The reality tour: What Houston can learn from Poland
Tourists want authenticity. We’re rolling in it.
My mother is in Poland, off on a 75th birthday/ Mother’s Day once-in-alifetime dream vacation, courtesy of her children. So far, she’s visited an ancient pagan shrine dedicated to the worship of spruce trees, a couple of death camps and a salt mine. Poland is a real barrel of laughs.
I think she’s having a good time. Mom is one of those upbeat, “always look on the bright side” people, so pagan spruce-tree worship and salt-mine labyrinths are right up her alley. Her messages have been cryptic, as you’d expect from a 75-year-old woman who’s six time zones and 4,000 miles away from home, and who has long regarded her computer phone with the same mixture of wariness and reverence the guy in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” displayed toward that Coke bottle.
The photos are grainy and haphazardly composed, like snapshots of Bigfoot. Her brief bursts of email either read like coded messages — “There is an update for Auchan in Krakow” — or offer baffling observations. Of Warsaw she writes, “It’s like New York City, without the skyscrapers!”
I am no great expert on New York, but “the skyscrapers” seem to be a big part of the attraction. New York without the skyscrapers is, what, Topeka, Kan.? Amarillo? Bismarck, N.D.? Mom offers no more details, so Warsaw remains cloaked in shadows, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a pierogi.
Ah, pierogi. Mom has been vague on most details, but she’s waxed eloquent on the food she’s enjoyed, including pierogi, those pillowy Polish dumplings that serve as a buttery reminder that there is a purpose to life. One night, Mom dined on trout pierogi with pink and white beets, an apple tart and mango gelato. (Mango gelato is not “traditional Polish fare.” It is yet another sign that we are living in a cosmopolitan age and that, even on the unforgiving steppes of Central Europe, consumers have access to exotic cuisine that in a less enlightened era would have been available only at your better Cheesecake Factories).
I grew up on sauerkraut pierogi and cheese and potato pierogi and even dried prune pierogi, but trout pierogi was a new one. Just reading the words tickled some long dormant strands of my DNA, 70 generations of drowsy Polishness rousing itself at the thought of stream-caught fish, broiled then stuffed into an egg-based dough. I went full Homer Simpson, slack-jawed and drooling at the thought.
She’s made some friends. Her traveling companions include a trio of young men from Copenhagen, sunburns and shaved heads all around. One of them is wearing a soccer jersey. My first thought when I see young shaven-headed Danish guys in soccer jerseys is “hooligans,” but I’m keeping a good thought. It seems unlikely that hooligans spend their nonmarauding weekends accompanying old ladies on salt-mine tours.
The next day, Mom is off on something called “The Communist Minibus.” It’s a tour. I do not know what qualifies a minibus as Communist, but you have to admit, if you’re looking for a name for your new Jeff Tweedy-inspired alt-rock/ alt-country band with subtle punk influences, you could do a lot worse than “The Communist Minibus.”
The first time Mom visited Houston, in 1986, I’d lived here for six weeks and was three days away from getting married. She asked for the grand tour.
“What I want more than anything,” she said on the drive home from the airport, “is to see the ocean and to have some Cajun food.” I drove her to Galveston. We had lunch at a Popeye’s just off Seawall Boulevard. I was new in town. I didn’t know any better.
You do your best, Maya Angelou counsels, and when you know better, you do better. I know Houston better, much better. And Poland has inspired me: You have to tip your Krakowiak hat to a people with the honesty, the self-confidence, the sheer brazen chutzpah to turn pagan altars and salt mines into major tourist attractions.
If Poland can do it, why not Houston? We have funkiness. We have idiosyncrasies. And unlike Warsaw, we even have skyscrapers.
Next time Mom comes to visit, I am taking her on a Polish-style adventure in my adopted hometown. Call it “The Houston Reality Tour.” We don’t have Communist Minibuses; the only proper vehicle for a Houston tour is a 1991 Lincoln Town Car, painted a metallic-fleck purple and perched on 20-inch rims, with windows tinted so dark, they actually suck in light, like a black hole. The sound system is robust, cranking out a steady stream of ZZ Top, Scarface and Beyoncé, with a soupçon of Kenny Rogers. (Mom is 75, after all, and you’ve gotta admit, that “Gambler” song holds up.)
Pierogi are as hard to find as Danish soccer hooligans in these parts, but we have tacos, which are just as good. We won’t go to one of those carpetbagging Austin joints, though: The tacos are expensive and microscopic, and the restaurants are always crowded with van-dyked suburban dudes named Dylan. Life’s too short to spend with people dressed head to toe in Under Armour.
There’s a place on the east side that’s pure Houston — hard against the railroad tracks and loaded with mismatched diningroom furniture that dates to the Eisenhower administration. There’s always a cat skulking around in the parking lot, looking like he’s up to no good. The main dining area appears to have been built using nothing but several hundred cans of compressed expander foam, the stuff people use to fill in cracks in concrete. It’s like eating inside a large orange igloo. A battered boombox plays mournful ranchera songs, heavy on accordion and remorse. The tacos are miracles, folded into corn tortillas. They taste like the Meaning of Life.
From there, Houston is our oyster. The Ship Channel. A run though Chemical Alley along Texas 225. Pho in Alief. It ain’t pretty, my town, but it’s home. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Now if I could only find a salt mine to tour …