Scotland!

I have just returned from a long weekend in St. Andrews, Scotland, where I visited a friend of mine from high school currently studying at the University there, who very graciously allowed me to sleep on the couch.

The experience of arrival was surprisingly jarring, as I felt like I had stepped into something very familiar and yet very different in important ways. It felt like a quasi-America with people driving on the wrong side of the road and with completely different scenery. Britain is still only half-metricized as far as I can tell: road signs were in miles and yards. It was also very odd to be in a country where English is the primary language again. Even stranger was the fact that I have an easier time understanding Polish than I do in understanding a Scotsman speaking at full speed and enthusiasm. I also had to work very consciously at not slowing down while speaking. When speaking English in Poland my reflex is to speak like Mr. Rodgers: slow, deliberate, clearly enunciated. Do that to a native speaker of English and they'll think you're a patronizing jerk.

All of my time was spent either in Edinburgh or in Fife, as I did not have time to go to the Highlands. I think a lot of people don't realize that Scotland is both relatively big and hard to get around. Edinburgh to Inverness is 150 miles (around 270 KM, and yes, they still use miles in Scotland), and is 3 hours and 18 minutes by train as the terrain is rough and the trains are slow. Edinburgh to St. Andrews is 50 miles or 1 hour 30 minutes by bus and only slightly less by train. Because the population is relatively sparse, and dispersed in small villages every 10 miles or so, buses are not particularly frequent. Further to the north, the terrain gets difficult to move through. Just ask the English Army, for instance. Driving is faster, but as gas is around $8 a gallon, very expensive, and having not driven for 7 months I was not about to try to do so in a rented car, on the left side of the road, having to work the stick-shift with my left hand. St. Andrews is a sort of secondary hub for the bus network, but the connections were such that day trips were very difficult to plan. While transport might be slow, I will say that it seems to be quite reliable. It is also not too badly priced if you know what you're doing. If not, you pay through the nose for tickets!

I did get to see the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, a town of about 3,500 located on the North Sea coast. It was actually a very interesting museum, provided that you like maritime topics. I also stopped by the lifeboat station, and I think the ladies there were very glad to talk to somebody as the guestbook seemed to log a couple of visitors a day, tops. I then took a brief hike down the Fife Coastal Trail to Pittenweem, probably the wildest and most windswept mile I've walked in a long time. The wind actually sounded a lot like those wind sound effects one often hears, it was that strong. The Coastal Trail winds from Edinburgh to Dundee, and I think that if I go back I would like to hike it. In general, I think I'd like to go hiking there if I could.

I was a little disappointed in Edinburgh. We walked a bit around both the Old and New Cities, and it seemed like there were two sorts of neighborhoods: touristy and residential. It was also surprising that on a beautiful Sunday in April the streets felt somewhat deserted. In Krakow such streets would be packed with people walking around, not particularly going anywhere, just kind of wandering around. I also had no desire to shop in Edinburgh. Something in the air of Scotland creates in those that breathe it an irresistible urge to not spend money. Also, goods and services were very expensive.

St. Andrews is a cute town, and is very much golf and student-oriented. It is also full of Americans and other such folks from overseas. The Old Course at the golf club didn't actually look all that impressive, but I'm not a golfer so what do I know.

I think a lot of Americans don't realize just how different the UK is, particularly considering how some things that are controversial in America are either not at all controversial or otherwise taken for granted over there. For example, CCTV monitoring is absolutely everywhere. Advertisements can be banned if they are deemed offensive or misleading, and those that place ads face fines and other sanctions in some situations. So, there's censorship. I saw a no smoking sign that said you could be ticketed for smoking in a bus shelter or for failing to report somebody else doing so. Abortion is widely available and uncontroversial. While the churches are certainly elaborate, they felt a bit more like museums than active places of worship. Part of the reason goods and services are expensive is that the rate of VAT is something like 30%. My host said that salaries aren't especially higher in Scotland than they are in the States, so people simply have to make do with less. Housing can only be expensive as the result of government policy. Edinburgh does not sprawl. It is very much centered on a central core, and as I mentioned before, there are miles of yawning empty space between towns. The buses on which I rode were never more than half-full with the exception of the airport bus. So, even if the UK government doesn't want to build Levittowns and interstates, it should still be possible to build lots of new houses supportable by currently-existing transportation infrastructure.

