From My ExPat Diaries: Sarita and the Dance of the Swan

As an ESL teacher in a preschool, I spend most of my time worrying that I have no impact on my children.  On my bad days I know with some surety that to my kids, I am nothing more than a pesky fly, pestering them with buzzing words of a foreign language.  I am an annoying and only occasionally amusing presence who prevents them from playing with their LEGOs.  On my good days, though, I mostly know that this is not the case. 

"I am Rico! Where's Kovalski?...Evaporation!"  Still not sure
how it fit into a game about cartoon penguins, but who am I
to question "kid logic"

During our most recent project, two weeks of intensive exploration of water in its various shapes and forms, I spent a day teaching the water cycle.  We spent two hours playing with and experimenting with evaporation, condensation, saturation, and precipitation.  Later that day I heard one of my six-year-olds shout “EVAPORATION!” like it was an interjection in a comic book.  Instead of BAM! or POW!, he opted for “EVAPORATION!” and ran off to continue his game of “Penguins of the Madagascar.”  It probably wasn’t the correct context, but this child remembered a word I’d taught him, so I’m counting it as a victory.

This last Thursday we concluded a week of lessons about music.  We learned the names of instruments, listened to various genres, we discussed what we liked or disliked, and we listened to music to hear the emotion or the story it conveyed.  For this last activity we listened to the awakening beauty of the sunrise in Peer Gynt and the violin’s heartbreaking melancholy; we listened to clips of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and (humorously) Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”  To end the lesson, I told them that often dance can also express musical sentiment and to illustrate, I showed them a video of a ballerina dancing the death of the swan from Swan Lake.  My girls exclaimed over the poignant beauty of the music and the dancer’s grace as she fluttered and floated to her tragic end.  I then played clips from Glenn Miller and ABBA and asked them to dance the way the music felt and we laughed as they tried to shake, rattle, and roll to “Dancing Queen.”

Later that day, after playtime, lunch, and naptime, I was working on lesson plans as the children had free playtime.  My partner put on a CD mix of Polish songs and classical music for the children to listen to as they played their individual and organized games.  During one particularly sweet piece of classical music, my partner Aneta whispered to catch my attention; I looked up and saw that my Sarita was dancing Swan Lake.

Now although I shouldn’t have favorite children, I have to admit that Sarita is one of my favorite children.  Quiet and small, Sarita is often drowned out by the four boisterous boys in her age group and she is often ruled over by her two more dominant friends.  In six months of work together, though, I have seen her grow in confidence and strength, and occasionally I see her challenge the other children and hold her own ground.  And although I have to tell her to be quiet and to sit on her bum, I am inwardly delighted to see her meeting the world head-on.  As I watched Sara dance the dance of a swan, I felt a similar feeling of pride and delight.  Sara wasn’t using any of the words that I’d taught, but she was moving her arms and gliding just as the Russian ballerina had.  Watching her, it was clear that the lesson had resonated with her, and when she heard the classical music, she decided to dance her own childish but graceful imitation.  It was perfectly beautiful and touching.  It is moments like this that make my “pesky fly” days more easy to endure.

...2012

Last year at midnight I wished that 2012 would be a good year.  For me 2012 included:

• Four months in Mexico
• Four months in Blackfoot
• Four months in Warsaw

Taking in another gorgeous sunset in
Puerto Escondido 

During my four months in Mexico, I: 

• traveled to an ancient pyramid and saw altars where actual sacrifices were carried out
• swam in the Pacific Ocean just offshore the closest thing to Paradise that I may ever encounter
• instilled in my seventh graders an absolute love of Puddles the Duck
• ate salsas that truly tried to sear holes in my tongue and loved it
• laughed harder and drank more cerveza than ever before
• and lived like the Mayan prophesy was really going to come true

During my four months at home, I:

• reconnected with old friends from my past
• bonded with my amazing nieces and did my best to teach them a few bad habits
• and FINALLY conquered the Teton Pass and, to be blunt, made it my bitch during my last few weeks of work at Bindweed Farm

Me with Thing One

And with Thing Two

During my four months in Warsaw, I: 

Looking out at the Vistula River,
with the Old Town behind me

• walked through the most beautiful park I've ever encountered
• learned how to say "please" and "thank you" in my sixth (yes, sixth!) language (English, Irish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish.  I rock.)
• successfully spent four months with small children without serious injury to them or to myself
• and managed to add TWO more stamps to my passport with a trip to Worcester, England, and two looooooong layovers in Germany.

