Busy, busy, busy day. And this is only about one-third of it.
Busy Day
travel
Paradise Unseen
They sit around the fire, complete darkness surrounding them, the only sounds the crackling fire and the occasional truck passing on the nearest road (still a mile away). They sit passing around a shot glass and bottle of vodka. The chaser, a can of beer for each, a cigarette in the other hand. Some talk of escape, of getting the hell out of this little f-ing village. They talk of going abroad, of returning with an Audi, of making it big. Some will escape, if “escape” is even the proper word. Some will return with with an Audi, though used.
Who will look around them, at the bark of pines glowing in the firelight, at the embers and sparks as they pop and rise into the jet-black night, joining the stars and the mysteries around them, and realize that they already have all that they really need? Who will look into others’ faces, listen to their girlfriend’s laughter, smell the magic of smoke in a hay-flavored summer sky and realize that what they have, others would kill or die for–and in fact already have?
Breakfast
Unfinished
Certainly not a strictly-Polish phenomenon: the occupied yet unfinished home. (Not the best example, but this house has had an unfinished upstairs since at least 1996, when I first saw it.)
Likely a phenomenon most common in Poland: the finished yet unoccupied home.
Certainly a purely Polish phenomenon: the two houses side by side.
Evening Walk
The first of many. “Your job, your daily responsibility,” Babcia explains, “is to take the dog for a walk daily.”
Wandering around Jablonka
We begin the day in bed: L and I are so exhausted that we sleep most of the morning away. When we finally get going, we take Babcia to the cemetery to tend Dziadek’s grave. We clean off the candle holders and light new candles, pull weeds, water the flowers.
We walk around the cemetery afterward, looking at graves dating from the beginning of the last century, graves so old that the name has disappeared from the grave marker, whether iron or stone. Who cares for these graves?
Do any family members still live in the area? Does anyone even remember?
Clearly someone remembers: there are flowers on some of the seemingly-forgotten graves.
Maybe the nuns take care of these graves. There’s one walking through the cemetery, and from a distance, it looks like she’s walking among the graves praying a rosary. Perhaps she is — there are apps for everything, including prayers. Perhaps. Or maybe she’s checking her Facebook page.
Everywhere we’ve gone in Poland thus far, we’ve seen the changes that accompany becoming a richer country. Instead of Polski Fiats and Trabants, there are more Volkswagens, a few Fords, significant numbers of BMW’s and even the random Porche or Maserati.
Cemeteries are no exceptions: they show the signs of increased affluence, including some family graves that would have cost likely tens of tens of thousands of zloty.
Yet Babcia has other concerns. Markers require work, upkeep, dedication. She doesn’t want to burden others with such responsibilities.
“After all, what is that? A pile of stone.”
Afterward, we head to a local shop for ice cream, then wander over to the kindergarten where L will be spending her mornings these first two weeks. She’s a bit nervous about it, perhaps because she still doesn’t feel confident with her Polish.
When we enter the foyer, though, I see that all her fears are for nothing.
“The principal of this preschool was a student of mine,” I explain to L. “She speaks English very well. In fact, she was an English teacher before she became principal here.”
Fears partially assuaged, we spend a bit of time on the playground.
Arrival 2013
After two flights, a moderate layover, a couple of car rides — it all seems to have gone by in a flash when L showing her youngest cousin, D, the treasures she brought with her. Of course she kept calling her by her older sister’s name, but little D didn’t mind.
She had someone to swing with, to pick berries and snack on cherries with,
to play hide and seek with
to hide obsessively in the same spot with.
There was someone to climb the back fence with, or at least to try scaling with.
Each arrival has been somewhat different, and this time began with a visit to wojek D’s house. Met us at the airport, and after bit of time at his place, we took Dziadek’s car and headed south. So for the first time, we arrived with me at the wheel.
Babcia of course had treats and treasures for us: a big lunch, strawberry compote, and a dog who was so excited to see L that they both couldn’t contain the excitement.
Yet after so long sitting — ten hours in the plane to Frankfurt including two hours on the runway in Charlotte, a two hour layover, an hour-and-a-half flight to Krakow, and a twenty-five minute drive to D’s house followed by another hour-and-a-half drive to babcia’s — there was only one thing to do: go for a walk.
Everywhere there was someone working: kids who’d ridden their bikes out ot the fields to help with raking the hay.
And there I was, camera in hand, tromping along the rutted road that generally leads people to the fields to work,
and I was just taking pictures of my shadow and worrying about taking pictures of strangers, wondering whether I should ask permission, wondering what that might look like,
a grown man wandering around the fields he should be working in.
And at the end of the walk, the river, a babcia with her two grandchildren played at the water’s edge, with the boy begging over and over for a picture.
“Honey, I left my camera at home,” babcia answered.