There is also the matter of Scottish Independence, perhaps the stupidest idea Sean Connery has ever personally endorsed. The Scottish National Party wants to break Scotland off from the rest of the UK, and there will be a referendum on this question in 2014. So, Scotland is gearing up for a startlingly American-style political campaign, particularly in terms of its length. As far as I can tell, the Nationalists are playing up the fact that Scottish identity is separate, Scotland should be able to decide its own future, the North Sea oilfields are taps full of money that currently just gets sent to Westminster, and nobody asked the Scots if they wanted the Act of Union in 1707 anyway. Now, these guys rather breezily assert that an independent Scotland will be able to enter the EU immediately, with exactly the same kinds of opt-outs the rest of the UK has. The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, breezily assumes England will cheerfully allow Scotland to remain on the Pound. They get startlingly silent when it comes to things like border control with England and who will end up controlling the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

I'm going to preempt the counterargument that Scottish independence is workable because, hey, just look at how the Commonwealth of Independent States is doing in Eastern Europe. The fact of the matter is, the creation of a bunch of independent countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall is entirely different than that of a potential UK breakup. In the former case, a failing state (the USSR) fell apart under its own weight. Scottish independence would rend asunder a functioning, functional state. In the Eastern Bloc, a lot of countries run by puppet governments, such as in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, already had agreements with their neighbors of some kind and were recognized as their own countries even when they really weren't. Scotland would be an entirely new country and be faced with a number of new, entirely unexpected questions. Finally, when one considers how Belarus and Ukraine are doing, it's sort of hard to use them as sterling examples of why breaking up a large country is a good idea.

What makes UK disunion such a resoundingly stupid idea is that 1) there's no guarantee that Scotland will be able to continue using the Pound, 2) there's no guarantee that Scotland will be able to join the Euro, or that the Euro will be worth joining in a few years, 3) there's no guarantee that financial markets will treat a new Scottish currency as worth more than Scotts-brand toilet paper, 4) the European Union has huffily said that Scotland should not assume admittance, and considering that the EU is not happy about the exemptions granted to the UK in the first place I doubt Scotland would be able to carve out those same exemptions. Also, 5) there would have to be extensive and unpredictable negotiations between England and Scotland over just about everything from tariffs to immigration to border control to, hello, what to do with British nuclear missiles in Scotland. Ultimately, if breaking up large, viable countries into little ones was a good idea, Serbia and Croatia should be mighty economic powers by now. The Balkans are a testament to short-sighted nationalism stoked by self-aggrandizing politicians, and while the breakup of the UK would not be as bloody as the breakup of Yugoslavia, the long-term consequences would be dire.

    

Chemistry and Bureaucracy

One thing regular readers of this blog may have noticed is that in spite of the title "Chemical Adventures in Krakow", very few of these posts describe any kind of chemical activity aside from the occasional imbibing of ethanol. Part of the reason for this is that the people working at the Politechnika daily have to deal with all kinds of external nonsense that prevents them from doing their jobs. Part of this is a simple lack of resources, part of it is the lack of resources, and part of it is caused by the caustic politics of this institution.

The most serious problem is the lack of resources and equipment. For example, I was just informed that we don't have access to nuclear magnetic resonance equipment in this department. This is sort of like saying the theater department doesn't have any stage lights. While we do have a scanning electron microscope, powder X-ray diffraction and elemental analysis available, the equipment is old and I think there's exactly one of each for the entire department. Our group does not have an optical microscope that works, and we're currently having to borrow instrument time from another group. Granted, I think this is a confocal microscope we are using, which is not something every lab in the States has either, but it still took a few weeks to arrange. We have some micro or nanoparticles we would like to find the size of using dynamic light scattering, but we need to talk to somebody somewhere else in order to do so. Even distilled water is not something every lab has: you have to go to a central source somewhere in the department and essentially sign for it: I understand I'm not authorized to get my own distilled water, I have to ask somebody else to do it for me!

(In an American lab, there is a distilled water tap for practically every sink everywhere in the chemistry building. Glassware is routinely rinsed with it.)

This causes perhaps the most visible difference between American laboratory culture and what is found here. When every sample you run has to be farmed out for characterization (in other words, it's not a simple matter of reserving some instrument time somewhere), if you are paying a lot for that characterization or calling in a favor to do it, you have to make every sample count. It does not do to simply run with an idea and see if it turns out. Therefore, the sorts of samples people make tend to be limited to the sorts of samples they are reasonably sure will work beforehand. The problem is, the sorts of things that are most likely to work are things that have already been done, with some small modifications or improvements. Further, professors generally keep much closer track of their groups than some do in the States, as the grad student might end up doing work that isn't useful or makes no sense otherwise.

