Krakow: I love libraries
7 December, 1999
The next day we had a fantastic breakfast at our neighborhood Milk Bar - the Poles often have big hearty bowls of soup for breakfast! What a wonderful idea.
In Krakow i saw some amazing buses. Most city buses around the world are about 12 meters long (approximatly 40 ft), and we saw plenty of those, as we do everywhere. In Seattle we have articulated buses which are about 18 m (60 ft) and bend in the middle for turns. In Krakow they had solid body buses that were 18 meters!!! I never saw one attempt a turn, but i'm not sure they could do it very easily... it was strange watching these enormous vehicles move through traffic!! I also saw an articulated bus once, but it was 24 meters long!!!!
Then we wandered the central part of the old town, just enjoying it. One of the things that i had planned to do in Poland was to do some research to try to extend my Cichanowciz family history - - as i understood it the village names that i had written down as where that branch (my mother's father) of my family came from were in the area around Krakow. But these are tiny villages and i really didn't have any idea where to look. In addition i had even less information about the villages from which my mother's mother's family came from, although i knew it to be in the general area of Poznan. So i wanted to see if i could dig something up.
We spent a very productive half hour or so chatting with the friendly woman at the tourist information center. She had some good suggestions and we learned some fascinating things about the city and even bought a book of legends and stories about Krakow for my mother (don't tell her!). One of the things she (the woman at tourist info, not my mother) suggested was the main University library, which turned out to be only half a block from our hostel!
We walked to the library via a different route then we had previously taking and, and along the way discovered, another Milk Bar! It was cozy and good, but a little bit more meat oriented than the other Milk Bars we had visited.
One of the things that i have discovered is that libraries are really good places to visit when traveling. You see the real local culture. You can sit and relax out of the weather. You can always find interesting things to browse through, even if you don't speak the language, you can often find Internet terminals and sometimes people to talk to. Also i have always liked libraries. They are a comfort thing. Many are kind of industrial, but often they are in cool modern buildings (like in Dresden or Vancouver) or in historical buildings (like in Prague or New York). Libraries are good.
We arrived at the library building around 14:00... it is a huge old building with a very elaborate, formal lobby that was, at first, a bit intimidating. I didn't use the coat and bag check, because Cheryln was going to sit in the lobby and write in her journal -- so i just left them with her. I walked up the big main staircase and explored the building a bit. This building had an interesting feel, one that i recognized from other places in Eastern Europe. The huge formal hallways were lined with closed, and sometimes locked doors. Everything was very elaborate, although poorly lit and often a bit dingy. And it felt very much like it was deserted, although on the rare occasion that i passed an open door i saw big, modern, well lit rooms full of people. It was a very bizarre feeling. On the 2nd floor (3rd floor in the American way of counting) i saw a door with a sign that i thought might mean cartography. After wandering a bit more to get up my bravery, i tried the door, but it was locked.
I wandered even longer, trying not to look as lost as i was. Finally i got up enough nerve and approached a student sitting eating a sandwich on a bench in the enormous formal stairwell. I asked if he spoke English, but he said "Nie" and turned back to his book. Eventually i wandered in to the "reading room", which was a huge, dark, Baroque sitting room with about 100 identical wooden desks with identical large backed upholstered chairs and identical antique lamps putting identical circles of light on the desks. Every square inch of the walls was covered with packed wooden bookshelves. There was a balcony above, leaving most of the room 3 stories high. Up on the balcony were more wooden bookshelves against the wall and desks lining the railing packed with students whose faces were lit by their laptop computers. The only sound was pages turning. Next to me at the end of the room was a raised platform with a big circular desk and a powerful light. The big computer on the desk was the only incongruity in the entire room. It was really a stunning sight.
Of course, after taking it in for a few moments i retreated back through the hallway/lobby and into the stairwell. I went upstairs and peaked into the room from the balcony. I could see the laptops more directly there - each was sitting on the old wooden desk at a station made especially for a laptop. It was cool. Finally i screwed up my courage and went back to the hallway/lobby where there were a couple of staffed desks on either side - probably circulation desks. I asked one of the guys working there, he looked like a student, if he spoke English and he directed me to the big raised desk out in the main reading room. There the librarian (at least i thought of her that way) was extremely friendly and helpful. We chatted for a few minutes, not quite whispering. She told me the cartography room was on the 2rd floor and gave me the room number and that it would be open from 0900 to 1300 the next day. I went upstairs to investigate and, sure enough, it was the same, locked, room i had found before.
So i went back to Cheryln and we went back to the town square. After buying a small Polish-English dictionary we stopped into the Telephone office and used the Internet a little, although it was hellishly slow. (We have found that Sunday evening is the best time to try to do email. It is Sunday morning in the U.S.A. and the response time is the fastest!). While we were there we thought about trying to call a friend of Cheryln's who had been begging for a phone call - she was having a tough time with some big emotional hurdles to get over and she needed a friend to chat to. But we had forgot the number. We did buy a phone card though! We started to wait in this extremely long line to pay for our Internet experience, but soon found out that line was for paying the bill for the home phone and were able to pay at the desk and head on out to, of course, the Milk Bar! On the way home we needed a post office, and looking at the map we found only 4 along our 10 block walk home! We wandered through a really cool neighborhood to the local post office where we had to wait in a long holiday line. I explored some phone books, looking for names in my family tree - i even found a couple! Cheryln bought a bunch of postcard stamps using only Polish... and they were cheap! That evening at the hostel Cheryln did talk to her friend on the phone for quite awhile, running up a huge phone bill back in the states, but the friend said it was worth it!
