“Three zloty, seventy-two grosze.”Now she tells me. I just spent the last 24 hours making a concerted effort to get rid of the change jangling around in my right front pocket. All the tiny unreadable coins I can’t use because, without a magnifying glass and good light, I can’t tell how much they are worth. It’s no fun having parts break down on you. Literally on you.
Even the coins that aren’t small can be difficult. The ones that have been circulating so long they’re dark with age, soot filling in all the important crevices that once made them legible, or worn flat where the numbers used to be. I gave up trying to read the Czech coins and just remembered what the pictures meant. Church, horse, castle… 10, 20, 50… in that order. Memorable because I’d read that the Czechs tend not to be church-going people. This made my life a lot easier. Fifty koruna for a copy of the Herald Tribune? Fine… that’s two horses and a church. Or just a castle, if I have one.
I can’t do that with Polish money. Zloty coins have nice big numbers on them but grosze are miniscule. Impossible to read even when they’re brand new, and worth next to nothing so it never seems to be worth the effort to try. As a result, they pile up quickly. And yet, with all these coins in circulation, somehow nobody ever seems to have any change. I give the waitress a 50 zloty note to pay a bill of 32 zloty and she looks at me as if I’ve just asked her to do something completely absurd. “You don’t have 32 zloty?”
I dig in my pockets even though I already know the answer. I show her my handful of tiny coins. Maybe one zloty’s worth if you took the time to add them all up. “No, sorry.” I need change in any case to give her a decent tip, but they don’t expect tips here so that hasn’t occurred to her.
“Ooh, I don’t think I have,” she says. She walks off to confer with her co-workers about the situation then walks by again, pulling her coat on. “Moment,” she says, and off she goes into the snow to get change. This must happen all day long. Surely not every person carries around exact change for everything they want to buy. Eventually someone has to give you change in order for you to have change to pay for the next thing with. But somehow they always make it seem like a unique and unexpected development. Even something as simple as buying a 5 zloty program at the opera.
You would think that, in a place where people are expected to pay in exact change, the guy selling programs that cost 5 zloty would have plenty of 5 zloty coins, right? But no… I give him a 10 zloty note and he is astonished. “Oh, that’s a problem,” he says. He asks his co-worker, who initially shakes her head. Maybe I’m the first person to buy one tonight. Maybe I’m the only person in this entire concert hall who actually wants to spend 5 zloty on a program. I contemplate whether I am willing to spend 10 zloty on it if necessary and decide that I am. The opera is in Italian with Polish supertitles. My Italian is adequate – barely – but only if I can first read through the short English synopsis I know will be buried somewhere in the program. Without that, I’ll be spending the next three hours in various stages of bewilderment. It isn’t necessary, though. The co-worker has pulled out her handbag. “I have!” she says with a smile. I don’t object to the fact that she seems to be giving me change with her own personal money… it’s the way they do it here. Before her shift is over, she’ll reimburse herself. I’m not sure how, but I’ve been assured that it happens.
It worked like this in Vietnam and Laos too. One of my most frequent memories of Asia is of standing around in a shop waiting for someone’s little brother, sister, grandparent, uncle or second cousin five times removed to go get change. In Poland, at least, you don’t have to wait for them to stop for tea and a visit while they’re at it.
In spite of this, however, because I have difficulty reading Polish coins, I had accumulated a rather large pocketful of the smaller ones by the time I got to Gdansk. And since Gdansk was my last stop in Poland, I made a point of getting rid of them. All of them. So by the time I am ready to leave my hotel, backpacks strapped into place and just enough time to walk over to the train station, I am happy to be coin-free. Or so I think.
“Moment, please,” the receptionist calls after me. “You owe the tourist tax. Three zloty, 72 grosze.” The tourist tax. Exactly one dollar by today’s exchange rate. She looks at me like I’m trying to escape without paying it. Most places include this tax in their room rates, so when you pay your bill you’ve paid your bill. But not Dom Harcerza. They wait until you’re ready to walk out the door with just enough time not to miss your train, and then they tell you that you owe them 3 zloty and 72 grosze. And, of course, I have no change. I’ve done such a good job getting rid of change that I don’t even have any small bills. Nothing smaller than a 50 zloty note, and I can’t just give her that.
Someone has to go get change. She’s supposed to be monitoring the security cameras so it’s up to me. This is a first. I don’t know how to ask for change in Polish. All I know how to do is buy things, so I go to a shop across the street and buy something. The woman at the shop also needs to go get change, but fortunately for me she manages to do that without going further than the back room. By the time I settle into my seat on the fast train to Olsztyn, I’ve got almost as many tiny coins in my pocket as I had when I arrived.
