Drive to Przemisl

We are ready to leave Warsaw at 9:30am. Last pictures together with our Polish classmates and friends. All of them came to say goodbye: Stefan, Romek, Borzena, Ella, Bonga, Elzbieta, Alina, Leszek, Tadek. This is it, our last departure from Warsaw, not for a drive around the country or the USSR, but to go home.

Romek and Stefan

Borzena Romek Ann Stefan Andrew and Marco

Alina Bonga Marco Ann Elzbieta Cathy
Leszek

Elzbieta Alina Bonga

Elzbieta Andrew Alina Tadek Bonga
Cathy Wadim Ann

Andrew and Romek

It's been an immensely interesting and fun to spend these four months in Poland. I know I will be back, though I don't know when. Borzena will come visit me in Italy soon.

Just before leaving the capital, we fill our tank with our last black market gasoline from Jan's station. The drive to Przemisl is smooth and easy. Funny I should think of it this way. A few months ago I would have described Polish roads in less positive terms, but I guess we are used to it by now.

Once there, we meet Cathy's auntie, her father's sister. She's been waiting for us. She can only offer one room to us in her small apartment, but it will do. We'll squeeze in, Andrew and I in one bed and the girls in the other. There is no hot water and no sewage in the building, a strange smell whiffs out of the toilet, but we don't mind the small hardship.

This family is clearly not rich, but very hospitable nonetheless. Dinner is based on kanapki. After  which, three ladies and one man, in their thirties, not sure who they are, friends we guess, arrive and offer to take us for a tour of the town. Nothing much, but it gives us a good idea of a different Poland than that we have seen so far in Warsaw and other major cities.

Last day in Warsaw, for now

Andrew and I go to the girls' dorm after breakfast, but they are not there. They were supposed to return yesterday from their tour of Finland and northern Poland. We are slightly worried, not that anything serious is likely to have happened (though you never know) but we had planned to start our trip back to Italy tomorrow...

Then Marek, Borzena's brother, calls to say everything is fine: Ann and Cathy are in Warsaw, they arrived in Gdansk with the night ferry from Helsinki at 9 o'clock, and managed to hop on a plane on to Warsaw. They just did not have a chance to call. We are relieved!

The afternoon is spent looking after our luggage and especially the last paperwork. We need a Polish exit visa, a transit visa to get us through Czechoslovakia and an entry visa into Hungary. By 5:30 in the afternoon our passports are decorated with a new collection of colorful stamps and we can relax. The most difficult was the Polish exit visa: after several months here we need to prove our course is over, our stipend is properly accounted for, our onward visa are in order. A friendly lady at the office somehow likes us a lot and puts our papers on top of the pile, just to be nice. She does not ask for money, just smiles.

We then go and say good bye to Marian and Ewa. I decide to buy a silver and marble clock they wan to sell, will present it to my parents. Because there are no official receipts, I am, strictly speaking, not allowed to export it. Silver is one of those precious metals that, if you can find it on the black market, is very cheap here, so the authorities want to prevent its contraband.

We also have various items that are not backed up by official sale receipts, like our monster 2kg Soviet caviar can, next to the pocket-size half-kilo can of Soviet caviar.


Final dinner at Borzena's home. The final intake of hearty home made Polish food. The kind that is often impossible to find in the shops but that her family, can manage to squeeze out of the black market. Or "free market" as, more appropriately, it is called here. She, always a melancholy type, weeps a bit, her mother more. In fact we all do a little bit, though the guys try to hide it.

Getting ready to leave Poland

In the morning we go to meet the Rector of our university. We have a plan: organize a two-pronged student seminar meeting between Georgetown U. and SGPiS, one event each in Washington, DC and Warsaw. It should do much to improve understanding and it surely will be lots of fun. He agrees but, as expected, has little money to contribute except hospitality expenses in Warsaw. We'll have to take care of that from the US side. We'll try.

This highly intellectual endeavor is followed by a more mundane one: buying Russian caviar in the market of "Praga" a neighborhood of Warsaw that is famous for a farmers'smarket. Or fishermen's market. Or Soviet traders' market. Here you can find Russians who have the right connections to buy caviar (or gold, diamonds, furs...) at subsidized prices in the USSR and then sell it at enormous profit in Poland. Sometimes to Poles, in the best case to Westerners who pay convertible cash.

