Manic Bookstore Cafe

In Poland many people seem to be proud of their apples; I've heard people say: "Our apples are some of the best." Of course, I come from the States, where we have really good apples, so I had to be convinced. We tried different kinds of Polish apples, and we recognized some of the varieties we buy at home. In Zakopane we were able to buy Mutsus. Here in Warsaw we've found the Ligol to be our favorite. I'm not sure why apples are so important to me, and to my family. Maybe because I love to bake pies; maybe because we make applesauce in the old-fashioned food mill every year. In fact, some of our biggest fights are over how to make applesauce. I insist on the food mill I inherited from my grandmother, but my husband wants to use the Cuisinart and keep the applesauce chunky. He claims my applesauce is too smooth... Regardless, we now make a batch on the wood stove and serve it hot for Thanksgiving dinner, and when we can find the time we make up a huge quantity...

Last weekend we were at a colleague's apartment for a dinner party. On the top floor of a pre-war building, the apartment was beautiful -- spacious, sunny, sparkling clean despite the fact that it's cottonwood season (our apartment, for example, currently features whirlwinds of white fuzz in the corners). The open plan featured a wonderful kitchen and was clearly a far cry from its pre-war original floor plan. The view out the windows east offered a changeable sky, and the company kept arriving in waves as we feasted on Mexican food. Yes, Mexican food, including delicious guacamole. (My son would have been ecstatic.) Elegant glass pitchers held water spiked with berries or with mint leaves; the antique oak dining table had to be pulled out to accommodate the Polish and American guests who eventually assembled around it. Piles of napkins -- needed given what a mess we made with our meal -- were anchored with gorgeous skinny red peppers. Our hostess kept saying "Mexican...

Yesterday was another holiday in Poland, but not one that causes school to be cancelled or banks to be closed. It was a "Holiday of Freedom" -- the 24th anniversary of the elections that led to the fall of the Communist system in Poland. At the Presidential Palace, there was a fabulous transparency celebrating the events of that day. And this week at the "Dom Spotkanie z Historiem" (House of Meeting History) there are all kinds of things going on -- public meetings, documentary and feature film screenings, collecting oral histories -- in conjunction with the project Europeana 1989 (see here ). Ironic, when you think about it, or maybe poignant: John Wayne strode into Poland at high noon, marking the end of a repressive state, and democracy followed in his footsteps, while on the very same day in Beijing tanks crushed the student demonstrations that called for reform and led directly to martial law and the repressions that continue today. One journalist i...

"A multitude of impressions!" That's what Michael Blake used to say in my 3rd year Russian textbook Русский язык в диалогах [ Russian Language in Dialogues ]. And that's the way I'm feeling. Overwhelmed. But in a good way. Colloquially we might say: "Impression overload!" When I was at Middlebury Russian School in the 80s, my fellow students and I loved to make fun of Michael Blake and the idiotic things he used to utter in our textbook -- his experience of Moscow ice cream, his commentaries on 1970s architecture ("In England we too now frequently build using concrete and glass!"), his visit to the barbershop where the barber spritzed his neck with cologne and gave him a little massage. But I guess that's what life in a foreign country is: daily new impressions. We are counting down our last days here in Warsaw, and we have many more things on our "to do" list -- places to see, walks to take, restaurants to try, even a ...