The West Pole

Language is a funny thing, especially your own language. I started writing this entry in the blog, when I suddenly found myself taking a step back, looking at it, and realising that everything suddenly sounded strange. From being someone who would write two or three essays a week, every week, I have become someone for whom writing seems almost foreign.

Part of the problem is simply how much I want to write in Polish instead of English. I got a letter from England a few days ago, confirming my place to study Eastern European politics at university, and this made me start to realise how little time I have left here in Poland to learn everything that is possible to learn. Even reading constantly in Polish doesn't help too much, because there are so many things which need doing in English: looking for funding, searching for jobs, working out just how to get my books back to England... When language does come in, it's because it's a necessary tool for the job, rather than because I really want to speak it.

Thinking about this made me wonder whether the language really makes a difference to how we think, and whether speaking in a second language changes your personality. Do the words try and fit your thoughts, or do the thoughts fit the words? If I say something in Polish, do I mean exactly what I say, or is it just a simplified form that roughly fits my thoughts? And if this is the case, do people add the levels of complexity back in when they hear me, understanding what I'm saying partly from their own experiences? Is this the case even when I speak in English?

There are so many ways in which English and Polish are different, that in the end I think people must think slightly differently when they use one language or the other. If you paint two realistic pictures of an object in two different colours, then although your audience will recognise both as the same object, they will be left with different thoughts and different impressions. I suppose language must be something similar.

All this should really have a conclusion, but I don't have one. The best I can do is this: to hope that despite being horribly out-of-practice with writing in English, the picture I wanted to give of what I was thinking will come out in roughly the right colour.

After a few days when Spring appeared to be on its way in, snow again covers Gorzów. The view across the rooftops from my bedroom window is one long stretch of snow, and in the streets the slush is deep enough to make you want to stay indoors. It is meant to be the last major snow of winter, and I am writing about it quickly while it's still there.

Today I finally got the internet connected to my new computer, so for the first time in months my blog is alive again. I find it very hard to believe just how much has changed in the short year and a half since it began. Starting writing again feels very much like opening a time capsule to find a pack of cards, and then sitting down with new friends to play poker. It almost feels like I should leave it hermetically-sealed, rather than continuing it. On the other hand, it's about time that I rejoined the real world, and started filling in the little details which make up my life here.

One such detail was an trip a few days ago with my girlfriend's stepmother to the small village of Przyprostynia on the shores of lake Zbaszynskie in Wielkopolska. This village consisted of one long street with cottages dotted along the edge, not just the picturesque ones in the centre but also the ugly concrete villas which straggle around the edge of any settlement in Poland. For one day a year however, Przyprostynia surprises everyone by managing to stage a festival which hangs somewhere between a carnival and a bizarre pagan rite.

The festival is based on a simple enough principle. There are two main groups of participants, the 'diably' (devils) and the horses. The 'devils' were maybe the most noticable, as they were dressed in a similar way to steriotypical burglars, only with small leather whips with which to whip the passers by on the legs. The 'horses' on the other hand were in white, but with wooden horses attached to their costumes, and (thankfully) no whips. They were joined by gypsies, a chimney-sweep, a bride and groom, a woman dressed as a tree, a bear, and a group of musicians playing something which looked (and this is no word of a lie) like a dead goat with the legs and head sawn off. As the procession moved slowly down the village, it occupied itself with painting the faces of anyone it came across, either with soot, or boot-polish (everywhere), or with lipstick (tiny hearts on both cheeks).

It's hard to work out where the origins of this procession came from, or even if it belongs to the time before there was written history, but some things about the village make you suspect that it is actually significantly old. Most oddly however, for a westerner in West Poland, is that there was no tourism attached to this festival whatsoever. It was an event that seemed solely for the village and a few chance guests. If it wasn't for the family of the sister of my girlfriend's father's second wife (and this is rather a tenuous connection), I would have been sitting in Gorzów, none the wiser, and missing a lovely day out. That, after all, has to be worth having your face painted black...

