Poland

After many hours of travel I got to Poland yesterday evening so it took me two days to get here from Mexico City. I went through Miami, Zurich and Warsaw. In Mexico City it was about 20 degrees Celsius when I was leaving, in Miami it was 32, in Zurich 9 and in Warsaw and Poznan about 12. Warm, hot, cold, warm. I flew with American Airlines first and then by Swiss Air and AA to Swiss is like a one starr hostal to Mariott five star. AA is dirty, the food is disgusting and the flight attendants look as if their work was some kind of sacrifice... Swiss Air is the best. My favorite airport is still the Helsinki airport but the Zurich airport is very nice as well. It is very elegant and was designed with great care. The Warsaw airport is, well... one of the worst I have seen and its shabiness hit me after flying there from the Zurich airport... It is also very disorganized and it's hard to get any information there... And so is the main train station. The direction to the bathroom stated that it's upstairs. After I climbed the long stairs up I found a typical wc lady (who since the deep communist time is called the "toilet granny" - czyli babcia clozetowa) sitting in front of the wc door who informed me that the bathroom is closed and I have to go down and outside of the station where there's another one. I wonder if paying the toilet granny just to provide this piece of information, instead of putting a sign downstairs regarding wc operation, is a way to cut unemployment... I decided that the surrealism which accompanied life in Poland before the system transformation still exists to the same extend... just slightly different... It looks like the whole Warsaw is covered with big billboards advertising politicians running for different posts in the government, many of them being disgraced in the past for involvement in various large scale corruption scandals. There's this really good Polish author and playwright Slawomir Mrozek (who lived for a long time in Mexico) whose work involved the absurdities of life in Poland and every time I encountered some absurdity I thought that it was, as the saying goes, "straight from Mrozek." I think I am so sensitive to absurdities in Poland because I spent the most of my life here and I saw the people's struggle for independence and the transformation of the political and economy system and it pains me to see how divided people seem to be now and how the old ideals have been lost...

I will write more about this and about my last days in Mexico City soon. Swiss Air is the best but the only thing I can complain about is that they lost my luggage. It went to Rome instead to Warsaw and I have to go home and wait for its delivery. It's been fun wearing my mother's clothes but I prefer my own stuff...