Warsaw Travel Quotes

As our meeting came to a merciful end and we were readying to leave, I mentioned that the paternal grandfather and namesake of one of my staff traveling with us, Jan Karcz, had fought the Nazis as the general in charge of the Polish cavalry, then served with the underground resistance and had died at Auschwitz. Jan’s maternal grandfather had hidden two Jewish women in Warsaw, saving their lives, and his mother had served as a squad leader of teenage medics in Poland. Netanyahu’s demeanor changed instantly, and he asked us to be introduced to Jan.

The arrangement fell to pieces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the disastrous hetmanate of that most un-Cossack of Cossacks – Ivan Mazeppa. Suave and subtle, famous for his love affairs and his deft hand at political intrigue, Mazeppa was an even unlikelier rebel than Khmelnytsky. Born into a noble Orthodox family in Polish-ruled ‘right-bank’ Ukraine, he was schooled at a Jesuit college in Warsaw before entering the court of King Jan Kazimierz as a gentleman-in-waiting. Keen to create a cadre of Ruthenian nobles loyal to the crown, Kazimierz sent him to study in Holland before putting him to work on diplomatic errands to the left-bank hetmanate. In 1663 the promising young favourite suddenly left Cracow and joined the Polish-ruled Cossacks on the western bank of the Dnieper. Legend – as embroidered by everyone from Byron to Tchaikovsky – has it that he had been discovered in bed with the wife of a neighbour, who stripped him naked and sent him galloping off into the steppe on the back of a wild horse. Whatever the truth, Mazeppa spent the next few years travelling back and forth to the Crimean khanate as the Polish Cossacks’ envoy. In 1674, journeying home from one of these missions, he was captured by the Zaporozhians and turned over to the rival left-bank hetmanate as a spy. At this

The low point occurred in July, during Romney’s junior week abroad, in which the press became increasingly frustrated over Romney’s refusal to talk to them. It came to a head in Warsaw during a visit by Romney to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there. As the former governor walked to his car, reporters shouted questions at him about his earlier mishaps. “Kiss my ass,” admonished Romney’s traveling press aide, Rick Gorka. “Show some respect. This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Channeling Fonzie, Gorka also instructed Jonathan Martin of Politico to “shove it.” Some in the political echo-system treated this as a major international incident, a skirmish between weary but still potent superpowers—the press, the Romney campaign—that conjured Cold War–like tensions. After Gorka’s unsacred words raced around the world, the jackals rechristened the Polish holy site “Gorka Park.” Ryan, on the other

It was the same with Chopin’s old compatriot Józef Nowakowski, a former composition student of Elsner’s at the Warsaw High School for Music, who had planned to travel down to Nohant and be reunited with Chopin.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18

The Accumulation of Holy Relics started with Helena, The mother of Constantine the Great. She was granted the high title of Augusta Imperatrix and allowed unfettered access to the imperial treasury so she could secure the precious objects of the new Christian tradition. To fulfill her mission, in A.D. 326, at the age of eighty, she traveled to Palestine as the first Christian archaeologist. In Jerusalem she ordered a temple that had been built over the site of Christ’s tomb near Calvary torn down and a new church erected. According to legend, during the construction, remnants of three different crosses were discovered. Was one the cross upon which Christ died? Nobody knew. To find out, the empress commanded that a woman who was near death be brought to the site. When the woman touched the first and second crosses her condition did not change. But when she touched the third she immediately recovered. Helena declared that to be the True Cross and ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at that spot.