Friday, May 6, 2016

Bialystok is a Party Town

"The President of the USA at that time was a Dutch Jew, his father a diamond cutter from Rotterdam, stole the Russian Imperial Jewels after the Bolshevik revolution, had to emigrate to avoid capture and prison sentence. Within ten years they were running the whole country. Had every important figure tied up - Walter Winchell, everybody. Their real name was Roszenfeldt."


The ride to Bialystok was in an eight-seat minivan. You can get anywhere in Europe in these things. It's just a matter of figuring out where they are. All of my usual scheduling tricks were like, "Sorry, no way to get to The B from The L. You can take a train to Warsaw and figure it out from there," but Jaroslaw was like, "There's a minvan behind the convenience store that leaves in an hour."

That's a thing. Google is totally fooled by these very old forums on very old travel sites. Like, if you you look up something easy like, "Is there a night train from London to Glasgow?" you get a page of ads and then a bunch of seriously old questions and answers, maybe six or seven years old. Is there even a Glasgow anymore? Are the people who asked these questions skeletons in a minivan?

Every place has "FREE WIFI" stickers, but the connection is a crime scene. You feel like wrapping your phone in yellow police tape after you've tried to check your email. But the people are all very nice and that's eventually how you get around.

I'm a little diminished today. Collections of tiny annoyances. Missing cords, storage issues, lost caps, tangled headphones, the incredible vanishing dental floss, work emailed me needing something, I haven't smelled Fernet in a few weeks. But, that's travel. It isn't like Indiana Jones was able to just get from Point A to Point Bialystok without swimming after a submarine now and again.


Each day is a technicolor miracle of green fields, sprinkles of yellow flowers, innocent animals, blue skies with the vibrance and saturation level pushed all the way to the right, and rickety farm houses built with the primary objective of assassinating you with love. O' those lonely houses in the lonely fields. You could live there forever and not need cabarets or metrocards. Just an old dog with a graying nose, a branch broom, and a nice woman to cook pancakes for.

And a few cats to keep you honest.

Each day, you circumnavigate roundabouts and feel the dizzy thrill of taking the correct exit, you cross brooks with weathered rowboats on the shore (tied with the slenderest of ropes), small villages with circus posters on the prison walls, children in uniforms holding hands in long lines, terminals, termini, billboards for yogurt, men smoking on benches, women doing the emotional load bearing.

Runaways, tall small businessmen, drunks handing pamphlets to drinkers, 24-hour flower shops, playgrounds, ruined buildings, Pepsi bottles.

You read difficult novels and fall in love with the illusion that you have understood them.


Bialystok was intended to be a quick stop. A mid-point to break up the push to Lithuania. It's a long vacation, but it's finite, and I used up my flex days at the Ukrainian border. I won't be going to Brest, Belarus to see this fucked-up Castle Greyskull fort I read about. I won't be taking a day trip to see the bison of Białowieża Forest.

I mean, I could, but the point of this trip was to see Latvia. So, I should probably go there at some point. Looks like it's going to be a quick sleep in Bialystok, early bus to Kaunus (Lithuania), two days in Vilnius, one day at the miraculous Hill of Crosses, three days in Riga (Latvia at last) and then I'll have to FLY in a PLANE back to Warsaw so I can fly in a plane back to Ruggles (Seattle).

So, I wanted B'stok to be over with quickly. BUT, it was a rewarding little town with an enormous public square and a charming, long, long, avenue lined with cafes and bars and pizzerias and ice cream, ice cream, ice cream.

The word for ice cream is Lody, and lord do they love loads of lody in Bialystok.

I ate mushrooms and drank coffee near the place where that kind-hearted maniac professor invented Esperanto.


It's kind of a cool place. Like the Old Town is integrated very nicely into the modern part to the degree that they're almost indistinguishable. So, like, when you're on the stones, you're mixing with locals and not just tourists. Sunglasses, rhinestone purses, large wristwatches.

My apartment was over an enormous bookstore. No internet, so I cleaned up and went out to explore. Weird old public statue of a king? Pushing a giant wheel? With a tin man dancing on it?

Strange churches and normal churches. Domes and spires. Police everywhere walking in gendered pairs. Strip clubs, casinos the size of convenience stores, boutiques. Nothing obscene. It was all happily and prettily bourgeois.

I had hoped to find a bialy. I've had a Manhattan in Manhattan and listened to Chicago in Chicago, but there were none to be found. The bakeries had doughnuts or get out.

Caught up with work at a pub with red vinyl seats called Little Hell. Drank Żubrówka with apple juice and helped the company. Fantasized about having a buffalo party with my friends back home.

Fooled around and found my favorite-ever mural.


Are you kidding me? The colors, the integration with the tree, the added element of the girl floating. It's a goddamn masterpiece of the form. I was assassinated with love for it, shocked by its beauty, felt like I was at once (and at last) living my life of chocolate.

Happy, sweaty walk back to the flat where I prepped for Lithuania with a nice history book and read Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant until I knew darkness.

I want to steal everything, write everything, live everything, sleep everything.


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