From The Lighthouse

We've returned from the East Brother Light Station, and it was a great time. Ed and Anne are fantastic innkeepers, and we not only had a great view and an amazing experience, but good food and wine as well. It's quite an experience to be about ten miles from San Francisco City (and less than five miles from our house), and yet feel so isolated. Being in a lighthouse on an island accessible only by boat really does feel like being "a world away" right in my own neighborhood. Especially enjoyable was sitting in the lantern room beneath the beacon and listening to mp3s of incredible readings of Edgar Allen Poe stories by Iggy Pop, Vincent Price, and Basil Rathbone. A visit to EBLS is highly recommended -- I'm sure we'll go back ourselves before too long.

Photo by Ed Witts.

To The Lighthouse

Today Anu and I, and some friends, are going to go spend a night at the East Brother Light Station in the San Francisco Bay. The Light Station was originally built in 1874 (though several of the buildings are newer) and is still a functioning signal facility, with a bed and breakfast that has four rooms in the lighthouse and one in the original Fog Signal building. It should be fun.

Fly The Unfriendly, Incompetent Skies

Legend has it, Lufthansa is a great airline. This is what I'd heard from fellow travelers many times before: typical German efficiency, and comfort on-par with riding in a Mercedes or Audi, rounded-out with an atypically (for German companies) friendly and helpful staff.

What a crock of Scheiße!

For starters, when my trip on Lufthansa was first delayed for a few weeks, the woman at the desk in San Francisco lied to me. Outright lied. She said that due to the cancellation, my ticket would be re-issued at a later date, minus a $250 fee. She also claimed she made an annotation to this fact in their computer system, and that when I called their New York office the next day to reschedule the flight, all would be well. Their central US office proceeded to tell us that there was no such annotation, that in fact there was no ticket number ever issued against my reservation number which could have been thusly annotated, and that there couldn't have been such a ticket issued on the date I was to fly since Lufthansa in Poland (where the ticket was purchased) had to issue a ticket number 2 weeks prior to the flight (which hadn't been done). After much effort, folks in Poland were able to get the ticket reissued -- with a $450 fee, not $250 as claimed. Lufthansa remembered to actually issue a ticket number that time.

My flight to Poland was relatively uneventful, though not particularly comfortable. However, my return was a nightmare. Due to a strike, my flight from Warsaw to Munich was canceled. When I went to the Lufthansa ticket booth, there were four women in Lufthansa uniforms but only one of three stations was open to serve the displaced passengers. After a little over an hour -- during which repeated admonitions against the women were made by the older gentleman in line behind me -- they finally opened a second window. As the passengers in front of me slowly made their way through the process (one couple took approximately 45 minutes to get processed), they finally opened the third counter about a half hour after the second. I felt especially sorry for the nearly 40 people behind me, as it took over an hour and a half for me to reach the counter and I was only behind 6 customers.

Rebooked on a flight to Frankfurt, with a connection in Frankfurt to a United flight, I specifically asked the ticket agent if an hour and twenty-five minutes would be enough time to make the connection, including passing-through the notoriously overcrowded Frankfurt passport check. She said it would be -- that an hour would be too little, but an hour and twenty-five was fine. I wasn't given a boarding card for my connecting United flight because -- Star Alliance be damned -- Lufthansa's computers in Warsaw couldn't talk to the United computers to issue me a boarding card (apparently the booking computer that issued me the reservation was on a special "is available to Lufthansa" network, while the boarding confirmation computer is in a special hardened United-only bunker, on the moon).

My flight to Frankfurt boarded 20 minutes after it was scheduled to take off (45 minutes after previously scheduled boarding). At this point, I was down to an hour in Frankfurt. Not enough time, according to the ticket agent. After boarding was bumped 15 minutes, I explained this to the gate agent, who said that the flight would still be on time in Frankfurt (through some inexplicable spacetime phenomenon by which a plane will arrive at its destination on-time regardless of when it takes off). When pressed further, as the boarding grew later and later, she overtly stopped responding to any of the passengers, turning to chat with her coworkers.

