Pióro

Gaining confidence with a new language is important. It’s something I try to instill in my students. But I found out how over-confidence can make for a bit of trouble.

Martha and I were going to prepare some food in the hostel. We needed butter. No, problem, I could skip out to the store and pick some up. It was an “everything behind the counter” type shop, which is hell when you don’t have the language to ask for things. Not for me though. No, I had most of the food words I needed down cold.

The lady asked if she could help me.

I said yes and asked for what I thought was butter. The word I used doesn’t actually exist. It was close to the word for butter, but it also sounded a lot like ‘town.’

The nice lady thought she didn’t hear me correctly. She asked if she heard me say ‘meat,’ which was a perfectly reasonable guess considering the garble that came out of my mouth. The odds were good the I hadn’t come to her small shop to buy the town or any town for that matter.

But no, I wasn’t there to buy meat; I was there to buy ‘buh-DDER’. That’s what I had said. So I repeated my new nonsense word slowly, enunciating very clearly and a bit patronisingly with a tone of “what are you Byelorussian or something? It’s Polish I’m speaking here.”

The nice lady, ignoring my unjust condescension, took a second to think about just what the heck I was trying to say. Then her eyes brightened.

“Ah, butter!”

Hearing her say the word properly hit me with instant humility and sheepishness. I then wrapped up the interaction as quickly and politely as I could and walked out while muttering the proper pronunciation of ‘butter.’

The best way to get into the Ukraine is to lie. At least that is the current wisdom circulating around web sites for bandanna-wearing, backpack-toting bo-ho’s. They say that it’s best to get a personal visa instead of a tourist visa. You tell the authorities that you are simply going to Ukraine to visit your great-uncle Yaroslav and have no intention of hiking around Crimea. A fake address that looks reasonably authentic is all you need to put on your visa application. In the end, you get in and travel wherever you want because people on a personal visa don’t have to resister. Frankly, skipping any contact with post-Soviet bureaucracies in a mafia-controlled country is okay by me.

To lead a bit of credibility to our visa application, Martha and I dug up a great-uncle Yaroslav, who lives in a small town called Travneve, just north-east of Ternopil’. Armed with the address, we hit the Ukrainian consulate in Kraków.

As I was filling out the application form in the queue, a lady in front of me started pointing to the address I was copying onto the form. Her Polish was too fast, so I had no idea what she was saying. I’m not sure if the address was familiar or there was something about my grandmother’s hard-to-read Cyrillic that caught her eye. Her daughter waved her mother off of me with that eye-roll that only embarrassed teenagers can do.

The nice but nosy lady wasn’t the only one checking out my papers. Shortly after we arrived, a bug-eye little man came in. He jumped our stair-case queue and went right to the gate and tried to open it. He asked nosy some question in Ukrainian and somewhat resigned himself to waiting. He looked like version of Dr. Frankenstein’s s servant after corrective surgery on the hunch. Standing beside me, he whistled and fidgeted and looked over my shoulder. Mar saw what he was up to and gave him the look of death, which kept him at bay for a moment.

“So you are Canadian?”

It turns out he’s an Israeli journalist working in Kyiv. He speaks Ukrainian, Russian and apparently English. He covers culture and Jewish issues in the capital. The first thing I wanted to ask him is if he was at all nervous about being a journalist in Ukraine. I also wanted to ask about whatever the hell Kuchma is doing to the government. But I kept the conversation general and meaningless. It’s probably not proper to talk politics when you are trying to pave your way into a country with white-lies.

Another man came in. Like the journalist, he didn’t queue up properly. Instead, he stood beside the journalist, but on one step higher. The journalist, not to be out done, moved up to an even higher step. They leap-frogged like this until both men had pressed themselves up against the gate. I also went up to the gate; however, it was not to thank the Israeli for showing me exactly what qualities a minor journalist needs, but to secure our position in line. Queues in this part of the world are not always sensible things.

When we got to the lady behind the bullet-proof glass, we found her very helpful. She took one look at our visa applications and refused to process them on the grounds that February is not the time to get a June visa. Such advance planning does not jive with them. Better to be told such information right away as opposed to making the trip back to Kraków for no reason. She also said that we shouldn’t get a private visa. A tourist visa is cheaper, by $10 USD and you still don’t have to register. This was uncharacteristically helpful for consulate staff, but I didn’t want to tell my family about this information. I had just spent the previous two weeks e-harassing my mom and, by extension my aunt and my grandmother, for great-uncle Yaroslav’s address. Still, I’m going to hold onto that paper with all the funny Cyrillic. You never know, it might come in handy.

