Lodz cannot be typed on this keyboard, or if it can, I don't know how. What is lacking is a tilted bar across the upright of the L, which would change it from "Lowh-duhz" to "Woodge."
A number of Polish cities are currently running ads on BBC to attract tourism and business. Some fall quite flat - others are just a bit corny. One which I am afraid was particularly effective was one which repeatedly asks "Would you - like to see Poland's longest street of bars and clubs? Would you - like to visit a famous film school?" Would you be surprised how it's pronounced? You Lodz!"
What so pleased me about this ad was that it took what I had thought of as the city's most crippling attribute - the fact that the pronunciation of the name bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the spelling, and focused exclusively on it till you would probably forget your own mother's name first. And now that I have been there, I can assure you the name is not their biggest problem in marketing the city.
Woodge (Lodz) is Poland's second largest city. When a long weekend arrived recently, we cast about for somewhere to go, and eventually decided, most likely under the influence of this ad, to to to Woodge (Lodz.) Along with our friends Peter and Rachel, we reserved rooms, and bought tickets from Krakow to Warsaw, Warsaw to Lodz.
What we noticed immediately upon arriving in Krakow is that EVERYBODY was headed somewhere for holiday. The highways were choked going out of the city. The line to buy tickets in the train station was 16 people deep. Even the city buses were crammed full of people lugging huge back packs. When we finally got our tickets to Warsaw, however, and went to the platform, we found that despite all the travel apparently going on, apparently no one was headed our direction. When we arrived in Warsaw and finally found our way to the platform for Lodz, we began to suspect we might be the only people going to Lodz this weekend.
Our first impression of Lodz, as we departed the station, was post-communist depression. The buildings were gray, blocky, concrete, with a good layer of soot and dirt to hold them up. At the entrance to the park facing the train station what appeared to be a junkie prostitute was having a desperately wheedling conversation with two men. I say appeared to be because firstly, the way women dress here in general makes it hard to separate the prostitutes from the honest women, and secondly, I have always been particularly poor at discerning ladies of the night. It is usually only after I have had a 2-hour dinner while admiring the night-life on the street that it occurs to me as odd that there are women who have not moved from their regularly spaced intervals along the street in all the time I have been watching.
As we walked toward our hotel, we passed a few nicer, newer buildings, but the general impression of dank and unkempt persisted. We made it past "Poland's longest street of shops and bars," which did strike us as nice, and then continued on the 5 blocks or so to our hotel.
A few blocks away from our hotel we were approaching a group of 3 young men drinking unsteadily on their feet when Cynthia decided to go back turn back and buy some water in a shop we had just passed. This somehow attracted the eye of the most heavy-set hooligan, who began barking at us as we walked away. As we waited out on the street Peter and I remarked to each other that since we resembled his cousins neither by smell nor appearance, he might feel threatened and might therefore be barking to mark his territory. Or it could be a display brought on by the appearance of females from outside his band, meant to impress them with his prowess. When the ladies in question at last finished their purchases we walked past the young males in question, who confirmed our suspicions by emitting a musky odour and shouting aggressively in my face as I walked past. It was a true "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" moment, and I could have wished for nothing other than a pair of khaki shorts and a silver-haired Marlon Perkins calling me "Jim" to make the moment complete.
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