Polish Booby Prize

This is the final of four reports that my Eastern Europe guidebook co-author Cameron Hewitt sent me from his travels:

In Poland, the big news is that several Polish cities are hosting matches for the 2012 Euro Cup soccer championships — which in Europe is only a small step down from hosting the Olympics. Everything’s under construction. They’re building new high-speed rail lines like crazy, which will be good news in a few years, but is bad news now since most journeys are substantially delayed. The Gdansk-Warsaw trip, usually about four hours, took closer to six.

Warsaw’s Central Station — my vote for most depressing and confusing rail station in Europe — is slated for a desperately needed overhaul soon. It can’t happen fast enough. In the five-minute walk from the ticket office to my platform, I ran into three different American couples who were toting my guidebook and hopelessly baffled about what to do next. Pointing them in the right direction, I felt pretty good-Samaritan about myself…until I realized that they were just the tip of the confused-tourist iceberg. Normally I’d take their confusion as a sign that the book needs improvement; in this case, I think it’s the station that needs improvement. (But I’m revamping the “Arrival” section anyway, just in case.)

There’s always something new in fast-developing Poland. Every time I go back to certain towns (like Gdansk), I discover that several good hotels and restaurants have opened. Occasionally I’ve had to list a hotel (with ample “last resort”-type caveats) that I know isn’t that great, just because there are no acceptable alternatives. It’s so satisfying to visit a few new hotels or restaurants, discover that they’re better than the old standbys, and delete the duds from my book. (There’s even a good sushi restaurant now in Gdansk — so long, “Pierogi Restaurant Under the Boar.”) In a few cases, if you compare my hotel or restaurant listings from five years ago to today’s, you’ll find only a couple of overlaps. That’s not the case in most books, but in Poland it just shows how things are steadily improving.

A couple of Poles bragged to me that Poland is one of the only countries in Europe that’s not suffering so badly from the financial crisis. It’s actually had positive economic growth last year. But it’s sort of a booby prize. When pressed for reasons, they acknowledged that it’s probably because the Polish economy is a bit backwards and not as well-integrated into the global scene, making it less prone to worldwide fluctuations.

I usually have total tunnel vision about my work, but this trip I’ve been trying to chat more with people I meet. This has reminded me how rewarding it can be to strike up a conversation — whether with a couple from Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, or a woman from Friday Harbor who’s about to embark on an epic journey that will take her to the Baltics, the “-Stans” of central Asia, and the prettiest stretch of the Camino de Santiago. Most fascinating was the pair of young Scottish women who quit their jobs and were traveling all around Europe for four months — sleeping in their car, cooking on a camp stove, showering once a week (“10 days was the longest”), and making a go of it on a budget of €50 a day, most of which went toward gas and experiences.

But, as always, my favorites have been interactions with Polish people. It’s amazing the connections you discover with people you’d think you have nothing in common with. On the long train ride from Gdansk to Warsaw, I shared a compartment with a woman whose husband is a cognitive psychologist/memory researcher. It turns out he’s familiar with the work of the professor I was a research assistant for in college.

And just now, as I write this on the train from Warsaw to Krakow, I’ve been chatting with Monika. She told me she was going to a very remote little village northeast of Krakow to visit her father. I prodded her for more details, and it turns out she grew up in a small town (Szczurowa) that’s just a 20-minute drive from the villages where my great-grandparents were born. I’ve been in her middle-of-nowhere town twice in the last few years. She knows several people with the same surname as my ancestors. And I have to assume that she’s probably a distant cousin of some sort.

A few minutes later, “Cousin Monika” became my guardian angel when my computer crashed after I spritzed a little water on the keyboard. She called her brother-in-law, who’s a tech support guy, and got some tips. Now my computer is humming away on my lap again.

When traveling, we focus so much on the museums, the cuisine, and the scenery. But it’s often these strange, funny, serendipitous little interactions that we remember the most fondly.