A few awkward questions about Warsaw

A marker in Nowe Miasto notes where the boundary of the Jewish Ghetto stood.

Exploring Warsaw with an inquisitive preschooler is a minefield of unexpected and unhappy conversations which I'd thought were still a few years away.

Here are just a few questions that popped up in our first day wandering around Stare Miasto and Nowe Miasto with my five year old daughter:

Q: "Why did they have to rebuild all these buildings after the war?"
Q: "Why were the Nazis so bad? Did they kill people? Even kids?"
Q: "Why did all the Jewish people have to go behind a wall? What was everyone else doing? Why didn't they call the police?"
Q: "What is that thing you do with your hand when we walk into a church?"
Q: "Why do we go into churches here but not back home?"
Q: "Did your grandfather live in Warsaw? Well, why didn't you ask him when he was alive? Why do you always tell stories about your granddad but not about your dad?"

Happily, introducing her to Polish food and taking her to new science museum weren't as intense.

Memorials like this, on Wierzbowa, mark the spots where Nazi reprisals took place.

... And in the early evening

Looking south from Margaret Bridge just after sunset this afternoon, on my way to get my daughter from school.

Mists

November is a very misty month here, when the air is a kind of powdery blue and quite still. It is particularly striking at dawn and dusk. This was the view of the Danube and Parliament  from the Lanchid this evening, just before sunset.

Comparative Playground-ology

The playground at Vermezo park in Budapest.

Thanks to daylight savings time, playground season seems to have come to an end. While the weather during the day is still nice enough that we can make a trip every once in awhile, no more automatically passing some time after school at the playground at Honved ter or the one outside our apartment building. Too dark.

Having young children necessarily means that you become a theorist about playground design. Especially if you aren't chatting with other parents, you need to be just attentive enough to make sure your kid doesn't go tumbling off something, which gives you a narrow range of things to think about. You try to figure out the right balance between engaging and overwhelming, between variety and safety.

In the States, playground design has come quite a ways since I was a kid. Our regular haunt is the one at Williamstown Elementary School, a new, plastic, multi-function structure that is pretty popular. It is in appealing, muted colors, has no sharp edges, and is made of lots of recycled materials, as a sign moralistically reminds you. But it is a place whose functions are very narrowly proscribed -- this is the slide, these are the monkey bars, etc. I don't think kids really like that -- after all, no self-respecting preschooler has ever met a slide and didn't want to skip climbing the ladder and just clamber up the downward part. And at the same time, the structure is a little overwhelming. It commands kids' attention.

In Moscow, playground equipment is ubiquitous and primitive. Rusty slides, unnervingly fast carousels, splintering see-saws. Kids seem to treat them as stage props in their little lives, occasionally useful for a few minutes of fun but by no means the main attraction.

In Budapest, we've met another category of thing. Most playgrounds here have these strange contraptions, which I believe are made by the same company, that are somewhat puzzling at first glance. They are often sets of reinforced ropes, parallelogram-shaped plastic platforms, sliding handles and trolleys. Some come to look like meat racks, others like commando training equipment. They seem almost dangerous until you watch kids grapple with them and realize how challenging and forgiving they are. 

This has been quite enough to keep our daughter quite engaged. She is particularly thrilled with this kind of rope bridge that frightened her at first. We've enjoyed them, but I already heard one of our friends who lives here complain that all the playgrounds have the same stuff on them...

Occupy Szabad Sajtó útca?

Sunday felt like the first of those late autumn, early winter days in Central Europe that people love to warn you about. Mid-40s, damp, pure grey -- the kind of days that make the happiest and healthiest people feel dour and fevered. Pulling up the shutters that morning, I thought to myself that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would probably be pleased -- both the left and the right might just choose to stay home.

I headed off to the protest after lunch, after taking a long time to decide whether or not I would go. I felt a little silly, like Norman Mailer in his writing on the 1960s protests, when he spent a silly amount of time thinking about himself and what his place in all these sweeping events was. Would I go as a journalist? not precisely, because there's no money involved. As a participant? that's tricky. I take the idea of national self-determination seriously, and Hungary is not my country.