We buy half a kilo of premium Beluga caviar to eat ourselves and a huge can of 2 kg which we plan to resell once we reach Italy. We'll see.

Romek presents me with a beautiful fur hat. It's not the season to wear it now but it will come in handy in Washington next Winter.

One last currency exchange. I buy some Czechoslovak Koruna from Marian. Keep some and sell some to Pat for Hungarian Forint. We'll be driving through both countries and need a bit of each. Our professionalism in currency black market deals has reached enviable levels of sophistication.

In the evening we start packing crystals, caviar and the rest of our belongings. It will be a challenge to fit everything in Giallina's trunk. Also, there where three of us on the way from Italy, now we have Cathy. But somehow we do it. We stuff even the back seat of the car with tightly wrapped merchandise.

If they stop us at the Czechoslovak border and ask about all the crystal, we'll say we bought it with our student stipend. We are entitled to spend up to half of it on domestic goods and export them duty-free. Hardly believable but it's the law. We are going to be safe.

Crystal and corals

Easy day of rest, laundry, catching up with our classmates at the dorm.

In the evening I go and meet Marian and Ewa at their place. News of our shipment to Italy is not good: my crystal vase broke. The big atlas and my old Tsarist rubles made it OK through customs and the rough handling of LOT Polish Airlines. There was no choice, Alitalia is not flying to Warsaw. Even Alitalia is usually better that flag carriers from Comecon countries. I long for a time when flag carriers won't exist any more. Why should governments have anything to do with flying people and cargo?

Marian and Ewa are very kind, they got me a new crystal vase! And one for Andrew. He also has a gift of corals for mom and another set of corals which he kindly asks me to smuggle out of the country. I am not sure why corals are such a good deal in Poland. But they are.

Back to Warsaw

Our ferry docks at Gdansk harbor in the early afternoon. It's been quiet sailing, quite different from that of a few days ago from Finland to Sweden. Lots of Poles on the ship: Sweden is one of the few Western countries that grants visa-free access to Polish tourists and they take advantage of it. For tourism, for business, for trading, at the edge of legality, all the goods they can buy in Sweden and that are out of reach in Poland. Sweden is surely capitalizing on its neutral role in the Cold War.

Smooth ride to Warsaw and evening with Romek, Stefan and the rest of the crowd. We tell our stories from the USSR over kanapki and vodka.

Flags, blonds, and ferry

We leave Oxelösund and the Ericsons after a hearty breakfast at 11 o'clock. In town I manage to buy a Swedish flag. I collect, and hang around my apartment in Rome, flags from the countries I visit. I always wanted a Swedish flag because of the special significance of this country in my life, but did not manage to do so until now. When I was dating Karin Ericson I asked her about buying a flag and she recommended I write to the king. So I did write to the King of Sweden to the effect that I was going to get married with a Swedish lady and we wanted a flag from him as a kind of blessing. I did not really lie, we were a real couple (as sixteen-year-olds can be) and in theory we could have been married at some point in time. The secretary of the king wrote that he had no flags to give away; however, she sent me a wedding picture of the king and the queen.


Flag properly folded in my suitcase, we drive to Stockholm and meet Lena, Karin's sister. She is as stunningly beautiful as she was three years ago. We have a ice cream while strolling together in the pretty downtown area, and after saying good bye we hit the road again, direction Nynäshamn, a small port town where we board a ferry headed for Gdansk.

Once again we leave the world of opulence to return to real socialism. We also leave the world of stunning blondes.

Car washing, catching up and night fishing

Rather unexciting morning at the Ericsons'. We need to wash Giallina from all the black tar that stuck to it during our drive to Novgorod, when we rolled over a highway while it was being built!

