Stalinist Bloomsbury...or the manifestations of unrealized wanderlust.

Last week, I submitted a visa application to UK Borders which involved surrendering my passport. The passport and I have never been parted for more then about 72 hours and I am not, to put it mildly, enjoying our estrangement. Even if I have no tickets booked, I love the possibility of travel, the sense that movement may be immanent. This in part explains my affection for central Europe, where you can train rapidly around Germany, Austria and Czech Republic at a moment's notice and the destination board at your local train station includes places like Moscow, Bucharest, Sarajevo...Sans passport and stranded on this island for the foreseeable future, I've developed a passing melancholia that seems to involve burning candles, drinking red wine, listening to endless Leonard Cohen (thank you, Spotify) and thinking dreamily about my former cities. It was in just such a mood that I noticed the following similarity.

This is the Palace of Culture, Warsaw:

And this, is Senate House Library at the University of London...

Both are massive and impossible to capture in a single photograph without inducing vertigo. The more I think about this comparison, the more apt it seems. Both take an eternity to walk around - P and I once spent 20 minutes circumnavigating the PoC and taking the wrong exit from the library can easily add 10 minutes to your journey home. Both have strange internal layouts and you have to go outside to get from one part of the building to another. I've been semi-lost in both and each time I was filled with a sense of unease irreducible to mere spatial disorientation. They feel wrong. It seems entirely plausible that both could house a population of feral cats in their basements and/or contain offices full of staff who haven't been outside in years and think the Cold War is still in full swing. Finally, and really, what greater confirmation could there be, both make excellent surfaces for projections:

Palace of Culture, January 2011

Senate House Library, January 2012:

I rest my case, and cannot help but wonder what other bits of Europe I will discover while wandering passport-less about London. Watch this space, and, in the meantime, here's some Leonard Cohen.

Notes from a reluctant kitchen...

Confession: I hate food writing. In undergrad, I took a creative non-fiction writing course, during the course of which we were required to read and attempt different genres. I loathed the food segment, during which we were force-fed Amanda Hesser's insipid (to my mind anyway) Cooking For Mr. Latte, and encouraged to send food-related "dispatches" from our fall break travels. At its worst, food writing makes me nauseous. I love a good restaurant review (this one, by the delightfully acerbic A. A. Gill in this month's Vanity Fair is a gem), but I can't stomach the actual description of food itself. I've been like this since childhood - a description of french fries in Ramona Cleary, Age 8 actually made me gag. Food writing repels me in a way that echoes the revulsion I feel flipping through the love scenes of a Harlequin romance (not a regular activity, to be fair, though my late great aunt was a devotee) or when listening to undergraduates attempting to "understand" T. S. Eliot. Some experiences, eating among them, are too sensual to reduce to prose.

Far better to just provide pictures, which is the method I've chosen to share with you several Polish-themed food adventures we have recently undertaken in the Flat of Doom. What catalysed this sudden culinary activity? Essentially, we've become a bit sick of eating out and, since attempting to grocery shop the way we would in the UK (fresh bunches of coriander from the Asian grocery store purchased on a twice-weekly basis, a significant Waitrose habit, really good bread), we thought we'd go (a bit) native and see what happened. Before beginning, I should express my thanks to the Bomi Delicatessan, aka War-trose, for providing a happier shopping experience than Dirty Carrefour and consistently stocking mushrooms, the lack of which had really been getting us down:

Our first attempt took place last Friday and was not a terribly high-brow meal, being comprised mainly of pierogies and hotdogs. Accordingly, we lit candles and banned all condiment jars/bottles/etc. from the table:

We rescued the pierogies from the freezer, to which Paul had relegated them while I was in Prague. I'd bought them during one of our first Warsaw grocery shops, since they rekindled fond memories of undergrad and a certain Mrs. T...

As will be evident from the above photo-collage (diky, photovisi), the amusement factor of the meal was significantly elevated by the inclusion of these sensible, if slightly rude-looking hot dog rolls.

Yesterday, I embarked on a new adventure, this time alone. I decided I felt like cake, and that it was therefore time to investigate the baking aisle. As each country's flour is a law unto itself, I decided to cheat by using a mix. I chose lemon cake, since my body, possibly in an attempt to ward of what feels like inevitable scurvy, has been craving all things citrus. Also because I could understand the directions.

Here are the ingredients I assembled. Note the semi-terrifying long-life milk and scary baking margarine, which I am nevertheless extremely proud to have properly identified.

And here is the (not terribly glamorous) result:

.

Slightly burned, though still tasty. I shall not elaborate, as that would stray into food-writing territory. I will, however admit that, while it's been fun, and may doubtless continue, I'm quite pleased to be putting the Polish culinary experimentation on hold tonight in favor of dinner at Frida.

