A new home, yet again.

So, as of one week and one day ago, I live in a city called Szczecin.  It's pronounced "Sh-ch-eh-chin" or "Sh-ch-eh-cheen," depending who you're talking to. Say it with me.  Again.  Faster.  Just kidding.  I know, it's ridiculous.  But it's home now.  Szczecin, for those who are interested, is in the Northwest corner of Poland, less than 15 kilometers ( that's about 9 miles) from the German border and about 70 kilometers (43 miles) to the Baltic Sea.  Basically, it's really far from the rest of Poland.  So how did I end up here?

Well, after I finished my CELTA, I started looking for work by picking a few really good schools and applying to the different branches, even if it wasn't in one of the cities I'd initially pictured myself in.  Then I wrote to other schools in the cities I'd had in mind.  Well, I got a few calls for interviews, and I talked to a few Directors, and at the end of the day, I chose a school that I could get behind, and a DOS I really wanted to work with.  It was actually an easier decision than I thought it'd be.  Yes, I wanted to move to Kraków or Gdańsk, but I didn't come to Poland just to look at beautiful buildings or to get drunk with people I met on CELTA.  I came here to change the miserable path I was on.  I came to teach, to learn Polish, to start a new life.  And I thought I could do that best with Bell, in Szczecin.

I spent about a week in Kraków before I came here, and it was wonderful.  I kind of fell in love.  It's a bit touristy, but for me, the city had so many beautiful places and, more importantly, such character that I never wanted to leave.  But I had to, so last Tuesday, I woke up early, bid adieu to my friends at the Mosquito Hostel (if you're ever in Kraków, stay there.), and got on a train to Szczecin.  For 10 hours.  Luckily, I had an excellent book with me (you'll find the link for that to your left), so I read for a good long stretch, and I napped for a while.  When the train stopped in Poznań, a lot of people got on.  Including the new love of my life.  A middle-aged man, blind drunk, came into my compartment and decided he wanted to have a seat right next to me, despite the fact that there were three empty seats to my right, and talk about an inch from my face with his 90-proof breath.  When he realized I was not Polish, it got really special.  He spoke to me the whole way to Szczecin, in a mixture of Polish and English, telling me how I was beautiful and should come stay with him and his wife.  He sang "Bad Boys" repeatedly for no apparent reason.  And he kissed my hand several times and even asked to see my breasts.  So romantic.  The younger (and handsomer) man in the compartment, to his credit, tried several tactics to distract Drunky, but in the end our new relationship could only be put to rest by the train reaching his stop.  I've never been so relieved to get to someone else's stop.

When I got of the train, the School Director, Zenon, was waiting to take me to my new flat.  It is right in the middle of what the locals call the "brand new old town," because large parts of it were destroyed in WWII and only very recently restored.  It's a nice flat, but it's big (for Europe), and I feel a bit like I should get a roommate or something, because it doesn't seem like I need all of this to myself.  I have a few photos:

kitchen

living room  

My first full day in town, I stopped by the school to say hello to Craig, the DOS, and to see what was there, I walked around Szczecin a bit, and I met up with a few teachers at this place:

Brama Jazz Cafe

This is a bar/cafe in one of the gates from the old city fortifications.  How they got the licensing to make this place a bar, I'll never know, but I love the idea of it.  There's also a lot of outdoor seating for nice sunny days.  Still, despite the city gate turned watering hole, the city did not immediately appeal to me, I'll admit.  I'm pretty sure it was a Kraków hangover.  That, and after having been in two Polish cities that were anchored by massive, beautiful ryneks (old market squares), I was missing the lack of one here pretty keenly.  However, Ken and Laura, who've been teaching here for 6 and 7 years, respectively, told me I should take a walk out to Park Kasprowicza, which is beyond the City Hall. So on Saturday, that's what I did.  So far it is, without a doubt, my favorite part of the city.  You walk around the City Hall and come out into the Jasne Błonia, a huge open green space lined by paths, trees, statues and fountains: 

Jasne Błonia

Then, if you keep walking, you head straight into a tangle of forest paths leading to a rose garden, a river/canal straddled by dainty pedestrian bridges, and if you keep going, even deeper into the forest.  It was Saturday and the weather was beautiful, so all of Szczecin was in the park with their children and their dogs, but it was still peaceful and there was so much room to roam around.  Here are a couple of my favorite parts:

peeping out onto the city

ducks under the bridge

Autumn reaching out
to meet me again.