Moving around Central and Eastern Europe is still a pain in the ass for Canadians. Martha and I are waiting with bated breath for EU accession in May. Hopefully we will be able to come and go through Poland and Czech with the same ease as Germany or France. At the moment, no one really knows what is going to happen with visa requirements in the accession countries, but the adoption of EU travel policies would be a blessing that would allow us to avoid countless headaches.

It would also mean we could go bowling, which is a pretty popular activity around here. Our Polish friends have invited us out countless times for some ten-pin antics and we’ve had to decline. We can look across the Olza river, but we can’t touch. The Poles, Brits and Yanks we know don’t have this problem. As our friend and fellow teacher Aaron says, “There are no fences in an American’s world.” Maybe it’s time Canada invaded somebody.

In December, Martha and I had the pleasure of visiting the Czech consulate. We got up before dawn to catch a bus for Katowice, which is essentially what Hamilton would look like if it was destroyed in a world war and then managed by communists, or at least the latter. All this was in an effort to get a single entry visa to visit Kavita and Mark. It was worth it.

The first visit, or the fill-out-forms visit, was a breeze. We jumped the line of Russians trying to beat impending EU border clampdowns and filled out our documents. The only thing that struck us as a little insane was the level of security within the consulate. A huge Polish bouncer escorted us to a bare white room. There was a tinted window at the far end and lights blazing all around it. Since we were blinded by the lights and greeted with silence, we assumed there wasn’t anyone around. We waited a few seconds before the window surprised us with it’s impatient intercom voice.

“Yes. Can I help you?”

The whole affair took twenty minutes. In one week, everything would be ready. So for one week, the Czech consulate in Katowice was our favourite consulate.

Because of our pleasant initial experience, Martha and I let our guard down. The next week we took a later bus to Katowice and got to consulate an hour later than before. The door to the consulate was locked. The bouncer was letting in people one at time so Martha and I were trapped in the outer courtyard, left to shiver the with Russians.

We waited for hours. We were some of the last people in the queue. We finally got in within the last fifteen minutes of consular hours. When we spoke to the blazing lights, she said we couldn’t get our visas. Visa pick up was done during the first hour of the consulate’s workday. Then the lights went off and the window wouldn’t speak anymore.

This news was no good. It’s a two hour bus ride from Cieszyn to Katowice. Mar and I had balanced our schedules so we could make the trip during the week. Another trip to the consulate would be a colossal waste of time and money. And where did this random pick-up rule come from?

We were escorted to the front door. I pleaded with the bouncer in broken Polish. He pointed me to the intercom by the front door. I buzzed it and asked in Polish if anyone there spoke in English. I was told to wait. I waited a while. I buzzed again. Nothing. Then I buzzed again. Still nothing. One more buzz and then a very angry buzzer asked me, in English, if I understood “wait.”

During this time of reflection, I decided I would resort to a strategy known as The American. We learnt it from a Brit we’d met when we were in St. Petersburg. It was at the visa registration office. He told us before going in that if there was trouble, he’d resort to The American, a posture that involves carrying on in very loud English about the ridiculousness of his situation and why they should do as he demanded. He never told us what his success rate was with this technique, but he wielded it with embarrassing gusto and futility in Petersburg.

When I finally got an audience with the intercom, I’d explained that we weren’t told about visa pick up time. (This was true, but later I noticed it was written in small print on the sign at the front gate. Still, I felt justified.) We were at the consulate ten minutes before the cut-off time (well, maybe one or two minutes), but we had to wait in line (true). That we could not get our visas today was “not acceptable” (a very common phrase used by practitioners of The American.)

Stunningly, The American worked. I picked up the visas a few hours later. I was nearly late for my classes, but visas were in our possession.

Because of all this, Martha and I started preparing for our Ukrainian visas at the beginning of February for our trip this summer. With all the trouble we’ve had with Polish and Czech consulates, we could only anticipate the worst from a country that rates a mere 2.3 on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (2003). I had phoned the consulate a few times to double-check their requirements and to see if I would get the same story each time. I didn’t let their curt but helpful demeanour throw me. Martha and I hit the Krakow consulate on the first day of our winter break. The lady behind the simple bullet-proof glass looked over our documents carefully and asked us when we planned to visit the Ukraine.

