Germany, Holland, and Belgium, while not a completely different world—there are no completely different worlds here on earth—are pretty distinguishable europes, wealthy and sleek, with smooth highways, the lines bright white and freshly painted and the church steeples protestant and severe. The early morning derelicts of late-night revels have darker complexions than those in Poland, even the tanned Poles. Lacking a recent empire, Poland’s hardship cases are mostly home-grown. My last memory of the Planty from this trip will be an early Saturday morning bum urinating spectacularly while he walked, his water arcing golden in the rare sunshine like a few flings of new groszy. The rough, the ragged, the unfinished, the ruined can surprise you.
I was ready to leave, though, not because I’ve tired of Kraków or Poland, though I have tired of the rain and drizzle these last two weeks. No, rather, it was just time to go, time to reflect, regroup, and reconceive in light of all the information I’ve gathered on this reconnaissance. Imagine a next step. While not a great leap forward—linguistically—I have moved ahead and with this realization, however cliché: Poles are just like everybody else I’ve ever met, live essentially the same life; but they live it in an old country and in Polish, no small achievement, two features that continue to fascinate and to elude me.