Rest of the day... rest. The previous weeks have been intense and we don't mind putting our feet up for a few hours. It's a warm and sunny day in Sweden, we wear T-shirts and it feels just perfect. Long chats with the Ericsons, we've got a few years to catch up on. They ask a lot of questions about the United States and Georgetown. I ask about Karin, who's got a good job, is living with a nice guy and come to visit once in a while. We also get in touch with Lena, her sister, and plan to meet when we go to Stockholm to catch our ferry back to Poland.

In the evening again we go out with the small boat, this time trying to catch salmon with a net. It is illegal, strictly speaking, to fish with a net, but normally law-abiding Swedes do it anyway for their own personal consumption. We do get some fish but, alas, no salmon.

Washing giallina

Swedish friends, salmon and Soviet submarines

After a long night spent listening to the moans of drunken Scandinavians, we arrive in Stockholm at 9 o'clock in the morning. The plan is to visit the Ericsons, the parents of my high-school girlfriend Karin. I have lost touch with her, but they never forget to write to me for my birthday, and we have kept in touch over the last few years.

We drive to the Ericsons' apartment in Hasselby, near Stockholm, but there is no one there. It is a green neighborhood, lots of flowers. Quite a change from the last time I was here, in the depth of winter, with sub-zero temperatures and all the flora either frozen stiff or covered in snow. Given the difficulty of communication, I had not been able to advise of our arrival, though I had told them months ago we could come by in the Summer. And anyway they had always said I was welcome any time, and I know they meant it.

We then drive to Oxelösund, where they have their Summer house. No one to be seen. Unusual. We wait a bit and have a light lunch. After a while Bo and Ulla-Britt Ericson arrive. Ulla-Britt is a bit surprised but smiling, Bo is enthusiastic as usual. Maybe my mother-in-law-that-never-was is a bit disappointed that her daughter and my did not solidify our relationship? Who knows?

Looking for salmon, or Soviet subs

We are fed abundantly with smoked fish from the Baltic, and then four of us set out on the Ericsons' small outboard-powered wooden boat to go fishing in the archipelago. These cobalt blue waters always bring to mind the USSR to me as a young student of defense affairs. It is here that the Swedish navy has repeatedly spotted unidentified submarines - widely assumed to be Soviet - trying to make their way and sound the defenses of the nearby naval base at Karlskrona. The USSR always denied its subs crossed into Swedish waters, but who believes them? I keep looking at the quiet waters to see if a periscope emerges.

No luck today... we see neither fish nor subs.

(P.S. In 1981, scarcely a year after my visit, a Soviet submarine ran aground for all to see a few kilometers from here!)

Finnish border and ferry to Sweden

Wake up at 7am, quick breakfast and sadly we must leave Leningrad. We drive slowly and take in the landscape. Brief stop at Vyborg (Viipuri), a town now in Russia that's been contested for centuried between Russia, Finland and Sweden. Everything goes smoothly until the Finnish border.

At the border station we must wait a good half hour before the Soviet guards even so much as look at us. Then another half hour inside the border station itself. The first thing to do is change the 7 rubles I have left into dollars. The exportation of rubles is not allowed. Not that we wanted to take any out of the country anyway. It's a non convertible currency and can not be spent anywhere else.

We are slightly concerned about the two bottles of Soviet champagne we got, strictly speaking illegally, from our waiters friends. Even more concerned with the Soviet Army belts we got from igor in Moscow that Andrew and I are wearing, but no one seems to care. This time they hardly even look at our luggage. They completely ignore the car.

We reach Helsinki easily and quickly. What a relief, the roads are clean and smooth, service station convenience shops are lined with shelves stocking everything one can possibly need while traveling by car. We are back to normalcy.

At Helsinki Andrew and need ferry tickets to Stockholm, the plan is to visit my friends, the Ericson family. Ann and Cathy head back to Poland.  The Silja line, the best one, is fully booked. We get a place for us and the car on a Viking line. Viking is cheaper but the ferry does not really exist as a means of transportation between Finland and Sweden. It is a floating pub where kids from both countries can buy and consume cheap alcohol without restrictions. On board, everyone, from 12 to 82 years-old, is completely drunk. We are not going to have a very social experience, rather an anthropological one: Scandinavians trying to find any possible way to beat the system and get drunk.

Leningrad churches, gasoline and romantic white nights

Touring under the rain around Leningrad city.

