First Week

These first days in Poland and into my language experiment, I find I’ve settled into the former much better than the latter—which already feels like more of a sinking. Merely living, even in a foreign country, has fewer and simpler demands than the good life, which requires communications broad and deep, but since mere life is temporally and logically prior to the good life, I’m counting my first week’s survival a success. Even as the language bursts from the TV and radio (advertisements, reklamy) and streams and ripples by me on the streets in almost perfect incomprehensibility, I reassure myself, “you just got here.”

My mieszkanie, a word that denotes both the general concept of “residence” and the specific form of “apartment,” recalls my first studio lodgings in graduate school, spare and, well, sparer. With no stove, per se, but a microwave that I just figured out how to operate, partially, and no refrigerator, this space does have two single beds and a functional bathroom. The shower, unfortunately, has both design issues—the fixed showerhead at anything other than minimal water pressure douses the bath mat outside the cramped shower box—and only the most temperamental association with hot water. Hot water there is, and it can be gloriously hot, you just can’t be sure when it will arrive and for how long. Nor does there seem to be any temperature gradation as it switches from hot to freaking cold. Of the conveniences of modern life, a really good shower is, for me, the hallmark of civilization; but unless I master the secrets of this particular fixture, I may be stuck at mere life for the duration.

Because Polish study, Polonistyka, is like any advanced study, the graduate student style seems perfectly appropriate in both shelter and food. So far I subsist on bread, tea, cheese, chocolate, and cup-size packet soup. The bread and cheese are better than my standard fare at home, especially the bread, cyganski (“gypsy”) and góralski (“highlander”), fresh, soft, yeasty, and the former, a little nutty. Of cheeses, I’m partial to oszczypek, quite edible if not pronounceable (actually, it’s not so bad, “osh-CHI-pek”), a kind of sheep’s milk mozzarella. My soup sampling represents a broad range of Polish standards from borowikowa (borowiki mushroom) to barszcz czerwony (borscht from red beets). Not a huge fan of root vegetables per se and particularly those whose liquid color verges on neon fioletowy (“violet”), still I found the cup of barszcz surprisingly not altogether terrible. 

So, for the week, the life Cracovia resembles graduate school—without the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, though on the classical music radio station, klasyczna muzyka, along with Mozart and Strauss, I have heard string renditions of the Beatles and the theme from “Rawhide.” Rock on.