2012 was by far the most amazing year I've had thus far; so here's my New Year's Wish for 2013....

A Clipping from my Ex-Pat Diaries: Cooking

Sauteing red pepper and kiełbasa

As I’ve said here before, I love cooking.  I love the magic in the chemistry of cooking.  I love the fact that egg whites, when whipped long enough, will transform from a gooey, questionable substance into beautiful white meringues.  To me, that transformation, like the transformation of whipping cream from liquid to solid, is nothing short of magical.  I likewise love the magic created within the oven or the refrigerator.  A person can put gelatinous, unappealing goo into the oven, set the timer, and (after being tortured by delicious smells for however long) when the timer dings, amazing, solid deliciousness emerges.  The fridge is even better; a person can put a good meal into the fridge and when she pulls it out the next day, the magic of the fridge has transformed that good meal into a great meal.   It’s amazing and, to be entirely honest, a little bit miraculous.

When I cook at my mother’s house, food is miraculous because the number of ingredients and kitchen supplies she has allow me to easily make a flourless chocolate cake or the red sauce to end all sauces.  Being allowed to cook in my mother’s kitchen is like letting loose the kid in the proverbial candy shop—everything I need is there and at my disposal.  Cooking at my mother’s house is adventurous and fun.  When I cooked at my various apartments in Caldwell and Eugene, the food was miraculous because it was almost always for the first time.  I made Chocolate Gran Marnier cake for the first time in my post-college apartment, using nesting saucepans for my double boiler and a blender to give my egg whites soft peaks (not fun, I don’t recommend this method); I made crab cakes with a lemon burre blanc in my second grad school apartment, along with blackberry cobbler, blackberry buckle, and blackberry pancakes; and I made olive oil rosemary cake in my post-grad school apartment.  Cooking in these apartments was a sort of ongoing experiment, a flexing of my culinary wings as I flirted with techniques and styles.  The food was miraculous because it was new, daring, and done completely on my own.

When I cook while living abroad, the food is miraculous simply because it actually comes together.  When I lived in Mexico, cooking was complicated because we lived with a temperamental, leaky old gas stove and an exploded oven.  The stove leaked gas, making each lighting of the pilot light a flirtation with death (seriously, our kitchen often smelled like burnt hair because someone lit the pilot with a WHOOSH and lost their hand hair).  Once the flame was lit, cooking was another matter entirely; the stove only had two settings, barely on and boiling.  To try to achieve some sort of happy medium was basically impossible, so if a person wanted to avoid burning their food, constant vigilance was mandatory (and even then it wasn’t guaranteed). 

My ingredients with their complicated, often
unpronounceable Polish labels

My issues with equipment aside, however, cooking in Mexico wasn’t too terribly difficult because I could always find the necessary ingredients.  Although the ingredients were packaged in Spanish, either my knowledge of the language or its inherent similarity to English usually made grocery shopping relatively easy.  Also, because Mexico is a part of North America, a large majority of the products sold in stores bore a striking resemblance to their English/American counterparts.  This is not the case in Warsaw, however.  While some foods and ingredients share similar names to their English or Latin equivalents (my personal favorite is that bread for sandwiches and toasting is called “tost”), so many others simply do not.  When buying produce or easily recognizable products, like coffee or milk, the language barrier is easily overcome and actually provides an opportunity to learn.  When buying spices, however, the opportunity to learn is present, but it’s more of an after-the-fact type of experience as I learn that “pieprz ziołowy” does not mean “cumin” but in fact means “herbal pepper” and would appear to be some sort of spice mixture or rub for meats.  As often as possible, I try to rely on the picture on the label, though this isn’t the safest of methods.  When trying to make black bean quesadillas last month, I needed black beans; I scoured the bean shelf, located a can that had convincingly small, dark bean on the label and purchased said can with some confidence.  When I pried it open in my kitchen, I discovered that it wasn’t black beans at all, but red. 

