Now that it's the end of summer it's time to wrap up that thread about what happened after my talk in Prague.
On Friday morning, I checked out of my flat and took the metro one last time to the train station, where I bought a ticket for Ostrova. I waited a few hours in the station, which had changed so much since 1992.
I took the afternoon train to Ostrova and then hoofed it to my hotel, a half hour walk with my backpack. It's an old post-industrial town. I stayed at an older local hotel near the center, the Hotel Maria. I liked the name. It got decent ratings. I asked for a good Czech restaurant and had a local beer in a tavern. The city square was magnificent in the late twilight. I walked along the river. There were no tourists but me.
The next day I walked back to the train station, bought a ticket to Częstochowa, in Poland, the site of its national Marian shrine. I spent two nights in a hotel that was about a half hour walk from the station. The walk took me up the main boulevard in the town. I prayed the rosary on my beads as I walked to the Hotel Mercure with my backpack. I was a pilgrim after all. The next day I went to the shrine at the monastery and saw the Black Madonna, and prayed the rosary there as well, as much on my knees as possible. I bought some gifts at a gift shop attached to the monastery grounds, and had a hot dog. The sign in Polish said "hot dogs--as they used to be."
After two days I took the train to Warsaw, where my only task was to catch the bus This proved massively harder than I thought, in part because there was no left luggage at the train station (so I had to carry my backpack during the half-day layover) and also because a thunderstorm that dumped rain on me as I circled the only Stalin-built Palace of Culture looking for the obscure private bus stop. I finally found it, across the street, and stood in protection from the rain under the sign of a modern mall along the main street until my bus came. I almost got on the wrong one, among the many private companies with their small inconspicuous signs, and was yelled off by the driver after showing the QR code on my phone. Getting yelled at my bus drivers in foreign languages is something that will happen to you, if you vagabond like I do.
By the end of the day I had arrived in my destination, the small town of Lomza (WOAM-zhuh) in northern Poland, where my old friend of thirty-seven years, Janusz, met me at the bus station. The bus station was much more modern than when I left this place in 1990. Poland has modernized a lot. It is actually very impressive, as I would tell my friend, and eventually his wife. I also told two of his four children and several of his grandchildren, none of whom were born when I last saw him face to face.
We spent a couple days at his house in the little town where he has lived many years, and where his parents live. He no longer goes into a hospital to work as a psychiatrist. Instead he does he practice from home, since the pandemic. His professional office is filled with publications of psychiatrist. During my stay, he consulted on a legal case regarding the sanity of someone he had examined. It is the kind of work he does.
After two days my friend, his wife, and I took a road trip to Gdansk where they have an apartment, in a newer complex that was once the site of barracks of the Imperial German Army. Gdansk is not try about playing up this part of its history. Historical it has brought in German tourists, some of one whom were born in the city. It is not a sensitive topic among Poles, apparently.
The occasion of the road trip was a national holiday in Poland, Corpus Christi, a Catholic feast day of recent origin that falls on a Thursday in mid June. On Corpus Christi, I donned my sport jacket in which I had given my talk, and my friend dressed in a jacket too, and we went to mass at the parish church. It was packed. Many young people dressed in white. After mass, as is custom, the procession went out into the neighborhood with one of the priest holding aloft the Body of Christ for the world to see. We stopped at four different places where we got on our knees and prayed. For now, all of this tradition is still alive in Poland, but it is like America in the early 1980s, as I told my friend. The next generation will not be fervent Catholics. They will not remember, or care, what the priests and nuns did for the freedom of Poland. That sacrifice gave Poland a little breathing room in history.
In Gdansk we took a marvelous cruise on the city to see the old harbor front, some of which has been rather tastefully restored to modern structures from its wartime devastation, matching the historic character of the city well.
On one afternoon when my friend need to work, I took a very long walk on the beach starting at a park that abuts the Baltic. I saw thousands of people sunbathing in the summer sun. I took off my shoes and walked in the surf. Along the way I passed some nuns. But more startling was seeing how few of the women had any sort of tattoos on their arms, the way that western women have disfigured themselves like plague victims. It was so beautiful. There are a few tattoo parlors in Poland, here and there, but still not that common on a given street. Like I said, Poland has a little breathing room. My friend told me point blank: you guys in the west have to get your shit together, and beat this, before it comes for us.
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