“I’ve got a camera,” I offered, which led to a long conversation about the weather, about moving here and there, about vacation — a wandering conversation that seems like it could have only happened outside the States. But perhaps that’s just me projecting.
Once we’ve met our goal, though, we turned to return. Everyone else, though contiued working. As long as there’s sun to illuminate the task at hand, they continued working.
As I neared home, the tractor rattled up behind us, passangers hanging on the back, other helpers coasting along behind.
Perhaps though not in the same way, we might very well have been thinking, “A good day — a good day.”
Growing
Arrival 2000
“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we bounced and bumped along the rough roads of southern Poland. It was June 2000, and I’d been gone from Poland for a year. A number of unexpected developments led me back much sooner than I expected, and I was in the car with two of the first guys I met in Lipnica, two guys I’d consider my best friends of my time in Poland, K and J.
What could have possibly changed in a year, I wondered. Lipnica is the end of the trail: it is on a road that literally led to the base of a mountain and nowhere else. No one passes through Lipnica; one can only go to Lipnica.
“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I’d only meant it metaphorically. What could be new in a village that sustains itself through a bit of logging and a lot of working abroad? One could pass by house after shuttered house in the village, its occupants in Germany, Austria, or even America, working to earn money to finish the house, to improve the house, perhaps even to forget about the house. Lipnica is not a village on the rise, I thought.
All images via Google Street View in anticipation.
“So what’s new in Lipnica?” Perhaps I was asking about gossip, for everything I saw out the car window as we neared the village looked essentially the same. Fields and forests, forests and fields. Probably the same view for generations.
“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we came out of the last forested area before the village.
“You’re about to see,” came the reply.
I probably cursed at the surprise of seeing a gas station in the pristine fields leading to the village of my dreams and often frustrating reality for three years. A travesty; a sacrilege; a profanation.
I’m told the changes in Jabłonka are even more shocking. “You won’t recognize it,” I’m told. “You won’t believe it,” I hear.
And Lipnica?
Charlotte to Frankfurt
The post I thought about writing: how was this a disaster? Let me count the ways. It began with the simple fact that the owners and operators of Charlotte airport thought it would be a good idea to renovate the parking, but this meant demolishing completely the existing parking facilities, putting everyone in long-term parking, and busing them to and from the facility itself. This means long lines to get to the terminals, long lines to get to the parking, long lines to get from the parking to the buses–long lines everywhere. The next disaster took a while to strike. We checked in without problems; we got through security with no issues whatsoever; we found our gate quickly.
And then the problems started again.
There appeared to be a line, so we stood in it. Only to find it wasn’t the line to check in. Check in? Who needs to check in again at the gate? Everyone.
“Are you in line?”
“Yes.”
Five minutes later, I ask again. “Are you in line to check in?”
“No.”
Where is the line for checking in? There is none. There’s a mass of people, a gaggle of travelers, bunched up around the check-in desk, but there’s no line. And once we wade through this mass, we learn that the gentleman whom we were waiting to speak with now has to do the boarding procedures, thank you, and we’ll have to wait for that gentleman, over there. We finally get to the gentleman in question, who makes two pink marks on our boarding passes and hands them back to us, sending us to another mass of people were we’ll wait to board the plane.
Once on the plane, the next adventure: a poor child who is in complete panic, screaming, screaming, screaming endlessly. As a parent, I completely understand, and more than anything, I feel sympathy for the child and the parents. But that sound does grate, even when it’s your own child. And then the second child, in a different part of the plane. And then the third, in yet another. What I’m really expecting at this point is to hear and endure the complaints of the passengers around me, but thankfully, either they all think the same thing that’s running through my head, or they’re just keeping their comments to themselves. It’s a nice unexpected development nonetheless.
We’re about to pull away from the gate when the next adventure strikes: a fault in the electronics of the plane is indicating that a door is open when it clearly isn’t.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain begins. “We’ve got a little malfunction here that is going to require some time to fix. We’ll have to wait a few minutes as the maintenance crew performs some checks and diagnostics.” Fifteen minutes later, we receive the all-clear and begin taxiing out.
At which time the next adventure begins: the air conditioning ceases working. And in a plane of that size, it means instant heat, instant high humidity–instant everything unpleasant. A few minutes pass.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you’ve probably noticed, we are experiencing some difficulties with the air conditioning. We’ll have to return to the gate to have the maintenance crew look at this new issue,” crackles the pilot over the PA system. The diagnostics are estimated to take half an hour; the fix ends up taking another hour or so. All told, by the time we are taxiing back to the runway, we’re two hours behind schedule.
The next challenge is only a mild inconvenience, but irritating nonetheless. The audio system for one of our seats doesn’t work, and so movies are out of the question one of us–there’s little doubt who that “one” is. And of course the airline-provided headphones won’t stay in L’s ears, so I give her the ones I brought and take hers. Which have terrible sound and are inaudible even at the highest volumes when I plug it into the iPod.
