And so we headed home…with a stopover in Paris en route. Karen’s brother, who had lived in Paris, had advised us on choice of hotel, located near the Eiffel Tower. We negotiated the RER (Réseau Express Régional) trains and Metro with aplomb.  Having survived the unpronounceable streets of Warsaw, we scoffed at a few simple accent marks. We dragged our suitcases from the Metro station to the hotel, navigating cobblestone-free sidewalks. It was easy. We were seasoned travelers.

As it begins, so it ends — with suitcases dragged through the city streets.  No cobblestones, no rain — but sidewalks crowded with people. What, we wondered, were all these people doing wandering around on a Thursday evening? The restaurants were overflowing.

Exhausted and ready to be home already, we retired to our room at the Hotel Muguet and were just settling down when something happened.

What next?  Make your choice:

Option one:  We heard explosions outside the window.

Option two: We heard explosions outside the window.

Yes, there really were explosions. We opened the drapes and discovered that we had a view of the Eiffel Tower — silhouetted against fireworks. It was July 14, the anniversary of the 1789 storming of the Bastille — also known as Bastille Day.

We watched the fireworks. We laughed. We flew home.

Final questions to consider:

This trip report is written in the form of a “choose-your-own-adventure” tale, but all choices lead to the same place. Is this a cheat? Or does it reflect a belief that many paths can lead to the same end?

Is the writer (that would be me) trying to get away with something? If so, did I succeed?

Do the questions above far exceed the reach of this report? If so, why? If not, why not?

Decisions are such ephemeral things. Decisions made that night did not affect our activities the next day.

Very early the next day, we caught the train to Warsaw. We did, at the station, make a rookie mistake and try asking for tickets to Warsaw rather than writing down our destination. But of course it turns out that Warsaw is actually Warszawa, which is pronounced Var-shav-a.

Of course confusion with platforms and trains and we rushed hither and yon, but aided by an elderly Pole with a complicated story, we made it to the right platform and found our way back to Warsaw (oops, I mean Warszawa). We went back to the street with the cobblestones and the guesthouse we had left the week before.

Having left Krakow early, we had time for sightseeing in Warszawa, where we visited the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. In 1944, Polish freedom fighters rose up against the Nazi and met annihilation and retribution. The museum tells this fascinating story. With photographs, recordings, artifacts, and more, exhibits recreate the atmosphere and events of the struggle of 1944, paint a picture of the realities of life under the Nazis, and present the Uprising as an example of the strength of the Polish spirit. The movie “Death of a City” shows Warsaw before the War — and after the Nazi backlash executed thousands of Poles and destroyed every building of importance in to Polish culture.  It’s impossible to summarize the museum (and the history it presents) in a trip report. It’s overwhelming and inspiring — adjectives that equally well describe Poland and the Polish people overall.

What next?  Make your choice: 

Option one:  Inspired by tales of how the Polish resistance used Warsaw’s sewers as an escape routes and fueled by bison grass vodka, we headed down a manhole (make that a “person-hole”) to explore the city’s underground. Eventually, we came back up and caught a plane to Paris.

Option two:  We caught a plane to Paris.

Having had it with organized tours, we decided to spend the next day on a self-guided walking tour of Krakow. (Translation: we had a map and a guidebook and we started walking.)

This is a fabulous way to see a fabulous city.  You can read about Krakow in many a guidebook and web page, so we won’t provide a full travelogue. Rather, we will give you our own personal highlights:

• In Rynek Główny (the city’s largest market square), we eat breakfast while listening to a trio of accordion players belt out the William Tell Overture as horse drawn carriages clopped past.
• The extravagant decoration of the basilica of the Virgin Mary (or Kosciol Mariacki) warms my heart. Every square inch of the interior is decorated with gold or stars or paintings or carvings.  What could be better? Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I say.
•  We visit Galicia Jewish Museum, which was created to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to celebrate Polish Jewish culture. The permanent exhibition, Traces of Memory, offers a view of the Jewish past that was destroyed in Poland, documents the Holocaust, and offers a look at current efforts to preserve and recreate the memory of the Jewish past in Poland today.  The museum focuses on Galicia, an area now split between the Ukraine and Poland and coincidentally, the area from which my grandfather emigrated to Canada.
• We descend 135 narrow stone steps in a dark passageway below Wawel Castle to the Dragon’s Cave. Legend has it that a dragon menaced the city until a prince fed it a sheep’s hide filled with sulfur. The dragon ate it in a single gulp, gulped water from the Wisla River, and then exploded — a fine mix of science and fantasy.  Today, a fire-breathing bronze dragon sculpture stands by the river at the exit from the Dragon’s Cave.
• We learn the word for ice cream (lody, and no, I don’t know how to pronounce it but at least it doesn’t have any diacritical marks).  We search everywhere in an effort to find the very best ice cream shop. Everyone needs a quest. We thought this was a good one.
• We mispronounce and drink Żubrówka at the Singer cafe in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter. No, we do not sing — the bar is named for the Singer sewing machines that are scattered about on the tables.
• We meet an amazingly personable devil, just outside the basilica of the Virgin Mary.
• Back in the market square, we mispronounce (repeatedly) and drank more Żubrówka while watching performers working the crowd: an opera singer, a troupe of fire dancers, and a levitating magician.

