Matching Tracksuits

Month: July 2022

Last Day in Jablonka 2022

Sunday 31 July 2022

Here in Jablonka, we began our last day with rain and temperature keeping us indoors. It never rose above the high-50s, and it rained all morning before taking a short lunch break to prepare for an afternoon and evening of rain. Depressing weather to go with a day of mixed feelings: ready to go home, we’re both a little sad to leave the adventure here.

In the meantime, K flew out of our local airport heading to Newark for a funeral. In New York, it was sunny and lovely, and K got to see a friend she hadn’t seen for years. Still, the motivation for the trip was a tragedy. A mixture as here.

With the weather as it was, we had few choices this last day in Jablonka. We watched some television, talked, packed — and repeated it all.

And for dinner: kiszka heated on the stove Babcia uses for hot water.

Random Bit for Future Smiles

A regular during our stay here was was the Magno-Z commercial: we got to see that a few times during our month here. The Boy groaned each time it came on, but he still sang along with it.

Commercials, it turns out, are a great source for learning a language.

Family Ognisko

Friday 29 July 2022

One of the things that must happen during a trip to Polska (from the point of view of our children anyway) is an ognisko in Spytkowice. We tried three times this visit — three weekends — and got rained out each time.

It looked like this time we’d get rained out as well, so we did the simple and obvious thing: moved the ognisko to Jablonka, where there’s a covered gazebo. Problem solved. Ognisko complete.

0% “beer” is all the rage now

Last Market Day

Wednesday 27 July 2022

Today was the last day at the jarmark for us. To be honest, I could have done without: there’s very little I’m willing to buy there, but I’m always willing to snap a few pictures with my phone, which is so much less obtrusive than walking around with a camera.

The Boy finally made a decision: he did indeed buy a knife. He’s been worried about whether or not it would make it on the plane, and my assurances that it would be fine as long as it was in our checked luggage finally convinced him. The actual selection process was typical: he handled this one, opened that one, examined a third, went back to the first when a fourth caught his eye.

In the afternoon, we went another bike ride. This time I took him through the forest before heading up along, mixed-surface climb that he declared at the end to be the hardest climb he’s ever done.

Finally, in the evening, I headed back to Lipnica Wielka on a solo ride with the intention of riding to the base of Babia, then crossing over to Lipnica Mala to come back down. However, I made it halfway through LW before I realized it was foolishness to think I could make that ride: I know the climbs that awaited, and I knew my legs didn’t have it in them.

Of course, I stopped by one more time to see how dom nauczyciela was going: it is, in a word, gone. Nothing remains but a hole where the basement was.

Ride and Visit

Tuesday 26 July 2022

The forecast called for rain by lunchtime, so the Boy and I decided to get a morning ride in before the predicted afternoon of rain. We headed out toward the area of the village known as “Wild,” but we came back along tractor tracts and dirt roads through fields.

One of the oddities of riding in rural Poland is the “Warning: Cows with Square Udders Ahead” sign. It has also given rise to a new danger for E as a cyclist: the unexpected blobs of cow blessings on the road.

Along the way back, we discovered yet more abandoned houses, but different in a significant way: these are not unfinished houses that the owners abandoned to move to the States. These are lived-in, likely-loved houses that have simply outlived their usefulness. To renovate them makes little sense to the owners: they’re too small, and to renovate them would cost more than just building a new house.

In the afternoon, once it was raining and rather cold, we headed over to the aunties’ house for name day celebrations. In loving yet typical Polish fashion, the aunties served a virtual meal even though Babcia had begged them not to. It wasn’t a formal meal. It was just enough snacks and cakes to make a meal.

Changes and Endings

Monday 25 July 2022

There was a shortcut through an empty field by a neighbor’s house that was worn down with years of use. The Girl used it heading to her first day at Polish school nine years ago.

First Day at (Polish) School

One of the first changes we’d noticed was that the shortcut is no more.

The shortcut

More and more people drive more and more. Fewer people walk. Just like fewer and fewer people have anything resembling a farm.

“The Polish village is dying,” Babcia insists. “It survived the Partitions, the wars, Communism — but capitalism killed it.” When she says this, I want to argue that it’s more complicated than that, but I never do. What’s the point?

This afternoon, we decided to go for a bike ride to Lipnica Wielka, my home for seven years. Along the way, we passed a monument to slain Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans in 1945 as the Soviets pushed the Germans back. The front shifted, as it always does, but from Christmas 1944 to Easter 1945, it ran right through this area.

There’s a monument to the men who died here, presumably at a mass grave based on the inscription.

While the Russians were certainly not heroes in the strictest sense (they were raping in mass numbers as they went along, particularly when they crossed into Germany), they were freeing the Poles from a greater immediate threat. Or were they? Didn’t they just replace one type of totalitarian rule with another? Was it really that much of a change? The Germans had Auschwitz; the Soviets had the Gulag Archipelago.