“June and July.”

“Well, then, I can’t give you visas.”

Turns out they can’t issue visas more than a month ahead of your planned entry. So that was that. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pull out The American as the pressures of time, money, pride or convenience were not at stake. There was nothing we could do.

Maybe there is a such a thing as “too prepared.”

Spring has been coming often to our part of Poland. It snows for a week, whitewashing everything and then it soars, sending all the white-stuff into the Bobrówka stream, which cuts through the middle of town. This Saturday, we caught the cycle on the upswing: the sun was out and slush lined the streets.

Four of us headed to one of the two old Jewish cemeteries in town. It’s on a road that divides a collection of apartments blocks with some suburban houses. One of us had heard that it was a very “romantic” cemetery. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me think of two Goths with a picnic blanket, necking by a tombstone.

Like the Christian cemeteries around, this one was fenced off, but unlike those cemeteries, this fence didn’t have a gate. We entered at a section that had been torn down, next to a hollow brick building. The building could have been an old synagogue. I’m not sure. There were two plaques on it. On one I could only decipher the word “Gestapo” and on the other, something about “Hitler.” There were sets of names and dates.

Also, in contrast to the hyper-manicured Christian cemeteries, this one looked positively bayou. It had a thick twiggy underbrush. Vines crawled everywhere. All of the stones were tilting and some had even been partially engulfed in the older hardwoods. I followed a path that someone had recently set into the snow. It took me to the middle of the north end, where it just stopped. I had to chuckle at bit, having arrived at a dead-end in cemetery.

We struggled to find a date on one of the stones, which was tough since none of us read Hebrew. There were a pair of stones that were written in German. The dates were from the mid 1800s, during Austria’s rule of the area.

I headed to the western side of the cemetery. The sun was a few hours from sunset. The houses next to the graveyard were quiet. It struck me as odd that these houses were so close to this neglected symbol. It exists like a box in the basement, with contents that should be saved, but whose caretakers have no intention of ever really revisiting. Living so close to this cemetery has probably made it invisible to the locals. It’s like a feature of the landscape, like any abandoned plot. It’s historical significance barely registers as people conduct their day-to-day. Again, the complete opposite of Christian cemeteries, which glow every night with a few candles lit by conscientious family members.

I made my way back to the entrance by the abandoned building. I found a hole in the building’s north side wall that I could squeeze through.

Inside, I found fewer liquor bottles than I had expected. I was in the main room, which was totally open. One side-room to the south-west had a sketchy-looking floor so I just stuck my head in to catch a bit of the sun setting over the cemetery. There was a hall on the east end of the building that ran parallel to the street. I could hear people walking and talking through the broken front windows. I kept still so they wouldn’t hear me.

Back at the hole in the wall entrance I found Patrick and Aaron waiting. Patrick decided to squeeze through the hole too. We went up-stairs. Patrick said he felt like he did when he used to break into construction sites as a kid. I felt the same way. Before we were wandering around an old cemetery; now we were trespassing.

The last stop was the basement. It was narrow and completely black. Patrick worked his lighter, but it kept going out. He said it was just like in a horror movie. Of course, that got my mind racing. It was very Blair Witch. We found someone’s bedding on the floor and, with practised calm, decided to leave.

I’ve found one site (you will have to hit the Union Jack in the corner of this page for the English version) with a history of the Jews in Cieszyn. It talks about some cemeteries, but I haven’t been able to find exact information on the one we visited. I’m not sure what records remain.

It’s been snowing straight for the last four days, not a full on dump, but always a consistent dusting of flakes from the sky. It all makes us a little homesick.

We got the first serious dump of snow on 15 December. Poles, to a greater extent than Torontonians, seem to have a collective amnesia when it comes to snow and its effects on driving. Before the white stuff flies, there are declarations that one doesn’t need snow-tires because one is a careful driver. But on that December day, the amount of fish-tailing I saw from my seat on the bus was ridiculous. One of my students said that it is like this every year. Although the snow comes like clockwork, the first snowfall catches everyone by surprise.

