Back in the States

The New Year is always a time for reflection and planning, so I have spent some time reminiscing about my months here and thinking about what comes next. I have spent the holidays back in the United States, which I hope explains the paucity of posts over the last month. Granted, spending time in Chicago is as close to spending time in Poland as you can get, particularly if that time is spent on Milwaukee Avenue. I am still struck by how much Warsaw looks like Chicago in terms of general layout, sprawl, street size and the faces of the people who are in those streets. 

One thing that struck me while taking stock of the time I've spent in Poland so far is that everything I've been learning takes place in a kind of indistinct haze. A lot of this is due to the language difference: my day-to-day conversations take place in a language in which at least one of the speakers is not completely comfortable. While my Polish has greatly improved with constant practice, I still can't express myself with all the nuance that comes naturally to me in English. I also do not catch all of the finer points of what others are saying, and when it becomes clear that I am not a Pole, most people will speak in simpler sentences anyway. Likewise, on those occasions when I speak English with someone from overseas, I find myself trying to be clear rather than nuanced. My writing and speech takes on a very straightforward and sometimes almost brutal quality for this reason. I will finish this year in Poland writing like Hemingway. My sentences will be short. They will be simple and true. And this will be good. Wordiness is too often confused for weightiness, complexity of writing for complexity of thought. I have long known the power of simplicity. My time in Poland continues to give me an occasion to practice it, as I spend time trimming unnecessary verbal foliage as a matter of course. That being said, it is nice to be surrounded by native English speakers, as this demands much less work from everyone involved.

In the coming year I hope to find a way to conduct some cultural outreach. This will of course be bi-directional: I want to leave people with an accurate impression of the United States, as well as thoroughly understand Poland. Accomplishing this will require more thought than I initially anticipated. If my time in Poland has taught me anything, it is that the best way to do things is often an informal one. Formal approaches through formal channels often require a tangle of red tape, pieces of paper with five stamps on them from different departments, and so on. Formal events are also few and far between. The other thing that I'm realizing is that I cannot expect to learn about Poland by the truckload. I think I had this expectation of having a series of deep and probing conversations with a number of people for hours on end. While I have had those sorts of conversations and learned many interesting things from them, far more frequent is the five-minute chat between classes or in a hallway. I'm going to have to piece Poland together five minutes at a time.

I still need to get into the habit of watching TV. I don't do much of that in the States, partly because there is seldom anything good on. Of course, to hear certain Poles talk about it, Poland is increasingly having the same problem. This is hardly the point: it is excellent language practice.
At the risk of sounding obvious, I will say that living in a country and being a tourist are completely different experiences, and that it isn't possible to really get the feel for a place without living there for an extended period of time. I saw Krakow on a superficial level for two weeks, and now at a deeper level for two months and change. Poland looks much more complicated now than it did the first time I was there, largely because now I have seen more of the warts that every country has but are easily hidden from someone who sees the tourist sights, eats at good restaurants, and is on a budget that is looser than that of the average resident.

All in all, I'm very glad to be working and living in Poland. It continues to teach me a lot about not only another country, but my own, not only about other people, but also about myself.