How did I get interested in Poland? Its a good question, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It would probably say a lot more about me than it would about Poland too. The easy answer would be that it was the first Eastern European country that I visited, but as is often the case with easy answers, it wouldn't be entirely true.

I think the real moment of falling for Poland came when I started to find out about its history. Like falling in love with a person because they represent things that you would love to do, Poland embodied a lot of things that I wanted to find in myself. To start with, it was somewhere that I had once known nothing about, and to start learning about it was like being a child again, who knows nothing about the world around them and wants to fill that gap. As well as that, Poland was North Eastern Europe in minature. Once it was not only part of that region: it actually was the region. Since then it had been the largest country in Europe, and the smallest; a country that had occupied Moscow and Kiev, and had become a proverb for a non-existant place; a country famous for tolerating any religion and race, and a country now best known for crimes against race and religion committed on its soil. For someone with an love of learning, there was evidently a lot to learn.

Even that wasn't entirely the reason. Just as you don't fall in love with a person solely for their past, I fell in love with Poland before I knew much about it. I fell in love with the forests first, as I was driven across Lubuskie, and then I fell in love with the towns, as I was taken to Gorzow and Poznan. Living in Poland will change how I feel about it, but considering that I have not visited Malopolski, Pomorskie, Mazowieckie, or Podkarpackie yet, its a love thats probably got its best days still to come.