Pawel, our conference organizer, seemed determined to make certain we experienced a great range of Polish culture — so we finished that day with a feast of Polish cuisine in a restored grain mill outside Lublin. We could not necessarily pronounce all the dishes that we ate, but we could (and did) enjoy them all.

The next day we returned to the university for discussion of gender and sexuality, of Hispanic SF, teaching SF, and much more, ending the day and the conference with the Awards Banquet at the Grand Hotel Lublinianka. The award presented to the Tiptree Motherboard was named for noted science fiction scholar Thomas D. Clareson, The Clareson Award has been presented annually since 1996. Past winners have included Frederik Pohl, James Gunn, David Hartwell, and Paul Kincaid.

At the ceremony, Karen expressed the Motherboard’s appreciation, saying, “As everyone in this room knows full well, when you join a volunteer organization you’d best expect virtue to be its own reward.  That’s not meant as a complaint.  Pat and I have loved every minute of running the Tiptree Award.  We’ve met amazing people and read amazing work and it’s all been a very good time.  But we did start the award with a specific mission, to support and encourage a kind of speculative literature we worried was not being recognized, a literature very important to us.  And it’s hard to see from the inside whether an impact has been made.  So we are enormously surprised, gratified, and grateful that you’ve chosen to honor us with this award.  It makes us hope that we are, perhaps, achieving those initial, fundamental goals.”

From its inception in 1990, the Tiptree Award has been associated with chocolate. The first award was a typewriter made of chocolate, and all subsequent awards have included chocolate. For that reason, the SFRA presented the Tiptree Motherboard with a delicious but difficult-to-pronounce addition to the usual plaque:  Plum in Chocolate or Śliwka Nałęczowska w czekoladzie.

What next?  Make your choice: 

Option 1:  Demonstrating our great will power, Karen and I transported the chocolate back to California, where we shared it with other Motherboard members Debbie Notkin, Jeanne Gomoll, Jeff Smith, and Ellen Klages.

Option 2: That night, Karen and I devoured all the chocolate, washing it down with Żubrówka, a specialty of Poland. (In English, Żubrówkais called bison grass vodka, but why call it that when the native Polish offers so many exciting diacritical marks and opportunities for mispronunciation?)

Before you make your choice, here are some questions to consider:

How do you feel about diacritical marks? If you like them, say Śliwka Nałęczowska w czekoladzie three times fast. Do you still like diacritical marks?

Is it proper to eat something you can’t pronounce? What if the item in question is chocolate? Does that change the rules?

Is unpronounceable chocolate better when washed down with an unpronounceable beverage?

Żubrówka can be mixed with chilled apple juice to make a drink known in the United Kingdom as a “Frisky Bison.” Do you think there is a name for a blend of Żubrówka and chocolate? Should there be? Or is the whole thing a very bad idea?

Without further incident, we reached Lublin, a university town in eastern Poland, and found our way to the Maria Curie-Sklonowska University. There we found signs we could pronounce.  They said:  “Science Fiction Research Association: Dreams Not Only American.”

At that point, though still in Poland, we were home. We were among our own kind — the kind who consider the subversive potential of Firefly, who care deeply about ecofeminist transgression in the work of Octavia Butler and Molly Gloss, who are willing to discuss freak shows, the fictional history of ants, and so much more. Yes, it was strange to be sitting in a university classroom in Poland chatting about hive minds and interspecies dialog, but it was a very good kind of strange.

We participated in discussions of cognitive linguistics and the metaphors of mathematics.  It was heady stuff, ably organized by Pawel Frelik and supported by graduate students, junior faculty, and faculty of Marie Curie-Sklodowska University and the Catholic University of Lublin. In the program book, Pawel wrote, “not all of them converted to SF but I’m working on it.”  Based on discussions at the conference, I’d say he is succeeding.

