Bandaged hands and a bloody phone

The phone was off the hook and there was blood splattered underneath. Nearby, outside a single-family home, seven or eight cop cars had their lights flashing. An ambulance was parked beside the phone booth and paramedics were walking around the area, not looking too urgent.

Police escorted a black woman out of the house. She wore a yellow t-shirt with a Superman logo emblazoned on the front in green and blue track shorts. There was a little blood on her t-shirt, just to the left of the logo and on her shorts as well. The woman’s forearms were in bandages and as the police gently led her away, they seemed to almost gently place her arms behind her back.

Several people stood near the phone watching. No one seemed to know what had happened. They were just curious.

The police led the woman to the ambulance and closed the doors after she entered. Later, they spoke to a tall man outside the house who also had bandages on his forearms. I left shortly thereafter.

A couple hours later I returned to use the phone. The blood had dried underneath and the receiver was back on the hook. As I pedalled past the house, the woman was in her front yard, speaking over a white picket fence with her neighbour. The police cars were gone.

Not a concert… not necessarily a celebration either

I feel fortunate to have escaped with my camera, my health and my dignity intact after taking photos of Tuesday’s Andrew W.K. concert at the Biltmore Cabaret for uptownsound.

The photos should be up soon, as should a review by my colleague, Quentin.

Some observations, though.

First, you can actually get into bars with a piece of identification from Guam. Makes you wonder why teenagers try to forge B.C. drivers licenses when they could make up Id’s for places like, say, Micronesia or Palau.

Second, getting people to stand up at a concert is easy. Getting them to sit down on a dance floor during a rock concert is infinitely harder, but that’s something Nardwuar, of Muchmusic fame, was able to accomplish with his band the Evaporators. Pretty cool. And makes for easy photos.

Andrew W.K. prefaced his show by saying “this isn’t a concert, It’s a celebration.” Well, it wasn’t much of a concert. Not much of a celebration either. More just a gongshow with half the audience ending up on stage and crashing around speakers, monitors and other seemingly valuable pieces of equipment. If you think it’s hard shooting a concert in your normal bar, where there is no convenient barrier between a slightly-elevated band and a raucous crowd, imagine the difficulty when the crowd joins the sole performer on stage. Fortunately, they all fell down in a heap. Again, go to uptownsound.ca.

Eventually, the concert ended with Andrew W.K. telling the crowd that sound equipment had been damaged and he couldn’t keep playing. Interesting to say the least.

Iran and Twitter

You can follow events in Iran two very good places;

The New York Times does a good job of aggragating information, citing it, verifying it, and getting it out quick on their blog. If you want to know what’s going on, this is the place to get it.

If you want to feel and live what’s going on, you can read first hand, real-time comments on the action on Twitter. It’s quite spectacular, although I’m not sure how, as more people begin commenting and overwhelming first hand reports, time will shape the reportage.

Something fishy…

After hunting, during which the sun or at least the radiation it is said the sun emits, slowly brought cover to the now somewhat white Mazurian landscape, I headed back to bed to catch up on my unemployment-mandated 10 hours of sleep. Then I ate.

On Christmas Eve, that’s basically all that happens. You eat, you decorate a bit, you eat, you sit in front of the fireplace, you eat, you converse in a language filled with sh’s and ch’s, you eat, you go to church at midnight, you eat (maybe, now that it is Christmas day, some actual meat) and now drink.

But because you don’t eat red meat on Christmas, your diet is limited to an assortment of fish, fish and more fish. Generally the same type of fish is served about a million different ways. I believe there is a rule that there must be 900,000 different dishes. That sentence will make Poles laugh because there actually is something of a rule that designates some slightly smaller number of different fish dishes. The fish is served cold and in some tomato-y type of sauce, with onions, in some white type of sauce, in some garlicy sauce, in an apple and onion sauce and wrapped around pickles. I’m missing 800,000 other types of preperation.

And on this, my second Polish Christmas, I again tried every single piece of fish. I think. This will impress my mother, who is convinced I’m a picky eater.

