Thursday, August 26, 2010

Pics

The 3Q10 GPC - pic courtesy of Amy Cheronis
(from left to right, back row(s): Chris, Jennifer, Ruy, Bob, Judy, Pancho, Claus-Steffen, Fuad, Martin, Jay, Vilmos, Yasar, Pawel, Mohamed, Grisha, Chacho, Julia, Vladimir, Mikhail.  
From The right to left, front row: Kent, Amy, Susan, Tomasz, Farid, Jarek, Mark, Nicola, Rosalie, Anja, Pattie)
For a much more interesting gallery of images from the group's trip out to the Platinum club, check out Chacho's amazing double-exposure gallery here.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Dziekuje

I'm ashamed to admit that "Dziekuje" is the only Polish I picked up after a week in this lovely country.  It means "Thank You," and I am indeed grateful for the opportunity to visit this country.  In defense of my linguistic failings, the quantity of z's, ck's, y's, & j's in written Polish make the language formidable to the average English speaker, and it feels almost foolhardy to even try mouthing the words, since the actual pronunciation seems to bear little resemblance to the way things are spelled.  So let that be a disclaimer for my ignorance....

Thank you Ola, Kasia, Nicola, Pawel, Tomasz, and everyone else who helped make this week so enjoyable.  I didn't even scratch the surface of this magnificent country and I hope to have an opportunity to return in the future to see & learn more, without such a hectic work schedule interfering with my desire to be a stupid camera-wielding tourist.  Your history is profound, your culture is beautiful, and your people are more gracious and welcoming to strangers than many nations I could name...   I look forward to returning to Chicago and conversing with my Polish friends about this experience, and hopefully coming back here again... May the 21st century bring you all the peace, love, & prosperity that the 20th century obscured...

Now...I'm on my way to Hong Kong for another meeting...  stay tuned...

Dinner @ San Lorenzo

I shared a final glorious meal with my friends before we all catch flights tomorrow to our separate corners of the world.  Nicola Novellone insisted on taking the entire group out to an exquisite meal at his favorite Italian restaurant in Warsaw, a Michelin-ranked establishment called San Lorenzo.  What a fantastic final culinary conclusion to a lovely week in Europe...  Thank you, Nicola, for being a consummate host in your adopted home...

Friday, August 20, 2010

Polish Fashion / Amber


Managed to squeeze in a quick shopping trip before dinner tonight. Snuck away to a mall with the American delegation in search of gifts, random clothes, and whatever other delectable goodies might happen to cross our paths... I didn't find much...but that's not to say there aren't some really nice, fashionable clothes to be bought out here. Here are a couple links (some of them dated, but fashion is cyclical) to Polish fashion forums online... These beautiful folks have a look and style all their own...
Polish Street Fashion
Street Fashion in Krakow
Polish Street Styles
I was hoping to pick up some amber jewelry for my wife.  I walked into a store earlier this week and was totally blown away by the range and quality of what's available here.  Unfortunately, the mall we were in was pretty limited in terms of their offerings.  We only came across a single store in the whole place that had what we were looking for, and although I did see something I immediately thought would be the perfect gift, it was sadly priced at about a thousand dollars more than what my budget can afford... sigh... Below are some random images of the kinds of amber pieces available from Polish jewelers...


Best Work - 3Q10

Finished up the meeting today. Below is the best (aka the highest scoring) campaign we saw this quarter, a marketing piece created by our friends in Brazil at Leo Burnett Sao Paulo. Tasked with finding a way to promote P&G's Koleston hair care line, the agency set up a makeshift beauty shop outside a passport and document agency, and provided free makeovers and salon-style hair care for women about to get their passport and visa photos. The insight is that a lot of women are unhappy with how they look in ID photos. So this makeshift beauty shop provided FREE makeovers before women took their photo, promoting Wella & Koleston as partners in beautification and making a lot of people happy in the process. Who doesn't like to look good for a photograph?