My "Warsaw Edition Chili" simmering away

Cooking in Warsaw is miraculous because it’s something of a miracle that I am able to produce something out of the chaos created by language and circumstance.  To my surprise, the pieprz ziołowy has a pleasant scent like anise mixed with Middle Eastern spices, warm and tasty, and it added to the flavors of my soup quite nicely.  Similarly, when mixed with fresh lemon juice and garlic powder, the red beans worked as a fine substitute for black beans in my quesadillas.  Each time I attempt a familiar recipe, I rename it with the addendum of “the Warsaw edition” because so many of my old recipes call for ingredients I cannot find, like black beans. 

Tonight’s attempt is my Polish spin on my favorite vegetarian chili.  I have to admit here that while the Warsaw Edition Black Bean Quesadillas contain red beans instead of black, and therefore aren’t actually “black bean quesadillas,” they do bear a strong resemblance to the original recipe.  My “vegetarian chili,” however, does not.  To start out with, one of the primary ingredients of my vegetarian chili is tofu, an item I have yet to see in Poland.  So instead of tofu I cooked with kiełbasa, or Polish sausage, so I may have to alter the name more than just adding “the Warsaw edition.” 

At home this chili includes:

• Spices: garlic, cumin, chili powder, paprika, chipotle
• Vegetables: red peppers, mushrooms, avocado
• Tomatoes: two cans of whole, peeled tomatoes and a small can of tomato paste
• Black beans
• Tofu
• Freshly grated Tillamook cheese and a dollop of sour cream

In Warsaw, I couldn’t find cumin, paprika, or chipotle, so I’ve had to settle for garlic, chili powder, and pieprz ziołowy.  The store was sold out of mushrooms and I haven’t seen an avocado here for months, so I put in a red pepper, corn, and a “soup mix” that had onion, mushroom, broccoli, and potato.  At the store, I trusted the can label and bought what I thought were diced tomatoes; turns out it was a thick and chunky tomato sauce, so I put in two cans of thick and chunky tomato sauce with one small can of tomato paste.  This didn’t really hurt the chili, but it now has quite the thick consistency.  And, of course, I have no black beans or tofu, so I settled for red beans and kiełbasa.  While it bears only a passing resemblance to my favorite vegetarian chili, though, my “Warsaw Edition Chili” came out warm and delicious and just what I needed on this chilly night.  Like I said before: something of a miracle.

The finished product: a little thicker in consistency than its Eugene counterpart,
and definitely more carnivore in nature, but I can report most happily that my
"Warsaw Edition Chili" is a recipe to be repeated.

Musings on a Snow Day: the Warsaw Edition

Despite the title, I do not have plural musings to log here, but a singular musing to post for posterity. "A Musing on a Snow Day" just didn't have the right ring to it, and as I generally enjoy sequels, I take a particular delight in posting here my own sequel to my earlier musings. Also, pasting "The Warsaw Edition" to the end amuses me because it reminds me of a bad volume collection, like the Now That's What I Call Music franchise with its specially branded Christmas edition, oldies editions, and so on. They might as well just go in for the truth at this point and declare: “We're Absolute Crap at Titles, But Enjoy the Music.”  But I digress.