Once we boarded the plane, we were further delayed because the pilot "forgot" to ask the control tower for permission to start his engines, and we missed our departure slot. On a plane loaded with mostly connecting passengers, that this didn't start a full-scale riot was testament to how tired and worn-out we all already were by this point. The best we could do was make smart-ass comments about it.

Landing a little over an hour late in Frankfurt, I sprinted across this rather enormous airport -- begging the Border Guards to let me go to the front of the line at passport control -- only to be told by United that my being late was Lufthansa's problem, not theirs, and I couldn't get on the plane. Much yelling about incompetence (during which I told the United agent who insisted it wasn't their fault to tell his company to pick better program partners), then begging and pleading, ultimately convinced the United gate agent that so long as he could lecture me about how I was late and this was not normally allowed, that he'd let me on the plane.

My luggage is still in Germany. United was able to find it in their tracking computer, which means it had been released from the odious grasp of Lufthansa as of my arrival at SFO (so there is some chance it will ever arrive).

Nothing about my Lufthansa experience was worthy of the praise I'd heard the airline receive previously -- rather, it was a performance worthy of the uniformly terrible Air France. In fact, this experience puts Lufthansa squarely in the camp with Air France and (Soviet Era) Aeroflot as the worst airlines I've ever had the misfortune to fly on. (And at least Aeroflot was trying, despite antiquated planes and an oppressive totalitarian regime crushing the souls of their entire nation, unlike Lufthansa and Air France.)

[Follow-Up: My luggage arrived this morning. So United, who generally gets a mediocre to bad rap amongst travelers, did pretty much everything right (yes, the flight was fairly uncomfortable, but so was the Lufthansa flight over), and Lufthansa did nothing at all right during this debacle.]

Sundays In Silesia

Spending four days traveling around Poland proved to be more exciting than I could have predicted.

The first two days, in Zakopane, were relatively uneventful affairs filled with cheese, beer, lamb and rain. Sofia, the woman whose home Marcin and I stayed in, was very nice and she made sure to stuff me full of food the first opportunity she got. Zakopane is in the Tatra mountains, and close to the border with Slovakia. Having exhausted the possibilities for photographing mountains and eating cheese, Marcin decided we'd go on a beer run in Slovakia.

In Slovakia we bought beer. I got yelled at by the angry gas station man for photographing his gas station, and I got waved at by the happy farmer. The happy farmer was particularly exciting since hardly anyone in Central Europe smiles much (with the exception a few of the guys at Platige). I don't smile much, either, so it must be genetic. Unfortunately, my photo of the happy farmer is pretty bad -- as it was taken just as we were narrowly avoiding a traffic accident, jostling me and causing a blurry and oddly framed image.

Sunday we went to Oświęcim, and to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The museum at Auschwitz is quite extensive, and both impressive and depressing in its scope. A group of Israelis was visiting the site, which I can only imagine was a terribly emotional moment for them. My (Polish Catholic) grandparents were in labor camps in Germany during WWII, and while all Poles suffered greatly during the Nazi occupation (the museum addresses this), Jewish citizens (of all the occupied territories) suffered the worst. So what I was feeling, the Israeli visitors must have been feeling even more deeply. For many in Central and Eastern Europe, it seems that Jews are now considered mythical creatures from the past, so I felt the presence of the Israeli group was a good reminder for the other visitors that there are indeed Jewish people alive today.

We then spent the rest of our Sunday in Silesia, hitting Katowice, Bytom, Ruda Slonska, and Gliwicia. We took some nice photos of the Huta Katowice steelworks from a neighboring hillside, and of some interesting looking old factories in Bytom. My hotel in Gliwicia was near a railway siding, which was both interesting to observe and not very conducive to sleeping.

