Blame Russia

I’m not sure if any of you have been bored enough to check up on the latest weather here in good ol’ Poland. But it sure feels like home to say the least, -30 for the last few days. This morning as we were leaving our apartment, we met one of our elderly neighbors, and all we could make out from her polish rambling was that Russia was to blame for the cold weather. It seems most people here think that nothing good can come from the East, and I guess it’s understandably so, considering their past. But things still haven’t changed much as far as trying to communicate with the old ladies, they still seem to think it helps if they keep repeating themselves in polish and that we’ll eventually understand.

Speaking of old ladies, another thing we’ve noticed here is that all of the “older” people seem “tough”. You notice small things, like we haven’t seen a wheelchair, let alone a medichair yet, and everyone has cane-type-braces. And very, very few of the towering apartments have elevators, so imagining how these people manage the stairs is another thing. We’ve also noticed that the “grandmas” are quite often the ones on the street corners, selling whatever they can trying to make some zlotys.

a lollipop crossing

I sure find the history fascinating here, and we’ve been lucky enough to be able to talk to different people about what it was like back under the “iron curtain”. Most people can’t understand why we want to talk about it, but its nice cause no-one is hesitant to share their memories. People our age don’t remember much, mainly just having to stand in long, long lines with your food stamps waiting to be served whatever you were given, and their parents bringing all of the kids along, because no matter what age you were, you got an equal portion. Quite a few people have talked about how they missed the old times of socialism. Where everyone was equal, employed, able to spend more time with family and everyone wasn’t so caught up in work and making money.

Another thing we’ve encountered in our Polish journeys has been strange sports fans. We quickly learned that whistling is bad, and the fans love to whistle away at the opposing team or ref. Most fans are also decked out in their team colors, and spend most of the game chanting something or other, we’re not quite sure what though. We went to a pro basketball game last weekend and got to see an all-out fan protest. At the start of the game people were handing out these signs, and of course we took one, not knowing what it said. After the game had to be postponed from the rioters littering the court with toilet paper we began to wonder what our nice poster really said? We’ll have to get out our polish dictionary.

“What does this mean?” and “some hoops action, and the climbing wall in the background”

Chris and me have also been able to visit a couple different public schools so far as “special guests”. I guess it’s pretty rare that a Canadian comes to Poland so its lots of fun talking about home and everything Canadian. This coming weekend we even get to go judge some English plays that local elementary school classes are performing.

an amazing benefit of having bad windows

But things are good, miss you all, are waiting for visitors, looking forward to non-Russian weather, and we’ll talk again next week…