October 18, 2011
On my last morning in Gdańsk, a golden cat woke me up by waving its paw.
And waving, and waving, and waving.
A bell was ringing – the kind of bell that is supposed to be used to get the attention of someone behind a counter, but always somehow seems rude to actually use for that purpose – and Agnieszka (ringing the bell), Karol (holding the waving golden cat toy), Stefan, and Marvin were smiling and laughing at how they had woken me up in this delightful way.
“The breakfast is ready downstairs!” Karol says, and the chorus laughs.
“You are all lovely people,” I say, beginning to pull off my blanket and go downstairs with them, when I realize that I had taken off all my clothes in the middle of the warm night. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
The breakfast is bread, cheese, jam, and instant coffee. There’s usually music videos playing on the television, and a bookshelf packed with National Geographic issues from the years 1998-2002 offers the casual astrophysicist a chance to see how slow the cosmos changes, and how quickly our knowledge about it becomes obsolete.
The sofas all face each other in a square, and whoever decorated this hostel had the thought, after arranging the furniture in this way: “Now they’ll have to ask one another questions like, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘Is there anything you recommend I see if I ever go to Istanbul?’, or ‘Have you ever considered a casual encounter with an Irishman?’”
And usually I’m not really a part of the social aspect of hostels.
When I travel, I don’t bring much with me, and for Gdańsk, I packed more books than pairs of underwear. (Sorry mom.) I knew there was a large basilica there, and one of my favorite things to do in a city is spend a few hours in its churches, alternating between reading a novel and watching to see what tourists take pictures of.
I have an empirically-educated belief that beauty has no subjective aspect to it: sitting in the seventh row from the back in the left set of pews, I watched hundreds of people enter the St. Mary’s Church, gaze around at its myriad relics and hallowed hollows, and then turn around to take a picture of the menacing organ that sits high along the back wall of the church. This is the largest brick church in the world, and all cameras point toward the organ.
But I’m compelled to write about Gdańsk for reasons other than its great monuments.
There you can stand on the ground where the second World War began, traipse through the shipyard where the Solidarity Movement was formed, or see a grand main street with its town hall and torture house that were rebuilt to preserve a bit of history. And I expected to walk around and experience all of those great things with my lovely new thermal underwear as my only companion. As I said, I’m not usually social in hostels, and since Lily is three thousand miles from here and can’t meet me in small European towns, I had every intention of finding various haunts with kebab or coffee and enjoying the music of a new language. But, you know.
“There’s four bathrooms in the house, I’ll show you everything else on the map in a second, and here’s the common room, filled with our lovely guests. Say hello, lovely guests.” The lovely guests all say hello.
“Hey lovely guests,” I say.
They did seem really friendly, and someone handed me a cup of coffee and invited me to sit down. I obliged. And then I quickly took out Middlemarch and started at the part where Lydgate’s character is given some wonderful background. A page or two in, I’m having a hard time ignoring the beautiful English dialogue between a guy from Turkey, a girl from Korea, and a German student with a convincing baritone.
“Do you know Korea?” Sasha asks me. “Yes, I do. Wait. You said Korea, not Korean, right? I don’t know Korean.” “Korea, my country, you know it?” “I know it, yes. Not too well, I’m sorry.” “How do you know it?” I don’t really know how to answer this question, and I’m thinking now that I must’ve made myself unclear, must’ve somehow said that I speak Korean. “I’ve seen it on a map.” “Oh, that’s very good. I’m happy you know it.”
Such fragmented geographic knowledge is worthy of accolades, you see. And there I was, engaging the out-of-season, mid-size hostel social scene.
The next morning, I’m eating breakfast and listening to people’s plans and the two Germans, Stefan and Marvin are talking about going to Malbork, which I know only as a very large castle made of bricks. I was thinking about polite ways to invite myself along. “Oh, I was going there anyway, so…” – but magnanimous Stefan must’ve seen my residual post-traumatic stress from not getting picked for the kickball team, moments with conclusive justifications: “Well Dan, sorry, we can’t take you because then teams would be uneven, you know. I think Dario is throwing water in the girl’s bathroom, so you could try that.” But here’s Dan, twenty-two, basically past all that stuff.
“Dan, you have anything planned today?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Do you want to come with us to Malbork?”
“Yes.”
And it turns out that Stefan and Marvin are great travel companions, and not just because they carry a limitless supply of apples, chocolate bars, and nectarine juice.
With Stefan, it was a weekend of coincidences: first, the shared interests (“One of my favorite bands is Okkervil River,” he says, “I think that Will Sheff is the greatest lyricist of our time.” I proceeded to think about all the times that Lily has been forced to listen to me offer an encomium to my second love, Mr. Sheff.); then the Parent Trap-esque happenstances (Our mothers are nurses. Our older sisters teach elementary school. We both like Oreos dipped in milk. Or at least I do, and I’m just assuming he does based on the congruence of the other stuff.); and then the concomitance of character that exists between two fellows who feel deeply about history, art, philosophy, and the beauty of large portions of pasta at affordable prices.
Marvin is clever and studious, and his humor consists of timebombs delicately inserted into the course of conversation, which explode several seconds later, after which Marvin’s face betrays no sign that his intention was to make anyone laugh – the natural effect of which, of course, is that someone is forced to play the role of a stock character from a popular television show about the college life of American adolescents and say, “You’re funny man, you know that? You’re ‘ha-ha’ funny.” And he absolutely is. On our last night, at an Indian restaurant right by the train station:
“So, are you seeing this girl or not Stefan?” I ask. “No, you don’t understand,” he insists, “that other girl is gone. She’s in Chicago.”
And Marvin looks over at me after this pause.
“Chicago,” he begins, and it sounds like ‘Sheecago’ in his great German accent, “is a city in the Midwestern United States.”
Or another time, right after we arrived at Malbork, and Marvin asked us if we were prepared to “defend the holy Christian faith as the Knights of the Teutonic Order have done in this very place.” A few minutes later, when we had taken a wrong turn on his advice and were forced to climb up a small hill to get back to the right street, Marvin assured us:
“Don’t fear, the Knights often made similar detours to prepare for battle.”
And so I found myself with a neat little group of friends for a few nights in Poland, and it’s absurd how fast human beings can form a routine and how then throw it away again, and so I’m back in Dresden, Marvin and Stefan continue their journey in Poland, and Agnieszka and Karol will continue to work at the hostel. And that golden cat, a perfect anomaly, is still waving.