Things changed, but they didn’t.

When we reached Centrum, I decided we should go look at dom nauczyciela one more time. I knew how it would look — just as it had always looked.

It was scheduled for demolition, but I knew that would take weeks. Months. Maybe even a year. When it comes to construction, nothing moves fast in Poland.

As we approached, though, I saw that the road to dom nauczyciela had been partially blocked off.

And soon, I heard the machinery. And I knew. I knew that although nothing in construction moves fast in Poland, destruction can come with unexpected rapidity.

There it was, my home for three years, three of the most amazing years of my youth, being carted away, load by load, in a dump truck.

It’s silly to feel sentimental about a building, to exaggerate the importance of a relatively routine action. “Things move on,” K suggested in a text.

The building was ugly — there was no denying that. It’s not like it had all the charm of a solution to a problem in which only functionality played any role at all. The strange roof that cascaded and became part of the side of the building suggests at least a half-hearted attempt to make the building original, in some sense beautiful. But like so many things built when communism and socialist realism ruled behind the Iron Curtain, the attempt at some kind of architectural uniqueness only highlighted everything wrong with the ideas ruling the country. The building was, in a word, ugly.

In addition, it was likely horridly inefficient at keeping the heat in. When the mayor’s assistant (who later went on to become the mayor himself) moved into the apartment beside mine on the first floor, he added insulation to the outside of the building to help with the frigid winter nights. The water for the heaters circulated in a clockwise motion from the lower left corner where the boiler was located. I got the hot water first, and as a result, my apartment was almost always oppressively hot when it was in the minus twenties outside. But by the time the water got to the mayor’s assistant’s apartment, it had cooled considerably, hence the insulation.

So K was right: it was time for the poorly insulated, ugly building to come down. But that reality doesn’t change the stab I felt as I watched workers clean up what was left of the building.

Oddly enough, just a few meters from my former home as one heads to the back of the school

is a home that has never changed in appearance since I arrived in 1996, a home that has never been inhabited.

The owners moved to America and quite possibly have even passed away by now. Their children, fully integrated Americans with no desire to return to a small village in southern Poland, a village that one only drives to and never through, own property that they likely never see.

The ride itself — the before and after the discovery — was fantastic:

a 25 km ride that the Boy handled like a pro.

Chabowka 2022

Thursday 21 July 2022

We’ve gone to the outdoor train museum in Chabowka at least twice before: once with L and her cousin S in 2013, once just the Boy and I in either 2015 or 2017. Either way, he was a very little boy the last time we went, so I thought he might enjoy it more as a ten-year-old.

“You mean we get to go in any of those that are open?!” he asked incredulously as we entered.

It was, to say the least, a hit.

But it wasn’t as much of a hit as it could have been: the heat drained us both, and we were certainly less than overwhelmingly enthusiastic as we finished up the visit. If there had been more trains to explore, I think we would have called it quits nonetheless.

We’ve gone to the outdoor train museum in Chabowka at least twice before: once with L and her cousin S in 2013, once just the Boy and I in either 2015 or 2017. Either way, he was a very little boy the last time we went, so I thought he might enjoy it more as a ten-year-old.

“You mean we get to go in any of those that are open?!” he asked incredulously as we entered.

It was, to say the least, a hit.

But it wasn’t as much of a hit as it could have been: the heat drained us both, and we were certainly less than overwhelmingly enthusiastic as we finished up the visit. If there had been more trains to explore, I think we would have called it quits nonetheless.

It’s strange: the temperatures here aren’t anything ridiculous compared to what we experience at home. The high today didn’t even reach the 90s. But it still somehow managed to feel hotter than I would have expected 88 degrees to feel. Indeed, Poland lacks to intense humidity of South Carolina, so I would expect 88 degrees in Poland to feel cooler than it would in SC.

Final Wood, More Rides

Wednesday 20 July 2022

First, breakfast — that old Polish favorite, salceson. It’s one of the things along with flaczki and tartare that I look forward to having while in Poland. (I’ve had tartare, and now I can check salceson off the list. Still looking for that bowl of flaczki.) Headcheese (I love that name) is available in the States, but I never buy it. It’s a Polish thing for me.

It is, I suppose, an acquired taste: the consistency is a little odd, alternatingly gelatinous and firm, but the flavor is quite pleasant.

After breakfast, we headed off to the jarmark. It’s Wednesday in Jablonka — there’s only one place to go!