In between lofty discussions of science fiction, we wandered the winding streets of Lublin’s Old Town, ate fabulous meals, and drank more than we care to admit. An afternoon excursion organized by the conference took us outside the city to Zamoyski Palace, a Baroque palace complex built in the 1740s and reconstructed and expanded in the early 1900s.  The interior of the palace itself is overwhelmingly opulent — marble stairways, family portraits, sculptures, elaborate stuccowork, velvet curtains, and 19^th century furniture. By way of contrast, one of the outbuildings houses the Socialist-Realist Art Museum, with giant portraits of happy workers pouring milk and harvesting wheat.

We returned from Zamoyski Palace to visit a darker era of Polish history.  Lublin was founded during the 9th century and grew into a thriving town, a hub of local and foreign trade. In the fourteenth century, Jews first came to the town, part of a Jewish emigration spurred by the invitation of King Casimir (Kazmierz). Royal edicts warranted Jewish safety and religious freedom, encouraging Jews to bring skills and manpower to Poland. Over the following centuries, while Jews were often persecuted in Western Europe, the Jewish population of Poland grew

By 1939, over 40,000 Jews lived in Lublin, making up about 1/3 of the population.  The passage from the Christian to the Jewish portion of the city was Grodzka Gate. At the time of World War II, the “Jewish City” within the city had been developing for almost 400 years.

Today, an exhibition at Grodzka Gate documents Lublin’s Jewish community before the Holocaust. Titled “The Memory of the Place,” exhibits have been created from primary sources. Aerial photos and town planning documents show the extent of the Jewish quarter that was demolished by invading Nazis. In darkened hallways, small openings provide glimpses of the past in the form of hundreds of black-and-white photos of vanished people and businesses, while recordings play the sounds of Lublin, circa 1940.   Placards — each with a photo of an individual and that person’s testimonials — tell the tale of the Holocaust as it affected individuals, both Jewish and Christian.

The effect of the exhibition is hard to describe. It’s overwhelming, saddening, and impossible to comprehend. As an American, World War II is an event in the distant past: important to be sure, but distant in time. In Poland, the same event seems much more recent, much more raw.

What next?  No funny choices here, sorry.

You made your choice — which may say more about you than about us. One way or the other, we reached the train station, and that’s a good thing.

Being savvy travelers, we asked for the platform number when we bought our tickets to Lublin. By asked, I mean we scrawled the word peron (Polish for “platform”) in a notebook and slid it through the opening in the ticket window like bank robbers.

Why this approach? Why didn’t we simply sound out the Polish words?  Before leaving for Poland, I had consulted the website How to Pronounce Polish Words. According to that site: Once you learn how to pronounce the 32 letters of the alphabet and the digraphs above, reading Polish will become very simple and straightforward.

The beginning of that sentence is deceptively optimistic: Once you learn…. As if this accomplishment were simple and could be taken for granted.

The Poles are very enthusiastic about diacritical marks. Using diacritical marks, they have created nine Polish letters, each with its own corresponding sound. These letters and these sounds are not used in English.  The letters in question are ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż.

How to Pronounce Polish Words has many warnings for the hapless foreigner who tries to sound out Polish words. Take, for example, the letter ę. How to Pronounce advises caution with this letter, saying “This sound is absolutely impossible for a foreigner to comprehend unless they hear it in person… it starts like the English “eh” and ends with an “wwww” sound with a thick French accent (please ask a Polish speaker to pronounce it for you to learn it correctly)”

Hmmm.  Do you wonder that we decided to make liberal use of the written word?

The woman at the ticket window scrawled a number on a paper and we were filled with confidence as we lugged our suitcases down a broken escalator to platform number one.

A word here about escalators. A broken escalator, as you may know, is a bit like funhouse stairs. The steps are not a consistent height and you walk on them with trepidation, never sure that they will remain still. People walking on stationary escalators have an odd sense of imbalance and dizziness that neuroscientists have dubbed the “broken escalator phenomenon. ” Yes, that really is what researchers call it. In Polish, that would be “złamane zjawisko ruchomych schodów.” Good luck pronouncing it.

But I digress. Meanwhile, back on the platform at the Warsaw station, we noticed that two other travelers were waiting — a mother and son, by the look of them. Being friendly Americans, we asked them where they were going. They too were going to Lublin.