Clubbing In Poland: Cutting Loose @ Platinum


Got on the bus ready to cut loose & kick back
as we walked into the club the DJ dropped my favorite Royskopp track
a promising harbinger of things to come
4 hours of getting down in a club called Platinum
with paparazzi & poseurs
party people & jet lagged Burnetters
local leading lights getting jiggy amongst displaced jet setters
sipping on an bottomless supply of Belvedere Vodka & sampling the sights
Bottle service in the VIP section under lavender disco lights
I slipped away from the group to check out the floor
Bought a Heineken and watched people pour through the door
to see the band at the center of all this hype
they weren't so much raw as they were ripe
the music wasn't bad but their act was tripe
they faked their way through a set lip synching to MP3s
filming a raucous live music video so they could become celebrities
they weren't even playing their instruments, just hamming it up for the crowd,
most of whom were fooled cause it looked good & sounded loud...
pretending to shred a solo with a crazed look in his eyes
if you're not gonna play for real don't bother to plug in
cause some of us know the difference between real blues and mugging...

but the night evolved
I drank more vodka till I felt absolved
found myself dancing till the stress released
surrendered to the body till my worries ceased
pacified, prostrating to the pounding blends
surrounded by souls ascending & some righteous friends
the DJ wasn't fakin' & he had mad skills
a sweet, sick selection filled with unpredictable thrills...

i looked around

everywhere
women with lithe legs & cruel eyes
sharing coy smiles & exposed thighs
statuesque profiles & shapely silhouettes
with men wrapped around their fingers like domesticated pets
big burly guys rocking buzz cuts & cigarettes
standing beside dolls in hot boots & mini dresses
brunettes with soft bangs in sky high heels
girls with highlights too impossibly blonde to be real...

...as the subwoofers slowly bumped us towards oblivion
the dancefloor filled with movements both graceful & simian
i thought it might be time to leave 
but the DJ dropped Parliament then Prince,
and a couple tracks I haven't heard since high school
then a sick James Brown remix that utterly rules...
I surrendered to the moment & stayed with my crew 
and my booty started doing what booties are meant to do....

"we're gonna rock down to electric avenue, and then we'll take it higher..."






Thursday, August 19, 2010

Solidarity

International solidarity is “not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives.” - Samora Machel
Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.” - Eduardo Galeano

So the end of this meeting is in sight...  I've spent 35 hours of my time here in Poland stuck inside this godforsaken conference room... Wish I had more time.  

Poland's new president was sworn in two weeks ago, following a run-off election after that horrible airplane crash earlier this year which killed the former President.  Poland's first democratically elected president was the legendary Lech Walesa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of the Solidarity movement...  If you haven't heard of him, he's well worth knowing about, because his rise to power mirrored the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.  He did as much as anyone to expose the Soviet system of domination for what it was... Here's are a few great quotes from one of Poland's national heroes, and below is a passage explaining how this trade-union rabble rouser helped start a movement that helped bring down an empire...
"Established in September of 1980 at the Gdansk shipyards, Solidarity was an independent labour union instrumental in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the primary catalyst that would transform Poland from a repressive communist satellite to the EU member democracy it is today. The Solidarity movement received international attention, spreading anti-communist ideas and inspiring political action throughout the rest of the Communist Bloc, and its influence in the eventual fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be understated or dismissed."



Doh!

So we were scheduled to visit the Warsaw Uprising Museum but had to work instead to stay on schedule.  That pisses me off, because if we'd started on time earlier this week, and people weren't so hungover and inclined to party till the odd hours of the morning, we'd have had plenty of time to go check out what most claim is the city's best museum.  Yes, I'm a history nerd, but c'mon!  Who wouldn't like to see a museum about a 1944 insurrection against the Nazis?  Instead we sat through another 3 hours looking at...ads...sheeeesh... 

More Alien In Transit

Not bad...a little Euro-trashy, but there's some nice electro in this floor-friendly mix... Courtesy of Polish club duo Alien In Transit... 

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A Poem For My Wife

"The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history..." Czeslaw Milosz 

Like I mentioned before, I just got hitched two weeks ago, and instead of going on a honeymoon with my new wife I'm sitting in a hotel room five thousand miles away from her, spending the week in a conference room typing like a madman for 8 hours a day...  I haven't been sleeping well either...  This one's for you, Becky, courtesy of Wislawa Szymborska...

True Love

True love. 

Is it normal

 is it serious, is it practical?

 What does the world get from two people

 who exist in a world of their own? 

 Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,

 drawn randomly from millions but convinced

 it had to happen this way - in reward for what?

For nothing.

The light descends from nowhere.

Why on these two and not on others?

Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.

Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,

and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts. 

Look at the happy couple.

Couldn't they at least try to hide it,

fake a little depression for their friends' sake?

Listen to them laughing - its an insult.