Thus Christmas Eve took place. With fish, fish, fish, and fish. Fortunately, it ended before midnight, with us heading to bed and missing out on the very Catholic tradition of midnight mass. Joy to the world, church is skipped.

Tomorrow. Some more interesting tidbits I’ll think up at the time

Rejoice, Christmas is over

Well, Santa or St. Nickolai, as they say here (and probably spell differently), has gone back into hibernation, taking with him all his Christmas carols, decorations and confusing traditions.

Woo hoo.

Of course, I say that every year, especially about the confusing traditions. In fact, in Poland at least, all the traditions seem to make at least a little bit of sense. This Christmas season, (because at this point Christmas has become more a season than a holiday or even a holiday season) was obviously different from most I experienced.

First, we spent this Christmas (and New Years’ Eve) in Poland’s Mazurian Forest, where Magda’s uncle is a forestry official. The forest is located in the Mazury region of Poland, in the country’s north-east and close to the Russian border (If you squint hard at a map you will notice that Russia owns a small block of land just east of the Baltic Sea and just north of Poland’s eastern quarter). Magda’s aunt and uncle live in a sometimes-guesthouse on a large tract of land a few kilometres outside of Czerwony Dvor. We stayed at the guesthouse for most of our stay.

View Larger Map

But there is a lot to write about so first things first, the forest.

This ‘ent your typical British Columbian third-growth forest. First, it’s relatively flat. While Mazury boasts more hills than Saskatchewan(!), they reach distinctly Saskatchewan-like heights. That means that if, say, you went hiking in the woods and got turned around, you can’t just look at your position in regards to the nearest large hill.

As for the trees, the forest is extremely managed. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that, by Canadian standards it is both small in terms of pure overall size and large in terms of the percentage of wood it contributes to Polish and European lumber needs. (I have no stats whatsoever to back myself up in this regard.) This translates into sections of forest that are very different. One section may contain almost exclusively spruce while another is populated by hardwoods. At ground level you can walk around easily because most underbrush has been cleared (I would guess, for firewood). In other words, a walk in the woods here doesn’t require a machete.

The forest, also, isn’t entirely a forest. There are farms, large clearings and small settlements all throughout it. If one were to make a video of a typical drive through the forest and then play it on fast forward, the general pattern would go as such:

Forest-forest-clearing-forest-long straight road-field-forest-forest-town-forest-long straight road-clearing-forest-forest.

Thus the setting of this Christmas. Later, photos and maybe even the Christmas itself.

Booking it

We have one computer and no television in our apartment. Finding reading material, then, is a challenge. The largest bookstore and media chain in Poland, Empik, usually has a section of English books but it is far from comprehensive. There is usually a large section of books by Jeremy Clarkson, a British television presenter and humourist whose memoirs, apparently, are so popular here that they need to take up a quarter of all English shelf space (The Polish translations also take up considerable Polish space). Beyond Clarkson there is usually a decent selection of classic books by authors who are all very, very dead. Not that that is a bad thing. Not that I’m suggesting I’m happy they’re dead. They are very good authors. I’ll move on now.

The most popular contemporary authors (other than Clarkson) seem to be John Updike and Nick Hornby and novelists who write (and whose names sound) like those two authors. Fortunately, on one of our first days in Warsaw we found a bookstore with the (only somewhat appropriate) name, American Bookstore. The bookstore does seem to have a more American influence than the Britishness of Empiks, but only barely. Still, the bookstore is stuffed 95% with English (language) books, most of which were printed in the last five years. So it has been the go-to bookstore for a pair of Canadians with a lack of reading material.

We’ve bought:

Genius Factory, by Slate editor David Plotz. It’s about the so-called Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, which began its existance as a eugenics experiment trying to recruit man-juice from some of the world’s best and brightest and which ended its life with considerably lower standards. Entertaining and page turning. Four stars.

