A Polish Wedding

I call my little blog “ Travels with an Unlikely Aunt.” It was a whim of an idea. It’s obviously not catchy. Even my friends cannot remember it. But there was this Grahame Greene novel called “Travels with my Aunt.” Then I mixed it up with the play “Charley’s Aunt”, who was a young chap pretending to be another young chap’s aunt for the purposes of schoolboy deception. I am an Aunt, but not a classical one I think. An Unlikely one perhaps. And Voila! A persona. A catchy phrase that is totally unmemorable. I went to Poland in the role of a true Unlikely Aunt as my eldest nephew married his Polish girlfriend, Malgorzata, or Maggie when you leave Polish shores. There was going to be small family wedding in the town in which she had been brought up and where her family still live. If you look up Kalisz, there aren’t a long list of things to visit. There is a big town square, there is a river. There are parks. And Lots of Catholic Churches. There are cobbled streets, a train station and a honey festival. I did all of those and that was on the first afternoon.

My brother and I rented a car and we drove around the area. Stephen had declared a wish to find a local pub and have a beer. Stephen lives in New Zealand. He has gained that “ good day mate” mentality where you can find a nook and smile at friendly people and laugh at the gathering storms. We drove and we drove. I had the map. I would navigate us to little town after little town, through which we would slow down long enough to see there was nothing more than a few houses and vegetables. The odd child on a bike. A dog. We were in an area known as the capital of the tomato. There was nothing more than fields of cabbages and greenhouses full to the brim of aforesaid tomatoes. Literally for a two hours we wandered every road from no-town to no-town until we came to what I have to describe as a square. With a fountain and a couple of benches. We emerged from the car as if we had found El Dorado. Neither of us speak any Polish but we went into the first shop which we sadly found to be a butchers. We smiled wanly and congratulated them on selling EVERY part of an animal and stumbled into the other shop. Which had laundry detergent, cakes and dried fish.

We went with the cakes and sat on the bench in the square eating them.

There were people milling around. Buying things. Children with a scooter. Nobody looked at us askance. We were obviously not the first people who had ended up here, hoping for a pot of gold and ending up with a bad chocolate eclair. In Kalisz we were all staying at the Hotel Calisia, which is where the reception would be. There was an overwhelming seventies feel to the hotel. With marble and brass and a curving staircase. In the reception area itself there is the bar. To the left of the reception area is the kidney shaped dining room, to the right are the bedrooms. Along the corridors are chairs. Rows of them on every floor, as if there would be auditions for wedding guests. The dining room is where the wedding reception will be happening. They will put the tables together to make one long one and the space at the end will become the dance floor. The wedding itself was held at the court house. There were just a few of us. A young couple of classical string players, two women to officiate; One speaking in Polish and the other in English for Joel. It was a very practical and humane service.

Joel and Maggie were declared married and we emerged into the afternoon sun and threw rice. A group of the parents’ friends arrived to drive us back to the hotel. With their windows open and wedding music blaring out on their radios. There was a not very dry champagne ( Read between the lines here for my taste in champagne) There were bottles of red, white and vodka on the table. There was a lot of vodka. The first course was a tasty courgette followed by a special vodka.

There was a main course that had a lot of meat and the very best mashed potatoes. There was a lovely cake. And then as I might have been looking for a small chocolate and a cup of mint tea, these vast platters of cold meats, cheeses and pickles arrived. I now understand it is a traditional “ soak up the vodka” thing. Then the lights went down and the music came up. The vodka shots were flowing. The dancing commenced. Jackets came off. Twirling happened. Margaret had asked us all to learn this folk dance which we performed in a circle. it looked easy, but those folk dances are designed to confuse.

I danced a little bit. I think of myself as quite a good dancer. Unfortunately, someone took a video and my dancing looked like a pigeon strutting with a stiff neck. Note to self…only dance in dark. I went to bed and left the dancing and the vodka shots to others. Long and the short, big and the small…is that my nephew has married a woman that he truly loves and has gained a large and gloriously chaotic Polish family.