The language they use - deceptively clear.

And their little celebrations, rituals,

the elaborate mutual routines -

it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go

if people start to follow their example.

What could religion and poetry count on?

What would be remembered? What renounced?

Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?

Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,

like a scandal in Life's highest circles.

Perfectly good children are born without its help.

It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,

it comes along so rarely. 

Let the people who never find true love

keep saying that there's no such thing. 

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

-- Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.


Polish Cinema

Watched Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" film on the way to London...  I do some ghost writing myself, so I figured I'd have a look.  It's an interesting movie, with a great cast, and Polanski does his usual masterful job directing a compelling political thriller.  It got me thinking about Polish cinema, which I really know nothing about.  Sadly, as this week is unfolding I'm repeatedly confronting my own sweeping ignorance of this place and its very rich culture.  It's somewhat disconcerting to confront your own profound lack of knowledge, but then, there's a lot to see in this world, and you can't be an expert on all of it.  It's a privilege to have an opportunity to learn more...
Here's an interesting link to a brief history of Polish Cinema...
"Polish cinema is known worldwide mostly due to a few names: Polanski, Wajda, and Kieslowski. But while these directors are mostly famous for their work outside of Poland, many names have been made within the country, though they tend to be neglected from outside except for a handful of enthusiasts and the Polish diaspora all over the world."
A suggested guide to the essential films of Polish cinema:
Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - Andrzej Wajda 
Knife in the Water (1962) - Roman Polanski 
The Passenger (1963) - Andrzej Munk 
The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) - Wojciech Has 
Hands Up! (1967) - Jerzy Skolimowski 
Camouflage (1977) - Krzysztof Zanussi 
Man of Marble (1977) - Andrzej Wajda 
Man of Iron (1981) - Andrzej Wajda 
A Woman Alone (1981) – Agnieszka Holland 
Possession (1981) - Andrzej Zulawski 
Sexmission (1983) - Juliusz Machulski 
No End (1984) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Year of the Quiet Sun (1984) - Krzysztof Zanussi 
H.M. Deserters (1986) - Janusz Majewski 
The Decalogue (1988) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Europa, Europa (1990) – Agnieszka Holland 
The Double Life of Veronica (1991) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Three Colours: Blue (1993) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Three Colours: Red (1994) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Three Colours: White (1994) - Krzysztof Kieslowski 
Killer (1997) - Juliusz Machulski 
With Fire and Sword (1999) - Jerzy Hoffman 
Pan Tadeusz (1999) - Andrzej Wajda 
The Debt (1999) - Krzysztof Krauze 
Quo Vadis (2001) - Jerzy Kawalerowicz 
In the Desert and the Wilderness (2001) - Gavin Hood 
The Pianist (2002) - Roman Polanski 

Chopin Benches

Nowy Swiat is filled with some lovely benches commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Fryderyk Chopin's birth.  The benches play Chopin's compositions when you sit on them... What a fantastic way to weave music into the city's streets, by honoring one of the finest musical talents to have emerged from this country...

Starka

Have you ever heard of Starka?  The good folks here wanted to give Mark Tutssel, the boss, a birthday gift, and bestowed upon him a 50-year old vodka...  
"Starka is the noblest and the most mysterious kind of vodka. The recipe is known from 500 years.
Starka is similar to Whisky. Both are made of fermented grain, yet Starka has different taste, more mature and sophisticated. The inspiration of Starka was strong alcohol made from a kind of polish corn, lying in a deck-chair in oak barrels, in deep basements of polish nobility. The phenomena of Starka results from its exclusive aroma and golden color with unique clarity."

La Boheme


Spent a lovely few hours at dinner with the group at Nowa La Boheme, a lovely restaurant with "a swish, upmarket interior of pastel yellow and marble, complemented by a menu featuring good looking Polish dishes served with a nouvelle twist."  I found myself conversing with some very entertaining friends, with Anja, Chacho, Pancho, Aliaa, Mohamed, and Pawel all seated around a table, representing Serbia, Argentina (& Iberia), Spain (& Chile), Egypt, and Poland....  After spending 8 long hours in a conference room, we decided to loosely enforce a rule to avoid talking about work, and so over the course of the evening our conversation touched on all sorts of things...  Thank you friends for reminding me about what truly matters in life, beyond the industry we happen to work in...  