Then there is the bureaucracy that pervades all levels of the research establishment. Professors have to fill out their students grades in triplicate, by hand, and have to sign for each of them. Individual pieces of paper often have several stamps on them along with signatures. It seems like our group is constantly writing one report or another, either to the Politechnika or to the Ministry of Higher Education or to separate accreditation agencies. Meanwhile, there are multiple academic pecking orders: if you want to get something done you need to make sure to talk to the right person, who may not be who you think it is or it may not even be who the person you talked to thinks it is. For example, on one particular matter I was sent from the Dean's Office on the first floor to the office of a professor on the 6th floor, only for that guy to tell me that the guy I really wanted to talk to was in an office across from the Dean's Office. I've also noticed that a lot of people tend to send you sideways rather than up if something can't be resolved at a particular level. It's usually only after you've exhausted a particular level of bureaucracy that you get moved to a higher level.

All of this illustrates the fact that Chemistry is done in many ways around the world. I also have a new admiration for Polish chemists: while I'm just seeing all this as a tourist, they have to deal with it every day for the rest of their careers.

A brief word on Lech Wałęsa

So, Lech Wałęsa has once again stepped into a firestorm of controversy by saying that the gay and transgendered members of the Sejm should sit either next to a wall or perhaps behind it. Of course, this has the usual tongues wagging about how Poles are all raging homophobes, because obviously Wałęsa speaks for Poland whenever he talks, right?

The problem is, few people outside of Poland recognize prominent Poles on sight. For example, I don't know how many people in the States could reliably identify this guy:

Bond. James Bond.

 as Prime Minister Donald Tusk or this guy:

Who's almost always PiS-ed about something

as Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the opposition, or this guy:

Bill Murray

as Janusz Palikot, leader of the Polish equivalent of The Rent is Too Damn High Party. These are the guys who are currently very prominent in Polish politics. The problem is, when the American public can't reliably identify this guy:

Uhh, Joe Biden, right?

as John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, who speaks for a considerable portion of the Republican Party, how do you expect them to identify the guys currently seen as important in Poland? Even the Western media, who should know better, assume that because Wałęsa is the only guy they actually recognize without having do do an internet search, he must be somebody important in Poland. The real picture is more complicated.

South of the Border, down Nowy Sącz-way

 

 

Lech Wałęsa won the Nobel Prize for his part in bringing down the Polish People's Republic (PRL). He helped organize strikes in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk and co-founded Solidarność, the trade-union-cum-political movement that eventually became the means by which the serious discontent of the Polish people for the communist state found a voice. Wałęsa also served as the first President of the Third Polish Republic (i.e. the first one after communism), but lost the 1995 elections and actually very quickly fell from political prominence thereafter.

The attitudes of the Poles I've talked to regarding Wałęsa are mixed, and that attitude varies greatly from person to person. Oddly enough, I've talked to both right-and-left-wingers about him, and it's not like he's a polarizing figure in Polish politics. Everybody seems not to think too highly of him. The consensus view, from everybody I talked to, is that he's currently irrelevant and kind of embarrassing. Some hasten to add that he should have retired while he was ahead, sort of like Vaclav Havel. Instead, he keeps trying to be relevant and in the public eye, sort of like Jimmy Carter.

Where I have been hearing disagreement is when discussing Wałęsa's legacy, i.e. how big of a hero he ever was. I can distill the opinions I've heard into roughly three views: 1) he really was a big hero, and deserves a lot of praise for what he managed to accomplish, 2) if he hadn't been the leader of the movement, someone else would have been because Communism was unsustainable, but considering that he still deserves credit and 3) he was just in the right place at the right time, mostly went along for the ride and so ultimately wasn't all that important. Opinions 2 and 3 sound very similar, and lie along a spectrum of opinion.

So, consider this the next time you read an article in the foreign press about how Lech Wałęsa just said something ridiculous, the implication being that everybody in Poland thinks exactly the same way.

Three Years since Smolensk

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the tragedy in Smolensk, where the President of Poland and 92 other people died in a plane crash in a fog. This is an issue that refuses to die in Poland, and the daily papers all had lead articles discussing it. The webpage of Gazeta Wyborcza even went so far as to have a live feed of various commemorations and protests. Prof. Wieczorek-Ciurowa this morning said that television coverage was likely to be wall-to-wall, and on the news channel yesterday evening, that was all the talking heads could talk about. Of course, this did not prevent the other channels from broadcasting the usual fare of Polish and American sitcoms,

There have been recent television specials about what "really" happened in Smolensk, from time to time it shows up on the news even when there isn't an anniversary going on, and so forth. Rzeczpospolita, a Polish paper, took a survey that found that 32% of Poles believe that there was a plot to bring the plane down, meaning that the crash was in fact an assassination.