At the Saints Peter and Paul cathedral all we can see is a few tombs from Tsars.

Then to Saint Isaac church. We read on a poster that "the people requested that the state take it over from the Church in order to better preserve it and remedy the neglect that it had been abandoned to and because of which many artistic masterpieces were being ruined by time".

Some pictures show damage from WWII but at a closer look they are infantile photographic alterations to magnify the state's role in the restoration and its respect for religion. It is true that Stalin and the Orthodox Church did collaborate during WW II to defeat Germany, but that did not last. On a wall there is a quote from Lenin: "The Church is an enemy of the people, not historically, but by definition".

We climb the stairway to the dome but from the top it is not allowed to take photos of the city landscape. Military secret. There is a large bin with hundreds of film rolls, the film pulled out allegedly from tourists who violated the ban on photos.

We then move on to the Hermitage Museum. Here it is allowed to photograph. Many Italian exhibits. The best exhibit of the Soviet department seems to be a large low-relief map of the USSR which allegedly " stunned visitor from all over when it toured the world in a roving Soviet exhibition.

We then move on to buy some fuel. We have official and perfectly legal coupons, but the lady at the service station does not want them. We guess it is too much paperwork for her. So we pay the local price in rubles, only 6 rubles for 30 liters!! Basically free gasoline!

Evening dinner at the Austeria restaurant, where we eat a lot of caviar and other delicacies to spend all the rubles we have left. At the end the waitress proposes that we pay in dollars, exchange rate 1 to 1. Not so interesting for us. We counterpropose to pay in rubles but give her 8 dollars on the side for two bottles of Soviet champagne. She accepts without hesitation and runs to get the two bottles for us.

Back at the hotel we spend some time chatting in the terrace of our room, it is mid-June, one of the brightest nights of the year, and Leningrad is famous for its "white nights". Very romantic.

Petrodvorets palace, moose and watch

Morning at the Petrodvorets palace. The imperial-looking, majestic palace of the Tsars, reasonably well maintained, rubs sorely against all the current regimes stands for. But here it is, witness to history.

It is very hot! Even too hot, incredible as it may sound. it is an incredible complex of imperial palaces built by the Tsars, now a museum.

In the central fountain of the palace a moose is swimming around having fun! After repeated efforts, the guards manage to pull it out of the water, but he goes right back in. In the end they must turn off the fountains and lower some row boats in the fountain to get him out for good.

Andrew and I throw our American football around a bit. There is a larger than life statue of Lenin in a pensive, intellectual mood, sitting on a pedestal, and I sit next to him trying, with only limited success, to imitate his pose.

Soviet moose swimming

Trying to imitate Lenin's pose

In the evening, we have booked tickets for the opera, "la Traviata", but when we get to the theater there is no opera. The program has been changed and we are offered a mediocre ballet accompanied by recorded music. Disappointing.

I manage to buy a Soviet watch from the local "Raketa" factory. Pretty though not so reliable reputation. We'll see.

All is well that ends well however, and we splurge for another caviar and champagne dinner at the Moskva restaurant.

Sightseeing and dining in Leningrad

Wake up around ten o'clock and off to town for some strolling and shopping along Nevsky Prospekt, the main high street in Leningrad. There is almost literally nothing to buy. Big shops and lots of salespeople but inevitably empty shelves. We have a look at the prices for staples, like meat, butter, bread. Everything is cheap, but nothing is there for anyone to buy.

Except for the Beriozka stores of course, but prices there range from uninviting to prohibitive, at least for us.

We go for lunch to the Sodko restaurant where we had booked a table. Just before we go through the door though, a couple of middle-ages men approach Andrew (for some reason black market dealers prefer him to me) to ask if he's got "anything" to sell. He does not. We really should bring along more stuff to sell next time.

Fixed menu for 22 rubles (about 25.000 Italian lire, or 30 USD at the official rate, about six times cheaper at the black market rate). No choice for the manu but we can't complain: excellent tender smoked salmon, caviar and Soviet champagne. There is also a show of Russian folk music and dances, at the end of which a waiter comes to our table, and only to our table, to ask whether we liked the performance. We did, really.

