Poland is Pennsylvania!

(With castles)

Ok, this is a picure of us with our old friend Nilda from Budapest, and our main sponsor/host, Chuck Hirt of the CKO organization and ECON.

Tonite we're in Warswaw, in a tidy two bedroom apartment across the square from the Castle in the Old City (actually all rebuilt in the 1950's...). We traveled yesterday from Banska Bystrica in Slovakia, up through the Carpathian Mountains of Slovakia and a corner of the Czech Republic and into Poland. Delightful to be driving with Kajo through his home town - he could tell stories of food, family and camping in castle ruins, etc. and he knew just where to stop at the roadside stand for this smoked sheepsmilk stringcheese. As Lindsay points out, like shoelace licorice only WOW!

Stopped for a vegetarian lunch and a quick howdy-do with a young civic acivist in Katowice by the name of Grzegorz...turned into six hours of enthusiasm, stories, ideas, plans, questions, answers and an impromptu tour that included the railroad station they saved with protest and a miners town where the coal mine is down at 1200meters. We saw this incredible community of brick flats and commercial buildings and then the nearby miners cottages - showed us two dramatically different approaches to company town development, and stunning examples of architecture and community design. Pictures later...In our talks, we got to the question I'm centering in on here - who is "US"? Who do you mean when you say "we're working for better transparency" or "we're trying to get the City to listen". This question gets us quickly to the membership dilemma - in the former Eastern bloc ("Newly Independent States") the ideas of voluntary associations and membership have been poisoned by their misuse by the soviets and allied governments. So what do you do about building an organization? He said at one point that they have 23 members (legally required for registration) and another 40 people who are strongly committed and involved and he has assumed they're not interested in being members but hasn't asked. Hmmm.

Thence on to Krakow, where we stayed in a pension in the Jewish District, ate at a Klezmer Restaurant (chicken schnitzel and potato pancakes with applesauce and mushroom soup from heaven!) then whisky, brandy and mineral water and cigars at a french-y cafe. ahhhh.

Sunday morning off to the city square and castle Wawel (vahvell)and geez the city square market building was under wraps with renovation but I fell in love with these goofy figures on the roof - gargoyles? grotesques? somebody? and we went in to the Church of the Assumption of Mary for an eyefull of dramatic beauty and abundant art and painted walls and ceilings. When church started, a choir of men with bass viol voices. The castle and it's church (with a statue of the former bishop here, who later got a bigger job in Rome...) was also fascinating, with tapestries and paintings of the Big Battles (tatar invasions, teutonic knights) and a great view of the city and surrounding plains. Also playful carved heads on the ceiling of one room, looked like they could easily jump out as animated cartoon figures direct from the mid sixteenth century!

On the ride north, I watched as the forest came and went, the farm fields waxed and waned, the factories smoked or sat idle, the coal fired plants and the nuclear power cooling towers steamed and I thought - Pennsylvania with castles!

Met up with the Warsaw team - delightful, serious, fun, intent and ready to prepare in any way that makes it better. Example - the Green Book (People Power from the Grassroots) is translated (!) and when I called it the Green Book, they (Kasia...more later) insisted that they will reprint the first page so the cover will be green. Nice people - we expect FORTY tomorrow (original estimate 15 - 20).

Anyways, to bed and to work tomorrow!