Nie movie po polsku....prszepraszam.

Friday, March 9, 2012

As soon as the airplane touched down in Wraclaw, any confidence I had gained in terms of communicating with locals completely vanished.  Over the past 13 years, I have visited family in Poland several times.  And before each trip, I made it a point to throw myself whole-heartedly into the process of cramming as much Polish into the antiquated PC mimicking as my brain as possible.  It is at times like these that I wish I had a more modern processor capable of storing much more information as well as accessing it more quickly.   One of the first things Elzbieta told me upon arriving in Norway was to give up all intention of learning 2 languages at the same time.  “Bah!”, I said to myself.   “I’ll show her!”  Yeah.  That’s right.  I’ll show her how incredibly lame I am.  One thing is for sure, however.  I know a lot more Norwegian than I thought I did, because no matter what I do to prevent it, everything I try to say in Polish comes out in Norwegian….without my even having to think about how to say it in Norwegian!  Awesome!  Score one for my efforts to learn Norwegian.  How I will survive 6 days on a farm where no-one speaks either of the languages I can use to say, “I’d like some coffee”, “Where is the toilet?”, and “I would like to help you with your chores rather than sit here like a dumb-ass, drinking all your coffee and going to the toilet all day,” is a challenge I will just have to meet when I get there. 

I should mention the humor I found in trying out my closeted French (which I have not used in 20 years) on Elzbieta’s friend (and our host in Wraclaw)  while we were sitting around the dinner table.  We actually were able to have decent conversations, since her French was much better than her English, and my French is leagues beyond my Polish, but my brain was still working hard to unbury all that vocabulary.  Visions of any one of my deceased mother’s storage sheds crammed to the ceiling with, um…..stuff….come to mind when I think about all the words I once knew.  My once nearly-fluent French is eerily similar to one of her gorgeous antique trunks that in its glory functioned so perfectly and was beautiful, but now is a shadow of it’s former self, in need of repair and in living in fear of being used should it’s poor hinges fall off. 

The first thing that always strikes me about Poland when comparing it to Norway is the tell-tale signs of an Eastern block country that had to endure years under the heavy hand of Communism.   The main attraction of which I speak is the good old communist block buildings that in their efficiency manage to sacrifice all semblance of individualism.  I lamented how mundane it must be to live in one, to which Ela corrected me that one would dream about having the opportunity to live in one at the time.  Wow.  What was the alternative?  A burned out brick skeleton with no heat or running water or indoor plumbing?  Yes.  

The view outside the living room window
of my aunt & uncle's apartment in Gzierzuniuw

Their living room

But, Poland is in the EU now.  Money has been forthcoming and each time I visit, there are new highways, new buildings, and apparently new quantities of paint, since the only way to individualize these massive concrete boxes is to paint them different colors.  I appreciate the efforts and really, there is plenty of grey in the sky.  One does not need to see it on the outside of every building as well. 

We spend an afternoon in Wraclaw in a very large and bustling shopping mall, in which there is even a Starbucks (ugh?).  Haute fashion is in the Polish blood, I think, and women are adorned with high-heeled boots, trendy sweaters and coats, modern hairstyles and cosmetics….one thing is for sure:  Polish women are beautiful and they make gallant  efforts to make sure that everyone around them notices.  The reverse-peacock effect, let’s say.  As I sit waiting for Ela to finish shopping, I enjoy taking in the sight the older people enjoying now what they had been denied access to for so much of their earlier lives.  As much as I bemoan the consumerism that capitalism always spawns, I am keen on understanding the benefits of the choices it allows.   Women enjoy having an opportunity to choose cosmetics and clothing that express how they feel about themselves.  People enjoy having a choice of what kind of tea or coffee they want to drink, what kind of toilet paper they want to have (gone are the days of using newspaper!), what kind of fruits they would like to eat,  what kind of cell phone they want to use, what kind of wine they would like to drink with what kind of meat they would like to eat.  The year 1989 was a long time ago, but not really.  Unraveling the accoutrements of decades under communism is a time-consuming and costly affair.  I immediately wonder how time consuming and costly the American recovery from the ravages of capitalism-gone-amuck will take.  But Poland is moving forward briskly, albeit on a fragile track.  All of Europe seems fragile these days, though.  Like the U.S., Poland’s unemployment is around 10%, which is far below the last time I was here.  The youth here seem like the youth anywhere else I go…tuned into their i-pods, cell-phones and all things technological, wearing the latest styles they have seen on TV shows from around the world, and many more are able to speak English than I have encountered in the past.

So much of how I experience a country and assess my comfort level in it is related to my command of the language.  I am very self-conscious about everything I do that involves having to actually accomplish something, like buying a stick of gum, trying on a pair of shoes, buying a bottle of lotion, etc.  And the “universe” always manages to pick up on this and provide the appropriate “crisis” to enhance my self-consciousness….like handing the cashier a 50 zl. note for something that costs 8.5 zl. and she rolls her eyes, has to get up to go to the other cashier to make change (requisite sighing from customers behind me increasing in volume), then comes back and tells me again how much it costs and looks at me for the money, not remembering that in her hand is the money that I indeed gave her first, not that the other cashier gave her, and she was truly stumped.  I just grabbed 40 zl. out of her hand, saying “prosze”, and if I had known how to say “keep the tip”, I would have.  Jeesh.  So, what this all boils down to is my wondering how long it takes for the mundane, mindless things in life to become mundane and mindless again in another language.   That’s my measure of fluency, I think.  When shopping for toothpaste is just shopping for toothpaste.  I’ll say this much:  thank GOD for numerals and digital displays.  Under normal circumstances, they circumvent the need to think in a foreign language, briefly.

On a final note, as I look out the window of my aunt’s flat I see that other reminder that I’m in Poland: Dogs just cruising around like they know where they're going.  Short legged dogs.  Those who know me know that I’m basically a dog-fanatic, so I notice these things.  Ninety percent or more of the dogs here look as though they have had the lower part of their legs removed….there goes a German Shepherd now!   Oh wait, it IS on the sidewalk and not in the gutter.  And no, these are not special breeds.  My husband and I witnessed a litter in the making and we can validate that indeed, that was most likely not a German Shepherd, but the product of a German Shepherd and well….some Corgi or Terrier thing. 

Whatever kind of dog it was, I know exactly how it feels when it is lying under the table at the feet of a bunch of humans talking in some language it doesn’t understand.