It’s easy to spend change in Gdansk. Most things are cheap, and the main things I wanted to see there were museums, which are very cheap. For $3 you can spend an entire day at the Maritime Museum, which has four floors of displays starting with archaeological exhibits of mankind’s earliest ventures in water transportation and ending with a tour of a cargo ship called the Soldek. In between lies a maze of models, replicas and artifacts pursuing every possible tangent related to maritime activity in fascinating detail. In the section on navigation you learn not only how astrolabes work but cross staffs, back staffs, quadrants and compasses as well. You ponder Renaissance era astronomical globes and learn why they are so empty on the bottom. The museum has its own underwater archaeology team specializing in recovery of artifacts from ships that sank in the Baltic, so an entire display area is dedicated to tracing the history of diving in concept and practice, from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings to modern-day Neoprene suits. Did you know that the first written reference to divers is in the ancient Mesopotamian text The Epic of Gilgamesh? Once you’ve had your fill of history, you can learn the rudiments of underwater physiology. And all that’s just to tell you how it is that people can go under the water to recover artifacts from sunken ships. Now in the next room we have some of those artifacts on display… and they are fascinating too.
But I also want to see the Lenin Shipyard, and I only have one full day in Gdansk.
I’m not that big on museums; two in a day is a lot for me. I was in Krakow for three weeks and in that entire three weeks I only went to two museums. One was the museum of Jagiellonian University. Jag U was founded in 1400 so it’s pretty well established. It’s not large; the main area is just a few buildings around a central courtyard, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in character. Its most famous student was Nicolas Copernicus and you can see some of the astrolabes and other instruments he used as a student, some of which are inscribed in Arabic script since that sort of science was still a relatively new concept in Europe in the 1490s. The collection also contains the Globus Jagellonicus, the first globe to include the Americas. North America and South America are not exactly in the right places – actually they are not even next to each other – but, as our guide pointed out, the more important feature of the globe is that it is round. Plenty of time for details after getting that one basic fact right.
Copernicus was not punished for daring to say that “all the [celestial] spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe,” but then again he was also smart enough to wait until he was on his deathbed before formally publishing his heliocentric theory. When Galileo set out to prove this theory in the following century, using his new telescope, the Catholic Church confined him to house arrest for the rest of his life. As recently as 1990 then-Cardinal (now Pope) Joseph Ratzinger reaffirmed that the Church’s verdict in Galileo’s case was “rational and just.” The Church did finally issue a formal apology, though, under Pope John Paul II, in 2000. The times they are a-changing… but at a leisurely pace.
Another one of Copernicus’ central assumptions by the way (there were seven of them), was that “there is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres.” This one doesn’t get as much attention and it is somewhat contradictory, but it also shows that he knew or suspected the existence of other solar systems and maybe even other galaxies.
Anyway, enough about Copernicus. Two other interesting and unexpected items in the Jagiellonian collection were an Oscar won by a Polish film director and a Nobel Prize won by a Polish writer. I’d never seen an Oscar in person before, nor a Nobel Prize, so that was pretty cool.
The other exhibit I went to see in Krakow was called “Guilt and Punishment.” Or “Torture,” depending on which poster you looked at. Humans are expert in the art of nurturing guilt. It is one of our more destructive traits, in my opinion, so I thought this exhibit might be interesting. Maybe would delve into psychological issues about how guilt nurtured by the punisher, rational or irrational, played a role in the scope and brutality of punishments meted out during the time the exhibit covered (Renaissance, more or less).
Well, it didn’t delve into that, but it was still interesting.
Other interesting things about Krakow. Every hour, day and night, 365 days a year, after the bell in St. Mary’s Church rings the time, a live trumpeter plays the first 30 or so notes of Krakow’s version of “the British are coming!” The story goes that, in 1241, the city’s bugler was shot with an arrow in the throat as he played the alarm to warn Krakovians of a Tatar seige. He couldn’t finish the alarm, but the city’s occupants had heard enough and were already preparing to defend themselves by the time he fell to his death. In honor of the fallen trumpeter, those first 30 notes are repeated day and night, every hour. They are even broadcast live on the radio every day at noon, and people actually listen to it.
I liked Krakow a lot. Crisis? What crisis? This town is thriving. Walk outside at ten o’clock on a Wednesday night and you are among throngs of people – locals, Polish tourists on a “city break,” tourists from other parts of Europe, some Russians, a handful of Asians, an even smaller handful of Americans. Also groups of British guys on “stag weekends” – basically, topless vodka bar binges – but fortunately they mostly only come out at night. The airlines promote this kind of tourism with incredibly cheap fares. And I do mean incredibly cheap… as in $5 or less.