The view from my window at preschool

I struggle with titles. Titles are daunting. I once sat in a two-hour workshop on titles and their importance, and by the end, my title-anxiety had actually grown. A title should draw the reader in, informing her of the subject without dully stating the obvious. A title should be clever (or at least well-constructed) without being misleading. At some point during my thesis-writing, I actually had more title-anxiety than thesis-anxiety. In the end, though, I did what I've done here--I recycled and updated a previous title and called it good. So now that I've returned to my title--my musing--I shall proceed.

I awoke this morning to snow. My normally bustling neighborhood was hushed by the almost eerie quiet that falls on a city during snowfall and everything has taken on a sort of snow capped charm. It's the perfect setting for a scene: Christmas music playing softly in the background and a hot cocoa in hand as I gaze contemplatively out the window....

[at this point in my musing I had to pause for five hours to resume my day job as “Ciocia Jerica.” First I was an armless, legless Princess Leia battling "Not Good Yoda" and "Not Good Darth Vader" (though the second title seems redundant, my five year old companion felt it a necessary nome de guerre, so I obliged). After ten minutes of attack by the combined forces of evil, during which I died twice but put up a damn good fight both times, I helped coordinate the blocking for our Christmas play--no mean feat I assure you. I spent two hours rehearsing lines for said play, a Herculean task, teaching twenty ESL children ages 3-6 to recite their lines in English. I served lunch to sixteen rowdy children, played three quite successful rounds of the quiet game (it astonishes me that this game works, but thank the various gods above that it does), and spent entirely too much time sniffing five Disney Princess Lip Smacker chapsticks with an enthusiastic five year old. On a side note, adding glitter and a princess label does nothing to lessen the fact that said chapsticks smell like a foul combination of way, rotten fruit, and old lady vanilla musk perfume. And, to cap off my day, I spent several minutes straddling the worlds of vaudeville and burlesque as I chased an al-but-naked child around the classroom as she gleefully evaded me, my partner teacher, and her waiting pile of clothes. My days at preschool are anything but dull.

Making my icy trek home at the end of the day

When I started writing this several hours ago, Warsaw had a light powdered sugar dusting of snow falling, falling, falling. It is still falling, showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. I dislike snow. It's cold, and as it sets it makes my clothes, shoes, and hair wet and cold. Snow makes the roads icy and dangerous and it scares the hell out of me to be on the roads as either driver or passenger. My children love snow, however, creating snow angels or sculptures, eating it with frightening frequency, and pelting me with snowballs thrown with an astonishing accuracy. They love frolicking in snow while I, bundled in my hat, scarf, vest, coat, and boots stand off to the side doing my best imitation of an ice sculpture. The snow is pretty when it falls, but that is the most praise I can muster.

It is six and a half hours from the time I started writing with my singular musing. Six and a half hours of gently falling snow and six and a half hours of outrageous antics with children, all punctuated by what has become an odd stream of consciousness journaling of my day. The snowfall aside, this is actually a fairly typical day. I often start a thought early in the morning, and, returning to it sporadically throughout the day, find myself finally completing that thought eight hours later, when, exhausted, I leave preschool and make the daily trek home. It is tiring, at times overwhelming, and demanding on me physically, mentally, and emotionally, but it's usually worth it to receive one small, bone-crushing hug from a small, sweaty, stinky child.

But, again, I digress. When I started writing this morning, this was to be a short post accompanied by a picture--a crumb offering to satisfy my need to post something here every so often. But somewhere along the way, as I spent my day attempting to return to this thought, I encountered a truth that makes relevant all these musings (now a definite plural). I dislike the snow, but every morning when I wake up to impossible cold around me, my first instinct is to peer out the window to check for snow. I don't want snow; I feel that I should make that clear. I don't want snow, but as I am checking, I feel the same anticipation and suspense as I did when I was six, peeking out the window to spy any evidence of a snow day. Snow days as a child were the best: there was no school and if the snow was right, a person could make a snowman or an igloo or some other snow creation before, numb with the cold, retreating inside to the warmth of a fire and cocoa.  When there is no snow, as when I was six, I feel a small shock of disappointment before remembering that I dislike snow. As an adult, I don't make snowmen or igloos or other types of snow creations, nor do I generally get to enjoy a day free from school or work or obligation.  In short, there is no reason for me to routinely wake up and check expectantly for snow.  But in between storytime and yet another round of Star Wars battling, I realized that I go through this routine of anticipation and expectation each morning because I am still that young six year old who revels in all the magic and possibilities a snow day has to offer.

