, beet roots, she says proudly. While we’re exchanging pleasantries, a guy talking on a mobile smacks the woman with him in the face. She thumps him back and he slaps her again a few times and they struggle and all the time he carries on talking calmly on the phone. They wander off bickering. Ah, typical.. Then there are two young children, sisters I’ve often seen, begging on the tram – singing a song in shaky harmony, holding up a sign and asking for money. They don’t get much sympathy. Yes, I’m definitely in Praga, I’m not still in bed, dreaming. Beyond the block of flats, a dusty path and a line of allotments with the old harbour wharves beyond. In one of the warehouses by this port there was a Vietnamese Cultural Centre – Thang Long/Flying Dragon – it’s gone, where to I don’t know, as the new national stadium rises into the air nearby. In the news they talk about the stadium being delayed by months. No-one expresses much surprise.

Targowa Street was a thoroughfare in the Middle Ages, and is lined by early 20th century tenements, many in a poor state, some still empty, waiting to fall down and for a new swanky apartment block to go up. The central reservation where the trams rattle by was once a green space. And some new trams are appearing this side of the river. This is the part of town where ‘the habits were violent and underperfumed’ – Obyczaje byly gwaltowne I nieuperfumowane. It has its charms for sure – the old Bazar Różyckiego is mere shadow of its former self, with it’s famous chitterlings and dumplings usurped by nearby kebab counters. The nearby streets embrace their funky little bars that have become oh so fashionable. Though it’s all in a constant state of change, as the city engorges and reinvents itself. Right next to the now mostly empty bazaar some of the oldest houses are being renovated and converted into a historical museum of Praga Muzeum Warszawskiej Pragi.

A little further along is the junction with al. Solidarnosci, where the trams and buses run west across the river to the Old Town, here is Centrum Wileńska, a shopping centre with a train station at its foot. And in between the roads, stands the The Memorial of the Brotherhood of Arms, commemorating the collaboration between the Soviet and Polish soldiers. Four soldiers with their heads bowed stand on the corners of a plinth atop are which three soldiers in battle action poses. Sculpted by Stefan Momot, it was the first statue to be erected in Warsaw liberated from the Nazis after the Second World War – its opening took place on September 18, 1945, though the figures then were only made of plaster, covered with bronze sealing paint. The metal sculpture was put in place in 1947, cast from fragments of the Nazi military equipment brought from the liberated Berlin. It is commonly referred to at ‘The Four Sleepers’.

The above mentioned artist in blue proposed a project to convert this and other monuments, writing ‘The ‘dead’ memorials in Warsaw should either disappear or be re­freshed’. She put a ‘swing’ on the Berling’s Army Monument, suggested a ‘slide’ for the Monument to the Red Army and a ‘carousel’ on the Brotherhood in Arms here – which would surely wake these four sleepers. (Read about it here: CarouselSlideSwing.pdf.) The monument will be moved at some point, as here is scheduled a new metro station. The Law and Justice Party in the City Council would like to see it completely destroyed. This logic of eradicating symbols of past oppressors may well apply to the beautiful Orthodox Cathedral of St. Mary Magdaleine just opposite, built in 1860 when the Tsar’s army was stationed in Praga, another clear indication of Russian power and influence.

There is a documentary film from 1957 which features several recognisable shots of Praga, including the wide concrete expanses of what was then the newly built national stadium. ‘Ludzie z postego obszaru’ – People from and empty zone – was directed by Kazimierz Karabasz and Władyslaw Slesicki was one of a series of reportage films coming out of Warsaw Documentary Film Studio between 1955 and 1958. These were described as ‘The Black Series’ – Czarna Seria.

