Graveyards of Poland... While I may never again experience anything quite like the spiritual dread I felt at Krakow's Rakowicki cemetery earlier this year, Stare Powązki in Warsaw is the place to go to at the start of November. The old cemetery was established in 1790 and is home to over a million graves (Krzysztof Kieślowski, Anna Bilińska and Chopin's parents are all buried here). It is a cold autumn evening with countless lanterns giving off warmth and red light. Everyone around is looking for a grave or talking about the dead, and even small kids are carrying flowers. A young violinist is playing Polonez Ogińskiego and there is a great sense of solemn beauty and calm about the place. The lanterns smell of wax and warm lemon, and I see people walking slowly through The Avenue of the Distinguished as well as the dimmest and the narrowest of alleys. It is essential to be here on the first of November to start to understand these people... Truly there is nothing like All Saints' Day in Poland.
In the second half of November, there was a two-day art exhibition at Hali EXPO XXI. Warszawskie Targi Sztuki. Not simply an art exhibition but also a sale. Over a hundred art galleries from all over the country brought their best paintings in order to sell them at an attractive price (not too attractive, as we soon find out). There is a lot of diversity ranging from grotesque modern art to Polish classics to a huge area taken up by wooden statues that all resemble Alberto Giacometti. It was a great experience - mostly, though, I'm left with an image of an elderly man in a vintage green coat whispering to his wife as we walk past them: "Nie wiem, nie wiem...".
No one goes through life unscathed, and I guess this is my turn. The central Warsaw Urząd in Marszałkowska is not a welcoming place and yet you have to be here to have any chance at all, to prove something, to make a stand. The place is full of people in long gray coats, and they invariably resemble a famous Japanese anime character in an impenetrable white mask. Only there are lots of them here, and they all sit on chairs or stand along the walls - with lowered eyes, sucked in by the bureaucratic vortex, waiting for their number. At some point, there is a sound, unpleasant but oddly inspiring in the given circumstances, a number appears on the screen and another figure pulls their head out of the invisible hood, awkwardly pushes the chair they were sitting on, takes off the white mask and runs to their window. At the window, it could mean a failure or a happy end. Mostly, though, it means nothing.
It was something of an odd experience - to be seeing the 50th movie by Woody Allen in French (the original language of the film) with Polish subtitles. But there is a true sense of event, not least because this is likely to be his final work. It is a fine little film, a cross between Scoop and Match Point, and its existence might have been predicted by the final scene of Hollywood Ending. There are not too many people in the cinema, so thankfully no one will find out that my French is even worse than my Polish.
I love Polish trams, and when I build my route around Warsaw, I often neglect subway and buses. Somehow, trams seem to be the way to go around the city. There are many interesting characters here who demand to be written about, and you can often see them in one of the four incarnations of Warsaw trams. The modern ones, smooth and slick, that you want to be on when you are late. The older ones, divided into two parts, that have a slight whiff of Soviet past. The very old ones, with uncomfortable plastic seats, that you hop on when you do not care too much about your destination. And, finally, the ancient ones, the ones that only appear on holidays and with a steering mechanism that, miraculously, does not transport you to the start of the 20th century.
