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stella41b -> RE: Tell Lushy your favorite memories..... (6/10/2009 4:05:39 AM)
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One of my favourite memories is my first arrival and first few days in Poland back in 1992. I decided to hitchhike across Europe and entered Poland by foot at a small border outpost called Olszynka not far from Cottbus in Germany. A large building in the middle of nowhere, on the German side a road leading to the autobahn through dense forest, and into Poland, a narrow road through dense forest.
Standing by the road about 200 yards into Poland was an old woman in her 80's selling mushrooms from a basket. Further along a stall selling garden gnomes, wicker baskets and Marlboro cigarettes. Nothing else.
I get a lift further down this road and get dropped off some 50 miles further by a wooden burger stand in the middle of a forest. I'm heading for Wroclaw the first city in south west Poland, and then finally to Lodz, the second largest city.
I'm standing there by the road trying to get a lift, nothing stops. Then I see a soldier in uniform appear out of the forest, stop at the roadside, and the very next car coming along stops and picks the soldier up and drives off. Ten minutes later another soldier appears and the same thing happens. Then two more soldiers.... hang on a minute. Is this a war? And where are the tanks? As more soldiers appear and get lifts I notice that they are making strange sorts of hand signals. So I try the same, and a dilapidated Mercedes appears and stops for me. Two youths inside.
I don't speak any Polish, all I have is a phrase book. Fat lot of good the phrase book is, because it says nothing about Wroclaw being pronounced 'Vrots-whaff.' However that's where I'm heading.
I decide to continue my journey by train after being dropped at a railway station. I go to buy a ticket to Lodz. Nobody understands. I try to pronounce the word 'Lodz' differently, I draw maps, I point, I mime, I pretend to be a steam train. All this gets me is blank stares from station staff and a sizeable audience of people on the station. I'm getting more frantic, the audience is getting bigger. I'm about to give up when a Finnish guy turns up with Polish girlfriend and offers to help. Lodz is actually pronounced 'Wootch', but there's also eight cases in the Polish language so the pronunciation becomes 'Doe Watchee.'
I'm staying with friends (people I met in the Soviet Union) and the thing that stands out most about my first week was the shopping. This was early January 1992. Rationing and shortages had kept the shops empty until just before that previous Christmas when everybody gave each other satsumas, women's tights and cooking chocolate as presents because there was nothing else for sale but toilet rolls. Everybody had money, lots of it, at the time the Polish zloty resembled Monopoly money and exchanged for about 20,000 to one US dollar.
I spent most of the first week shopping and helping friends to shop. But this wasn't like going to the mall. Oh no. Shop owners bought whatever they could just to have something to sell. Therefore the pharmacy dispensed medicines and sold clothing, the clothes shops sold meat, the butchers sold office supplies, and so on. Most shops sold beer. The post office sold stamps, envelopes and cigarettes.
I made matters worse by offering to buy dinner one evening for my friends. I screwed up again with the phrase book, and ended up with a bottle of vodka, six loaves of bread and 50lbs of frankfurters. I was at the start of a very long queue and feeling very nervous and I didn't know how to communicate so I just paid up and left the shop.
I could go on but I don't think I will ever be able to forget that week.
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