After the death of Stalin, the barriers of censorship had weakened and documentaries like this began to be made looking at social problems. This film follows a group of disaffected young people, hanging out on street corners, who complain of a lack of money, flats that are hard to find, who say that noting is interesting about their lives. They hang out on the wasteland by the riverside – where they might find ‘a taste of the forbidden world’ – smoking, drinking, wandering.  ‘The same, bored faces with no expression’ says the commentary. ‘They don’t have lives of their own so they keep looking.’ A woman’s body is dragged from the river as they watch impassively. They go window shopping, looking at goods they can’t afford. Only a trip to the cinema ‘brings dreams closer’. The film follows them to a party in one of their flats, where they dance to rock’n’roll – Little Richard belting out ‘Ready Teddy‘ – and the drinks flow. This is contrasted with news headlines about young people, one of which states ‘Co dalej? Pytanie ciągle aktualne’ – What about the future? Still an open question…

One thing is certain, the future is wiping away more and more of old Praga. Once there was a bar on Targowa called ‘Oasis’ just after 1945 -  where, according to Jerzy S.Majewski, ‘herring and black Astrakhan caviar were in constant supply and secret police agent on duty kept eavesdropping the vendors and other patrons’. For some, those indeed were the glory days.

Notes:
‘Obyczaje byly gwaltowne I nieuperfumowane’ is borrowed from an article on Place Hallera in Praga, in the ‘Book of Walks – Landmarks of People’s Poland in Warsaw’ by Jerzy S. Majewski, with additional texts by Iwona Kurz, Ewy Toniak and Waldemara Baraniewskiego; it was published by Bibilioteka Gazety Wyborczej in 2010.

A useful guide to Praga in both English and Polish, first published in 2006,  is Warsaw Praga Guidebook by Michał Pilich.

Late at night, the sound of Polish rappers engaged in a street battle drifted over the Barbican. Early in the frozen morning, a crashing sound of empty bottles being collected. We walk to Kafka for breakfast. A snowboarder speeds down the slope behind the university wall, leaping through the air to grind sideways along a large concrete pipe. He does this again and again. In the dreamy warmth of the café, we talk about the writer Andrzej Stasiuk. Last night, we watched a film based on his stories of rural Galicia* – Wino Truskawkowe/Strawberry Wine, for which he co-wrote the screenplay. These rural summer landscapes seem a distant fantasy – the sky here is a constant leaden grey, the visual representation of a gnawing headache, the daylight fading quickly. There is little magic realism to be found within the city boundaries. We find more of a resonance with the sad streets of Warsaw described in his 1995 book, Biały Kruk/White Raven.

This tells the story of a group of men in their mid-thirties, who embark on a foolhardy winter trip into the mountains of the south, near the Czech-Slovak border. Bored with their lives in a city slowly grappling with the conflicts of the free market, their journey becomes increasingly desperate as one of them gratuitously murders a militia policeman. On the run, they forage like imaginary and forgotten partisans, marching with closed eyes through snowstorm where all directions look the same. In the bitter cold, they seek refuge in the ruins of an old kolholz or in a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere. They find shelter in a shepherds hut or with an old farmer who asks no questions. They sleep under the remnants of a ruined church dome. Cigarettes are smoked, vodka is drunk, memories consumed, along with pig fat fried with onions, bread and some garlic. The snow keeps coming and they move higher and further into the mountains. The landscape is described with tenderness and beauty, while their lives are depicted without sentiment, almost brutally. Communism has fallen apart, and the bright new future is viewed through a dim light.

This is an enclosed world of bruised masculinity. The story flips between their present dilemma and past memories of growing up together, living in the ‘shitty suburbs’, learning how to match up to the men who worked in the Żerań car plan. Dispossessed nights spent drinking, boasting, dreaming. “Live or die. If you want to die, die” – is the philosophy of one of the characters, who has the idea to make this trip into the mountains. He suggests this in a bar called Crossroads, on one of their nights of heavy drinking. Outside, the city is pitiless. “Down the concrete gutter of Lazienkowska thoroughfare foamed a colourful sewage of cars, a stream of glistening vomit flowing from east to west and from west to east, while we sat in what felt like a terrarium, among people with dead faces and slow-motion gestures.”

