Your Man in Kraków

Life updates: I no longer wash with a sock. Polish dish rags, I find, make much better wash cloths than they do dish rags. As dish rags, they don’t really absorb the water so much as smear it about the surface of the glassware, or the counter top, distributing the moisture over a wider surface area so as to facilitate evaporation rather than absorbing it directly and hanging on a rack later to dry. (Poles also air dry their laundry, which I have now done once. It works as it must have worked in the olden days.) Folded into quarters, these yellow synthetic wipes are about the right size, thickness, softness, and latherability, and while not a wash cloth, they’re definitely an improvement over a sock. Similarly successfully, the shower challenge has been met. I can now confidently locate, with the shower joystick, the precise angle, pitch and yaw at which hot water and civilization can be sustained.

About an earlier visit to Poland, I wrote disparagingly, or at least not graciously, of its food in general and its bread in particular. I hereby correct myself on the latter, feasting daily and variously on “good Krakow bread.” (Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 91) Cyganski, góralski, staropolski, bieszczadski, galicyjski, słoneczniki—a different style not for every day of the week, but almost for every day of the month, or at least every day of  the fortnight. And while Poles reportedly complained about a recent rise in price, a loaf that can feed a man for two days costs about a dollar American. I take it unsliced, so that I can cut it and into it myself, with a bread knife I bought instead of the wash cloth, in thick slabs, thick as a book, thick as my new missal, and smelling divine of yeast and seed and rye. In the U.S. you make a special trip for bread like this; here, there’s a bakery, a piekarnia, on almost every block, sometimes two, though, I guess I made a special trip. As for the food in general, I’m not yet convinced. I took my first plate of bigos this week, a “hunter’s stew” of sauerkraut and various meats, which I can’t fault for taste or heartiness, but you know why it’s a hunter’s stew: it’s something you will want to have eaten out of doors.

The snow fell all day today. Hot water, bread, beauty make for the good life in Poland.