The trauma of the plane crash is somewhat like that which hit the United States after 9/11, and there are a number of parallels. Much as with 9/11, there was a period during which the country united completely. Afterwards, the opposition accused the government of mishandling what came both before and after the event itself. The government responded by saying its opponents were just trying to score political points and wasn't that a shame. There was a sense that this was not just a tragedy for those who died and their families, but rather a blow to the nation itself. Numerous reports and commissions were started to investigate the tragedy, and some people are still convinced that it was all a set-up. In the 9/11 case, some are convinced that the Government did it, and in the Smolensk case that the Russians did it.

One major difference I've noticed between the United States and Poland is that in Poland a lot of resentment is directed out whereas in the United States a lot of resentment is directed in. This is not an absolutely perfect duality: class envy and political grousing is as much a part of life here as it is back home. However, whereas in the U.S. minorities complain about how other Americans have treated them, everybody complains about how The Government (as in, the apolitical entity that is The State) treats them, and the religious or atheistic complain about how America is too religious or not religious enough, in Poland people complain about how the Germans regard them, about how the Russians are bullies, about how the Prime Minister is too interested in good relations with Russia and the EU at the cost of Polish interests, and about how the Poles were chased out of Ukraine and Lithuania, for example.

In some ways, the closest parallel I can think of to the Smolensk tragedy is the Kennedy Assassination. There are conspiracy theories galore in the U.S., and a lot of people believe in them. Now imagine that the leading theory was that Oswald was a Japanese spy, the United States had had bad relations with Japan for 400 years, and that Kennedy was on his way to commemorate the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Or, alternately, that the Grassy Knoll was involved and the erstwhile Japanese assassin crouched there. The simile is not exact because the United States is not Poland. We never experienced the systematic murder of 40,000 of our best and brightest, and aside from the conspiracy theories that either pro- or anti-Castro Cubans really killed Kennedy, most conspiracy theories aren't made more plausible by the potential involvement of some other country. Considering Poland's historical relations with Russia, including years of Russian and Soviet occupation and the death of the Polish Prime Minister in Exile during World War II in a mysterious plane crash shortly after Joseph Stalin severed relations with that government, unfortunately conspiracy theories regarding Smolensk are made more plausible by possible Russian participation.

While I'm not surprised that the Smolensk tragedy is still news on the three-year anniversary, I am surprised that it is news on the 2 year, 9 month and 13 day anniversary, for example. I think this probably comes from the fact that there are still so many versions of what might have happened. The Russian Government has been decidedly unhelpful by not returning the black box of the plane to Poland, and by releasing a report that, from what I understand, said that air traffic control in Smolensk was entirely blameless and it was entirely the fault of the Polish pilots and their commanding officers. The Polish government of Donald Tusk blew it by not asking for an international commission to investigate the plane crash immediately after it occurred, something he had every right to do considering that the crash involved the death of a Head of State. And the opposition has not been at all helpful, promoting the story that it was all part of a plot to kill the President and twin brother of the current party leader.  

One thing that I've noticed that nobody is stressing (and this is a good thing) is that the tragedy was, in a way, a testament to the strength of the Polish state. Despite the fact that so many of its important people were killed, the Republic soldiered on with an apparently minimal disruption to everyday life. Three years later, life has moved on, with the TV audience getting a chance to see a thrilling 1-1 tie last night between Barcelona and Paris St. Germain in Champions League play.

Łódź and Poznań

I have not had much of a chance to get out and around Poland, partly because I have a day job I have to go to and partly because Kraków takes a lot of exploring in its own right. However, during Holy Week the country slows down, and the Politechnika was no exception. It seemed like a good time to travel.

I was in Łódź (that's pronounced "woodge") for a theater performance staged by the Fabryka Sztuki (Art Factory). One of our Fulbright Fellows (Ms. Dara Weinberg) works with them extensively, and this was a performance of her original work To Die in Athens in Polish translation. I was there to provide part of the Greek chorus, including a couple of musical numbers with Greek lyrics by Sophocles himself. Following our performance, I decided to visit Poznań, in western Poland (so-called "Greater Poland"), seven hours by train from Kraków but only two and a half by bus from Łódź.