Outside, midst the silence of black trees of the city parks, it’s easy to imagine no surrounding metropolis, no Palace of Culture lit by an eerie purple light, and to be wandering in those mountain ranges. “It was a strange mountain,” wrote Stasiuk, though I feel that the angst of masculinity is more likely to be rediscovered these days in salsa classes, hip-hop rhymes or even car sledging.

* You’ll find a nice essay by Stasiuk on the First World War battlefields and burial grounds of Galicia (where he lives) at signandsight.com, which also appears in his book ‘Fado’.

Sledging photo by Marcin Bas.

Our conversation shifts to the world of bars. We talk about the old ones that are disappearing, one by one. On a chilly night in Wola, you might be waiting for a tram at the dark end of the street, and notice nearby a small window with a blue light, and a darker still doorway. Nothing to give away what might lie behind the glass. Peer closer and you might make out a few tables and chairs,  a few huddled figures, a shiny counter with a few bottles behind it. There is no sound of music, only a drift of conversational voices, the clink of glasses. It may not seem that welcoming. The basics only, with no frills. You may look into the monthly Warsaw Insider magazine – it’s a useful starting point, let’s not deny it – and not find this bar. It’s more likely you will wander along the spruced up Nowy Świat towards the Palm Tree then turn left under some arches, past some Vietnamese fast food places and find here some bars with no name on the doors, housed in the small cabins with the metal grills in front, which seem tiny and intimate but also have a larger crowded basement. Here people just say, We’re going to Pavilions.

The nouveau popular bars in Praga – on Ulica Ząbkowska (which have been there a long time for the cognoscenti and are deserving of their reputation) or around the courtyard on 11 Listopada – we can surely leave you to find those yourself.

We wander the streets, a curmudgeonly pair, bemoaning the loss of the old bars. Warsaw is a fast changing city, where you might notice some evidence of the economic downturn, but in the past decade it has been knocking itself down and building itself up again in a fury of transformation. Already I find myself saying, Where’s that one gone in old Ochota, where there was one type of vodka only and one brand of beer, that seemed like a dusty corridor piled up with beer crates and boxes of crisps and only had two small tables? It’s been swallowed up by the pizza house next door. Or it’s now a wine shop. Or an empty space. Forgotten.

On Nowy Świat there is one bar that seems to have been there since time immemorial, though it looks a little tidier these days. Amatorska, the basics with mirrors, was once the kind of place where an old guy walked in the door and by the time he reached the bar at the end his drink and choice of food was laid before him, where these customers were long standing. Here’s a glass of vodka to wash down a portion of chicken liver or French fries. You might try flaki (tripes), fasolka po bretońsku (beans a la Bretagne), sausages, sometimes pierogi. There’s rather nothing much for veggies. If you venture down the tiny spiral stairwell to the bathroom, you can, we have been assured, experience ‘the true smell of PRL’. The air freshener down there has a particular spicy quality that is both dusty and pungent, and in no way contemporary. It simply smells of the past. (For aesthetes, there is also bar Piotruś opposite, an ancient institution managing not to turn into Starbucks.)

Another bar that seems slightly out of place can be found Al. Solidarności near to Metro Ratusz Arsenał. If you stand on the tram platform (the trams going across the river to Praga), you’ll see a small building at the foot of a block of flats. Large windows, brown lace curtains usually drawn, you wouldn’t know it was a bar. Enter and you find a warm wooden interior, a little careworn perhaps, a number of round tables, people drinking tea or coffee, beer or vodka with a hot dog or wuzetka cake or apple pie. These are places that people pop into after work, or between taxi jobs or shifts. They are palpably untrendy, and all the better for it.

Finally, for an acceptable version of trendiness, or for an evocation of old good times, let’s call in at Przekąski Zakąski, the 24 hour bistro opposite Hotel Bristol on Krakowskie Przedmieście. This one is the original recreation of the old style bars, with a basic selection of traditional snacks and vodka and beer at a basic price. And open all hours. Magnificent and popular – it has a fans page on Facebook of course. This is the place to discuss irregular verbs with a Varsovian, whose sense of English grammar is far superior to mine.

