Matching Tracksuits

Every now and then, a friend from my first three years in Poland sends me a picture that I’d forgotten all about. This was with a friend C, who lived in Nowy Targ, the nearest town to my little village. We were returning from a trip to Gorzów Wielkopolski, where some of our students had participated in a Model UN session.

I can’t remember what the concerns were at that Model UN meeting, but any that are going on right now have only one concern: what to do about Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine.

I was looking at the photographs of British/Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal when I saw an image of PKO Rotunda in Warsaw. Suddenly, I was back in Poland in 1996, experiencing the country for the first time, with a vivid memory of the first time I saw the building.

A friend took several of us to see Warsaw for the first time, and as we walked out of Warszawa Centralna and long Jerusalem Avenue, the impressively Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science on our left, we approached a most peculiar building.

"That's where we're headed," said A as we descended the stairs to pass under Marszałkowska. We weren't headed to the round bank building itself, though. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I never even entered the building.

It was, in fact, the building just behind the PKO Rotunda that interested us: "There's a Taco Bell there," our guide explained. "It's okay if you like cabbage on your tacos instead of lettuce."

It was one of the signs of the growing Westernization of Poland that, in 1996, was still relatively new. We were all interested in the Taco Bell for that reason: not because we were necessarily craving substandard "Mexican" fast food but because we wanted to see what Polish Taco Bell looked like, tasted like -- to get the local spin on one of the restaurants that provided us with cheap eats during college. With everything so new and unknown, it was fascinating to see things I'd always known in that setting.

Recently, developers demolished the original building and replaced it with a nearly-identical building.

The same spirit, but a different building.

So many of those old, communist-era buildings have been demolished or so completely remodeled as to be unrecognizable in the last twenty years. It's understandable, I guess: only from a sentimental point of view are those buildings of any aesthetic value at all, and for many, there's no question of sentimentality about the oppressive past they represent. For me, the sentimentality arises strictly from the novelty of such buildings when I first lived in Poland twenty-five years ago.

The dinner was infinite. Every two hours or so they brought out another course. And there were snacks on the tables at all times. We had cutlet for the main course followed later by meat and rice; the egg-roll-type things were served with barszcz; cold cuts stayed on the table all evening, too. And of course there was vodka. The seventy some odd bottles R made certainly did not go to waste.

There was a most interesting traditional dance. E began waltzing with R, then someone would approach them, clap, and cut in. Whenever someone was done dancing with E, he/she/they (often couples danced with E, making a strange circle) headed over to where R was. After dropping money into a hat held by some lady, the shook R’s hand and took a shot which R had poured.

During the dance the band would often stop playing and whoever was dancing with E would make up a verse, often belting it out while another sang the slightly out of tune harmony so common to this area. One lady must have taken six or more verses.

After this was completed, the crowd grabbed E and R and tossed them up and down. R had quite a frightful expression the entire time. It looked like a blast to me, but R solemnly informed me, “It’s dangerous! I could have smashed my head on the floor or the ceiling!”

Joe and I went out for a walk this morning to take some pictures. He did a lot this weekend to help me with my new camera. I feel much more confident in my picture-taking ability now.

Journal entry from my first Polish wedding

 

When we arrived, we were all exhausted. It was not just the journey itself, a trip that included a five-plus hour wait on the tarmac at Dulles while we waited for some part or other to be flown from Atlanta and installed on the plane, replacing the broken whatever that was keeping us grounded. It was not the nauseating bus ride from Warsaw to Radom, where our training was to be held, a ride that included much swaying as memory serves as well as a lot of heat and an already-upset stomach for me. Framing all of this was the simple adventure the group of Americans (were there sixty-some of us, or was it eighty-something?) were embarking upon. A new country with a new language and new culture (new to us, anyway), a new job, a new everything.

We arrived at the training center to find a crowd of Poles -- our host families, with whom we would be spending the next twelve weeks -- milling about the crumbling parking area, walking around the building, just generally waiting. Kids from the surrounding apartment blocks were circling the main training building on roller blades, something that somehow surprised me and stuck with me as the most memorable element of our arrival. Somehow or other we were portioned off to the various families, and I set off in a Polish Fiat 126p -- a Maluch, meaning "a small little thing" -- with a mustachioed man and what I thought was his son. I never saw the man again, never figured out who he was. The young man I thought was his son was Piotr, the son of the woman who was putting me up for twelve weeks during training. My host brother and host mother -- host family -- though the relationship between my "brother" and me at times was so strained that even outsiders noticed the tension.

