Three Wise Men visit Krakow

There are three apartments on my floor, mine and two others. On the doors of the other two apartments there are strange and mysterious inscriptions written in chalk. They look like this:

Amongst the welter of bewildering and unfamiliar details that one is faced with in a foreign country it took me a long time to even notice them. Once I had noticed them though I very often looked at them as I was going in or out. I would vaguely wonder about them in the way that one vaguely wonders about things while doing semi-automatic routine tasks such as locking or unlocking a door, and then forget all about it by the time I was halfway down the stairs. It was only through a chance conversation with my girlfriend the other day that I found out what they were.

Every year, just after Christmas, it’s traditional for the local parish priest to visit all the households in the neighborhood and touch them for cash. There’s probably some praying and blessing that goes on too. This annual visit is known as kolęda. In more traditional neighborhoods kolęda is anxiously anticipated. The house is scrubbed from top to bottom and the table is loaded with the finest and most lovingly prepared food and drink. The poor priest must be absolutely groaning by the time he gets half way round, and he has to do this day after day if he has a big parish. I suspect this may be the real reason for Lent. It gives overstuffed priests a chance to shed the 17 kilos they put on during kolęda.

I have no idea if this is true elsewhere, but in Krakow the priest writes an inscription on the door of each home he has visited to show that it has been blessed. This is what I saw on my neighbors doors. Here’s another one:

K + M + B are the initials of Kacper, Melchior, and Baltazar; the Polish names for the Magi (or the Three Wise Men) who visited the infant Jesus. And the date is, well, the date. I rather like this tradition and I’m quite prepared to overlook the fact that in this case the visiting holy man takes gifts away with him rather than bringing any with him. It’s kind of sad that it’s dying out. In my building these are the only two apartments that have the blessing mark and one of those is three years old. If you ever find yourself in Krakow, look out for them.

A couple of things I wondered, just because I’m like that. Is the old inscription wiped off by the priest himself and, if so, does he do it before he goes into the home or as he leaves? And does he write the new one straight away? And do they have some kind of special cloth or blessed chalk for wiping off and writing on? I’m not being flippant, I like to know these things, honest!

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Celebrity outing Polish-style

Polish society is not at ease with homosexuality. And it is not surprising that many gay people try to keep their orientation a secret. This includes celebrities.

Homosexuality in the Polish world of rich and famous is still mostly a mystery. One hears rumours, but the number of openly gay celebrities is next to… 5.

The arrival of the tabloid press hasn’t changed the unwritten rule “don’t mention they’re gay”. Among all the intimate topics press loves to investigate, sexual orientation is not. Paper editors usually belong to the same crowd, party in the same clubs, and loyally keep secrets in exchange for photo opportunities and gossip.

Only when a celebrity decides to out oneself, tabloids are happy to pick the topic up and create the right space for their coming-out. As was in recent cases of Jacek Poniedziałek (stage actor and soap actor), and Tomasz Raczek (film critic and tv personality). Their confessions made first page headlines of the large circulation daily Fakt.

The rise of Internet celebrity gossip sites brings some clues on the new order of things. Last month Pudelek (Polish version of Perez Hilton) published video of a soap actor Maciej Gołębiowski dancing shirtless and snogging his boyfriend in a trendy gay club. (You can watch the video here). One of his main roles is in a tv series called “The Parish” set in a conservative peasant community.

Yet they still felt some kind of obligation to the unwritten rule, as they wrote:

We previously received several photographs showing him in private situations with guys – and we only decided to publish this information now, as he himself puts his orientation to public display.

Indeed, it is possible he did it on purpose to out himself. He must have known what he was doing showing himself around in a trendy Warsaw spot, in which celebrities and paparazzi are nothing rare. But just as well he might have simply enjoyed a night out.

The new attitude is out there however. And with increasing competition on the market unwritten rules will probably be less and less obeyed.

