Never think you have nothing to write about

Last year at this time I was in Poland- in fact, I was nearing the end of my trip. I'd been floating back and forth between Krakow and Warsaw for about 30 days on the train, getting off and taking pictures where I felt like it. This one here is the last stop before Katowice; Misłowice. I also happened to stumble onto the Black Madonna at Noon Mass in Czestochowa (how does one "stumble" on 1000 people praying and singing in a room the size of a bread shop?) and visited Auschwitz Camp.

On my last day I was being driven to the airport (in tears, of course) and someone asked me what I liked best about Poland. I said something about how green it was or some such nonsense. In reality, I'm still not prepared to answer the question a year later.

I've been to Spain, Japan and Poland- soon to the Middle East and Kuwait. Spain made me feel like a giant, I was always knocking my head against the door lintels! Japan was a true electric fairyland; bizzare, overwhelming and achingly beautiful in the dusty corners.

John Steinbeck said it best, but he was talking about my upper vena cava as opposed to right atrium. Poland is indeed "a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

Poland is, to say the least, a dream.

You need a taste for it. For the cleaning women on the landing, arguing for the sake of argument about who cleaned the toilet last week and their justified present refusal. For the 200 Poles who bum-rushed the pimply 17 year old clerk at the entrance gate squeaking "One at a time! ONE AT A TIME!" at Heathrow, then cheered as one when the plane touched the runway in Warsaw. For the man crossing the street in Krakow who decided to stop traffic on Ul. Starowsłna by fighting a car; for the hordes of people who stopped to help an older woman ("Babcia" or "Ciocia") when she slipped with her groceries and bloodied her nose outside the Urseline Convent. For the wreaths and plastic flowers dotted around Warsaw, marking countless memorials from 60 years of repression.

You have to have a taste for it. You've got to appreciate a fight. You have to relish contrasts and the picturesque (in the people and landscape) and really high humidity with smog/coal dust smearing your skin while you eat Kebab.

Hold the image of a beautiful summer day in the countryside, traveling slowly on a train through apple trees so dense the overloaded branches brush the windows. Briefly, the apple trees will release a scene of intimate family life in a backyard or two barefoot girls at a dirt road crossing, waving and giggling.

This was the train to Auschwitz.