This is my life now: emoting and hanging out with fuzzy pink
dogs and Polish Tinkerbell. My six year old self loves it.

Oh Nostromo...

To say that I struggled with Nostromo would be an understatement.  I could say that I am still struggling with it, despite having finished the novel in August, for it is now October and I have yet to put into words the jumble of thoughts and impressions Conrad’s novel left me with.  It might be somewhat evident (given my noted lack of writing on the subject) that until now I have no idea what to say about this novel.  This is, in large part, my own fault.  I started Nostromo over a year ago, when I was still living in Eugene and sneaking in a few pages while hunched over my desk during my lunch break at work.  Not long after I started the novel, I took a position as a Paid Volunteer ESL Instructor (it sounds so much more official when I capitalize the title) at an English language school in Mexico.  Conrad’s weighty tome and his even weightier words took a backseat to the multitude of preparations necessitated by first a move back to my hometown and then on to Mexico.  While I was at home in my parents’ house there were too many distractions—new, lighter books to read, old friends to see, and much much catching up to do with family—and once in Mexico there was a whole new world to see and to experience.  When faced with the choice of dinner and drinks with my roommates or an evening with Conrad, I’m afraid that ten times out of ten I chose the dinner and drinks.  But I will now finally attempt to distill this jumble into a somewhat coherent review (or, lacking that, a blog post that will allow me at least to end my current association with Nostromo).

While not a coastal picture, I found this one so deliciously
bohemian that I had to include it.  Much of my Semana Santa
found me ensconced in a hammock valiantly continuing my
struggle with Nostromo, if only for a few pages

As I posted on this blog, finding the time to read over the past year was something of an issue.  I took Nostromo along with me on our Spring Break trip to Puerto Escondido and delighted in the fact that I was reading this coastal adventure story while also away on my own coastal adventure story.  I also managed to sneak in an hour here and there to read a few pages between classes; however, the exhilaration of daily life paired with the exhaustion of teaching and the irresistible warmth of the Mexican sun and conspired to lull me to sleep while struggling with Conrad’s passages.  More often than not, I jolted awake to find that half an hour or so had passed and I was still on the same paragraph. 

After Mexico I found more time to read, but was often so exhausted from farm work of the highs and lows of life on a farm that my progress was sporadic and jerky.  But, spurred primarily by my decision to move to Warsaw, I managed to speed through the last half of Nostromo and conclude the novel mere days before I left the country.  Once in Warsaw, though, I was so busy experiencing life in a new country and (even more intense) experiencing life as a preschool teacher.  Before I knew it, days had turned into weeks and then months and I still had not found the time or the words to talk about Conrad’s masterpiece.

While I had delighted in Nostromo's intersection
of Italian and Latin American, I was even
more delighted at the discovery that Conrad
was Polish.  Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that
Nostromo occupied so much of the last year and
its own intersection of Italian, Latin American,
and Polish.

It was not just circumstance, however, that left me spending a year with Nostromo.  No, some of the blame I will shift onto Conrad and the erratic timeline his novel took.  The story of Nostromo is more than a story of a reportedly incorruptible sailor; it spans the full breadth of the Costaguanan town of Sulaco and its inhabitants.  The reader learns of a sequence of events that took place in this fictional country as they revolved around the feats and, ultimately, the fate of the cargadero Nostromo, but the reader is also treated to the histories of the country’s tumultuous political past, as well as the personal stories of several of Sulaco’s prominent citizens.  These histories, rich in detail, serve to give flesh to this country, to make its fate and the fate of its people important to the reader, to bind them to us in a way and to keep us turning the pages.  I did not object to this; in fact, as I read, I did form attachments to characters as I learned of their various pasts and motives.  No, what I objected to was the manner in which Conrad presented these stories.  The narrative would often jump in time with no indication that we had done so.  I would find myself reading passages set in the novel’s present tense and then find myself immersed in the history of a year past or three years past without any clue from the author that we had made a transition.  This method, while important to both plot and character development, served to confuse me and necessitated more than once a rereading of one or several pages.