What next?  Make your choice: 

Option one: After the third glass of vodka, Pat decides she will abandon writing in favor of levitation and fire dancing.

Option two: After the third glass of Żubrówka, Karen decides she will abandon writing in favor of opera singing and playing the accordion.

Questions to consider:

Did you know that I spent a year as the marketing director at The Crucible, Oakland’s school of fire arts? The Crucible offers classes in blacksmithing, welding, glass flame working, fire eating, and fire dancing, among other things. Do you think working at The Crucible means I am likely to abandon writing in favor of fire dancing? Or do you think I’ve already gotten the fire-dancing inclination out of my system?

Do you know how Karen feels about opera singing?  Are you sure?  Have you heard us sing to the winner of the Tiptree Award? Do you want to? (Consider your answer carefully.)

As is so often the case, the truth lies in the gray areas between two extremes. Karen and I were given two boxes of Śliwka Nałęczowska w czekoladzie. One box made it back to the USA. Over the course of our remaining travels in Poland, the other box mysteriously and gradually became lighter and lighter — until we discovered it was empty.

How could such a thing happen? Alien abduction, perhaps. I have heard that aliens are fond of chocolate. It is also possible that Żubrówka was involved.

But again, I digress.

The next day, we boarded a bus for Krakow and had an uneventful journey. In Krakow, we descended into the depths of the earth and met the Devil. In that order, but not like it sounds.

Our descent was into the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Feeling that it was our duty as tourists to take at least one organized tour, we signed up for a tour of the salt mine, which some say inspired Tolkien’s descriptions of the mines of Moria. The mine is a Unesco World Heritage site, after all.

First, a few pertinent thoughts.

• We cannot pronounce Wieliczka.  Can you?
• The mining of salt at Wieliczka began in the 13^th century and continued for the next 700 years. Commercial mining stopped in 1996.
• The mine now functions as a tourist attraction. People come from all over to see the amazing underground chapel carved out of the salt by the miners. In the tunnels and chambers are great walls of salt, statues of gnomes and popes and saints, glittering salt chandeliers and the mandatory carving of the Last Supper. There is an underground post office that takes a very very long time to deliver a postcard. (My mother can attest to this.)
• The mine includes a labyrinth of tunnels, over 180 miles (300 km) of them, on nine different levels.
• There’s an underground lake in the mine and an underground sanatorium where chronic allergic diseases are treated. Rumor has it that the mine reaches a depth of 1072 feet (327 meters).

The official tour does not include the sanatorium. On the official tour, you must shuffle along in a tourist group, descending a wooden stairway of 378 steps and following a tour guide for about 3/4 of kilometer, staying with the group and never lingering behind to lick the damp gray walls to make sure they really are salt….not that anyone would ever do that.

What next?  Make your choice:

Option 1: Pat and Karen dutifully stayed with the group, mailed letters from the underground post office, and returned to the surface unscathed.

Option 2: Despite having watched many horror movies in which it is fatal to leave the group, Pat and Karen snuck away in a dark tunnel, licked the walls (yes, they are salt), liberated the bored residents of the sanatorium, and went skinny-dipping in the underground lake.  Eventually, the cops were called and the group was ejected. Karen and I talked our way out of trouble and eventually returned to our hotel dripping wet and leaving salt stains on the carpet.

Questions to consider: 

Do you really think Karen and I, co-founders of the Tiptree Award, would stay with the group? Really? How much do you know about us? Have you read any of our books?  Have you read any books that won the award?

Wouldn’t Karen and I have dried off while in police custody? Why would we still be wet when we got back to the hotel? Does considering this detail influence your choice? If so, why? If not, why not?

Do you really think we would lick the walls of the mine?  Maybe I would, but Karen? I mean, she once belonged to the PTA.  Think about it.

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?