Of all things about that arrival, though, I most clearly remember those children on roller blades, circling the building, screaming and laughing in a language that was then unintelligible to me but now is an every day reality. Twenty years ago, though, it was gibberish. Poland, a mystery. The future, an adventure.

We were all so naive then. Well, I was so naive then. Naive about my motives. Naive about the impact I would have. Naive about my own ability. Naive about the future. No, not naive, perhaps. Just unable to guess at the turn of events that, twenty years later, would lead me to go on a walk with my Polish (now Polish-American) wife up the street with my son, who just learned to ride a bike really well ("Daddy, I'm really getting the hang of this!") and my daughter on her new roller skates. Not roller blades, but roller skates -- the variety I used myself as a kid, the type I would have expected to find kids wearing in Poland in 1996 instead of roller blades.

Twenty years ago. June 3, 1996 -- the day I arrived in Poland for the first time. The day it arrived in my heart and soul, never to leave.

It’s amazing how quickly plums can roll. You would think that since they’re not really round but more oblong—more like a small American football than a soccer ball—that they wouldn’t roll as much as they would wobble, doing a strange dance which could look like a drunken lame man hobbling down the street. But they did scoot through the bus with amazing speed.

When the bag full of plums sitting in the aisle tipped over, I didn’t imagine the comedy of the ensuing scene. Its owner, a drunken Polish man in dire need of a belt, was completely obvious to the fact that his plums were making their way throughout the bus, rolling down the aisle and under people’s feet. Finally, whether by intuition or chance, he realized what was happening and with a groggy grunt he turned around, bent over and began picking up the plums. First, he had to put the bag back up, and this resulted in an immediate and new deluge of plums.

Containing my own amusement—for it’s not a good idea to laugh at a drunk man who’s losing all his plums—I helped him put the bag back up and then grabbed a few of the plums and plunked them back into his bag.

After he replaced the fruit in his immediate reach, he began moving people’s legs aside with a gruff “Przepraszam” as he lurched for the plums which had rolled under passengers’ chairs. Pleased with the unexpected entertainment, we sober riders which him, glancing up occasionally to smile at each other as if to say, “If only this poor guy knew how stupid he looks.”

Finally he retrieved all the fruit that was within a few feet of him, but then he revealed just how tenacious he could be. Swaying with the bus which, combined with the high level of alcohol coursing through his veins, seemed to make him look a shade of nauseous green which is not healthy even for folks with the strongest stomachs, he stood up and stumbled toward the front of the bus, grasping the chairs for balance.

His destination: a small trove of plums which had rolled all the way to the front of the bus.

He brought back three or four, dropped them in his bag which he carefully rearranged to prevent the catastrophe from happening again, then slumped down into the floor—there were no empty seats—and leaned over in a drunken stupor. A lone plum, which had somehow eluded the man, sat balanced in the middle of the isle. Though the bus was swaying back and forth fiercely and though his comrades had set an amusing president, the plum did not roll at all but sat still, content to be alone and free.

And that was what kept me amused for the rest of the bus ride from Kraków.

I got journals from IIB and IIIA today. I’ve already graded the journals from IIIA but I really dread starting on the big stack from IIB. It takes such a long time to grade those things because I always want to be fair. I don’t know if it’s possible in such a subjective thing as journals, but I try nonetheless. In some ways I wonder if they’re more trouble than they’re worth. That’s really a stupid thing to think because it does a great deal of good for the students—it provides an opportunity for them to write without worrying about mistakes or the eventual grade (for correctness, that is). The question is not whether or not to continue the assignment, but how to grade it more quickly and effectively.

I just noticed a drawback to the new grading system I’m using this year. I can’t get any kind of grade whatsoever until I have at least one grade in each area (test, journal, projects, etc). That will mean that we have to give a lot of assignments to each class. That won’t be too difficult, but it will be terribly time consuming to grade all those things and then put the grades in the computer.

One thing is certain: I am not doing all the grading like I did last year. I did it because I had so much more free time than Danuta did, but this year I’m going to get her to grade a few things. Of course that wasn’t the only reason: I was also worried that she would grade them too harshly. I always thought of those tests she gave IIB last year—some students received no credit whatsoever. I could never convince her that giving no credit for a test item is a bad idea. Perhaps this year I can talk her into it—but she is so stubborn at times.