I suppose that the case may be made that I am, in fact, to blame for this confusion.  As I have said before, I am a casualty of my generation.  I am so spoiled by modern theatrical storytelling that I have become unused to the styles and tactics of older generations.  I have become accustomed to seeing the passage of time represented with a slow fade to black or white, or with a cheesy montage set to music, or (for the viewers who lack imagination and need facts set before them clearly and unmistakably) with white lettering floating across the screen informing the viewer that the following scenes are set “one year later” or “one year ago,” etc.  In short, I have seen too many films and TV shows, so when confronted by a timeline that shifted without convenient cinematic clues to alert me, I was left to struggle with my own confusion and frustration.

This one complaint aside, though, I found to my own surprise that I actually quite enjoyed Nostromo.  One review I read said that the novel’s greatest strength was in creating characters so rich in detail that they became real, they became people with pasts with whom the reader could form a connection and to whom we could cleave to.  I found this to be the case for me.  I was so invested in the fates of favorite characters that I wanted almost to flip forward in the book, to speed through the book and discover their individual endings.  To present a concrete example, one such character was the town’s doctor.  From the outset this character was presented in a negative light.  It was evident that few of the townspeople liked the doctor, and many made little effort to conceal their feelings.  For almost two thirds of the novel the doctor appeared a shady character with questionable motives, saved only by his apparent loyalty to the central and much loved female characters.  Eventually, though, we are given insight into the doctor’s past and it is there that Conrad’s prose shines with clarity and poignancy and sheer beauty.  Conrad’s descriptions of the doctor, his troubled past and his daily struggles are so detailed and complex, and peppered with beautiful (if terrible) imagery that they immediately lend the reader understanding and compassion.  In a matter of pages, the doctor, previously a tertiary character, largely unimportant to the reader or to the progression of the novel, transformed into a dynamic and central character in whom the reader could invest emotion and care. 

Late Autumn in Warsaw: as the last vestiges of summer's
greenery give way to the vibrancy of autumn, I turn
 my attention to the north of Africa with Albert Camus'
The Plague.

The central plot of Nostromo—the story of how an incorruptible sailor was tempted, tested, and ultimately destroyed—composes a relatively short story.  If one were to cut out the exposition, excising the histories and insights into the various characters, the story of Nostromo could be condensed into a short story or modern-day parable: a proud man is tested by a dangerous situation and gives in to the temptations of greed and ego, destroying himself and others.  While this is an interesting and at times exciting story, it would be insignificant and forgettable without its rich, descriptive prose.  Conrad so convincingly describes scenarios of madness, grief, shame, disgrace and despair that one could easily imagine him living each episode himself in some hellish nightmare of an existence.  Though terrible at times, these descriptions were so vivid and so eloquently phrased that for pages at a time I forgot any complaints I had against Conrad and gave myself over to the allure of a masterfully told story.

When I started Nostromo I feared that I might at last have encountered a novel that I could not endorse as fitting among the ranks of the other great novels I had read.  As I struggled continuously to orient myself in the ever-changing timeline, this fear was repeated over and over again.  More than once I even contemplated abandoning this project, giving in to the temptation of lighter literature.  I persisted, though, and in the end I am glad.  And I am equally glad to finally (a year later) be finished with Conrad and Nostromo.