After spending the day in the park, I felt refreshed and ready to start treating this city like my home.  On Sunday I was invited to Joasia's house (She is one of the Polish teachers) for a barbecue.  In Poland, pretty similarly to the States, that means you drink beer and cook sausages over an open flame.  There were also some home-baked pastries filled with rose jam made by Joasia's mother.  Yeah.  you heard me.  Rose jam. Made from rose petals. It was different, and delightful.   Pani Joasia was a wonderful hostess, and her animals (all rescued) are adorable.  

 On Monday, we (the three new teachers) got a tour of the city, and I saw even more of what's lovely about Szczecin.  Then we had drinks and listened to an insane pianist/lounge singer who seemed to read our minds (and did a pretty mean Louis Armstrong impression for a Polish guy). As for the rest of this week, it's been about easing into work. I'm training, getting to know my colleagues, taking some Survival Polish lessons, and observing some placement testing.  Next week (or maybe Friday), I'll start teaching.  I'll get my schedule tomorrow.  I'm nervous, but ready to jump in.  

This is getting absurdly long, so I'll just wrap it up by saying this:  I'm happy.  So far, I like my colleagues, my school, and my boss.  Szczecin's beauty is not as in your face as Kraków's, but it creeps up on you in quiet moments when you aren't paying attention.  It's home, and I'm glad.

A Day in Hell

     As some of you know, I went to Auschwitz Monday morning.  A few of you have asked for my impressions about it.  I’m happy to oblige you, because it really is an experience that’s got me thinking about a lot of things.  That said, I’m glad that I’ve had time to let it roll around in my head for a while before writing about it, because I didn’t have the experience there that I expected, and I wasn’t really sure what to say before.

     First, a bit of background: There are two camps near one another: Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau.  The first is set up more like a museum, and houses most of the famous sights and the disturbing exhibits.  It has the famous sign above the entrance, “arbeit macht frei,” (translation: work makes you free).  There are piles and piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, a wall of photos, and even a room full of human hair (we weren’t allowed to photograph the hair, but let me assure you that the sheer quantity is enough to make even someone with guts of steel feel queasy).  There is one gas chamber, a “death wall” for executions by shooting, a crematorium, and the building where medical experiments were carried out.  It is pretty small.  Birkenau has largely been left alone, except that most of the wooden barracks on the men’s side were falling down, so they used timber from the broken ones to re-create several examples, and left only the chimneys up from the others.  There is also a memorial in between two of the gas chambers, which are left in ruins, as they were destroyed by the Nazis near the end of the war.  It is enormous.  As far as you can see, there are rows and rows of barracks (built by the prisoners themselves, and each housing hundreds of prisoners).

     The museum was pretty hard to see, but it could have been worse.  Whoever set it up meant for the buildings and objects to speak for themselves, and therefore did not include images of many of the more heart-wrenching, gut-turning things that I have seen in books and movies.  But for me, somehow, Birkenau was harder to see.  It was just buildings and fields, and a railroad platform running down the middle.  But when I thought about the sheer number of people who’d been trapped in there, starving, squeezing together to eat, sleep, shit, and die, when I thought about the fact that some 75% of people who arrived were killed before they ever saw those crowded barracks, and that it was the prisoners (and not the soldiers) who had to clean up and cremate all the dead bodies, including their neighbors and family, sometimes…that was the part that felt most real.  That was when I felt the goose bumps you feel when you’re standing in a place where something momentous has happened.  I was walking the long path to the gas chambers, and I knew it was the same path that so many took to their deaths, and it occurred to me how lucky I’ve been, and how self-indulgent.  How no matter what is in my past, no matter what sad things may be in my future, I have never seen that kind of senseless evil.  I have never met anyone who could kill thousands and thousands of people with the twitch of his thumb in the wrong direction.  It wasn’t just Hitler.  Everybody talks about Hitler, and how he set the whole thing in motion, but there is no way that all of this evil was even planned by just one man.  It was planned by many, and carried out by thousands.  Did you know that a lot of Jewish people actually bought tickets on those horrid cargo trains?  They were told that they were going to be resettled in a better place, and they were sold tickets to their own torture and executions.  I don’t know how I didn’t know that, but I didn’t.  And we separate ourselves from it so easily, blame it on one nutcase, but it wasn’t one man, it could happen again, and most of us don’t show proper respect for those facts, as far as I’m concerned.