I drink some vodka (present);

I drank some vodka (past);

I have drunk some vodka (past participle).

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: I don’t know how well this expression translates into Polish, but we are finding versions of the 24 hour bistro Przekąski Zakąski springing up in various sidestreets in Warsaw and it’s tempting to travel from one to another in between the September rainstorms and dark skies as summer has abruptly ended. There’s one in Foksal Street for example, first visited some months ago. Small, homely, with the basic selection of traditional dishes (sausages, herring, hams, pickles) to go with your vodka at a reasonable price. Mirrors also. There you might decide not to take a clear vodka but instead choose the sweet honey-flavored krupnik. The décor was pure fake PRL, but inoffensive. That was the evening when we wondered whether or not to wander along to the Empik superstore on Marszałkowska, where via a tweet we knew that favourite author Neil Gaiman would be doing a signing. His partner, Amanda Palmer sang a song by Radiohead and later they were going to a club whose manager we knew, where she might do a little performance, but we decided that – let’s face it – there are a lot of Gaiman fans here in the city and it would all be faithfully recorded and put online. Sometimes it’s sensible to keep your heroes at a distance to avoid disappointment.
And so it came to pass…

Mr Gaiman then went on to Moscow where he reported faithfully in his comprehensive online journal: I did more Vodka shots in the last three days than in the previous lifetime. Mostly because my Russian hosts were convinced that it was the cure for the flu-cold-thing I arrived with from Poland. I suspect that they would also have pitched Vodka as a cure for anything else I had arrived with, including broken limbs, heartbreak or psoriasis.

I finally got around to reading his award winning ‘The Graveyard Book’ this last month. No mention of Poland within its pages. This was straight after devouring ‘Fado’ by Andrzej Stasiuk, bought in the American Bookstore in Arkadia shopping centre, which has a marvelous selection of English language books. Stasiuk’s book is a travelogue of impressions of Central and Eastern Europe, and of his home in the Carpathian Mountains. There was one essay there about the visit of John Paul II to Warsaw in 1979, which I wanted to immediately take to any remaining Defenders of the Faith sleeping overnight on the chairs outside the Polish Film Institute and say, Please worship this instead of the theories about the deliberate murder of the President by Putin and Tusk and other shadowy figures complicit within the New World Order. Stasiuk speaks of humanity and communality and freedom and connection, and not of paranoia and suspicion. But somehow I feel they would be more likely to believe the remarkable fantasy worlds conjured up by Mr Gaiman – even though his Gods are usually Norse.

On that evening, not so long ago, not as warm but not cold, we headed to a quieter location, an old railway ticket office built over 50 years ago – Warszawa Powiśle - now restored as a bar come cultural centre. It was fairly empty (Mr. G obviously drawing the hip crowds of well-wishers) and a little off the beaten track. You can get breakfast here or a substantial cappuccino or find some small concert. It’s not a big place, a lovely little circular building with the original lettering standing intact on the flat roof – a space age modernist environment as imagined in the Sixties – here by the railway and under the darkness of the arches of the road bridge than spans the river. A large collage photo-mural wraps itself around behind the bar, constructed by the young artist Jan Dziackowoski, who makes small scale collages of tourist postcards images of Western Europe combined with PRL era socialist propaganda imagery to great effect.

That night, only several young people busy with their laptops updating their Facebook profiles, and some cyclists, one of whom worked there. There was an animated discussion amongst the latter about how to fix her pedals. They stood around an up-ended mountain bike and an old drunk guy added his commentary. Beer was his choice of poison. I don’t think he had a page on Facebook and what would it say anyway? Pissed again, life is good.

My fascination with Warsaw bars delayed me longer than intended, and this being an out of the way place in terms of public transport, it meant a long walk home – but not unpleasant, through green terraces all the way back to Mariensztat. Maybe I should get a bike. But not now that winter seems to have bypassed autumn.