Monday we went to Częstochowa, where I saw the famous Black Madonna painting presiding above a morning Mass. The reliquary that was open to the public had other fabulous pieces of art (paintings and metalworks, mainly), and the museum had lots of interesting artifacts from the Jasna Góra monastery's political and military history -- including the repulsion of the Swedish army in 1655 during The Deluge).

In the Łódź district we stopped to take photos of the Bełchatów Power Station. This resulted in our being detained by the guards of the plant, after we stopped to take some photos near one of the coal feeder conveyor belts and Marcin asked one of the workers if it would be ok with him. During our nearly an hour spent at the guard offices, one of the guards proceeded to tell us pretty much everything a terrorist could want to know about the plant -- including telling us which photo had the sensitive municipal power feeder line that I'd inadvertently snapped a picture of (and wouldn't have known what it was without his info). So, had we been terrorists, we'd have gotten more info than we ever hoped for. Of course, as Bruce Schneier points out, terrorists don't generally take photos (and if they did, they would not likely stop and ask the workers for permission).

Police were brought in, and we were taken to the station. For the most part, the Police thought the whole situation was a waste of their time. Marcin pointed out that we were movie makers taking reference photos, and the chief of police believed him but said he was being pressured by the guards to do something. He decided he'd have one of the younger cops take a report. The police were mostly quite nice. The officer assigned to our "case" took our statement and (at the request of the head of the factory guards, who called the station) checked out Marcin's laptop to see what other photos we had. Afterwards, he gave us a map to a location where we could take photos of the power plant without any problems. Clearly he didn't think we were much of a terrorist threat. Neither the factory guards nor the police made me delete the photos that had caused such consternation, and once we were released we were thus free to take hundreds more photos of the facility.

A fine example of the absurd, time-and-money-wasting, feel-good nonsense that Bruce Schneier calls "security theater." At least in this case the police knew their time was being wasted, and were all too happy to have the affair be over and done with as quickly as possible. Maybe Polish police have a more realistic perspective on the true nature of crime and terrorism than their paranoid American counterparts, like the Rodeo Police who illegally drove me out of town (literally, with a squad car less than 10 feet off my bumper until I left the city limits) after I took photos of the refinery in town while standing on a public street.

The Days of Pickles, Coldcuts And Languages

One thing about traveling in Poland -- I keep having to defend American food, particularly American meat, to my Polish friends. Indeed, you find a greater variety of coldcuts in regular supermarkets and restaurants in Poland, and most of them are quite good. Personally, I prefer contintental breakfast, with its ham, rolls, hard-boiled eggs, mueseli, yogurt, and pickles (and in Poland, pickled mushrooms). But what many casual visitors to the U.S. don't realize is that it is possible to recreate this, and many other European treats, if one knows where to look for the ingredients. Higher-end supermarkets, artisanal cheese and meat shops, and specialized ethnic grocery stores abound in places like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Without a local guide who appreciates good food, one may easily wind up only going to T.G.I. Fridays and Von's and having an American food experience that fulfills all the expectations of greasy medocrity that most Europeans have of our food. However, with an American friend who likes good food, it is quite possible to find all manner of delicious items in the U.S., and not only American local items, but foods from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa as well. I don't think anyone really believes me, so I'll have to prove it when they visit the U.S.

Another thing about traveling to Poland is it gives me an opportunity to lament the fact that my mother didn't teach me Polish. It is a difficult language to learn, and it is not coming along very well for me. Believe it or not, words like "Szczecin" (a place name) and "Wyindywidualizowaliśmy" (looks like some form of a word related to "individualism") can actually be pronounced by some people. With seven noun cases and three genders, Polish is also vexing because words change out from under me at all times. As a native English speaker I'm not accustomed to, for example, grammatical variations on my own name.