It’s easy to complain — too easy. There are other inconveniences, but there are blessings as well. The flight is without incident. L is able to curl up into her seat and fall asleep. The entertainment selections for L are suitable and enjoyable. I manage to get a touch of rest. Still, on the balance sheet, this airline comes out far behind Lufthansa. The moral: be more flexible with your dates and fly the airline you trust.
Now we sit in Frankfurt airport, waiting for our connecting flight. L plays Angry Birds on the Nexus and I sit wondering if I’ll be able to make the drive from Krakow to Jablonka or if we’ll end up staying at the brother’s-in-law place. The hardest part is behind us, I like to think; the most tiring anyway.
Arrival 1996
It’s been almost twenty years since I first went to Poland with seventy-some other Americans in an effort to save the world. We were young. We were idealistic. And truth be told, most of us we were probably a little naive. We were probably there less for altruistic reasons than we would have cared to admit.
We arrived five hours late, thanks to a mechanical issue with the plane and the necessity of flying a replacement part from Atlanta to Dulles, so when we pulled up to the ul. Bolesława Chrobrego 33, it was early evening as opposed to midday. The sun was setting, and all around the square, socialist-realist building where we volunteers would soon be spending so much time, dozens of Poles — our host families — milled about as kids were rollerblading on the sidewalk surrounding the building. We all stood around as the staff matched host families to volunteers, and I stood with my tired bags, wondering where I’d be spending that night. A young man, newly-graduated from liceum, approached me, led by a staff member and accompanied by a middle-aged mustachioed man.
“This is Piotr, your host brother,” said the staff member, and soon, I, Piotr (who insisted I anglicize his name to “Peter”) and the man I assumed to be my host father were roaring through Radom’s streets in a Maluch — a Fiat 126p, a small, ubiquitous car with little leg room and a 24 horsepower engine — arriving at ul. Perłowa 12, where I stayed for twelve weeks.
I never saw the man again, but I saw the arrival grounds on a daily basis, taking a bus (the the number fifteen, was it? or twenty-something?) up ul. Słowackiego, eventually getting dumped an empty lot where the bus turned around and headed back the other direction. I and two other volunteers — a married couple — were the first to get on, and as the bus lumbered along its route, more and more volunteers boarded until there was a little knot of Americans at the back of the bus.
Our days usually started in a small shop next to the bus stop, just a bit in front and to the right of the training facility where we learned to teach English, to speak Polish, to protect the dziennik with our lives, and to do all the little things that were supposed to make our two years in Poland a success. We started at the store, though, because that’s where all good days in Poland start, and because we needed water for the day and perhaps a snack or two. The water was obligatory: with no air conditioning, the buildings that housed our classrooms grew almost unbearable by late morning. Learning to decline Polish adjectives with sweat rolling down your back at ten in the morning is unpleasant to say the least, and the water served to mitigate and to hydrate.
I’ve only been back to Radom a few times since training concluded, and I returned to the training center only once. Every time I’ve been in Poland since, I’ve wanted to return, to photograph the classrooms with the pealing linoleum and stained ceiling. The wonders of the Internet, though, show me that that’s now impossible: where the long buildings once stood there is only a grassy field. The socialist-realist building that housed the cafeteria that served potatoes with dill every single lunch and that held the large meeting room where we gathered as a group is now a library for the Uniwersytet Technologiczno-Humanistyczny im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego, a tech/art (what an odd combination) university.
The one thing that really hasn’t changed: the clump of bars just across from the bus stop. A group of us almost always ended the day there, having something cool to drink before heading back to the rigors of host-family life.
Every time I arrive in Poland again, I think of these first weeks I spent in the summer of 1996. The frustration of learning a difficult language, the adventure of always being out of my element, the ironic simultaneous newness and oldness of everything around me new — all these things made each second seem more alive than anything I’d experienced before.
When I return now, nothing is new. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily lead to contempt, but it does threaten complacency. K and I always visit the same sites, spend time with the same people, drive the same roads — it’s only natural when you only make it back once every couple of years. This summer, though, I’m determined to see things anew again.
Final Evening
We’ll be leaving for Poland tomorrow, but not the whole family. There’s the rub. Only L and I are going, for K and E have been a couple of times in the last few months. That makes the trip bittersweet. I’m excited to go: I haven’t visited my adopted homeland since 2010 (L hasn’t been since late 2011). Yet I’m not excited to leave behind K and E for an extended trip, and neither is the Girl.
“I don’t want to go without them,” has been a recurring theme in these last few days.
There and Back Again
K and the Boy have returned from two weeks in Poland. We spoke on the phone, we video chatted via Skype, but the simple fact was they were there while the Girl and I were here.