I spent a lot of time in Krakow reading books in cafes, comparing pastries and nursing cappucinos or hot chocolates. Developing a taste for borscht. I found tons of things to do at night, even for an Anglesky who can’t understand Polish. The symphony orchestra is world class and you don’t need language for that; I caught up on all my Oscar movies (in English with Polish subtitles – very useful); went to the opera (in Italian with Polish supertitles – less useful). The opera… for all the dourness Krakovians show in their interior design tastes, they are no prudes. Their production of Don Giovanni was borderline pornographic, with scantily clad women and scantily clad men, too, for a change, a really intriquing rope bondage scene, and some other stuff that would have made Mozart himself blush with approval. Krakow is also home to the International Sea Shanty Festival. I had no idea what a Sea Shanty was so I had to check that out… think rock concert, Trekkie convention and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland all rolled into one. Exuberant nerds in sailor hats drinking beer before lunch, and in the lobby a Junior Knot Club selling trinkets and giving demos. The music itself is, well, words fail me.
Movie theaters work a little differently in Poland. You get a seat assignment when you buy your ticket, as if you were going to a “real” theater. Also, sometimes the seats are just lounge chairs lined up across the floor. It’s great… if someone is kicking you from behind you just scoot your seat forward and he can’t reach it anymore. The other big difference is that you’re not supposed to eat or drink inside. The signs pointing this out are only in English; Poles presumably already know. I overheard a Polish girl translating for her boyfriend, then the two had a good laugh… why would anyone think of eating in a movie theater; you might spill something and make a mess… and where would you put your garbage, on the floor? hahaha…
So Krakow is vibrant. And some Poles point out with a certain amount of pride that their country in general has not been hit as hard as others by the financial crisis because they, collectively and individually, banks and people, did not overextend themselves as much as others did. Domestically, they’re doing alright. They’re still worried. Or at least they say that they’re worried, because they still need to weather the storm striking at them from outside their borders in the form of diminishing numbers of international visitors, decreased demand for products and that sort of thing. They don’t look worried, though. They look happy. They look like they’re enjoying life. It is so pleasant to be among them that weeks go by before I think seriously about moving on.
But I do have to move on. The most interesting part of Gdansk for me is the area around the Lenin Shipyard. This was where, in 1980, Solidarity became the first independent trade union allowed to operate within the Soviet bloc. Socialists tend to like unions, but Communists just see them as impediments to central planning. Because Solidarity refused to go away, this was where European Communism eventually began to unravel in earnest. You can’t go into the shipyard because it is still in operation, now just called the Gdansk Shipyard, but you don’t really need to because the cranes that are used in shipbuilding are massive and you can see them easily through the shipyard gates. Solidarity was legalized in 1980, squelched under martial law 16 months later, then revived as a major political force in 1989 when, one by one, Central and Eastern European countries started chucking Communist regimes out right and left. That kind of change is good, too.
The Solidarity Museum and its Drogi do Wolnosci exhibit – Roads to Freedom – is worth a trip to Gdansk all by itself. If you could do nothing here but look through a gate at a shipyard and go to this museum, it would be worth diverting all the way to the Baltic coastline just to experience it. The museum’s artistic designers have created a sensory rich context for the information on display. A jail cell in the middle of one room shows how political prisoners lived, while along the walls are photos, bios and bullet-riddled clothing of some of the agitators killed or imprisoned in such cells by Soviet police. You walk through a shop display that shows what kinds of goods were available, or not available to consumers during the Soviet era. Then you move through replicas of the shipyard gates and sit down in the workers’ diner to watch footage of speeches made from that very place. KGB shout warnings at you when you walk by some sensor or another, invisible doors suddenly swoosh open and you are whisked into a completely closed and windowless room, or forced to walk down a corridor lined with riot police. If you can read Polish, you can sit down with the guys at an underground printers bunker and leaf through replicas of subversive newspapers. Nowhere are there signs saying “do not touch.” In fact, they want you to touch… they want you to be touched so that the memory of what happened under Soviet style Communism makes a visceral impact. That makes a visit here more like going to a funhouse than a museum, and yet you leave with a much greater appreciation of what Solidarinosc did for Poland and for modern human freedom in general.
2009 is an interesting time to be traveling in this part of the world because so many countries are getting ready to mark 20 years of independence from Communism. And with The Crise (don’t forget to pronounce that with a phlegmy French “r”) looming heavily over their economies, some are wondering whether Western style Capitalism was really a better choice after all. A final interactive exhibit at the museum has visitors reflect on the meaning of "solidarity," a word that some high-ups in the EU are muttering with unease these days. If the member nations of the EU don’t show solidarity with one another in the face of The Crise, they fear, the Union could come apart at the seams. And that kind of change, most definitely, would not be good.
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