When we got on the train to Warsaw on the Monday morning, Margaret's father, Artur, came to see us off. We all waved and said the two or three Polish words we knew which we hoped were thank you and I hope you don’t have too much food left over. And as the train slowly pulled out of Kalisz station he ran alongside and kept running till he ran out of platform. Margaret was crying and I understand why. Who would do that? Run alongside a train pretending you were faster than any engine? It would be a father who didn’t care about anything more than to let his daughter know he would always be there to catch up with her if she needed him.

The most important meal of the day…….

I know that is now considered “old hat”. In our modern world of intermittent fasting. But three things come into play when you are traveling. Breakfast is an indication of the country you are in. Breakfast is an indication of the money you spent on the hotel. If you eat breakfast well, you don’t need to worry about lunch. In Tampere north of Helsinki in Finland. I had landed in a rather nice family run hotel. All by a happy accident. I had a lovely room with a view across the city. They gave me slippers and a waffle cotton dressing gown. I never managed to sort out the lights. And the top floor of the hotel was a sauna that opened from 4 to 10 each evening. With separate men’s and women’s and a joint infra red sauna.

And to the point of this whole message from abroad: Breakfast.,And I have to point out we are starting high and going low. There was an omelette bar. There was a whole honeycomb, waiting for you to scrape it. A selection of gluten free breads and cakes. there was the yoghurt and cereal section, with toppings of dried powdered berries and seeds and a green powder that smelt like a christmas candle labeled “top of the pine trees.” There were many breads, all warm, waiting for you to slice them. Rye, seeded, crisp breads. There were different butters, salted, unsalted and smoked reindeer butter. There was Kale pesto. There were jams galore. Cloudberry, lingonberry, gooseberry. ( The reindeer bit is going to be a theme, but only in Finland…makes sense really) There were containers with mushrooms and onions ( for me) and reindeer sausages ( for others) And there was a container of the best porridge I have ever had in my life. I wrote about it when I wrote about Finland and I have a packet in my case with instructions on how to make it and it involves milk and salt and butter. In the centre of the room there was an island with a massive selection of sliced cheese, sliced meats, pickled vegetables, pickled herrings, smoked salmon, smoked eggs, and yes, reindeer.

The hotel was full of Finns, who were having a weekend break or something similar, and I noticed that most of them had bread and then piled everything on top into a vast open sandwich which they held between their two hands and engineered it brilliantly so it didn’t slide an inch. I went for courses. It’s the way I do things. I started with a tiny bowl of yoghurt with aforementioned sprinkles. then I went for the porridge with lingonberry sauce, then I had a baby omelette with mushrooms and cheese and two pots of tea. One black and one of their home made roobios. I should point out in relation to the reindeer. I did try the smoked reindeer butter on a slice of rye bread. As I pushed it around on the bread I realized it was butter with tiny pieces of smoked reindeer in it. For some reason I thought they milked the female reindeer and the butter would be made from that milk and the smoked bit.. I don’t know what I was thinking… a Lapland bar-b-que?

Anyway , I left it to one side. Eating reindeer is not for me. 10/10 The next hotel was in Helsinki. A sharp slide down to a hotel that looked like it was left over from a safe house in a John le Carre novel. The room was filled with old office furniture. The shower could only fit someone under six foot and slim of girth. The lift or elevator doors looked like te belonged in a morgue.

The breakfast was meat that looked like spam, cheese that looked like it belonged on a hamburger bun, bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth and pickles. 2/10 In Estonia. The sliced cheese and meat was becoming a visual backdrop. With lots of warm sausages and containers of flavored yoghurt.I’d give it 4/10. Latvia, we were staying at this hotel I mentioned before. Built in the seventies and a few miles out of town on the Number 1 bus line. The other guests seemed to be Russians on a mini break or a large group of young and naughty Indian men who took to running around the corridor at night in their underpants. I know. I opened my door in my white cotton nightie to remonstrate with them. they looked sheepish.