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World’s #1 hostel

The Flamingo hostel in Kraków was voted the world’s best hostel in the 2007 “Hoscars” ceremony, held last month in Dublin. I’m not sure I could deal with the pink Flamingo décor myself, but if you want to visit the most obvious 1st-stop tourist attraction Poland has to offer and you don’t want to spend more than 90PLN per night then this may just be the place for you. Bring another nine people to share the room with you and you can nearly halve that cost!

I’m particularly fascinated by “We recommend” in the “Krakow” section of their website, which is a blank page. Lots left to discover then! :)

You can find details of the rest of the top ten world hostels in this Guardian article.

Polish Countryside

My mother-in-law’s house sits at the top of a large plot of land in Southern Poland, majestically positioned to survey the vast garden and surrounding forest. She purchased the land 10 years ago despite the warnings from friends and family who all said she was mad but now they invariably comment on her perseverance and vision and how lucky she is to live in such a beautiful place. The house was built 6 years ago on one level to her own design. The outside painted stucco white with large windows all around to provide a feeling of space and light. The windows offer a wonderful view of greenery from the surrounding fields, garden and forest no matter which side of the house you are enabling you to watch the ever varying expressions on the trees as the sun shines across them.

The garden retains a few of the magnificent trees that once made up every square metre of the land. The grass is a luscious green and a small pond sits in one corner where goldfish and frogs swim freely from the threat of herons, the fish even allowing you to get so close to them that they tickle your finger tips. Her dogs Alpha and Beta, German Alsatians, on guard at all times to bark at any passing strangers but both of whom roll over and wag their tales as soon as you smile at them.

The terrace overlooking the garden and forest provides an extension to the house, with a small covered area so you can sit outside and enjoy the fresh air regardless of the season.

A 500 metre walk from the house through the forest brings you to a fresh water lake which is about 5 kilometres in circumference, lucidly clear and clean, the water temperature often rises above 20 degrees during the summer months when it is perfect for swimming.

The surrounding forest is made up of oak, yew, walnut and conifer trees. Foxes, boar, hares and deer roam wild. The birds a bright mixture of cuckoo, woodpecker, jays, and finches fill the air with their songs. In autumn bushes contain a plethora of wild berries, which we pick and make into fresh fruit cocktails, jams and cakes, ideal for lazy Sunday mornings.

Likewise mushrooms are in abundance which we gather for soups, omelettes and for drying and marinating to add to casseroles and other food dishes. So delicious and tasting just that much better when you have picked them yourself.

My wife and I often escape from our home in Warsaw to visit this beautiful area, we sit with a picnic, drying off from a swim in the lake, listening to the sounds of the water and songs of the birds. Late at night we sit on the terrace and look up at the stars, which here have a beauty that people living in cities can only dream of. Never before have I felt so at home except possibly in Sweden but my wife was not there and her presence adds to the beauty. This could be paradise, not at all the impression I had of Poland before coming here.

The only downsides the bugs the sizes of bats, bats the sizes of crows and in the summer mosquitoes that have no respect for human pain and then there is the occasional thunderstorm which during June seem to happen a bit more occasionally than occasional. In fact they seem to happen every second evening! As soon as one strike of lightening is seen anywhere within a 30 kilometre radius the generators are shut down in the village, rendering us with no electricity and bizarrely enough no water. That means no water for washing your hands, no hot tea and no water for flushing the loo. So if you happen to be on the loo doing an ‘ooh ooh’ as my wife calls it, when there is a power cut then you are really in the shit.

2 + 2 = 5

Swarm intelligence (SI) is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. Although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of global behavior. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and collaborative blogging.

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while ‘swarm intelligence’ refers to the more general set of algorithms.

See also:

Anxiety Bandwagon effect Collective behavior Collective consciousness Collective effervescence Collective intelligence Crowd psychology Conformism Fear Flocking (behaviour)

Group behavior Groupthink Herd behaviour Herd mentality Hive mind Informational cascade Mean world syndrome Meme Mob rule Moral panic Propaganda

Self-organization Sheeple Socionomics Spontaneous order Team player