And yet we look through the pictures K took and it’s just as if we went there: the familiar visits; the time spent around the kitchen table; the walks in the fields around K’s folks’ house; the pictures at the small chapel on the way to the river; breakfast with the sun streaming through the window; the silly play on the kitchen floor.
We weren’t there, but we can see the whole story in a handful of pictures.
Departure
The house feels empty: the Girl, asleep in the other room; K and the Boy, somewhere over the Atlantic. It’s an odd feeling, this quiet, not entirely unwelcome after the stressful departure. Rain, rain, and more rain, and a delayed departure from Munich which meant a delayed arrival in then departure from Charlotte. And then there’s the question of further delays from Munich to Krakow. So it’s been a fairly up-and-down evening.
When the Girl discovered the up escalator paired with “stairs that don’t move,” the up-and-down became literal. It was a good distraction: the Boy was hungry and the Girl was fidgety.
Everyone else was, too. Especially in this part of the airport — baggage claim. It’s the worst part of any journey, especially the return home. All you want to do is get back to your own comfortable and known reality and you’re waiting with dozens more people for the worst carousel in the world to do its job.
After some slightly stressful difficulties at passport control, K and the Boy disappeared into the labyrinth of departure gates as L and I walked away, with one of us shedding enormous tears and the other only worried about the journey home and how long the wait for the shuttle bus to the parking — Douglas airport is adding parking garages, which ironically makes for nightmarish parking — will take.
A slow tearful return ends with the Girl in bed while I put off shuffling to an empty bed for as long as I can.
Departures stink.
Packing
Packing is seldom fun. It should be an event filled with great anticipation, but the stress of forgetting something usually ruins that.
K is getting ready for a trip to Polska, leaving tomorrow. I tell her, “Except for the moonshine, there is nothing you’re taking that can’t be replaced in Poland should you lose it or forget it.” And as for the shine — bought in a liquor store with an official seal, it can hardly be called shine, so even losing that’s no big loss.
“How I dislike packing,” she says. “How I used to like packing when I was younger. It was a sign of adventure. Now, it’s just trouble.”
Sunday Downtown
We never made it to Falls Park during our walk yesterday, so the family decided to start there today. I would have guessed, were someone to ask me, that we were too late to get much of an autumnal view, but I was happily mistaken.
This time, though, we took the whole family, including our one-and-a-half tooth Wonder Boy who seems willing to smile at just about anything.
The Boy’s smile probably had something to do with my wiggling fingers and silly face, but with colors like this, though, who could resist a smile?
As we headed into the main downtown area of the park, the sun came out fully and consistently, making the Peace Center glow. We, though, were less glowing, especially the Girl, who had by then adopted an all-too-familiar refrain: “I’m hungry.”
Nothing is quite as filling on a fall day as an ice cream cone,
and it never tastes as better than when outside. Or so someone told me.
Final Day
The final day at Lake Tillery also included a boat ride, with the girls sitting in the back singing Polish Christmas carols as the Boy slept.
The destination: “Big Bridge,” a name that sounds just like something a three- or four-year-old would name a bridge that is rather large. Sort of like Big Wolf. (He still sleeps with the Girl every night. “He keeps me calm,” she once explained.)
Of course, there was one last swim…
asdf
First
Nana and Papa certainly have the picture somewhere: I stand by my uncle’s pond, rod and reel in hand, with a small fish on the line. I must have been four, maybe five. The rod and reel seemed impossibly heavy, and I thought the photographer — my uncle? mother? — would never snap the picture.
So I think I can understand the Girl’s frustration with me as I maneuvered for picture after picture of her first fish.
Boat Ride Bookends, Part Two
After the boat ride and swimming, we were shocked suddenly to discover it was lunch time. And once lunch was over, we were shocked at how tired the kids were — except the two youngest.
But soon after, everyone was rested and the water called us back again. The little puppy running around the lakefront — dubbed Cutie by the kids — was quite an attraction, too. In fact, more so in many ways. Even when the puppy wasn’t there, they played as if she were there. “We must find Cutie!” L cried out, fishing for her with a bit of line and a magnet. “She must have fallen in!”
But she hadn’t — we were the only ones to fall in. Make that jump in — the Girl’s newest water obsession.
Meanwhile, the youngest looked on and ate an early dinner.
With a twelve-week-old, our schedule is his schedule. “He ate at three,” K begins, figuring the next feeding time and its impact on our less-than-tight schedule. Sometimes that’s a challenge; at the lake, it was inconsequential. After all, how many vacations run on a tight schedule? Well, scratch that: I know some who run their vacations like boot camp.
Evening came and we decided on another boat ride. The Boy took it all in stride: his expression consistently said, “Oh well, here we go again. This should be fun…”
And it was for some of us. L got to drive a boat for the first time. It was a carefree frolic for her. No stress; no worries, no fear.
We returned to find brilliance.
Brilliance that shifted.