sweeping conversations circling back to sufi sentiments
seeing permutations of my cynicism slowly fade into irrelevance
cause we're all drinking from the same well
merchants of beauty looking for something pure to sell
the stories we tell are oddly parallel
perhaps our past lives propelled us to this moment to meet
the circuit completes when the vision is shared
we encounter the right teachers only when our souls are prepared
i've pieced together a profession catering to this circle of peers
& they perpetually spell out complex truths I need to hear...
sometimes when the shadows fall just right
once bottles of wine have tinged the night
the jet lag dovetails into some surreal deja vu
& I start to realize this might be what I was born to do...
i write till the collective wisdom comes through
distilling the diverse opinions of an entire motley crew
submerging my voice to the committee's will
just to pay my bills
& cause there's so much of the world i want to see still...

My New Friends from Egypt

So I finally had the opportunity to meet Mohamed Hamdalla, the man who wrote and directed some of my favorite advertising from the last few years. His work for Melody, out of Leo Burnett Cairo, is hilarious, perfectly targeted to Egyptian audiences, and is easily the most entertaining ads I've ever seen come out of the Middle East.  For people outside of Egypt, they might understand this work, but it's not written for you...  Not that I'm any kind of expert, but everyone knows what they like, and I LOVE this stuff. Have a look at the two films below, and here's a link to a post I wrote for the Cannes Predictions 2010 blog earlier this year, in case you'd like to see more of the Melody Aflam films...



Here's Mohamed with his stunning wife Aliaa, who's the hard working stylist behind the Melody Aflam films who made all the costumes period-specific, and gave each character an evolving look... I mean, check out those 70's hairdos! These two are a vivacious bundle of fun...

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

CJ Art

Stumbled across CJ Art while looking around for local DJs...  I don't spin much Progressive House, with the exception of Trentemoller, who straddles multiple genres, but out here in Europe, these folks love their Trance.  Here's one of CJ Art's cuts... hmmmm... This doesn't really do it for me, I'd never spin this... Does anybody have any tips on where I can pick up some good local electronica?  

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont


"It is only our exactions of life that are terrible. It is only our impossible conceptions of beauty and good and justice that are terrible--because they never are realized, and at the same time they prevent us taking life as it is. That is the real source of all our sorrow and suffering."

Here's a link to some memorable quotations from yet another Polish Nobel Laureate, Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont...  When I find myself in countries I don't know much about, I generally make inroads into understanding the culture I'm in by canvassing the local literary greats...  In my experience, literature and local history offer the most trustworthy guides to understanding any given place, but the history of this country is so complex that I can't even begin to wrap my head around it.  You could fill several hefty volumes with just 20th century happenings in Poland... 

Czeslaw Milosz - from The Captive Mind - I


Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for his book "The Captive Mind," an outstanding treatise on the affects of working under Soviet domination, originally published in 1953.  Poland only emerged from the Soviet Union's sway when communism collapsed in the late 80's... Up to that point, the country had been dominated by the socialist dogma imposed upon them by a series of Soviet leaders, beginning, of course, with Stalin, who cast a long, enduring shadow over Eastern Europe...  Below is the first of many passages I've been thinking about as I read this book, a profoundly influential piece of writing from this intellect in exile, who defected to America rather than live under the sway of Stalin....  

From Milosz's Preface:
"For several years I carried on a debate with those of my friends who were yielding, little by little, to the magic influence of the New Faith...As the nerve centers of [Poland] were mastered, on after the other, by the adherents of Moscow, I was forced to abandon my philosophic beliefs one after another, if I was to keep from throwing myself into the abyss.  The abyss for me was exile, the worst of all misfortunes, for it meant sterility and inaction.
In the end, I found myself driven to the point where a final choice had to be made.  This was when "socialist realism" was introduced into Poland.  This is not, as some think, merely an esthetic theory to which the writer, the musician, the painter or the theatrical producer is obliged to adhere.  On the contrary, it involves by implication the whole Leninist-Stalinist doctrine.  If writers and painters are not forced to become members of the Party, that is because such a step is unnecessary.  So long as they act in accordance with "socialist realism," they are automatically and inescapably enrolled among the followers of Stalin.  "Socialist realism" is much more than a matter of taste, of preference for one style of painting or music rather than another.  It is concerned with the beliefs which lie at the foundation of human existence.  In the field of literature it forbids what has in every age been the writer's essential task - to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole.  It preaches a proper attitude of doubt in regard to a merely formal system of ethics but itself makes all judgment of values dependent upon the interest of the dictatorship.  Human sufferings are drowned in the trumpet-blare: the orchestra in the concentration camp; and I, as a poet, had my place already marked out for me among the first violins..."