I found it remarkable that Dara was able to throw the production together with only 5 hours to rehearse an ensemble consisting half of those who had extensively prepared for the play and half of those who, like me, were there for the first time for the heck of it. There were also many disparate elements that went into the show, such as two different dance troupes, a choir, solo performers, and the piano stylings of Stan Breckenridge. The fact that all those elements gelled is a tribute to the professionalism of all of those performers. The Polish cast was quite capable, and I was very impressed in particular by a gentleman with a stutter who delivered his monologue flawlessly in performance despite some struggles in rehearsal. Unfortunately, speech impediments seem to be even more obvious in Polish than they are in English, particularly as Poles are expected to speak with one very standard accent. I found that actor very brave and I wish him all success.

Łódź is the Pittsburgh of Poland, or perhaps its Detroit or its Baltimore: a major industrial city with a reputation for being an eyesore, and whose major industry has largely collapsed. The major industry in Łódź was once textiles, but cheaper clothing from places like China and Bangladesh has essentially wiped that industry out. Ironically, Poland experiences outsourcing from all kinds of directions: labor-intensive manufacturing has largely left Poland while at the same time an increasing number of European firms have set up shop in the country and are bringing in work from Western Europe. Meanwhile, a large number of Poles have outsourced themselves, i.e. immigrated, to Ireland and Great Britain. In fact, I understand that Polish is now the second-most spoken language in the United Kingdom.

Łódź clearly is somewhat edgier than Kraków, as even the main tourist street, Piotrkowska, is a little shabby-looking in places. The city is also newer than most of its fellows in Poland, as it only truly began to develop during the Industrial Revolution, rather like Manchester in England. Piotrkowska is interesting, however, as it is where the guys who got fabulously rich by building textile factories built townhouses. Therefore, it is a fine example of 19th-century architectural decadence. I did not get a chance to see much of the city, but I am assured by our Fulbright fellows there that there are still places where damage is visible from World War II. Riding the trams was also a bit of an experience because the rails were old and not quite set right. Indeed, as a tram pulled up to a stop on one route I could see it waving from side to side about 15 degrees in each direction, which made me somewhat unwilling to step on. I should have worried instead about the fact that the rear door of the tram, which got stuck and required two people to bolt shut: without that bolting, the tram was unable to move, which made me rather nervous as I had already validated my 15-minute tram ticket. A word to the wise: don't validate your tram tickets until the tram begins to move.

Łódź definitely has a feeling of urban sprawl, much more so than most cities in Poland. If you ride a bicycle 10 miles from the Rynek in Kraków, you can be out in what are, in essence, the exurbs. In Łódź it took about 40 minutes for us to clear the agglomerated area of the city by intercity bus. While this does not seem like much by Chicago standards, in Poland where cities tend to be more compact this seemed like a long time.

Poznań, in contrast, felt a lot like Ann Arbor, Urbana, Bloomington, or other large Midwestern college town with the addition of a baroque-era square and other more Polish accoutrements. The look of the buildings was definitely more Germanic, which is not surprising as Poznań was under German management whilst Kraków was under Austrian and Lublin and Warsaw were under Russian. Poznań was also the site of a 1956 student uprising against Communist rule, and Adam Mickiewicz University is a major presence in the town. Shopping malls form another large presence in Poznań. One of them, located in an old brewery, is actually kind of neat, but the newest one's interior looks like an unfortunate combination between the set of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a car dealership, and a Chuck-e-Cheese's for grown-ups. By visiting this mall, I actually got to experience "new-mall smell." It smells a bit like a cross between, well, a car dealership and a Chuck-e-Cheese's.

The National Museum in Poznań is home to a number of great works of art, and others that are only so-so. Surprisingly, I actually liked a lot of the works in the abstract and contemporary galleries, and I'm increasingly surprised that Polish artists aren't better known in the West. The museum's focus was undoubtedly Polish art, though there was a gallery of Dutch masters painting portraits of Dutch people looking Dutch, a gallery of Spanish paintings of Jesus looking both badly scourged and Spanish, and a bunch of random Frenchmen who couldn't decide if they were impressionists or fully abstract or what.

My seven-hour ride home to Kraków was punctuated by a lengthy conversation with a gentleman who looked a little bit like John Wayne and was convinced that Darth Vader and the guys who dress up like Imperial Stormtroopers at Star Wars conventions were out to try to take over the world. He was also telling me that there's a new form of alternative medicine (discovered in Poland, no matter what others in Europe may claim) whereby by patting the top of your head with your palms in a special manner it is possible to cure almost any ailment. I think I can speak for many of you when I say I've never heard of anything like it before.


And so, enlightened by my travels I returned to Kraków, where I spent Easter with Prof. Kowal. But that's a story for another post.