{"id":2439,"date":"2011-11-16T20:57:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T04:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2439"},"modified":"2011-11-17T11:57:46","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T19:57:46","slug":"life-in-lublin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2439","title":{"rendered":"Falkon."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Many of Lublin's inhabitants live in blocks of edible Lego.<\/p><\/div>\n

So. Poland again. Only this time, leaving the Warsaw Arrivals lounge I turned east instead of west to find myself confronted with two guys holding up a sign that reads Giant Squid<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Already I like the place.<\/p>\n

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This gory effigy of a tortured murder victim hangs over my door to bring me comfort and joy.<\/p><\/div>\n

They put me in \u2014 well, a monastery, maybe. At least it\u2019s attached to a church of some kind, and skeletal vampiric old men in dark robes with white collars glide along the halls, which are utterly dark if you get in after nine. There is a tiny bloody man hanging on a cross over my door, and a much larger bloody man hanging on another much-larger cross downstairs in this weird hall where people in vestments throw water on passers-by. If it\u2019s not a religious institution of some kind, it\u2019s the weirdest Motel Six I\u2019ve<\/em> ever been in.<\/p>\n

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After two world wars and a couple millenia of violent history, Lublin evidently doesn't have enough bombed-out ruins. So they built these fake ones as a tourist attraction.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I wasn\u2019t in there very much, though. When I wasn\u2019t sleeping, I was sight-seeing; when I wasn\u2019t sight-seeing, I was in one of a seemingly endless series of pubs.<\/p>\n

(They have many pubs in Lublin: Irish, Czech, German and French \u2014 pretty much every variety of pub except for Polish. Apparently there are no Polish pubs.) When I wasn\u2019t in a pub, I was in a bookstore straight out of a David Lynch movie, and when I wasn\u2019t in Lublin I was in City 17. And when I wasn\u2019t in any of those places, I was\u2014<\/p>\n

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Due to a Soviet-era lack of construction materials, many of Lublin's buildings are made of recycled wedding-cake icing. <\/p><\/div>\n

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One of Lublin's most popular tourist sites, this is where Gordon Freeman was first ambushed by the Combine.<\/p><\/div>\n

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This traditional Polish meal consists of stewed pork poured over the femurs of three-month-old babies.<\/p><\/div>\n

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"And that's the gibbet where we suspend the eviscerated remains of dinner guests who fail to chug a pint of homebrew without taking a breath." (Photo by \u0141ukas Federowicz)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Click on this image for a dream sequence from "Twin Peaks". Or maybe "Blue Velvet".<\/p><\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Oh, right. The con.<\/p>\n

The thing is, despite the fact that Poland\u2019s surface area is small enough to hide under a cheese scone, it has a population comparable to Canada\u2019s and cons that are \u2014 well, this one was thousands strong, and I\u2019m told that it\u2019s not the biggest one over there. The place was jammed. As in Zielona G\u00f3ra, I didn\u2019t sit on any panels \u2014 that whole language thing, you know. I did do a Q&A that lasted a solid two hours, and fielded some surprisingly complex questions. (One soft-spoken lady in the back row wanted to know if Blindsight<\/em> was fundamentally solipsistic; obviously solipsistic<\/em> is one of those Polish words for which there is no English translation.) I signed books until my fingers fell off. I introduced a few worthy Poles to the Paws of Power chant, and to the concept of the Life Sausage. \u00a0 I think there was another iteration of that Blindsight<\/em> LARP I missed at Bachanalia Fantastyczne, and since I\u2019d promised to catch it this time around I headed out to the high school where it was scheduled; but all the players had apparently slept in, and I had to leave to give my own talk before I could find out whether they’d ever roused themselves.\u00a0 I presented an updated version of last month’s SpecFic Colloquium speech, tarted up with some nifty new references to ventromedial cortical lesions and Anton-Babinsky syndrome. I fucked up the ending, though; lost track of time and had to blow through the last couple of pages in a panicked rush. I bought a couple of PedoBear t-shirts for the stepdaughters (and how come I had to travel all the way to Europe to find out about Pedo Bear in the first place? How can I have fallen so out of touch with my inner child?).<\/p>\n

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Apparently certain Japanese males sleep with body pillows like these. Some have even married them.<\/p><\/div>\n

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These people wanted my autograph. Either that or they were organizing a book-burning.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Right to left: Andrzej; Dominika; Natalie the Pynchon-puncher.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Left to Right: Beata; me; \u0141ukasz <\/p>\n
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This is a cat that requires a forklift for locomotion. This is a tankard that I somehow managed to chug in one take. Andrjez's dad was so impressed he let me take it home.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Of course, none of this conveys much of the actual experience, because none of it mentions the actual people involved; and the actual people were pretty awesome. There was Andrzej and Dominika, the forces behind ArsMachina<\/a> and the publishers of the rifters books in Poland (Dominika has got to be one of the most insanely thorough translators I have ever encountered). There was \u0141ukasz and Beata: graphics-designer-with-a-law-degree and disillusioned-insurrectionist-grad-student\/teacher respectively, who showed me the sights and got me where I needed to be even after their car broke down. There was Natalie the American expat, who loves Thomas Pynchon so much she wanted to punch him in the fucking mouth after finishing The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>; Piotr and Adam, who argued with me about free will vs. agency (Adam is still<\/em> arguing, but I have to finish this blog post before I answer my e-mails); Daniel, who looks like Doogie Howser MD and speaks better English than I do (normally this would be a testament to his ESL teacher, except that teacher is Natalie and he also speaks better English than she<\/em> does). There were at least a dozen others whose names I never learned, have since forgotten, or am simply unable to pronounce. (That last thing was a recurring problem. I realized after a couple of days that you pronounce \u201c\u0141ukas\u201d like the first syllable of \u201cWookie\u201d followed by the surname of the science officer from \u201cAlien\u201d; but I always mumbled \u201cAndrzej\u201d and \u201cBeata\u201d to avoid embarrassment). There were Andrzej\u2019s parents<\/em> for Chrissakes, who had a bunch of us over for a 213-course dinner; an orange cat named Garfield, who all-too-obviously lived in a home where 213-course meals were the norm. Andrzej\u2019s folks didn\u2019t speak English but his dad was fluent in that lingua franca<\/em> in which the Polish people are so very proficient: I\u2019d sampled home-made wine and mead previously, but the moonshine was a new experience. You know how, when you have a head cold, you snort Otravin up your nostrils and can feel that hydrochloric acid eating away at the mucous in your head,\u00a0 feel<\/em> that ecstatic corrosion as your sinuses clear?<\/p>\n

Now imagine that happening to your whole body.<\/p>\n

Also there was beer, served in what was either a hollowed-out dragon claw or one of the boots those dwarfs danced around in during Spinal Tap\u2019s iconic performance of \u201cStonehenge\u201d. I participated in the traditional Polish Rite Of Manhood in which you chug a pint while a marmalade cat kneads your genitals.<\/p>\n

So, yeah. All in all, another huge blast. About the only downer was having to leave; that, and forgetting my lens cap in the bar and twenty dollars worth of subway tokens behind in my cell.<\/p>\n

Hopefully I can head back before too long and retrieve them.<\/p>\n

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Last time I did this was with my former accountant, at his wedding. I have no idea who took the picture; it was just there in the card when I got home.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I have no idea who this person is.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So. Poland again. Only this time, leaving the Warsaw Arrivals lounge I turned east instead of west to find myself confronted with two guys holding up a sign that reads Giant Squid. Already I like the place. They put me in \u2014 well, a monastery, maybe. At least it\u2019s attached to a church of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2439"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2506,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions\/2506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}