But back to breakfast. In Riga there were pancakes and fried eggs along with the regular fare. And very bad white bread that had to be toasted at least three times to make it edible. And butter in packets that were labeled “ Butter.” But you can’t fool me. I am a butter connoisseur. That butter had never met a cow. 3/10 Lithuania. The first breakfast was by the sea in Klapaieda. That was very inventive, Jams and dumplings. Egg salad, tomatoes sliced with cheese, beetroot sliced with vinegar. Lots of sausages. It probably looked better than it tasted. But I’m giving it 6/10 for the colour palette. Second breakfast was in a home stay…..whole new world. A long wooden table with drop scone style pancakes one day and a quiche style thing the next. Sliced tomatoes and cucumber from the garden.7/10

Third Lithuanian breakfast was in a hotel in the capital Vilnius. I had a fantastic view from my window. And I have to stop there. If I put porridge, cheese and a pear on my plate..they would have all tasted like wood clippings. 1/10

And lastly to Poland. In this gently tacky hotel in a town called Kalisz. Which I will be more forthcoming as to why I was there, later; the entire ( been-there-before) enterprise of sliced cheese, meats, pickles, tomatoes and bready buns with a jam filling, was lifted to the ceiling by a young woman called Emily who was making scrambled eggs to order. I will never whisk them in a bowl again. I will never let the butter fully melt again. I will eschew Jacques Pepin and Delia. I will follow young Emily hereafter. Breakfast 5/10. In conclusion. Go to Lapland for breakfast , if you happen to be passing. Skip out the Baltic States unless you happen to be staying in a lovely home in the country. Go to central Poland for scrambled eggs. But only if Emily is on duty. She gets 11/10.

A skate over the two “L” Countries in the Baltics.

It’s not that I want to roll Latvia and Lithuania together. The problem is I didn’t spend enough time in either one to speak with intelligence. It was a little of the “ Oh, it’s Rome, then it must be Monday.”

I have two friends who came from Latvia and Lithuania respectively. Friend 1. was brought up in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before emigrating with her family to Israel. Her father lost his first family in the holocaust before marrying a second time and then giving up his country because of the Soviets. But she has memories of a lovely childhood in the city, as only children can do, when the weight of invasion seems such a far away concept. Friend 2. Never lived in Lithuania, but her mother came from there and would sing songs in her native tongue all the time. Her mother ran away in a party frock when she was a child, when the Russians invaded her town and her grandmother spent decades in the soviet gulags’s before gaining her freedom. I always wanted to go to Lithuania with my friend, but sadly she died a couple of years ago. So I took a tiny bag of her ashes instead. The Finns go to Estonia to buy their alcohol. The Estonians go to Latvia for theirs. And so on. The price seems to drop the further south you travel. Alcohol in all the countries are sold in shops called ALKOHOLE. Seriously. Latvia seemed more Russian than Estonia. And indeed it has a much higher percentage of Russians than Lithuania.

The story seems to be that Latvia is demanding that any person unable to speak the Latvian language by the end of the year will be repatriated. To be clear, they are talking about the Russians. These Russians were settled in Latvia from that period after World War II until independence in 1991, but for the last 32 years the Latvian flag has been flying and still, not only is Russian their first language, it’s their only language.

There is a similar story in Lithuania. But there, the Russian Population is much smaller. Education is taught in Lithuanian, so all the young Russians speak the language, but their parents do not. Nobody, anywhere, seems to be flying the flag for Russia. But the blue and yellow flag…. In the plaza in Riga, bang in front of the Russian embassy. there is a large scaffold where many Ukrainian flags are whipping around in defiance.

And with the young Rigans, the educated, multi-lingual, clear-eyed and astute young Rigans; they know that Uber-wealthy Russians are being allowed to bring their “ not so clean” money in and have bought into the nicer parts of the city and the beach resorts. They know Latvians are not without blame in the atrocities that happened under the Nazi’s and the Soviets. But they are looking westwards and all of them are very conscious of the drumbeats on their eastern border. And the Lithuanians. They are still struggling to find a way to teach the children in school about that dark period of their history in the Second World War. It is an active and ongoing story. Some would like to be truthful. But others wonder if they will ever know the truth. So I end this eavesdrop of a note on Latvia and Lithuania, with this fantastic image.