I was shocked to find that my bus to work was incapacitated by a slight incline. After an hour of being stranded on the side of the road, someone asked the bus driver what was going on. Frighteningly enough, I understood the driver’s answer. There was one way he could take the bus: “Only down.” I got off the bus and decided to walk to the next stop. Maybe another bus would get by mine. I’d take whichever was the fittest.

Somehow, Mr. Only-down got his vehicle down the hill, past the line-up of cars that had collected behind him. Who knows how? He took a running start at the incline and met me at my new stop, just past the top. I sheepishly got on and allowed the man to drive me the rest of the way. Since that day, drivers seem to have gotten used to the snow. The constant flurries haven’t disturb my bussing activities.

Tonight, the snow is extra fluffy, a layer of sequinnned cotton-batten, if ever such a material could be made. It’s the kind that falls through air that sits at -10°C. A teacher that Martha works with hooked us up with a uniquely Polish way to beat the cold. The cheeky stereotypers can stifle their cries of “wodka,” I’m talking about another great Polish invention: bigos. Bigos is usually translated as “Hunter’s Stew” but that’s not very helpful. This dish is mostly cabbage and meat stewed for days. That’s right, this stuff is supposed to sit for days before it’s just right. The rumour is that real bigos won’t be on the menu in restaurants after EU ascension because the whole “sittin’ out for days” part doesn’t jive with EU food standards.

As unappetising as “cabbage” and “stewing for days” may sound, the end result is great. Even the travel guide books advise you to get your hands on the stuff if you can, not the stuff out of a can or in lower-end restaurants, who resort to the aforementioned canned concoction, but the honest-to-goodness, someone’s-babcia-was-chained-to-the-stove-and-cooked-this-goodness, kind of bigos.

Well, today Martha and I got our hands on some of the good stuff. Joanna, Martha’s teaching colleague and star piłkarzyki player, hooked us up. Now, we are as warm as can be.

What do two people do on Christmas Eve when they are far away from their family and friends in a cold cold Slavic country? They go to church, that’s what.

I have a range of emotions associated with church spanning awe to boredom. Since my grandmothers are not reading this site, I can say quite safely that the faith I had in my youth has been pretty much mothballed. But I still have a residual curiosity about Catholicism. It’s more anthropological than anything else. So, I wanted to see what Midnight Mass is like at St. Mary Magdalene’s Church in the centre of town.

The church is nice and old. I’m told it’s late baroque. The ceiling is plane, but the altar and side chapels have impressive art. There is stain glass, but it never seems that impressive because the surrounding buildings have been put up too close to the church.

I hoped mass would be scary. I’ve said this many times before, but religion isn’t any good if you are not afraid. The services I’ve been to in Whitby are as insightful as the new-age section at a Chapters. But I remember that the Polish church in Ottawa could be scary. (The church, St. Hyacinth, is actually a lot nicer than its gaudy web site.) It could be really boring too, but let’s stick with the scary. The services were in Polish, which made them strange. The stations of the cross were stone with weird Art Nouveau figures. Whenever the congregation—which was mostly old ladies—sang, they did so with a unified wail that ached of Old World sadness. I was hoping some of this fearful magic would be present at the Midnight Mass here in Cieszyn.

Martha and I did Christmas Eve the Polish way, or at least as Polish as we could. For the Poles, Christmas Eve is a bigger deal than Christmas Day. They have a twelve course dinner without any red meat and then they open presents. We cut our dinner down to fish, mashed potatoes and cabbage, but we didn’t skimp on the presents part. The walk to church was freezing, but it went pretty quickly because we spoke with my family on the cell phone. I think that was the first time I’ve ever said, “Oh hi mom, you just caught us on the way to church.” We got there really early and found a seat. We were afraid we might sit in somebody’s regular spot so we settled on the pew at the back left, just under the Seventh Station of the Cross. The church was really cold.

Mass was a bit of a let down. The incense was pungent, which was good. The lighting was well done: soft at the beginning and big and bright in the middle. But, things just weren’t scary enough. In some ways, a Catholic mass is just a Catholic mass. I suppose it takes more than setting to get one spooked. Or maybe we should have just sat closer.

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Here’s my excuse for not blogging: we’ve been busy. New country, new language, new flat, new job—I’m sure you all understand. Yes, we do get around to playing piłkarziki (foozball) at least once a week. But other than that, it’s mostly school, school, school. Let me tell you a bit about it and how our school works.