Yet, 2011 has a certain special feeling, like 1989, 1968, maybe even 1848. Whatever is happening is bigger than any one country. I've spent a lot of time these past few weeks thinking about Occupy Wall Street, and how I'd respond if I were still back home right now. My opinion has changed a few times over that stretch. I began from a definite distance -- I have a permanent skepticism of the way leftist dissent in America presents itself as a laundry list of isolated grievances. Maybe its generational, but I can't think about this sort of checklist of interests without irony. But I've been won over by the idea of it. After all, I have an unreasonable mountain of student loan debt. I devoted myself to a profession that was trashed by unimaginative leaders, investment bankers, and a professional managerial class. So in general, yea, I have some pretty serious grievances. 

So I chose to go as an observer, a blogger, and see what I could see. The walk to the protest was striking, as usual. I crossed the Lanchid, which I've done dozens of times this month, and it never looks the same. On Sunday, it was decorated with flags -- it was National Day, when the country commemorates the beginning of the 1956 Uprising.

Across the Ukraine

I've let keeping up with things fall away the past few eventful weeks. The simple story is, we are in Budapest, having arrived here at the beginning of the month. We've been getting used to our new surroundings, and more on that later.

We arrived here by train from Moscow, which was truly one of the most interesting ways to cross the steppes. It took about two days -- conveniently at the same time as the Red Sox were flushing the season for good.

Here are some images:

I had very distinct ideas about what we would be able to see from our window. I wanted to see those rolling steppes, the 'Black Earth,' the vault of the sky and the curve of the earth. I was a bit off. The land was in full autumn gloom -- permanent drizzle, menacing low clouds. But somehow, the land itself seemed to be appreciated, as opposed to in Russia, where it sometimes feels taken for granted.

The station at Vinnytsia, about halfway through.

Reading the land as it passed, all I could think about was the place's long, bloody history. Just the idea of the millions that perished here in my grandfather's lifetime alone is staggering. The whole place feels haunted.

The schedule, more or less.

Our spalny vagon, at the station in L'viv. This was the only place where we stopped long enough to get out for some fresh air..

Keleti Station in Budapest.

Twelve more years....

I went online to check the news Saturday afternoon, and saw a peculiar headline at Izvestia. It was the usual humdrum weekend layout, but the main headline read "Medvedev agrees to head United Russia Duma list." That's funny, I thought, because if he ran for Duma it would be hard to run for... oh.

Talk about burying the lede. Every western news agency got it right: "Putin to return as Russian President." All of a sudden, with unmistakeable clarity, the national political life of this country has been decided for the next 12 years. But much of the Russian media seems to have taken incredible pains to avoid spelling out the obvious, presenting the developments as just another "normal" part of the political process in this "sovereign democracy."

But it is sinking in. The past few months, you hear a lot of talk about "stagnation," reminding many of the Brezhnev era's modest economic comfort, stifling stability, and soft repression. It's understandable. Something about the way people complain about the difficulty of life in Russia has gotten more desperate, I've noticed, and I've heard some surprising people talk about how tired of it all they have become. It's hopeless, so no wonder the media is trying to downplay the reality of what just happened.

It is a rather different feeling than the last time Russia was told of a shift at the top in December 2007. I heard about it in the evening, when I was listening to the "Nachtkonzert" online, and was convinced I'd misheard the German news announcer. Could it be Putin had really picked the gentle, Western-minded legal scholar over the defense industry stooge who was considered his primary rival? There were certainly good reasons then to be queasy about how the transfer of power was conducted, but there was a possibility it could be the light at the end of the tunnel. For those that clung to that belief, this weekend's developments must be particularly hard.

This underscores the limits of the "stagnation" narrative. Under Brezhnev, the USSR was simply old and worn out. On the occasion of his death, in November 1982, Serge Schmemann of the New York Times wrote about the mood on the street:

"In the later years of Mr. Brezhnev's life, his slurred speech and obvious infirmity evinced a combination of pity, embarassment and aggravation among many Soviet people.

During his recent speech in Baku, at which he began reading the wrong text, a woman watcing on television was overheard to say, 'Poor man, why do they make him do all this at his age?' The comment was typically Soviet in the presumption taht even the General Secretary of the Communist Party is somehow manipulated by the faceless 'They.'