Inauspicious Monday

It's really hard to cheer yourself up in Warsaw. I learned this today when I woke surprisingly in need of cheering. I'm not sure what to attribute this to - the past four weeks have been a flurry of academic and grant-writing activity (hence the lack of posts), but last Thursday I managed to meet an important thesis-related deadline, so I should be feeling quite good about the world. Still, this morning I awoke feeling tired and hopeless, despite the aggressive bright sunbeams streaming through my window, which caused me to go running for my sunglasses, having misplaced my sleeping mask. Paul found this amusing and promptly snapped a photo of me in this state - a photo which will NOT be turning up here under any circumstances.

Deciding I had earned some sort of horrible girly perk, I decided to get my nails done. This seemed particularly appropriate, as I had chewed on them maniacally while rewriting the thesis, an activity which did not leave them looking particularly lovely. I phoned two manicure salons, neither of which could give me an appointment today. Strike one.

Not to be daunted, I decided to vacate the Flat of Doom (just because I've stopped complaining about it doesn't mean the Warsaw abode and I are now simpatico) to do some work at the local cafe. My old laptop wouldn't talk to the wifi there, but I figured my new one would and I could stay there until early afternoon. Wrong again.

Facing the reality that I would have to return to the FoD earlier than anticipated, I decided to pick up some sushi. As the kitchen currently resembles the set of Withnail and I, not having to cross its threshold was a decided bonus. I surveyed the sushi options in Local Cafe and decided they were uninspiring enough to warrant a search for the take away sushi place Paul showed me a few weeks ago, but which I had yet to try. I set off in what I firmly believed was the right direction. It wasn't.

Cold (the sun was cruelly misleading), I turned back, consoling myself with the thought of the chicken noodle soup I'd bought last week. This being Poland, it was instant, but at least it would be warm and tasty. Alas, when I returned home and braved the kitchen, it transpired that I had purchased not soup, but some sort of bouillon, requiring a pre-existing vegetable stock. I thought I'd try it anyway, but couldn't get the stove to work (have I mentioned that the burners function only sporadically?), as a result of which I am now eating last night's leftover salad and with a mood that is worse than it was when I decided to improve it.

I've nothing else to say, really, so here is a picture of a squirrel from Lazienski Park...

It was wonderfully tame, but alas did not wish to eat any of the nuts we brought for it. Trying carrots and bread next time.

And you shall know her by her left ear….

Happy New Year! (How late is that still an acceptable way to begin a communication and/or to explain away with three words one's complete lack of productivity over a period of time which encompasses, but is not limited to, the festive season?)

This mid-January day finds me in Warsaw, where it is particularly January-some in the most depressing way: unrelieved grey skies coinciding with the uninspiring sight of dirty snow melting to reveal just how many cigarette butts, tram tickets and other discarded items were dropped in it over the past month. Nasty. At least the Christmas decorations have remained up, which ameliorates things somewhat. In praise of Poland, I must admit that it's lovely to be once more in a country where people do not believe that Christmas decorations left up past January 6^th transform magically into harbingers of doom and general bad luck. I'm not sure quite how widespread this belief is – I first encountered it in the UK, but I don't know where it originated. In my family, we tend to leave the decorations up for as long as possible, in part because my mother completely redecorates the house for Christmas – after so much work and creativity, it seems churlish to tear it all down immediately. Given the shortness of the days here (it's dark before 3.30pm), I'm glad the Poles share my mother's approach and have the left the lights on a bit longer:

The festive lights are of particular comfort to me on this week of bureaucratic tasks. I'm off to Prague for research-related adventures at the weekend, so have only this week to sort out visa-related hiccups. Thus far, I've been to get a medulnek (a sort of local residency permit, a bit like a Czech ubytování, which allows you to then get a visa) and to have my picture taken for my eventual visa. The picture-taking process has given this post its title: Polish official portraits require that you show your left ear, while your body is turned slightly to the right and your head tilted to precisely the right angle to display said ear, and the rest of your facial features, simultaneously. You can also smile, slightly, like this:

To get this image, the photographer and I communicated using my new system. The longer I'm here, the more I realize that I can actually understand the gist of basic conversations, provided I keep calm and don't start mentally hyperventilating the moment someone addresses me. In fact, it works best when I imagine that they're speaking to somebody else. This strategy dovetails nicely with my approach to making up for the fact that I don't actually speak Polish. In preparation for specific encounters (like the one with the photographer, or a trip to the drycleaner after I'd lost my claim ticket) I write down exactly what I need or what has happened, in Polish. Google Translate and/or Polish friends are very helpful in this regard. Upon reaching my destination, I explain, in Polish, that I do not speak Polish, and hand over the note. Assuming the person I'm speaking to doesn't speak English, I handle anything else that comes up with a combination of Czech verbs (most basic verbs are similar) and miming (I don't trust the nouns to overlap as much as the verbs do). So far, this seems to be working. I managed to communicate with the photography shop man quite effectively – I was even able to convey the fact that I'd left my hat in the shop's coat closet and needed him to retrieve it for me. I also find people respond better to this approach. I'm not sure why – perhaps it's better not to include English and, by doing so, imply that I expect them to speak it, or perhaps they actually think I'm from another Slavic country. I don't know. But so far, so good, in any case. The photo-fetching scenario had the hallmarks of a potential Polish disaster written all over it, but went down much better than Monday's attempt to reconnect the internet, which saw myself and Mr. P spend ninety minutes running maniacally back and forth between the post office and tp, with Polish friends on speed dial, clutching stacks of bills and receipts and trying neither to cry nor swear very loudly and at great length.

Now if only I could figure out what the notice taped to my building's door says…something about personal safety and the gas meter. Oh dear…Google Translate, here I come.

From a library in the frozen north…

I'm back in Warsaw, after a quick working week in Prague. This was the trip I was always planning to take, though the excessive back-and-forth-ness has left me feeling two things: first, that I live rather more here than there at the moment, which doesn't distress me, as I continue to like this city; and, second, that three eight-hour train journeys in the space of seven days are too much, even for someone who loves movement as much as I do.

Since I'm not confined to the weekend, I've had a chance to experience the day-to-day-ness of working in Warsaw, which for me means finding a good library. I wish I was the sort of person who could read and write texts more complicated than email effectively against the backdrop of café-noise, or that I could discipline myself to work at home, but after much trial and error I've accepted that libraries just work better for me. As a result, I have quite a collection of international library cards, the newest of which I acquired yesterday:

My endeavors to photograph it haven't gone too well – it's sort of come out all blurry – but I love this photograph. The lighting is almost painterly. It was taken by a Polish undergrad-type manning the registration desk at the University of Warsaw Library, which is equipped for this purpose with a light not dissimilar to those I encountered at the London College of Fashion. The library is located off Nowý Swiat – I know which street to turn down thanks to an enormous statues of Copernicus conveniently located at the intersection. The full name of the library is Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie, which offers a fascinating glimpse of the differences between Czech and Polish, a topic currently occupying much of my attention. In Czech, the word knihovna is used for library, which can create some confusion since the word for bookshelf is also knihovna. You can alleviate this problem by using the diminutive form to distinguish between them. The Poles have avoided this altogether by using the Latinate biblioteka. This is fascinating to me, having studied the modernization of Czech in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there was much squabbling among grammarians about the appropriate sources of new words. The attitude that was eventually adopted was quite conservative – loanwords should come, if at all possible, from other Slavic languages or be created from Czech themselves. Thus, Czechs can borrow a kniha (book) from a knihovna, while speakers of Polish, which seems not to have had such a conservative loanward policy, use a biblioteka, despite the fact that the Polish word for book is książka. Linguistic analysis aside, I like this library, which looks like this:

On the ground floor there's a sort of atrium thing that contains Coffee Heaven – Poland's answer to Starbucks – as well as used book kiosks and a poster shop I want to visit today. Within the library itself, I have found a wonderful book by Eva Hoffman called Exit into History, which documents her travels through post-Communist countries in the early 1990s. It's very personal with lots of material from interviews, as well as her own reactions to her experience, which makes it incredibly insightful and unpretentious and – from my point of view – very helpful. She also talks about the frustration of being unable to use Polish in Czechoslovakia very effectively, a situation I am now experiencing in reverse. I feel an overwhelming desire to wear a badge, like those sported by Costa Coffee baristas in London – festooned with little flags conveying the information that I am able to function reasonably adequately in more than one language. It is a bizarre situation to be able to read, and even understand, (though as always, my language skills are better in written form) while being unable to produce anything. I feel profoundly guilty that I can't answer an old lady's question about which bus stop is next, even though I know that's what she's asking. I also know that this response, as I told Mr P (in an extremely rare low moment of his own last week), is irrational, as there is no way to master a complex language within one week of arriving somewhere, even if one has a good working grasp of a related language. At least the Poles are nice about it, generally. Yesterday a research student asked me to take part in her study and when I told her I couldn't speak Polish she still gave one of the cookies she'd brought along as thank yous to participants. Bless.

In other news, it's freezing here! The freezing starting on Monday, but before that it was quite beautiful, as in this picture that I have chosen to leave you with, taken at a concert of Chopin music in Lazienki Park.

(And yes, that's a stature of Chopin looking on…apologies to random girl on the right. I really need some photo editing software of greater sophistication than Paint.)