I don’t teach in the town I live. Every day of the week I commute to the town of Skoczów, which is about twenty minutes by bus. I teach fifteen different groups, ranging from a group of six ten to twelve year-old boys to beginner adults to one student who is planning to take his English proficiency exam. For each group, I provide a minimum of one hour of fun and education a week (teaching hour = 45 minutes). Most see me for two hours at a time and there are a lucky two classes that get me for a three hour stretch each week. Poor souls. I usually teach for five hours a day, except for Thursdays and Fridays where I teach four and seven respectively. So, I suppose that sounds pretty cushy: just a twenty-six hour work week. And things would be cushy, if I weren’t spending every other waking hour preparing for classes and marking homework. I really have something like a fifty hour week. Those are the new teach blues.
A lot of work, yes. But I’ve never made the mistake of complaining about too much work to a Pole. Most Poles work a truck-load and make car-load: a European car-load. At our schools every native English speaker shares his or her classes with a Polish teacher, who also teaches English. A typical class sees me for two hours a week and the Polish English teacher for another two. While I’m the only native speaker at my school (well, Martha is at my school on Fridays), I share my classes amongst four Polish English teachers, which is not to suggest that I can do the work of four Polish women. Far from it. These Polish English teachers are also full-time grad students or teachers in the public school system who teach some more in their free-time. I don’t think they need sleep. In short, I’ve been sleeping where I could be blogging.

Another impediment to the blog is the paucity of internet connections in our corner of Poland. Except for one avenue that I’m exploring, it looks like we won’t be able to get an internet connection in our flat. For now, I will keep you posted from random computers at random internet cafés that keep random hours.

So there you have it: my 360 word essay on “Why we haven’t been blogging.” We hope to blog some more as we get into the rhythm of things. Also, I think we’ll back-date articles so all the fans can read about our crazy first three days, the “Heil Hitler” guy and our adventures in Polish medicare. Stay tuned.

God truely does love Poland. Not only has it been sunny and beautiful every weekend (pissy and cloudy in the work week), the beer is cheap, as is the vodka, and the fooz is free! That’s right, we have never felt more certain of our decision to come to this country to teach than when we found in our local pub, only a scant hundred meters from our front door, a foozball table that never needs to be fed. It sits there on a Friday night, after a long week of lesson planning and lesson failing, and it waits for us to abuse it’s players and curse it’s goalie when he’s obviously asleep on the job, letting that pathetic shot of Matt’s in.

Matt and I first got hooked in the fooz only a month or so ago when we visited our friend Mike in Revelstoke BC. Mike was entertaining us in the lovely province that I’ve spent way too little time in. At his service, he had his sisters lovely house, complete with a foozball table. After a long day of hiking, we were home at a good time, had a wonderful meal, and by 10 pm were so ready for bed. But let’s have one more game of fooz first. I don’t know the science behind it, but the energy realeased by one game of fooz—actually there is no such thing as one game of fooz, more like one installment, which is like 10 games minimum—but the energy released by one installment of fooz was enough to keep us going for another five hours, and I no longer felt like a tired old person. Ah, the fooz.

But I digress—Poland, it’s got the fooz. In fact it’s got the piłkarzyki.

It’s way more than mere pub games that has us happy to be here. We’re working with some wonderful people from North America and Australia, and our hosts here have gone way above the call of duty, and have been showing us a great time. Oh, and our appartment is more than we ever could have asked for.

I hope to get some pictures up soon so you can see what I’m talking about. If you can’t wait, I suggest getting your ass over here to what the locals refer to as the center of Europe, we’d love to have you.

One week and counting and we are on our way to Poland. We finally know what town we’ll be living in. It’s Cieszyn (pronounced Cheh-shin). The website makes it look great. The only problem with the place is that we’re not allowed into a part of it: the Czech part. As I understand it, the border divides the municipality into Cieszyn (Polish) and Česky Těšín (Czech). Since Canadians need a $70.00 visa to see all things Czech, we’ll watch where we’re walking. Actually, I think we’re going to take extra special care to stay out of trouble. Not that Central Europe is a dangerous place. It isn’t. It’s just that the Canadian government hasn’t been so good at looking out for their citizens abroad.