Among more sophisticated people, a common feeling in later months was a frustrated sense that any progress, any reform, any assault on the country's economic and social stagnation was impossible under the aged, frail Brezhnev regime.

'I don't care if it does get worse,' one economic planner recently said. 'As long as there's change.'"

There is nothing old and worn out about those in power now, and there aren't words for the feeling of finding yourself once again at the bottom of such a very large hill.

A trip to the 'Main Universal Store'

Moscow's GUM department store was built in the early 1890s, a mix of traditional Russian architectural themes with contemporary glass and iron engineering.

I went through a very distinct phase in my youth when the idea of a "shopping mall" embodied everything I thought was wrong about the world. Such commercialism! how shallow and pointless, all those people wandering around like cattle. Like, man, it's all so corporate.

But as I grew older, and my sense of irony became real instead of forced, I developed a real interest in these places, and not just because they are the emblematic structures of late 20th American public life. They belong to the world, to capitalism and modernity itself. Didn't Walter Benjamin spend his working life on vast, unfinished thought experiment about the arcades of Paris, the forerunner of the modern shopping mall?

Though to be honest, what really changed my mind was living in a small village like Williamstown, where getting to any retail center is major work (I have no idea how people lived there without the internet and Amazon). Whenever I drop off or pick up anyone at the Albany airport, I make time to wander around the Crossgates Mall of Colonie Center, usually withouth buying anything, just to look at things. There is always that weird shudder at Barnes & Noble, when I see in reality a book I've read a lot about.

In Moscow recently, I took my daughter to visit Red Square, and we did the usual things. We watched the changing of the guard at the war memorial, had lunch at Okhotny Ryad, listened for the bells of Spassky Gate.

But I also took her to GUM, the enormous 19th century shopping edifice that occupies the eastern side of the Square. I hadn't been there since my first visit in 2003, and was curious what it looked like now.

The answer, of course, is awfully elitny. The Glavnyi Universalni Magazin enjoys pride of place like no other shopping center in the world. And the inside shows it, with a painfully high-end string of boutiques filling a space that is remarkably beautiful in a very practical way.

The fountain, in the central courtyard of GUM, is decorated for the season.

A funny piece of Soviet nostalgia: the store, with its blank, descriptive name ("Gastronom No. 1") and window full of Soviet-era essentials like flour and sugar betrays its real identity. Inside, you won't find much to be nostalgic about, but lots of incredibly expensive imported wines, cheeses, truffles, and whatnots.

A map of GUM. Notice the trapezoidal shape.

This unique news kiosk reflects the interest of most GUM shoppers: glossy gossip tabs, psychology magazines, business titles, and, of course, a magazine solely about luxury wristwatches.

One more thing on Sept. 11...

Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.

I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.

I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."

The Space Age

I'm always going to think the "Monument to the Conquerors of Space" is pretty cool. The enormous, titanium-coated arc to the sky was completed in 1964, and mixes space age cool with socialist realist silly. The whole area around it -- the old VDNKh is next door -- is a bit like that. But it seems with each passing year it feels like the past is becoming more, well, passed.

The last time I went there was in winter 2003, during my first visit to Moscow. Back then, it was a full-blown Soviet kitsch experience. I remember the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics -- which is in the base -- back then was a small, dark, and very much like visiting a mausoleum. An extensive renovation was completed in 2009, and did quite a lot to bring it into the, well, 20th century.

But the result is still a little curious. There is a lot of hagiography, especially about Gagarin, and a good bit of red meat for techies and engineers. But unfortunately for my visit, it couldn't quite capture the attention of my four-year-old girl. She skipped right past rocket scientist Pilyagin's reading glasses, and did not share my amazement at how closely the sleeping compartment of a Soyuz capsule resembles an overnight train compartment.

I find it absolutely hilarious that for a museum that relies rather heavily on models and replicas, they have on display Belka and Strelka. The real Belka and Strelka. Right near the front, which prompted a strange conversation with my daughter about how yes, they came back safely. And went on to have long, happy dog lives. But were stuffed because they were heroes (like Lenin, I guess).