We end the day with a leisurely drive through the city. It is so much more pleasant than Moscow. It's still mostly Soviet apartment blocks, but here and there the occasional pre-Soviet building makes for an interesting dive in the past.

Novgorod to Leningrad, black market, caviar and Soviet champagne

Tour around Novgorod. Many monuments to tanks, artillery guns, Katyusha missiles from WWII, anti-aircraft guns. A war monument on the Kreml (citadel) is guarded by young children about 10-12 years-old, who perform a change of the guard with an elaborate goose-stepping choreography like the adult guards at the Kremlin in Moscow who guard Lenin's embalmed body in the Red Square. Some other "Young Pioneers" are marching up and down the central avenues of the city.

We have lunch in a restaurant in the Kreml, a charming building that is a converted old Orthodox church! Many other churches are still... churches but closed na remont, which means for restauration. But no one is working at them, it seems there is no hurry to restore them any time soon.

After lunch we hit the road again, direction Leningrad. The road is poorly indicated  and once we get to Leningrad we are lost. Andrew gets off the car to try and buy a road map at a service station but after a few steps, he is stopped by a man who wants to buy his jeans from him and makes some business by selling one of his jeans and a T-shirt for 85 rubles. The man approaches the car where we are waiting and tells us in excellent English he is interested in buying more from us. We ask what exactly does he want to buy and he says he'll buy anything we are willing to sell: our frisbee, sun-glasses, anything. Tongue-in-cheek, I ask him if he'd be interested in buying Ann and Cathy. He is very serious and replies that I would not be laughing very often if I lived here and knew how hard it was to buy any of the objects we have in the car.

When we reach the camping ground the receptionist has a proposal: we would be upgraded to a proper hotel but on one condition: we must now ask why. Well, it's an easy one. So we accept and get settled in a fairly nice if simple hotel.

In the evening we go to town. Again shut churches dot our serendipitous itinerary around the city. They must have been really magnificent in their old times.

Nicer if it were open

We park Giallina by the "Neva" restaurant, near the bank of the river of the same name. As we walk to the restaurant, one man comes up to me and offers 20 rubles for a crocodile belt I am wearing, but I need it and must regretfully decline. He offers 30 rubles. No deal.

Once at the restaurant door (we did not reserve a table in advance) we are told we can't eat there because the whole restaurant has been booked for a private party. But the belt seeking man, who is still following us, perhaps pondering to increase his offer, explains to the restaurant receptionist that we are Italians and need to have dinner. The receptionist goes inside to confer with his manager and after a minute he comes out and says yes, we can eat, they'll set a table for us. A waiter arrives running and leads us to a free table.

We end the day with one of the most luxurious dinner of our trip. Of our lives really: starter, main and dessert consists of black caviar and Soviet champagne! When we are almost done the belt man barges into the restaurant and ups his offer to 50 rubles, then gives up. I'd like to sell him the belt, he is a nice guy and got us dinner, but it's the only one I have. I strongly regret not having taken more stuff along to sell here. I knew one could sell trendy clothes like jeans on the black market but had no idea of the pervasiveness of local demand for so many items we just take for granted.

Highway experiences and Novgorod churches

Departure in the morning direction Nogvorod. We'll miss Igor for the rest of our trip, he was fun company and quite informative. But then again who knows, maybe he was a KGB operative, haha, no I don't think so but it is not inconceivable. So few tourists these days, and three kids from NATO countries in a yellow Volkswagen? Very suspicious!

It's a long ride and the road is of mediocre quality at best. About 50km out of Moscow, there is some road work on the highway. Again, as we have seen before just after we entered the USSR, most, in fact, all workers are women. The workers who work that is. There is plenty of men road workers who just lie down by the roadside and look on.

Soviet female road workers and male onlookers.

Anyway, after witnessing some of the work of the unsmiling stocky Soviet ladies, we can see all vehicles ahead of us are re-routed to a secondary, much smaller, road. When we approach the deviation the man who is sending everyone for the detour flags us to go straight through and stay on the main highway. Such a privilege! Why? I imagine they don't want to show foreign capitalists poorly paved secondary roads that would make the country look bad. Not sure.

