Lublin

“She had no tolerence for scenes which were not of her making”

Edith Wharton

Via Slovakia.

First, breakfast at Zërgë coffee shop and pick up the ride.

I had never heard of Lublin. It sounds like a cream you apply to irritated skin.

Warsaw was our planned destination. Prices were steep, and when we found that Muzealna was temporarily closed, we looked elsewhere.

Muzealna did everything right, great decor, a wonderful outdoor garden for good weather, exceptional service, first rate food, and a fascinating wine list. We will miss our regular Warsaw fine diner.

It was the Michelin guide that took us to Lublin. A small city with many red pointers. It is a food destination.

We only have two nights here and arrived late – a seven hour drive from Budapest.

I am already thinking we might need a week, even if the place doesn’t fix my rash.

Our apartment is in the heart of Old Town. We take a stroll and shower for dinner.

Ukryta is right beneath the apartment; the distance suits my laziness.

Outdoor seating on a mild Lublin summer evening – a Whiskey Sour from Monkey Shoulder and an Old Fashioned on Woodford Reserve.

I odrer the Vichyssoise. Rachelle, the Bouillabaisse, both excellent. Shell washes hers down with a Żywiec beer; I go with a 2024 Paço de Teixeiró Alvarinho from Portugal.

Mains are shared: Halibut with grilled pak choi, mussels in browned butter, and cauliflower purée. Scampi aglio e olio spaghetti with shrimp, chili, garlic, white wine, cherry tomatoes, and parsley.

Shell orders another beer, and I order a Spanish 2025 José Pariente Verdejo.

We take another walk around the city. Ice cream everywhere. Shell wants to look at the city gates, and by the time we get back, the ice cream shop is closed. I am secretly devastated and blame Shell. None of this is verbalised for personal safety.

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

F. Scott. Fitzgerald

It is our habit to take an early morning walk before breakfast. Good for the constitution and much needed with the firm focus on food and alcohol adopted for these journeys.

Like many Polish towns, Lublin endured some dark times.

Rachelle takes me out of the Old Town on a seemingly aimless circuit. As we walk, she explains that during the Second World War, the Jewish population was moved into the ‘Lublin Ghetto’. The Zamek Lubelski or Zamek w Lublinie, was converted into a prison before the entire Jewish community was sent off to either the Bełżec extermination camp or the Majdanek concentration camp.

The town has plaques in the footpath showing the area of the Jewish Ghetto, which they could not leave, unless to the prison and onto the extermination camp for liquidation (Nazi term, not mine) or the concentration camp for hard labor.

Between 1941 and 1942, almost 50 000 Lublin Jews were killed in the ghetto or the camps. An estimated 99% of the Lublin Jewish community.

The rest of the walk is a sombre affair. It is a struggle to reconcile the beauty of a place with the violent past.

Home for a shower, some constitution benefiting calesthetics before heading for breakfast.

Breakfast is in three acts. First, some food. Second, a sweet pastry in the park. Third, a stop for some specialty coffee.

We eat at Pelier in the morning sun. Rachelle orders the omelette with ricotta, smoked salmon, capers, and toast.

I order the grilled chicken bagel, which is interesting because I had decided on the crispy chicken bagel. Even as I order a small part of my small brain is aware of this error, and yet I continue ordering something I don’t want.

Both are delicious.

Act 2 is a sweet pastry and some sort of brewed beverage that tastes like apple pie in the park. I feel like Nabakov, eating a pastry from a bag in the shade of a tree. It is relaxing and medative. There is also anxiety. This anxiety stems from the fact that earlier this morning, in this very park, a pigeon shit on me.

Act 3 is a specialty coffee roaster – Miejska. Cortados made from an Ethiopian bean. An excellent coffee and not a pigeon in sight.

We spend the afternoon reading in the park and threatening pigeons.

An evening of beer ahead of us.

“Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it’s all–hahhhh.”

Thomas Pynchon

It is a warm day, and dinner is not until 6.00 pm. We have pre-dinner drinks at Twin Brothers Brewery. An IPA and an APA.

Both are average. Surprising, considering Poland has a reputation for beer. Maybe consumption of quality?

We move on to dinner, another brewery with a highly rated restaurant attached. Many Lagers. Many black beers. Neither is my preferred drinking.

Dinner is equally disappointing. I order the burger, and Rachelle ordered the saddle of rabbit. Starters of some type of beer bread with onions, and cheese croquettes.

The Whiskey Sour was quite good.

As the evening winds down, I finally get my ice cream.

A great day despite an average dinner, ordinary beers, and a pigeon shitting on me.

Tomorrow – Lithuania.

“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them.”

Margaret Atwood.