After a long time out of internet contact, I'm back. The past couple of weeks have been fairly full of work, marking, lesson-planning and rushing from place to place, so the blog has finished in a poor last place. On the other hand, my English is improving a lot now, on account of being forced to speak grammatically, slowly, and without any slang. My Polish is improving too, so maybe by the end of the year I'll be able to speak both languages properly.

The schedule of work is rather odd, as I normally start work at the private school at about 16.30, and continue until some time before 21.30, which seems to be the wrong way around. It's odd having the mornings off, as you have a vague feeling you should be working, followed by a hectic and exhausting evening of work. I also teach at two more schools now, which means that I am amassing hours (and hopefully, eventually money, if not free-time). Still, it hardly compares to how hard some of the Poles at the schools work. Some of them must be the hardest-working people I've ever met, and I'm really glad I don't have their schedules. Similarly, the Polish schoolchildren seem to have a day based around waking up at 6am, working until mid-afternoon, going home to do homework, going to private school in the evening, and then sleeping ready to start all over again at 6am the next day. It makes me very glad that I'm only teaching at Polish schools, rather than studying at them.

One of the downsides about it taking so long to learn polish, is that I have arrived in Poland during the month of the 25th anniversity of Solidarnosc ('Solidarity'). Every day there is a channel of Polish tv devoted to the events of that particular date, 25 years ago; so far I'm not really able to understand more than a few names, and the connections between what I know of the history and the pictures I see on tv. In a way, it's a bit like being transplanted to Russia around the October Revolution, and not being able to speak Russian.

It's possible to see Solidarnosc everywhere in Gorzow. In the streets of the old town there are polish flags everywhere with the Solidarnosc logo emblasoned across it. It would be impossible to not find a reference to it on at least one of the channels at any given time of the day. On the other hand, as with all anniversaries of important events, it doesn't seem to effect daily lives at all. Nobody is wearing ribbons, or Solidarnosc badges; and the people I've talked to seem to focus more on the difference between the ideals of the movement, and todays government. It seems doubly ironic in a way, because apparently a lot of members of Solidarnosc went into government in the end, and seemed to have become rather like the pigs in '1984'. Falling as it does in an election year, the anniversary would be expected to increase the hope for for future, but the atmosphere seems more apathetic than hopeful.

Today in Gorzow, it is yet another baking-hot, gorgeous, day. I'm starting to get used to them by now (all the bad weather seems to land on Berlin, which is fine by me). The only (possible) downside is that it's meant that I'm only spending a little time in the internet cafe, as there are plenty of sunnier places to be. Now that I'm here, I've also found quite a few emails for me, needing replies (as well as teaching stuff, it was lovely to hear from Joleen, and Chairman Mao- thank you both, and I'll reply asap!).

While I was replying to an email recently, I was trying to think of the funniest part of being here, and I concluded that it had to be the polish adverts. There're two in particular that deserve special attention, and need to be alluded to in the blog, so today I'll start with 'the one about the sheep', which goes as follows:

The advert is set in an old fashioned puppet show, with a castle on the horizon, and three characters: a dragon (in the distance), a woman, and a sheep. There appears to be something unusual about the sheep, but it is hard at first to tell what it is, until the woman (at least, I think it's a woman) sets fire to its tail, for reasons best known to herself. Upon this, the sheep takes off like a fluffy firework, flies around the scene, before knocking over the puppet show, and exploding , revealing the three puppeteers who then sneak off, shamefaced.

It took me a great deal of thinking to try and work out what it was an advert for, until in the end I asked my friend Asia. She explained it to me: apparently there is a polish fairy tale about a man (?) who decides to kill dragon that has captured his girlfriend, by filling a sheep full of explosives, and getting the dragon to eat it, thus igniting the dynamite. Unfortunately, the fairy tale goes sour when the man lights a cigarette on the way to celebrate his cleverness, and obliterates both himself and the sheep. The advert, therefore, is for a mobile phone company (!), which advertises its low rates as honest- because 'we're not very good at telling you fairy-stories'. If this makes any sense to anyone, I'd be really glad to hear from them.

Anyway, in the absence of more exciting things to tell you about that will take less than four minutes, I'd better leave you to think about this one.