We then keep driving splendidly alone on this newly surfaced black highway. Almost alone that is, because at some point we are passed by a very official-looking convoy of black cars, led by two big Mercedes Benz sedans (the first we have seen in the USSR) with police markings. Usually the police have Ladas, this must be an important convoy but they are too fast for us to try and peek inside and maybe try to recognize a Politburo member or two. The only problem is that the tar is so fresh much of it gets thrown up by Giallina's tires and ends up sticking to her pristine yellow sides. It will take a lot of work to clean it up when we get around to it.

When we reach Novgorod we settle down in our assigned camping ground then head to town. Lots of small churches, I counted at least twenty, all next to each other in the same part of town. And they are ALL shut down "NA REMONT", for restoration. It's one of the first Russian words I've learned and I've read it so many times I am sure I'll never forget it. Can't get into any of them. Oh well.

Hard currency shopping, Kremlin Museum and Bolshoi dancers

Lazy morning and lunch at the Rossiya hotel, absolutely forgettable. Much (most?) of what is on the menu is not available. After repeated "we don't have" by the waiter we ask what they have. Some mediocre meat and potatoes.

Kremlin and Saint Basil

We then visit the "Beriozka" shop, that sells all kinds of stuff that is much in demand in the USSR but taken for granted by us. These shops have a long history and exist in several Communist countries, we use Pewex in Poland, but here they have a special transgressive flair, maybe because most Soviet citizens are not allowed in. Prices are quite high, really the same as in the West and much more expensive than Poland for certain items: for example a beautiful book on the Kremlin that I bought in Warsaw for 430 zloty (15 dollars) here costs 40 dollars. In fact they sell quite a few beautiful art book, Soviet authored and Soviet produced, that are not available to normal Soviet consumers in regular bookstores.

Unknown soldier's monument

Kremlin march

We then go the Kremlin for another walk. Lots of soldiers marching around. There are many churches in the citadel (the meaning of the word "kremlin" but they are ALL closed NA REMONT, "for restoration". We try to buy tickets for the famous "multifaceted palace" but they tell us you must book several weeks in advance. No luck. However we are treated to a free show of thousands lining up to visit Lenin's embalmed body in his mausoleum.

Long line to see Lenin

We all feel a bit depressed and keep walking along the Kremlin wall, chatting with Igor. He says that it is very difficult for a Soviet citizen to travel abroad. First, you must apply at the local police station, and they will apply on our behalf to the relevant foreign consulate. Then, after you have a visa, you can apply for a passport. Strange, hard to believe in fact, that any embassy would issue a visa to someone without seeing a passport. Anyway it is well knows that it is difficult, most of those who do leave go on organized tours. Private trips abroad almost unheard of and usually require an invitation by someone in the country to be visited.

NA REMONT

After a while we see a small door that is half-way open. There are a couple of guards but they are mostly intent at chatting with each other. We decide to try our luck and walk through the door. The guards notice us and come to meet us, speaking Russian and indicating fairly unequivocally with their hands that we must leave. I reply to them in Italian that we are tourists, only here for a few days, we'd like to see more of the Kremlin. I was about to say I am Communists and a friend of the Soviet Union but that would not have been very credible with three Americans by my side. Meantime, some stranger, a Russian, comes by and starts talking to the guards. Not sure what they say for the next few minutes, but at the end of it all the guards escort us to a ticket office where we can buy the last three student tickets + a regular ticket for who knows what.

Church in the Kremlin

Once inside our jaws drop at unison. There is a fantastic museum of the Tsars' ceremonial weapons and armour, robes, furniture, carriages, etc. Absolutely stunning. There is a separate museum for the jewels of the imperial family but that requires yet another ticket and we can't get it today. Not allowed to take photos, unfortunately.

In the evening, another amazing show in the Kremlin's Congress Palace's theater: a dance performance by the Bolshoi ballet, one of the most famous in the world. Much much better than anything I've ever seen before, or that I am likely to see again any time soon. So much better than the one we saw in Warsaw. Again, no photos.