     Some of the people I was on the tour with told me that they were “disappointed,” because they’d expected something more.  I didn’t exactly feel that way myself, but I knew what they meant.  I’d actually been worried that the experience might prove to be a little bit too much for me.  It’s been two days now, and I think I’ve figured out why we didn’t get what we expected.  We’ve been inundated with movies, stories, books, photos of the violence, torture and suffering that took place in those camps.  Somewhere in our minds, we filed it all away with all of the other stories we’d been told in our lives.  An awful one, but another story.  My generation has never seen cruelty on that scale, thank God.  The closest we’ve probably come is 9-11, or Abu Graib.  Both awful, but not like the Holocaust.  And even though we know it’s true, we can’t really imagine it.  The camp doesn’t have blood stains on the walls, the grass has continued to grow, the sun still shines there, butterflies swoop around.  The kind of suffering that happened there just doesn’t, and probably can’t feel real to anyone as privileged as we have been.  I’m grateful for that.  And incredibly humbled.

    

If you want to see the rest of my photos, they're here.

Thanks for reading.

I'm dizzy.

This has been a really uncomfortable (but amazing) week.  I thought I was completely prepared to come here and deal with the ambiguity of not really knowing where I’d end up after the CELTA, but you can’t ever completely prepare for that, can you?  Whether I meant for them to or not, images formed in my mind about the places I might want to end up, the schools I might want to work in, the people I’d like to be close to.  But because I placed priority on good schools, on my roots, and on what I really wanted, I let go of all of that and branched out.  I stretched my hands out to people and places I wasn’t thinking about last week.  I decided to decide when the time came that I had to.  I haven’t been able to get the butterflies out of my stomach since (and my pants are already getting quite a bit too big for me.  If I keep this up, I’ll be swimming in them by next week).  Despite the discomfort (or maybe even because of it), I’m really feeling a part of the world again.  I’m not just forming images in my head of what my life should be, or will be, or could be.

So because of all of this, I’ve been thinking about two kinds of people: those who reach out, and those who don’t.  I always used to think of myself as one of those who does reach out, but for the last five years or so,  I’ve mostly been among those who don’t. I placed far too much stock in the necessity of seeming like I was strong, or cool, or any of a million other things that I couldn’t possibly have seemed like, walking around swathed in the emotional equivalent of bubble wrap. (And if any of that was cool, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be cool.)   I’ve known this for quite a while, and I’ve wanted to open myself up, but I’d been stumped about how exactly to go about fixing it.  It just seemed like trying to teach myself to breathe underwater. 

Well, maybe it’s the culture here, maybe it’s got something to do with getting away from home and all the expectations about who I am there, or who I have been,  maybe it’s because I need help from other people here, or maybe it’s just the right time, but now I’ve gone back to reaching, without even really thinking about it.  And because of it, I’m making friends, learning amazing new things from them, and noticing things I never would have seen on my own.  I’m interviewing for jobs in places I never thought I’d live (happily!), having legitimately interesting conversations during these interviews instead of just posing and cringing inside.  I’m opening myself up to the honesty of really, really wanting something. 

I feel like myself again.

*

Stamps and Spadek

     At the post office the other day, the extroverted guy who’d been in line in front of me (who had shamelessly flirted with the cranky-looking woman behind the glass window, by the way) came over and fired a question at me in rapid Polish.  

     I stared dumbly at him for a minute before stammering out,“Przepraszam, nie mówię dobrze po polsku. ” (Excuse me, I don’t speak Polish very well.)  

     He looked at me as though I were some kind of alien for a second and then said, “Nie mówisz po polsku?!?  (You don’t speak Polish?!?)  Where are you from?” (In perfect English, of course.) 

     I smiled sheepishly and said, “America.” 

     For him, that seemed to explain it all.  “Ooooh.  America!  But you’re Polish, right?  Your family is Polish?” 

     “Yes.” 

     “I could tell.  You look Polish.  Why don’t you learn the language, though?  You should learn the language.  It’s your roots, your spadek.”

     I thought he was trying to have a go at me, there in the post office, for being some stupid American who couldn’t even be bothered to learn the language when I was in the country of my fucking spadek.  I could feel my hackles starting to rise.  Why was the post office always the place where these things happened to me?  I was never going to set foot in a Polish post office again.  
     Then he said, “Uczysz się po polsku?” Are you learning Polish?

     Well, yes, of course.  “Oczywiście, ale…”

     He was smiling now.  “Ah, jest skomplikowany.”

     ‘Skomplikowany’ was a brand new word for me.  I’d never heard it before.  But when he said it, if you try to say it, it seems obvious.  It means what it sounds like: ‘complicated.’  I nodded enthusiastically and tried the new word.  “Tak.  Jest bardzo skomplikowany.”