The Boy still has money that’s burning a hole in his cliche, so we stopped at every single knife monger (is that even a term?) for him to look at the available wares. His concern was simple: he wanted something that he could use in scouts, but most of the knives were switchblade-esque: they didn’t look like the old switchblades you’d see in West Side Story, but they did have spring-loaded blades that flipped out at the press of a button.

“I’d better do some research before I buy one,” he wisely decided. (The verdict, as we predicted: such knives are not acceptable for scouting events.)

After we got home, the Boy and I decided to go for a bike ride. After a few kilometers, the Boy turned back. I continued.

It was the same ride as yesterday until the point at which I turned right instead of left. The route I’d mapped out earlier would drop me down toward Chyzne before turning back up toward Jablonka. However, I didn’t count on one thing:

Over a kilometer of deep, thick mud. Virtually impassible mud. I spent a good bit of the middle of the ride with one foot up on the only-slightly-muddy bank pushing myself along or, when the mud to got six or more inches deep, simply walking in the less muddy part and dragging the bike beside me.

After lunch (pierogi z borówkami), Z, a Georgian who rents from Babcia, and I finished up the wood. Even Babcia said we were done — there were no lurking piles that I had not noticed.

Listening to Babcia and Z communicate was a lesson in the value of hand gestures: he speaks a bit of Russian and almost no Polish; she speaks Russian fluently and no Georgian. Their conversations reminded me of Dziadek and Papa talking: I got the feeling neither was really responding fully to the other.

As for me, I used Google Translate to talk with him. I showed Babica and suggested she could use her tablet the same way, but her response was predictable.

Finally, the Boy and I took one more bike ride in the evening, this time through the fields between Jablonka and the two Lipnicas.

The sun was setting so we had to make our ride short. Of course, on the way home, we had to take a spin through his favorite riding location: the empty jarmark.

At the far end were long-abandoned stalls that had seen neither seller or buyer in years. It’s a testament to the changes in Poland: the jarmark is shrinking, probably because of the availability of items in Poland and, truth be told, the comparative lack of quality of many things sold in the jarmark, especially clothing items.

Wooden Bikes

Tuesday 19 July 2022

Day two of the wood adventure. Today, we focused on cutting the pieces that were too long to fit in Babcia’s furnace. That meant using an enormous and old homemade table saw to cut the pieces. The blade must have been 14 inches in diameter, with just under half the blade above the table and no way to adjust it. It was, in a word, a nerve-wracking experience. But we got it all done. And there awaits yet another pile, Babcia explained

In the afternoon, we focused on finally getting our bikes ready for a first ride. I had to put the new tire on my back tire having finished the front wheel and tire yesterday. The Boy pumped up the tires of his borrowed bike and we were ready to head out.

It’s been a long time since we’ve ridden; it’s been five years since we’ve ridden here. So many changes in the meantime.

Once the Boy tired and I took him back, I headed out for one of my favorite rides in Jablonka: a 15-kilometer circle through fields and forest.

Wood

Monday 18 July 2022

Today the Boy and I set out to tackle a basic but important project: sorting and storing all the wood Babcia had delivered in April. It’s largely to serve as kindling for coal-fed fires in the winter months, but during the short time that it’s not necessary to heat the whole house, the word heats the water.

Our job was to move and store the wood. And make a friend along the way:

We had an enormous pile with no before picture for comparison. All we have are pictures of all the various little corners we stored the wood.

And what with my little helper?

Orawskie Lato

Sunday 17 July 2022

Today was an annual festival here in Jablonka — the thirtieth year in a row. That means they began having the festival just a few years before I first arrived. When we’re in Poland, we usually get at least to drop in on this festival.

This year, I saw several former students from those early days. Except for one, I didn’t recognize any of them immediately. I had to ask their name. When a bearded man in his mid-thirties approaches you, you’ll be forgiven if you don’t recognize him as the former student you last saw at age eighteen.

Final Full Day

Thursday 14 July 2022

Today was the last full day K and L will be here. Tomorrow afternoon we head to K’s brother’s house for a grill and a short nap before taking the girls to the airport at the ungodly hour of 4:00 am.

Today, we went to Spytkowice to visit with a few people we hadn’t seen at all or had seen only shortly.

And of course, there was the lovely drive home.

But the highlight of the day came at the start of the day, so to speak — before taking Babcia out for a final lunch, we had a short photo session.

The Boy took a picture.

I took a picture of the three generations of ladies.

But the picture of the day, in some ways the picture of the whole trip thus far, was a quick, informal portrait session with Babcia.

Babia Gora

Wednesday 13 July 2022

I lived at the base of Babia Gora for seven years and only once tried to reach the summit. Shortly after that, I injured my knee while hiking in the Tatra Mountains. Some time after that, when my knee had healed, I injured the other knee. And so I never made it to the top of Babia. Until today.

Here’s some video showing just how windy it was at the top.