But I also am reminded of how difficult English is for people who weren't born into it. While English isn't as grammatically complex as Polish, it has just as many irregularities and a vast vocabulary. Homonyms seem to be particularly distressig to non-native English speakers, but drifting phonetics also causes trouble -- such as why does through sound like threw, but trough sounds like off? My friend Marcin was also quizzing me about our various past constructions, such as "has been driving" vs. "drove." The idea that the former emphasizes the past process, where as the latter emphasizes the past accomplishment seemed to make sense to him, but if a native speaker hadn't given this explanation I am not sure it would have ever made sense.

It seems the most difficult languages are the ones that are farthest from your own. English and Polish are not very close at all, and mutual understanding is quite a laborious pursuit. Fortunately, the language of pickles, ham and beer is nearly universal.

Press The Meat

Today I had my first experience of being on a press junket. Because the Polish distributor got word that a member of the WALL-E crew would be in town, I was asked to give interviews about the film. Disney publicity liked this idea, and thus it came to pass. Fortunately, most of the questions were about what a great company Pixar is and what the job of a Technical Director entails. I knew how to answer those questions quite well.

Unfortunately, once the interviews are edited and translated, who knows what the Polish people will think I said -- but I guess that is the nature of interviews, especially for foreign-language press. You do your best in the room with the journalists, and hope that they are respectful and responsible with your words when they start editing.

It is a bit of an odd feeling knowing that in a few days millions of people will believe I said something which may or may not resemble what I actually said. The feeling is somewhat similar to when I wrote a few articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which were translated into German before publication, except that in that case I had a written record of what I had given the FAZ. In this case, I have no recourse but to trust the journalists (and they were all very nice folks) to do right by my words.

Despite being fairly exhausting, it was much more enjoyable than I had expected. Perhaps it wouldn't have been at all enjoyable if I had been discussing with fellow native English speakers anything more controversial than my experiences working on the latest film from the world's most beloved animation studio. By that measure, I suppose I couldn't have asked for a better first major press experience.

Greetings from Sunny Warsaw

While perhaps the title of this post seems like a joke to some, and it happens to be raining during the evening as I write this, Warsaw was indeed quite sunny all day today. In fact, it was almost Los Angeles hot here today.

I spent the day with Marcin, Adam and Olga tooling around Warsaw. The Warsaw Uprising Museum seems twice as large as it was when I last visited two years ago. The most interesting part of the museum is finding out about the people and their feats, but there is also military hardware to peruse (including a Liberator bomber hanging from the ceiling of a newer section). A recent purchase of letters with stamps minted during the rising itself was an especially interesting new curatorial find. During the uprising, a post office and newspaper was set up specifically to spread news during the fighting. It is an amazing testament to the drive for self-determination amongst Varsovians during that period.

We also went to a cemetery where soldiers, prominent citizens, and people who were persecuted by the Soviets in Siberia are buried, which was very interesting in its juxtapositions, such as being the home of both the Communist General Secretary Gomulka and a spy who turned over Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA named Kaminski. Many units of Armia Krajowa soldiers are buried there, as well as units from the 1920 Polish-Soviet war, and the January Uprising of 1863.
Beside them may lie victims of Soviet deportations to Siberia (those who returned to die at home, that is), as well as loyal Communists and pro-Soviet military units. Quite a lot of history is reflected in the graves in that cemetery.

Finally we went to the Praga district, pretty much the only place in Warsaw where there are pre-WWII buildings. The highlight, for me, was a disused Vodka factory that is slowly being converted into a mall for boutique shops and a cinema. Fortunately, for now, it is still mostly disused and therefore still interesting to look at.

Many of the oldest residential buildings in the district are very run-down, victims of a deliberate Soviet policy of moving the very poor into this district, and running out artists and intellectuals. Artists have begun to return, which is a good sign, but so have yuppies and now there are plenty of restaurants and boutiques in Praga that neither the desperate poor, working class, nor artists can afford to go to. Poland's economic modernization is still emergent, and the government is struggling to adapt a German model of quality social services but with a robust private sector. It is a work in progress.

(Note: I will update this post with photos when I get a chance to upload them. The connection in this hotel is very slow.)