The Blind Leading the Blind

Have you ever been in a group of a dozen tipsy adults, lost in the woods in pitch black darkness in the middle of a rain storm?  After tonight, I can resoundingly answer yes.  Exiting the Royal Lazienkowski Park turned into a surreal episode, as our little crew of tourists ventured down a series of unlit paths looking for an exit to this huge, sprawling, 74 hectare park. We encountered a padlocked gate at the first exit we came across, and things quickly descended into an absurdist comedy from there. 12 jet lagged confused foreigners wandering through pitch black woods in the rain makes for a pretty good horror movie premise, and the idea of vampires or werewolves lurking in the darkness stopped being quite so amusing after the first ten minutes or so of fruitless wandering.  The rain, which had been threatening all evening, started coming down quite hard, and our pack of desperate tourists began a frantic search for an exit back to the sanctuary of our hotel.  The paths through the carefully tended baroque gardens were indistinguishable in the dark, and we circled through the labyrinthian park getting progressively more soaked & disoriented.  Eventually we returned to the Belvedere, re-routed our way through puddles in a parking lot, and found our way out through a nondescript gate... The rain left us drenched to the bone, and we eventually all found our way back to the safe, dry, warmth of the hotel...
Moral of the story?   
When you're walking around a foreign city with a bunch of tipsy tourists, without a map, an address, or lights, and it starts raining, maybe you should expect to get lost...  I thought I'd learned this lesson before, but these episodes of collective disorientation & lost meanderings seem to occur rather frequently at these meetings...   
Here's a pic of the indomitable Nicola Novellone after he finally herded all the delegates out of the park...soaked to the bone, with a smile on his face, still clutching the ever-present Cuban Montecristo Cigar...

Monday, August 16, 2010

Dinner @ The Belvedere in Lazienkowski Park




































Tonight I met the 3Q10 gang.  Every quarter the group's a little different, made up of new and familiar faces, interacting against a backdrop of a culture some of us are seeing for the first time.  For a few members of the group, Poland is home, and for others, Warsaw is a place just around the bend from their home country, which they've visited for work or on a holiday.  But none o
f us have been here before for a meeting quite like this...
After a day of small group conferences, we all gathered in the hotel lobby at 6:30 to venture out to dinner.  The restaurant was just a short walk away, and after a few minutes of cat-herding, we managed to cross the street, and venture a few hundred yards north to Lazienkowski Park, aka "the Royal Baths Park," a lush, 76 hectare park full of historic monuments, peacocks, and iconic architectural structures.  









Dinner was in a lovely restaurant in what was once the park's orangery, which has since been turned into a gorgeous dining venue called The Belvedere.  Thick ivy runs from the floor to the ceiling along the length of one inside wall, and huge stately windows make up the entire facade of the building.  Among a tasteful array of options, I had a roast duck entree with baked apples, a warm apple pie, and some delectable dumpling soup.  The food here has been delightful so far...a bit heavy, but indisputably refined cuisine...


From wikipedia: "The building was built by Adam Adolf Loewe and Józef Orłowski in 1860.  Neo-classicist with eclectic elements, it was designed to shelter the collection of orange trees. The building was necessary because tsar Alexander II of Russia, who purchased one of the largest in Europe collection of tropical plants from Nieborów, could not transport it to Saint Petersburg, due to climate conditions there.  The collection's pride were long-lived orange trees (there were 124 of them in the collection).  Unfortunately, during the World War I, they were left without appropriate care and froze.  The building consists of a oblong hall, with glass walls."  

Alien In Transit

Here's a lil' taste of some local electronica from Polish club duo Alien In Transit. Not necessarily something I'd spin, but I could see some of my friends weaving this into a set...This is a remix by producer David Ravski...

A Poem by Wislawa Symborska

Here's a poem from Wislawa Symborska, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.  Fellow Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (who I'll be writing about a lot in the next few days) penned this lovely essay regarding her work, quoted briefly below:  

"In Szymborska's poetry the "we" denotes all of us living on this planet now, joined by a common consciousness, a "post-consciousness," post-Copernican, post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-two-World-Wars, post-crimes-and-inventions-of-the-twentieth-century. It is a serious and bold enterprise to venture a diagnosis, that is, to try to say who we are, what we believe in, and what we think."