Red Tape and Yellow Buildings

My first proper glimpse of Old Town

Oh bureaucracy….  At one point in my life I aspired to be a bureaucrat.  I realize that this is an odd dream; people do not dream of being bureaucrats.   People dream of being actors or athletes or great statesmen.  No one dreams of being one of the unseen “little people” who work to aid and support statesmen and politicians as they work to change the world.  For a semester at the end of my junior year of college, though, I believed that I was made to be a bureaucrat, and a damned good one at that.  I have no real reason to offer for this aspiration besides the fact that for most of my life I have known that I am an excellent assistant.  I can take the lead when necessary, but in general I prefer to let others do so, acting as a first mate to someone else’s captain whenever possible.  As such, I believed that as a bureaucrat I could happily and effectively assist great people as they worked to mold and shape our world into a better one.

I have since outgrown this aspiration.  Since my junior year I have desired to be a lawyer, a pub/restaurant owner, a rockstar, a college professor and historian, a rockstar historian, an aesthetician, and a teacher, to name a few.  I have flirted with the idea of working as an assistant, and many of the professions I’ve looked at are in the government and could be said to be within the realms of bureaucracy, but I no longer approach the idea with the same sort of starry eyed enthusiasm as I did at the age of 20. 

No, on second thought that isn’t true.  When I look at jobs working within for and with the U.S. government, jobs that would be considered bureaucratic, I still tend to tint the idea with a fair amount of rosy idealism.  I still cannot help but thrill at the idea of the U.S. government as a whole, and the idea of working for it, even as a paper pusher or severe matron with a modicum of authority and the power to wield a really cool stamp, still appeals to me in some sick, sick way.  And yes, I’m aware I just said that.

It delights me that even the lampposts are
charming with their swoops and flourishes

Bureaucracy, though, has taken on a new meaning for me.  Since coming to Warsaw I have had to encounter oh so many components of Polish bureaucracy as we seek to legalize my prolonged presence in Poland.  A regular tourist visa, granted to the average tourist entering Poland, lasts for three months; my contract, though, is for the period of one year.  For EU citizens, like my Irish roommate, visas are not an issue.  For me, however, it has been over a month of jumping through hoops and signing my name so many times I’ve almost forgotten where to make loops and where to make swoops. 

As a certified ESL instructor, I am not required to have a work visa in Poland, which saved me from making a hasty trip to San Francisco to obtain a visa.  Instead, my employers and I have to file page after page of documents verifying everything from my official place of residence and my work contract to my passport’s travel details and a copy of my boarding pass.  I’ve signed at least six copies of my contract (in Polish and in English), submitted my passport for copying countless times, and signed documents verifying that yes, I have an apartment, yes, I have a job and health insurance, and no, I won’t pay taxes here.  Together with my employers I have filled out almost 80 pages of documents detailing my physical description, my personal and family background, and my reason for wanting to remain in Poland for longer than three months.  I am exhausted simply thinking about all the documents we have assembled.  Every time someone from the office approaches me with another paper to sign, we both laugh and sigh at this latest hoop through which to jump, and inevitably someone says, “Ohhhh bureaucracy.”  But finally, on Wednesday, I went with our administrator Sylwia to file my paperwork.

The first office we visited was located within the “Old Town.”  I should note here that while it is called Old Town, this beautiful area of Warsaw is not actually old.  Like so much of the city, the Old Town was destroyed during the Second World War and has been rebuilt and reproduced in an effort to reclaim some of Warsaw’s cultural history.  Since coming to Warsaw I have been eager to visit the Old Town and see its sights, whose bronze-colored steeples have been calling to me for a month now. 

I felt like a small child as we drove over beautifully cobbled streets, with my face pressed against the window and gasping with delight over the lovely architecture of these official buildings.  I’ve stated several times that merely being in the presence of old buildings gives me a contact high, and although these buildings aren’t technically old, they still thrilled me to my core.  As our car slowly passed a vibrant yellow office with cherubs and statues standing at attention, I even managed to forget my anxiety over my upcoming interview with the bureaucrats who would decide my fate in Poland.