This exchange of information was conducted with limited English on their part and absolutely no Polish on our part. It was a cordial communication, with many smiles and nods.

We waited on the platform, sure that we were in the right place. But then another traveler came along, and exchanged a few words with the mother.

The mother looked alarmed.  She and her son grabbed their luggage and gestured for us to follow them up the broken escalator to the walkway over the tracks and then back down another (also broken) escalator to platform #2.

We waited on platform #2 while the mother conferred with a few people in Polish. Then she smiled and shrugged and went back up the (still broken) escalator and back down the original broken escalator to platform #1. We followed, lugging our suitcases and looking about like nervous cats.

And then, as you might expect (as indeed we did expect), a train pulled into platform #2 and our native guides dashed back up the broken escalator and down the broken escalator to reach the train just in time.

What next?  Make your choice: 

Option one:  We tried to follow our guides, but were slowed by those pesky suitcases. While we were on the walkway above platform 2, the train began to pull out of the station.

Unwilling to miss an important academic conference, Karen flung her bag over the railing and leapt onto the moving train.  Not to be outdone, I followed, abandoning my heavy bag. Having perfected her technique while watching Emma Peel in the Avengers, Karen landed successfully.  I landed, but slipped. Catlike in her reflexes, Karen grabbed my hand and saved me from certain death beneath the wheels of the train.

Option two: We ran down the escalator and reached the train in plenty of time.

Before you make your choice, here are some questions to consider:

Do you think Karen really learned this skill from watching Avengers reruns? Is the Avengers even shown in Santa Cruz?

Is it really possible to run down a stationary escalator without tumbling head over heels to the amusement and concern of all onlookers?  Have you tried it? Do you want to? Is it possible while carrying a heavy suitcase and cursing about diacritical marks?

Warsaw has some lovely cobblestone streets. The word “cobblestone” comes from the very old English word “cob”, which meant (among other things) “big rounded lump.” Someone added the prefix “le” to “cob”, transforming the meaning from “big rounded lump” to “smallish rounded lump” and then added “stone.”

That’s all very interesting, but that’s not the most important thing about cobblestones. The most important thing is this:  cobblestone streets are much less charming when you are dragging your wheeled suitcase over these rounded lumps while wrestling with an umbrella.

We learned this when we took a night flight from San Francisco to Warsaw and landed in the rain.  We took a taxi to our hotel, which was on one of those lovely cobblestone streets. And so we learned that cobblestones in the rain are annoying.

This is the sort of information a writer can really use. Next time I write a scene in some fantasy environment — like a dreadfully picturesque village with ponies and peasants and that sort of thing — I will have a deep understanding of those cobblestones. If I have a character running down a cobblestone street I will be very careful lest she or he turn an ankle.

So we dragged our suitcases over the cobblestones until we found our guesthouse. This process involved climbing up 131 stone steps to the keeper of the keys at the New World Hostel at #27 Nowy Swiat. Then climbing down 131 stone steps and trudging across the cobblestones while dragging the suitcases and then climbing 60 more stone steps, lugging the suitcases up each one.   But who’s counting?

At last we reached our guesthouse and the cobblestones regained their charm and even the steps seemed rather quaint. Until the next morning, when it was time to repeat the process in reverse.

What next?  Make your choice: 

Option one: During the night, I considered the problem of the suitcases and the stairs at length and arrived at a solution. Using our umbrellas, I constructed a parachute of sorts, lashed the suitcases to this contraption, and hurled them out the window. They floated to a safe landing. We hurried down the stairs, grabbed our suitcases, and caught a cab to the Central Train Station.

Option two: In the morning, rejuvenated by a good sleep, we lugged our suitcases down the stairs and caught a cab to the Central Train Station.

In 2011, Founding Mothers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler went to Poland to accept the Science Fiction Research Association’s Thomas D. Clareson Award for extraordinary service. Pat Murphy has written a madcap trip report, replete with opportunities for you to choose the next step of their journey. Pat at her best!