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble 
to the sides of the road, 
so the corpse-laden wagons 
can pass.

Someone has to get mired 
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door. 

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left 
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged 
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was. 
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about 
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths 
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth 
gazing at the clouds.

Old Town & Fukier

Got in at 5 in the afternoon.  Breezed through customs with 100 pounds of corporate gear and caught a taxi to the hotel.  After a glorious shower, scrubbing off the detritus of 17 hours of air travel through multiple airports, I ventured downstairs to the hotel lobby in search of a meal and encountered a whole crew of Burnett folks from across the region.  Turns out they had already made plans for a lovely meal in Warsaw's Old Town, so I happily tagged along and spent the next few hours amidst wonderful company, soaking up the history of this 700-year old city... 






















Our wonderful host, the suave & sophisticated Nicola Novellone, had arranged for us to dine at Fukier restaurant, a fantastic gourmet restaurant in the Old Town's main square.  Nicola is the regional head of LB in Central and Eastern Europe, a charming Italian man currently residing in Warsaw and perpetually traveling throughout the region, always armed with a stash of Cuban cigars & the inimitable charm & elegant fashion sense of an Italian businessman.  At home across the world, he treated us to a magnificent meal at Fukier, a legendary institution that has been open for several hundred years, offering up delectable meals in an intimate and romantic setting.  The place felt very old world, with ceiling befitting a wine cellar & beautiful decor coloring the space with an intimate and romantic feel.  I had a lovely meal of lovage dumplings, carp cooked in a savory porcini mushroom gravy, and some delectable white wine selected by Nicola.  The food was outstanding, the company lovely, and the atmosphere was magical.  After dinner, we walked for a few kilometers down Nowy Swiat Street, along the "royal route," past some very beautiful government buildings & museums.  I'll post some pictures later today...   


"Travel is Fatal"

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It)

Said a hard goodbye to my wife at the airport...  Just got married two weeks ago and I feel slightly despicable for departing on a 12 day trip to Warsaw & Hong Kong and leaving her behind at home...  
The wedding was a glorious, blissful week-long affair and we're both still buzzing from all the love we've been showered with, but now all of a sudden it's back to reality, to the ongoing demands of our respective jobs...  I'm off on another work trip and she's back to teaching school, dealing with the unruly kids of Chicago's Public School system...  sigh...  I knew I'd found the One when the appeal of these trips suddenly diminished sharply, because they mean weeks away from my love, with thousands of miles of distance between us.  The thrill of seeing a new part of the world is eclipsed by the absence of my better half.  I suppose that sounds horrendously sappy, but it's not easy on a relationship when one person is bouncing around the planet and the other is home alone.  This is our karma though, and we're making it work.  Plus, our jobs are paying for our honeymoon, a 3-week trip to Bali in December, so while I may lament her absence at the moment, we're both looking ahead to a well-deserved trip to paradise to close out 2010...   

As I boarded the plane to London, I found myself thinking about the possibility of dying in a plane crash, plunging to a horrible death and missing out on the glorious life awaiting Becky and I.  What a horrible thought, right?  I'm not particularly afraid of flying, but for whatever reason I found myself morbidly ruminating on death as I stared out the window of the plane.  I think about it a lot when I travel, actually...  Perhaps because something inside me dies each time I venture to another country, my preconceptions wither and succumb to the new reality awaiting me at every border crossing.  My perception of reality sheds off me like so much dead skin, to be replaced by a fresh new way of seeing things.  That's really what travel is to me; an exfoliate for the mind & soul.  The Zen folks talk about approaching life with "beginner's mind," an attitude of openness wherein you discard your preconceptions to fully appreciate the experiences you encounter on your journey through life.  Sounds great in theory, but in our everyday lives, we are faced with routine and regimens that make that an increasingly elusive theoretical idea.  Travel, on the other hand, puts it front and center.  The Twain quote above perfectly encapsulates the idea: when you're thrown out of your comfortable surroundings, confronted with people who don't speak your language, and eating food you can't quite identify, things inside you shift.  Becky & I live for that shift, an expansion of perception that comes from incorporating new ideas & realities into your awareness...  I just wish she was here with me to share the experience...