My trip to Old Town was remarkably brief, however.  Immediately upon entering the correct office we were informed by an uninspiring little bureaucrat that it was Wednesday and this office did not accept paperwork on Wednesdays.

Oh bureaucracy.  It would have been so much more palatable had he had a stamp that proclaimed with red ink that he would not accept my claim on a Wednesday—I feel that if one must be an authoritative and disliked (at least by me) bureaucrat, one must at least wield a stamp with red ink.  Or be garbed in a white shirt and branded in red tape with a scarlet B for Bureaucrat.

another steeple peeking through the leaves,
 captured on my phone just as we drove away
from Old Town

We subsequently took my paperwork to a second office (which did accept paperwork on Wednesdays, though I failed to discover whether it accepts paperwork on the other days of the week, perhaps it rejects paperwork on Tuesdays, or Thursdays).  At this second office we had a rather lengthy interview with a terse bureaucrat who reviewed my documents closely.  She told us that the nearly 40 pages of documents I had filled out had been done incorrectly—completed in English when they must be completed in Polish; we also needed more information about me and my travels, much more information.  She, too, sadly failed to possess an official stamp with which to reject my paperwork.  As she held the door open for me to pass out of the bureaucrat’s office, Sylwia smiled tiredly and sighed, “Oh bureaucracy.”

At least I can cling to the memory of that beautiful street in Old Town as it opened up before me, revealing beautiful European churches with their spires and steeples, and buildings of state, accented perfectly by the early colors of autumn.

Mur Getta

From what I could see, the onetime borders of the Ghetto
are now delineated with markers like this that run the
length of the Ghetto

This last Wednesday I had an impromptu trip through part of the Warsaw Ghetto.  It was a very sobering experience to read the markers which detail briefly the number of people forced to live in the Ghetto, and the numbers of people who were subsequently and systematically killed by Nazi forces at one concentration camp or another.  Unfortunately, the pictures I snapped were on an old phone that I have inherited, not my own excellent phone's camera or my new little red camera, so the quality is not what it could be.  Nor do my photos do justice to the weight of the streets I was walking or the history I was visiting.  Over the last few weeks I have reveled over the majesty and grandeur of this great city and its beauty; this week I finally came face to face with the other side of Warsaw, the heartbreakingly painful truth of its own history.  I have not visited its many museums yet, but I do know that a large majority of Warsaw was destroyed during World War II and that so many of the beautiful buildings that I've been delighting in are new, simply designed to replicate their destroyed predecessors.  Beyond this, though, is the even more devastating fact that during the war the Jewish population of Warsaw was rounded up and quartered within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.  The Ghetto, as I learned Wednesday, was actually in two parts, the Large Ghetto and the Small Ghetto, and the two were connected by a small footbridge.  I won't attempt to synthesize a brief history of the Warsaw Ghetto, at least not at this time.  There are many, many sites online that can detail with greater clarity and accuracy than I the history and significance of this Ghetto and its role during the war.  But I will post here my photos, and when I have the opportunity to return, and to visit the Uprising Museum, I will update my photos again.

For now, I will say that I am still infatuated with my new city, but, like a woman who finally realizes that her lover has had a long and tumultuous past, I am confronted with my city's past and it has shaken me a bit, changed me in a way that neither pyramids and sacrificial altars in Mexico nor drinks on pallets on the Wisła could.

Off to one side of the footbridge that connected the Large Ghetto
with the Small Ghetto is this small memorial, which includes a topographical
map of the Ghetto, and a few brief details about the Warsaw Ghetto and its people's
fate during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943

This is the site of the wooden footbridge that connected the Large Ghetto with the
Small Ghetto.  Like so much of Warsaw, the bridge itself did not survive the war,
but where it once stood is this memorial.  There are two towers with pictures of the
bridge around their bases.  Just behind this bridge tower are a few viewfinders where
visitors may look at four pictures of the Ghetto and the bridge as it stood in 1942

The opposite side of the bridge