Valencia

I love Spanish cities, and had never been to Valencia yet, so it was a great pleasure to discover it. It's a beautiful city, lively, big and diverse.

We stayed at a nice hotel near the Estació del Nord, a beautiful building from 1917, right next to the Plaza de Bous (bullfighting arena). It's right in the transition between the Eixample - the modern city, full of big ornate apartment buildings, sometimes veering a little too much on the wedding cake architecture - and the Old Town, with its many big and small squares, churches and cafés.

The Plaza del Ayuntamiento, the Plaza de la Reina and the Plaza de la Vierge are all big squares lined by beautiful buildings - the Post Office, the City Hall, the Cathedral, the Generalitat - and with lively café terraces and Christmas markets. But the small squares are even lovelier, with so many shops and small restaurants.

With its Baroque and Gothic façades, the Cathedral is an impressive building, and it houses no less than the Holy Grail. We climbed the more than 200 steps of the spiral staircase of the Michelet tower to enjoy sweeping views over the city.

The Central Market is a bustling food market, with its vegetables, fruits, hams and fish stalls. Literally across the street, the Lonja de la Seda is a Gothic cathedral of commerce, with an impressive hall with tall columns, rooms with amazing painted ceilings and bawdy sculptures in the porticoes.

The museum of Fine Arts and the Ceramic museum are very interesting, as are the St Vincent's crypt and the Admiral baths. Then there is the old Carmen, and the gardens del Turia, a green belt encircling the Old Town where a river used to run.

Then there are other neighborhoods, like the Benimaclet, with its feeling of quiet village crossed with bohemian quarter, and the Cabanyal, the old fishermen's neighborhood near the sea.

The City of Arts and Sciences is definitely worth a visit. I like the Calatrava buildings, the Science Museum is extremely interesting and the Oceonagraphic has very interesting and beautiful specimens - just don't pay attention to the awful cardboard "rocks". And I had my first experience of Imax with a NASA documentary on the Hemispheric.

And the gastronomy? Valencia is the paella home par excellence,and we dutifully ate 5 excellent paellas on the five days we were there. But there are also the esgarraet, pumpkin pudding and lots of tasty tapas.

All in all, Valencia is a beautiful city, well worth a visit.

The Journey, not the Arrival, Matters - an Autobiography of the years 1939 to 1969, by Leonard Woolf

I finished Leonard Woolf's autobiography, and am really glad I read it. Leonard Woolf was indeed a great mind, and it's amazing how clear minded he was in his eighties. I so much agree with him on so many levels, from what constitutes true civilization to the importane of pleasure and the value of justice and fairness. The account of Virginia's final illness and death is moving, but it's his musings about old age, the meaninglessness of most of our life's work and the reflections on the world's state and on what is meant by civilization that are really worth the reading. How much better the world would be if there were more people like him.

I would accept the risk of immortality, if I were offered it, but I do not worry about my inevitable death. As one grows old, one is forced to think of it, for it grows nearer and nearer; the time comes when you see that people are surprised to see that you are still alive, when you know that, if you plant a tree in your garden, you will not be alive to stand beneath its branches, or, if you buy a bottle of claret "for laying down", you will probably die before it has matured.

Justice and mercy - they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy toleration.

The most civilized civilizations have always counted pleasure to be a very good thing, and the most uncivilized civilizations have always puritanically frowned on happiness.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, by Miron Bialoszewski

This is an extraordinary book. I bought in the wonderful bookstore Massolit in Krakow, due to the advice of an enthusiastic young employee that talked lively about lots of Polish books when I asked him what I should read to get to know something of Polish literature. I was not disappointed with this one, hope the others will be as good.

It's a violent book, extremely well written, the Warsaw Uprising in August and September 1944 narrated day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. One can almost feel one is there, in the middle of the constant bombing, running from shelter to shelter, keeping up the chores of daily life in the most extreme and unreal circumstances. Fortunately, I never experienced war, but this must be like war feels like, and it's horrible. I felt literally tired reading it, all that running from the bombs and the shelling, when short distances of a few blocks in a familiar city became almost insurmountable, when the once familiar streets became unknown territory, the rubble replacing the apartment blocks.

The frantic moment by moment rhythm of the narrative reminded of another book I read recently, about another kind of war, The City Always Wins. Both impressed me deeply. War and oppression are indeed a terrible burden of human history, and similar through every epoch. These testimonies are essential reading for anyone who cares, and the capacity of people to endure extreme circumstances never ceases to amaze me.

A trip to Krakow and Wroclaw

For several years I had wished to visit Krakow, but somehow kept postponing it out of a vague dislike of Poland - I perceive it as a very religious, nationalistic and xenophobic country, with a strong tradition of anti-Semitism. That kind of dislike of a country's regime, politics and general mores (as I perceive them, of course) has kept me away from going to places I would otherwise love to visit for their history or natural beauty - I'm thinking of countries like Russia, Hungary, China, Cuba,Turkey, even the present Trumpist USA, and of course extreme cases like Iran. But Poland hasn't yet reached that no-go threshold, so there I went. I might have reconsidered if the infamous nationalistic march that took place in Warsaw on the eve of our arrival had occurred a few months before - it confirmed my worst misgivings.