     We laughed, we smiled and said our goodbyes, he wished me luck, and I went on my way.  But of course the whole experience made me more eager than ever to learn the language.  To get it down, once and for all, and to be able to really talk to people.  Really be a part of society here.  It occurred to me that just being able to order coffee or beer or say good morning to the woman in the store was not enough of an accomplishment for me anymore.  I was dying to really talk to people.  I’d been called out as an imposter, a foreign Pole, and I didn’t like the feeling.  I wanted to be a real Pole.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen just like that, just because you want it to.  I’ve been working hard at it, but it’s still going to take ages.

     I walked away light-hearted, though, because he really hadn’t been meaning to lecture me; he was just interested.  Light-hearted, because there was something about his bluntness that felt real and good, compared to the nice baristas who were always pretending my Polish was so lovely.  And it obviously wasn’t.  But I thought about how far I’d really progressed.  From the flight over, when I was too afraid to say the word for “chicken,” to the flight attendant, even though I knew it, and I resorted to English with her,  to this moment in the post office, when I’d been able to have a conversation about my spadek and my Polish education, about 1/2 of which was actually in Polish.  Probably not very pretty Polish, but Polish nonetheless.  And I can’t really expect more.  After all, it’s skomplikowany.

     I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt.  I’d been confronted with my deficiencies, had seen the long road curving ahead of me.  But I could also see how far I’d come.  I’d had a small victory, there in the post office.  And moments like that, they are exactly why I came here.  I am in the right place.

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring

Ale brzydka pogoda! It's been cold and rainy all week. There's a forecasted low of 48 today. It feels like late October. I don't think it's typical weather for the end of August (especially since they're talking about it on the news non-stop), but this is supposedly the hottest city in Poland, and I'm this close to buying a new coat, because the one I brought in my suitcase is just not cutting it. If I didn't possibly have to pack all my stuff up and get on a train to move again (and me with too much to carry already!), I'd have done it by now. Ayisha and I somehow got on the subject of Halloween today, and she asked me about hot apple cider (apparently, they don't have it in England). Now, all I can think of are the things I like when Autumn rolls in, like pumpkin spice lattes, chai, knitting and wearing scarves, crunchy leaves underfoot on sunny days, and carving pumpkins with children. Natalie will be three in October, and if my job search is successful, I won't be there. I feel kind of bad about that. But I hope she knows how much I love her.

Despite the weather, Poland in general, and Wrocław in particular, still has a lot of charm for me. I'm always running across odd little buildings or sweet, helpful people who make me smile. That said, I admit that, quite aside from increasing my odds of getting a job, I'm excited to be applying in some other cities because I'm feeling the itch to see more of the country instead of just settling down in the first place I happened to touch down in. Of course, if I get work here, I'd be perfectly happy with that. It's a beautiful place, and the atmosphere is probably going to change again when all the students come back. And once I'm settled in, I might be able to take the odd weekend trip to visit friends in other cities. I'm actually pretty nervous about getting a job. And since I'm done with CELTA, and a lot of my friends have gone home, I have the long days stretching before me again, giving me plenty of time to think about everything I'm worried about. Don't get me wrong - I'm using the time to send out my CV, but all I think about as I write cover letters is "What if this doesn't work?" I guess worrying about it really doesn't do me much good, and I should just try to take it easy on myself, but that's easier said than done, isn't it?

I took a little break and watched about 15 minutes of the Polish version of Family Feud today. I don't watch much TV, but I turn it on once in a while to help me with my Polish. What I learned is that Family Feud is even less exciting when you can't play along. The questions and answers were honestly a bit beyond me. But I did understand most of the contestant-host banter. I think it must be some kind of rule that the host of this style of show has to flirt with all the ladies in each family. Especially the older ones. Did anyone else think it was weird the way Richard Dawson used to kiss everyone? The Polish host doesn't do that, but he does call every woman "bardzo ładna," whether she is or not.

The dogs continue to be lovely, and though I'm usually not keen on the idea of taking them out in the cold the first thing when I wake up, by the time I'm out there walking them I feel better and more energized about the day ahead of me. Having them here to distract me has actually done worlds of good. Waru is nuts about tennis balls, and Hades is nuts about Waru, so he chases them with her, and puts up a teensy tiny fight before giving her the ball - I think more because he knows how much she likes it than because he actually wants the ball. And if I wanted a marriage of convenience, I think all I'd have to do is take those dogs with me everywhere I go. Young men flirt with the dogs constantly. And who can blame them? They are beautiful, aren't they?

Waru

Hades

Anyway, I've got plenty to do, so, that'll be it until next time. Do zobaczenia!