On the 23rd of August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of that Hitler/ Stalin Pact made to invade and then share the Baltic States that no one was ever willing to acknowledge; On that day in August… One and half million people stretched in a line from Tallinn the capital of Estonia, down through Riga the capital of Latvia to Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. They held hands. Women, children, men, Priests. They stood there all day. To demand their independence. They sang. A protest that shook the Soviet Union. They got their independence. The Berlin Wall fell less than three months later.

Estonia

There is a sort of joke in Estonia. That they weren’t happy with the 2 meter rule that was enforced during Covid. There was great relief when it was revoked. So they could go back to their usual 5 meter rule. Tallinn is on the north coast. On a clear day you can see Helsinki. If you look to the east you can probably see St Petersburg. it is the northern country of the Baltic States. It’s language is related to Finland but not to it’s sister Baltic countries, nor to Russia.

The population is small. And the population is quiet. These are not noisy people except for once a year when they get together and sing. In costume. Tunes of olden days. They dance. They pic-nic . And they cry.

But as you walk around they don’t engage. They don’t look at you. They don’t say hallo. They certainly don’t smile. A young student at the University was asked whether he could differentiate between the students coming into the library by nationality. He had a perfect score. “ How did you know who were the Estonians?” He was asked. “ Because each one walked in on their own and looked grumpy” was his answer. It is hard to judge. I am here in August. The days are still long. The sun shows it’s face most days. But this is a country that spends 8 months under woolly wraps. I don’t think cold climates lend themselves to friendliness. But the story in Estonia is different. It seems that the more recent of their occupations… this dance between the Nazi’s and the Soviets. Where the two forces threw these Baltic countries between them like a weighted balloon. There is a hotel in Tallinn. Outside of the quaint old town. A white solid structure. Not particularly interesting. But it sits there high and squat as you stand at the Russian war memorial and look back into the city. It clearly has 23 floors. You can count the windows. But the Soviets, at the time, insisted that there were only 22. It seems that the 23rd floor was inhabited by all these KGB agents who used to spy on all the people staying in the hotel. Every room had listening devices wired in, Every table in the bars and restaurants came with an ashtray. If you moved them because you didn’t smoke, they were politely returned, because the all important bug was stuck underneath. The talk is that the building is composed of 50% cement, 20% glass and 30% wires.

So the Estonians don’t bother with small talk. They don’t chat in the street with you or to any of their fellow countrymen. Because they have grown up with overheard conversations having the possibility of dire consequences. So they turned their hand to things that could be done with little communication. They have cemented their place in the world with their skills in the world of tech. Skype was invented here. And “BOLT”, the first of the electric scooters came out of Estonia. Apparently at some political conference the prime minister was handed a laptop and asked if she could fix it. It was meant as a joke. But that is the reputation of these taciturn Estonians.

Outside of town following the edge of the water you come to two memorials. The first is blocks of cement. A sharp tower. A metal structure linking an arch which turns out to be falling birds. There are barriers to keep you away from the bits that are deemed dangerous. There are weeds coming up through the cracks. There is no one there. Apart from a few Bicyclists who use it as a short cut back to town. It is the Soviet War Memorial. Just past that there is the Estonian memorial.

To the lost, killed and missing under Communism. Two high smooth black walls that you walk between. You turn into an open space, there on the wall are four lines of a poem from an Estonian Poet called Juan Liiv.

It’s a poor translation but here goes: And thousands fall on the path And thousands will come home Leading them with effort and care They will fly to the beehive. And on this wall are 22,000 silver bees.

One for each person who didn’t come home. Flying towards the bee hive. And when you turn around there are gentle slopes planted with fruit trees. In memory. And a home for the bees.