A Crack At The Edge Of The World, by Simon Winchester. It’s about the great San Francisco earthquake and the geological and human forces behind it. Interesting and very comprehensive but not as narrative-oriented as I would have liked. Three and a half stars. Still worth buying though.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. We got the movie version, which disappointed Magda because it includes a whole bunch of movie tie-in interviews and the like which takes up the bulk of the back pages of the book. Magda didn’t realize this until she got to the very end of the novel, which left her unhappy because it seemed to stop very abruptly. I liked the book, in part because I knew around where it ended. You don’t realize it but as a reader, the amount of pages left in the book very much influences how you read, I think. If the book seems twice as long as it really is, then, the ending comes up very suddenly and without warning.

Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel. Magda bought this. I haven’t read it.

Before our trip I bought Almost Green, by Bowen Island writer James Glave. We both read it while traveling through Europe. It’s about his attempt to build a super environmentally-friendly writing studio. It’s more entertaining than that description makes it out to be. It’s also an interesting look at how we live, consumerism and building techniques. And I think it may be the only book I’ve ever read set in B.C.

I also picked up Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternik, in Croatia and finally finished it a thousand kilometres later here in Warsaw.

A holiday to a different tune

This photo was taken on Nov. 11 in Gdansk. The only thing I know about the guys is they were coming from celebrations in the centre of town as we were casually making our way into the city centre. All during our walk – we left the hostel around 11:30 – we saw Poles going the other way clutching Polish flags. I knew the day was a holiday, but I naively figured it was like the Canadian and British version of Rememberance Day. I forgot that Poland was created (not for the first time) when the First World War ended. Because of that fact, it’s not such a sombre day here with the Polskis.

Sailing, sailing, on a Mazurian lake.

We are now in Lodz (pronounced Woodge!), having wrapped up our time up in the Mazury Lakes area of Poland. While there we went sailing with Magda’s uncle aboard is tiny little sailboat. My job was basically to get the hell out of the way of the sail as it spun around. I did so with mixed results.

Mazury Lakes. Sailing, Light wind. Push boat out through maze of 10 ft. rushes. Chilly, damp wind. Unlike past dry sunny days. Sun trying to fight its way through dark cloud. Trees orangey, turning grey as they bear less and less leaves. Skinny trees still have green leaves. Bog to get there. Once out, we go parallel, then right, then parallel, switchbacks trying to fight our way into the Lake, like switchbacks trying to fight way up mountain. Two dogs on board. One wants at some birds. Curious, keep eye out on where going. Mast goes left, then right. The wind swings around the front mast and blasts me in the face. On the other side of the lake is a working farm and a bed and breakfast, orange rooves. Five or six buildings. Human presence. Dogs there. Area is flat but with trees, the sky is more obscured than in, say Alberta. A sense of isolation that is rare in Europe.

Zagreb Rock City

One of the best things about traveling to new countries is coming across events that can’t be found in any guidebook. We had one day to spend in Zagreb and spent it trying to see everything worth seeing, including a couple of museums, the lacklustre botanical gardens and the old town. The city very much resembles an old European capital in the mode of London or Vienna.

With tourists few and far between, we basically got a personal tour of Glyptoteka, which houses the country’s main sculpture museum, during which we briefly met the artist who had a feature exhibition running and who was evidently (loudly) explaining his work to friends, or at least interested acquaintences.

But the best part of the day was stumbling across a downtown free concert, much like those staged in public spaces in Canada in the summer. Grabbing a beer and, for Magda, a hot chocolate (literally warmed up chocolate), we took in a pair of interesting bands.

The first featured a very enthusiastic frontman playing a harmonica over what can only be described as Croatian Rock. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Neither do I. Yet he was entertaining as he played his Gypsi-fied rock and roll, singing English words in a very strong Croatian accent. The second band lost the accent and replaced the harmonica solos with guitar shredding. They would not have been out of place playing an early slot at Funtastic and clearly knew what they were doing even if they were playing for a free crowd of a couple hundred.

Today in Prague, meanwhile, we stumbled across American track star (and alleged steroid user) Carl Lewis during a charity run being headquartered in Prague’s main square. Apart from the fact that I thought I would finally escape taking photos of charity runs by leaving my job at The Morning Star, it was quite the scene, backed by the spectacular Tyn Church.