Tuesday morning we got up and headed to our favorite Milk Bar confident and happy because we had a goal, a task. After breakfast, and a short walk in the park to use up enough time, we went back to the University library. I went directly to the room on the 3rd floor and knocked lightly on the door - there was no answer, so i cracked open the door and said hello in Polish. There was a series of 3 offices, with no walls between them that gave the effect of a long hallway to the window. At the desk near the window was a small compact woman. I carefully read the two or three sentences in Polish that we had composed. She stood up to greet me and i asked if she spoke English - she said that she spoke 'only a little' (and for once, this was true!).
I set down my page of family tree data, and tried to explain the last names, and the village names, that i was looking for. She seemed to understand and ran around a bit collecting reference books, but seemed unhappy with her choices. She didn't speak to me actually, but kept coming back to where i was standing, finally she found a book that had a listing of every village in Poland in 1897. One of the big problems with this research is that the names of counties, regions and even cities and towns in Poland have been changed multiple times in the last 100 years, by various governments and occupying forces. So a listing from the end of last century was essential. Finally she looked up at me and said, "This is going to work. Come with me." and strode out the door. I followed her down the hall to another room, which turned out to be huge. It was the actual map room. On the way down the hall she said, "We will find the village of your grandfather!"
Once in the map room she collected about a dozen reference books and we started searching for listings for the two villages and two counties in question. The names i had written down were quite confusing, but we started to find some things that looked interesting. Actually as much as i tried to help, she did almost all of the work, running around finding maps and books, and then looking through them for the proper listings. I was pretty good at finding them on the maps, once we had the right maps though.
Eventually she went next door and asked another woman, who i assumed was her supervisor, a question, and this brought in the second woman to help, and now they were both running around looking for things. The second woman would only speak to the first woman, and only in Polish, but after quite awhile, perhaps half an hour after she was recruited, she suddenly spoke to me in almost fluent English! After perhaps an hour in the map room, the first woman disappeared, she just went out the door and i never saw her again. But the second woman continued to help me. We found listings for all three towns on my mother's father's side, but made little progress with the fairly confusing county names on my mother's mother's side. I was very excited to find Tartaczysko! And it was not where i expected it, near Krakow, but far up in the northeastern corner near the Lithuanian border! Mordarka, though, which we also found, was rather close to Krakow.
We had about a dozen maps out on the tables, ranging from very old, brown maps of the entire country to recent very detailed topo maps of very specific regions. She was helping me write down the precise names of the area maps that contained my ancestral villages so that i could buy them at the map store downtown. At one point she was holding one of the maps, i forget which one, and she kind of looked both ways and then shoved the map into my pocket. "Don't let anyone see it!", she said! A few minutes later she gave me the other one, told me to take it as well. I kept asking if she was sure she wanted me to have them, but she said it was fine, just don't let anyone see them! When i tried to put them with my papers, she insisted that i put them in my pocket! After a little while she asked to see the maps again, and she took one back, but said i could have the other. I think the one she took back was the first one she had given me, but i am not certain.
Anyway we kept looking at maps and trying, in vain, to find the two counties of the Kubinskis. At times i felt like she had fogotten about me and i started trying to figure out how to make my exit, but she would come back with some new book or map. I spent a lot of time restacking and organizing the many books and maps we had lying around. Of course i am not complaing even in the least, it was a fantastic experince, it was great having her do all this research for me and of course, i can stare at maps endlessly. It was really great. Finally we took every reference and map containing useful information, a pretty substantial stack, and she told me we were going down to get copies made. I followed her down to the reading room, where there were photocopy machines in the corner. (How come i hadn't noticed them before!?) Finally, after getting the copies and taking the books back and thanking her, i was ready to leave... i was getting a little worried about Cheryln because i had been upstairs for over two hours! I thanked the woman profusely and went looking for the first woman to thank her, but i could not find her. So i headed down stairs with this huge map buldging in my small front pants pocket and a large packet of photocopies and notes. It has to be ranked up there with the best travel experinces!
We left with a feeling of euphoria and decided to stay another day in Krakow, in hopes of perhaps getting out to Mordarka, which was about 3 hours by train from Krakow. Of course we went to the map store and bought the maps that were not given to me, then we went back to the Telephone office, but the Internet was not available so we got a listing from one of the guidebooks and went wandering the outskirts of the city center looking for places to access the Internet. We got to see some cool neighborhoods. We also saw something pretty unusual, a tram wreck. It wasn't bad, but the traffic backup was terrible. Krakow has one of the better tram networks we've seen and people really depend on it. In fact, Poland ranks up there with Germany and the Netherlands for excellent tram networks! So the first two places on the list had both closed, but the last one, called LOOZ was open, albeit a bit smoky. We read email and news reports from the war zone in Seattle, shaking our heads. We were amazed at the intensity, happy that the protests were successful and sad that we missed out on it. We checked our email and left with that strange daze that doing email while traveling always seems to cause. So we went to a Milk Bar - the second one we had found, down in the center of town. I really liked this one because of the wonderful potato pancakes! And now with our Polish dictionary we were getting much better at reading the menu.
