a stroke of culture
Krakow, Poland
What do you do when you turn up in a country where you don’t speak the language and very few people speak English?
Well, I don’t know what you would do, but we went from door to door in our neighbourhood trying to see if anyone would talk to us. We had a Polish student living with us and he would translate and record onto our state-of-the-art walkman, a little saying for us to then learn off by heart….and out we would go.
Hello.
My name is Robert (or Rachela – no, not a spelling mistake; just Polish)
I come from New Zealand.
I am learning Polish.
This is all I can say.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
That was the first little speech!
A bit later, when we were in the thick of coming to terms with numbers up to the millions (just a loaf of bread cost a couple of thousand), we would carry a piece of paper with a dozen numbers on it, and say our memorised phrase:
Hello Sir/Madam (we were also learning the way to address people by then)
Please tell me one of these numbers and I will point to it.
(WAIT WHILE THEY PERFORMED AS REQUESTED)
Thank you.
Goodbye.
Slowly, but surely the strange sounds became familiar.
Now they’ve lopped three zeros off each banknote and the numbers are a doddle.
But on the same day recently we both thought of that very “please tell me” sentence!
It was an effective method – our grammar was still perfect.
There were other advantages to our door knocking. We got to know our neighbours. We made friends. Good enough friends to exchange the three kisses on the cheek upon meeting (just the girls, that is!) We were given countless cups of tea and sampled all sorts of homemade Polish delicacies like bigos-off-the-balcony, cakes, sausages and even broad beans (no, really, an old man cooked them for me specially!!) We also met a couple, whose son owned a private language school, and in doing so solved our dilemma of how to make money during the school holidays (at the time we were working at another school, living hand-to-mouth day-by-day, and needed to work in order to eat). We worked the summer camps for the son that year (during which the gherkin exploding episode occurred) and came home with permanent jobs providing much better conditions.
We made contact with this son last week, and today met him at his parents’ place.
The father is now 79, a very spritely 79, too. His mother, a year older. I had thought she might now have grey hair, but no. She is still Pani Redhead, as we affectionately used to call her (Pawel, if you are reading, please use your discretion as to whether or not she should be told of this!!) She might be eight decades old, but there are no pastel colours for her! Their flat is still a vibrant blast of colour, just as we remembered it. As a painter, and a well-known one in Poland, she has plenty of artwork at her disposal for decorating plain walls. She is also fortunate enough to have embroideries stitched by her own mother and other trinkets with special meaning, all artistically arranged.
What a wonderful evening we had. Of course there was sumptuous food (pierogi, bread and ham, cakes and more cakes, apples, grapes – a real feast). Eat, eat eat! Older Polish folk are sure children are always hungry and if they are not, they should be eating anyway. How else do you get to be a nice big fat healthy Babcia? I thought back to sharing Easter lunch with this couple the first year we were here. Red beet soup was on the menu and to us it tasted delicious – our hostess was disappointed that the potatoes in it were not of good standard, not that there was any choice at the time. You bought what you could get.
Funny how little memories come floating back.
We talked and laughed a lot. Pawel found himself translating things we had said in Polish into English supposedly for the benefit of his parents!!! I guess we had never had cause to speak Polish with him, and so he no doubt expected us to be English-dependent. With his parents we had always struggled along with increasing degrees of success in Polish; they were used to us butchering their heart language and were some of the best language helpers, because they were not afraid to correct us. We made a million mistakes tonight, and could have just used Pawel to translate everything, but somehow it is more connecting to communicate directly. The translations to English were fun though! While we chatted, the children found a cat to taunt play with. And there were all the wonderful things hanging on the walls to just look and look and look at.
Upon leaving, Pan Z, the father, took my hand and kissed the back of it.
Ah, that’s right. Poland is so nice. So polite. So cultured. So dignified.
They don’t seem to do it as much now as they used to, but men even tip their hats to ladies in the street. Gentlemen.
It was easy to like living here.
PS We now have an enormous hard-cover book to add to our baggage. A record of all her work, it is signed by Pani Z. We looked through it together, her telling the stories behind many of the paintings, the children picking out which ones they could find on her walls. And then she gifted it to us. What a treasure, even if it is enormous and heavy.
Tags: 2008/09, children, craft, food, history, language, postcard: Poland, tradition
rayres
WOW! The hair, the embroidery, the art.
I am loving all your posts on Poland. My ancestors were from Poland (my maiden name was Radomske which originally was spelled Radomski – we’re not sure when or why it was changed but think it was a mistake as they came through immigration in the USA).
We don’t know much about the Polish origins apart from the fact that the name is Polish and that there are a number of towns in Poland called Radom or similar. My Father’s family when they arrived in USA and then settled in Canada were German speaking and had been in Romania for some time (generations?) before that.
My Dad has a close Polish friend from Canada, they worked together as young men. His friend had left his wife and daughter in Poland and came to make a better life for them. It was 11 years before he was able to bring them out to Canada.
Anyway, it is all very interesting.