That said, Krakow is indeed a beautiful city. We stayed at an old-fashioned hundred-year-old hotel in Stare Miasto (the Old Town), with everything from the old-fashioned furniture and wallpaper to the gilded bathrooms taps and the staircases with blue majolica vases and the porters exuded a scent of fin-de-siècle.

It was raining softly but steadily on the first day. I walked around the city, down Florianska street to the huge and beautiful Rynek (the Market Square) with the Cloth Hall building at the centre and the Our Lady church to one side and the Old City Hall tower to the other. Then down Grotzka street, stopping at the Dominican church and the baroque church of Sts Peter and Paul, unto the Wawel hill. There stands the impressive Wawel castle and the cathedral.

I walked inside the cathedral, along the majestic tombs of the kings of Poland - several Sigismunds, Jadwiga, Kazimierz, and of course Wladyslaw Jagiello. Back outside, saw the Vistula and walked down the hill towards Kazimiers, the old Jewish neighbourhood.

What most impresses in this quarter is the sheer size of the Jewish remains - several huge synagogues, that attest to the size of the Jewish population there, and makes it heartbreaking to imagine how most of those people were murdered by the Nazis. I visited the Remu synagogue and cemetery, then the Old Synagogue, now an excellent Jewish museum. It seems the Jewish community has been doing a great job of recuperating its heritage, there is a well marked Jewish route, several very good bookstores, and all the synagogues are rebuilt and host a number of quite good exhibitions. Hope they won't be driven away again by the recurring Polish anti-Semitism - one of the purported claims of the nationalistic march was to "drive the Jews away from government". What Jews in that very conservative government? Crazy.

In the Kazimierz, I still visited the huge Corpus Christi basilica, another of the over decorated Polish churches - Catholicism in Poland assumes a very kitsch aesthethics, the generally beautiful Gothic or Baroque architecture disappears under several layers of gold, silver, paintings, saints, embroidered cloths, flowers, etc.

On the second day, I walked around Stare Miasto, Wawel and Kazimierz again, this time without rain, under a nice sun in a crisp cold weather. This time, I went inside the beautiful Franciscan church, a remarkable jewel of Art Nouveau decoration, and again the synagogues, this time going inside the High Synagogue and the Izaak Synagogue. Then headed north again, along the interesting Kanonicza street and visited the Jagellonian university, beautiful buildings and Copernicus memorabilia.

The inside of the church of Our Lady is again over decorated, but it's worthwhile for the Veit Stoss late Gothic altarpiece, that is truly remarkable. And as the night sets in, horse carriages gather on the Rynek, where the covered café terraces fill with people drinking, eating and talking.

The last day in Krakow was spent walking around the neighbourhoods around Stare Miasto, like the area of the huge Central Railway Station, the square with the Unknown Soldier's memorial, and the Piasek quarter. There is a very nice market with lovely vegetables, fruit and herbs stalls, and I loved the Massolit bookstore, with a cosy café and piles of English first and second hand books; I had a nice chat with one of the employees that advised me on Polish literature and bought a few books.

In the meantime, every evening we had very good Polish food - pierogies, borscht, rich salads, bigos, zurek, hearty pork dishes. Polish cuisine is not very varied, but the food is tasty and abundant. Also quite cheap by European standards. I didn't taste the ubiquitous Polish lard, though.

We took the train to Wroclaw, where we stayed in a nice hotel near the centre. Wroclaw is another beautiful city, but completely different from Krakow, much more alike a German city, which it was until the second World War. That can be seen in its architecture - the façades of the houses, and especially the churches, so much more austere and bare (I like that much more).

St Elizabeth's church was near our hotel, with its tall tower, then we came into the Rynek, another impressive square lined with beautiful façades and with the remarkable building of the City Hall.

There are several beautiful churches in Wroclaw, like St Mary Magdalene or the cathedral of St John the Baptist. Also a university and a nice lively covered market (I love markets).

The Piasek island is lovely, and the quiet and old buildings reminded me somewhat of the Île de Saint-Louis in Paris. But the most remarkable spot in Wroclaw is probably the Panorama Raclawicka.

It is a huge mural painting of the Battle of Raclawice, extremely well displayed, so one feels like one is really in the middle of it. I was really impressed.

Wroclaw Synagogue is also huge, and there is a small kosher café at the entrance. Again one is impressed by the size of the former Jewish community, wiped out during the Nazi times.

In the evening, we strolled along the Christmas Market at the Rynek and nearby streets. I love these Christmas markets in Northern Europe, so characteristic and so different from our southern countries' traditions. Lots of colourful stalls selling a bit of everything, and people drinking mulled wine and walking around. It was a nice finishing touch for our Polish trip.

(A final note about my trip to Krakow - why didn't I go to Auschwitz? I had considered going, after all it is an important site connected with the history of the 20th century, a memorial to the horrors of human cruelty, and I had thought of going there as a kind of pilgrimage. But then I was confronted with all these "Auschwitz tours" in Krakow, and suddenly it felt like an obscene thing to do, to go as a tourist to that place, to pay these anti-semitic Poles to visit a place of suffering and death. So I didn't go.)