The Finnish Imposter

I can’t believe I have never been to Scandinavia. I have meant to, so many times. To go to Elsinore where Hamlet takes place. To visit the birthplace of so many friends over the years. These elegant floaty type people who have wandered through my life. A college friend of my sisters. An old girlfriend of my brothers. My mother’s friend Nina who had a blonde plait all the way down her back. My friend who still visits her mothers family home on an island of the Norwegian coast every summer. They all spoke English with the lightest of touches and the odd curve of a syllable showing that this language wasn’t their first. They all had and have eyes that reflect an achingly open sky. I can say it was because as a family we headed south to the Mediterranean and the tablecloth sized apartment that my parents had bought before I was a teenager. I can say that when I was traveling on my own I wanted to conquer the strangeness of farther shores before I got a ferry across the North Sea to countries that I had seen in Bergman films. When I went to work in America, I didn’t take holidays in the same way. It was people whom I missed. So I went to where they were. Be it the UK, or New Zealand, or Greece. But last week I landed in Scandinavia. Finland to be exact.

I got off a plane into an acutely organized airport and found myself on a train heading north to a small city or a large town called Tampere. It was a nice hotel, a nice room, with a view above the rooftops.

I went downstairs having put my toothbrush in a glass and asked if they had a bicycle I could use. Ten minutes, armed with a map, wearing a red helmet, I was out there. If I had been walking with a map I would have felt self-conscious. But with my yellow bag in the basket and my red helmet and knowing there were no cliffs I could drive off or motorways I could accidentally join, I rode and rode along by the river, away from the river, up and down the streets that had little strips marked out on the pavements for me and my bike. Nobody fussed. Cars stopped, pedestrians accommodated, me and my other friends on their bikes just ambled along getting where we were going whenever we could get there. The thing was I didn’t know where I was going. And so it continued for these days I was in Tampere. I went to beaches, arboretums, museums, harbours, look-outs. On my bike with no gears. One day I took a ferry out to an island. I bought myself some wild raspberries from this lovely farmer who had a little table on the dock with onions and peas and chanterelle mushrooms and berries. He is going in September to the beaches at Normandy. We had a lovely chat about that.

Because one of the oddest things here is that everyone speaks English. Everyone. Some young girl said it as because they watch television. But I don’t think it is that. I think they must have a curiosity. After all, they speak a language which reverberates in a very small circle around them. They just have it their back pocket.

Finnish is not an easy language. The street signs are unrecognizable. The language as you listen to it, is impossible to guess at. And then I have to mention breakfast. In no particular order: Porridge made with milk, salt and butter. Kale pesto. Lingonberry sauce. Pickled cauliflower Thick white yoghurt with cloudberry powder. Reindeer sausage. ( I just looked at that one) Rye bread. Chanterelle mushrooms.

There was this lovely woman who worked on the crew for breakfasts at the hotel. Her name was Jaana. She noticed I was alone. She guided me to a table with a good view.

She brought me my two pots of tea in the morning. The first, black. the second, Roobos. She told me how good the porridge was. I found out where she lived and what her hours were. I didn’t get much more than that. I don’t know if she had children or if she still liked the man she had married. She learned nothing much about me. On my last day I asked if I could take a photo of her. I told her I wanted a photo for this “ Thing” that I write. She got sort of embarrassed and sort of posed.

I think that people like her are a part of how people like me can travel alone. When I handed in my key card, the receptionist said I had a gift. Jaana had left me a package of the porridge. With instructions of how to make it at home. And a note. All of which is packed in my suitcase. I have no words for how big and small that made me feel. And I just want to go on the record that I didn’t pretend to be Finnish. Everyone just assumed I was. Maybe there is a stamp of someone who looks like me. Or there is a shampoo bottle with a face like mine on it. But I turned up anywhere and people launched at me with streams of the Finnish language. It took me two or three goes of “ I’m sorry.” before they stopped and heard my British bleatings and said ..” oh”. They still kept their eyes on me, thinking I might collapse into what surely must be my mother tongue. Apparently I look Finnish. People in the shops, In the museums. On the streets when I made a dodgy maneuver on my bike. When I sat in the wrong seat on the train. They all were so sure. Made me question my heritage . For a good long minute.