Visitors see the good, bad and ugly
There's nothing like guests on your watch to get an update on what's happening around Poland, good and bad.
At one point, there were three sets of friends here at the same time.
Some were first timers, others veterans. They all had interesting assessments of where Poland is, and isn't, today.
Clare Crawford-Mason and her husband Bob Mason, who are film and video producers from Washington, D.C., were on a non-tour to Warsaw, Krakow, Prague and Vienna.
They are also U.S. experts on productivity and quality-circles expert Edward Deming. And that made for an interesting breakfast with Andrzej Blikle, who has pioneered quality-circles concepts in Poland within his own growing company and promoted the idea to a new crop of Polish business managers through lectures.
That breakfast would have been held at the Blikle Cafe, but Blikle belatedly realized that on weekends the company's breakfasts don't start until 10 a.m. So there was a decidedly less swish breakfast at the Forum Hotel. But it was the two-way conversation on concepts that worked and those that didn't that was the attraction anyway, not the food. "Very interesting," Blikle said later. And Crawford-Mason was going to put Blikle's most recent papers on Deming and productivity on her Deming web site.
Crawford-Mason and Mason weren't sure what to expect on their first trip but gave the city high marks. The hotel front desk went out of their way to give them good directions and to warn them about street crime. They were, however, a bit astounded to be given leaflets and telephoned by prostitutes and their "handlers."
Sheila Darnborough is a British-born, naturalized American who grew up watching Polish soldiers and pilots coddle her baby sister in a carriage outside the store where her Mom shopped. The British, meanwhile, thought the infant was Polish so she received attention and sweets from all sides.
That's not the only reason she's been back to Poland three times since 1992; a longtime mutual friend, Robert Gosende, had been cultural attache here in the late 1970s, and that may have been the initial reason for her interest.
She went back to Krakow for the first time since 1992 and was blown away by the explosion of tourists and cafes, better signage, and all that sprucing up that has resulted from Krakow being one of six European cities spotlighted this year.
For the most part, her experience was positive and then some: "There is enormous vitality in both Krakow and Warsaw," she said. "Krakow felt very solid moving forward while living with its history. Warsaw feels different it's just galloping along."
She thought the banner for the Royal Castle's "Winged Horseman" exhibit said a lot, with its map showing how huge the country had been in the 15th to 17th centuries and its description of Poland then as "the ramparts of Europe; a bastion of solidarity." And that is centuries before the current version of Solidarity.
"I hope they don't lose that 'Polish sense' and keep their past while still being part of the West," she said.
We also spent a few days in Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia. The new Solidarity Museum was a winner except that Darnborough was disappointed by the lack of English or any other non-Polish language on the high-tech interactive computers. But that may be coming, along with an exhibit catalog.
She also supped with John Borrell and his wife Ania. They talked about country life, and the upcoming sauna and hot tub they're installing in their elegant Kania Lodge, a bed and breakfast located 45 minutes from Gdansk. Look for those to be onstream by January.
And then there was Lublin. Warsaw guide Edward Wrzesien takes small minibus tours there to see the renovated Byzantine murals in the chapel overlooking the Old Town and he talked about the burgeoning crop of small cafes.
On the train there from Warsaw, Darnborough read that the latest "Lonely Planet" guide warned of crime in Lublin's Old Town. The front desk clerk at the Orbis' Unia Hotel shrugged it off and said you only had to watch your purse in trams and to take normal precautions.
So at 7 p.m., after a beer in the mostly deserted but beautiful Old Town, Sheila was looking at the wall menu outside of what looked like an interesting small kawiarnia, Trakt Krolewski when a young man ran by and grabbed her bag off her shoulder.
She kept her hands on it. He was stronger and flung her to the ground, running straight and then left into a cobblestone alley.
And the reaction by the cafe employees to her shouts of "You bastard!"? They opened the door, looked on as she struggled to get up from atop their sandwich-board promo, and then the waiter came out and straightened up his sign and went back inside.
Later, at the police station, the cops said that tourists had huge problems in the Old Town, partly because there were so few of them and so few cops, especially after dark.
The next morning, the Unia sales manager said the problem was that the huge numbers of peasants brought in by the communists after World War II to occupy the huge Old Town houses had been nationalized are now in the way. The city wants to restore the Old Town and turn it back into a business and cafe-society center a magnet for companies but also for tourists, who go by the millions to Kazimierz Dolny, an hour away.
