A jaunt to Naples

"You're going to Italy? What happened, what's wrong?"
"You went to Naples? Wait, people just don't go to Naples [for no reason]."
- Two friends who will remain anonymous

Well, nothing was wrong and nothing went wrong. I was visiting my college friend Cassie who lives and works in Italy's second city, and this visit presented the perfect opportunity to get out of Poland for at least a little bit.

Naples is a messy, disorganized, crowded and absolutely fascinating city. In general I would say that it is a jumble that teeters on the brink of constant chaos but somehow manages. In general, I appreciated the very palpable energy in the air that was by and large not accompanied by thoroughly crabby people as it is in certain places like New York. The fact that it was 55 degrees F (+12 C) and sunny also did wonders for my mood.

As my host was extremely busy with work and other commitments I had the opportunity to wander around the city on my own and see what there was to see without any particular plan but with the aid of a good map. While I did see the archaeological museum, a few underground excavations, a museum in an old monastery, Pompeii and Herculaneum (which I will discuss separately) and the soccer team manage a very disappointing 0-0 draw, the vast majority of my time was spent just collecting impressions of the place, which I would argue is in some ways a much more edifying way of conducting tourism than taking a high-speed tour of a bunch of museums in a gaggle of other tourists.

The historic city center is pretty darn historic: it's built on medieval ruins which are built on Roman ruins which are, in some cases, built on Greek ruins. There are actually underground tours of Naples where it is possible to see old Roman reservoirs and the remains of a theater. Some of those remains have actually been incorporated as structural elements in present houses, i.e. the Roman ruins are still actively holding the city up. Our tour-guide added that the modern city is also actively holding the ruins together. Bulldoze the modern city and the ruins underneath will collapse. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that all of this is taking place in a seismically-active zone next to Mt. Vesuvius, which is one of the 16 most dangerous volcanoes on Earth. This thought rather uncomfortably entered my head as our tour was squeezing through a passageway that was about 150 m long by 6 m tall by 60 cm wide (that's about 500 feet by 20 feet by 2 feet).

The soccer game was an interesting experience. We sat, or rather stood, in the cheap seats in "Curva A", which I think will provoke amusement here in Poland. Most remarkable was how quiet the game could be. Now, I don't mean quiet in the sense that there wasn't any noise, because the fans in Curva A and B could be very raucous and noisy. However, all of the cheering was very organized: the same cheer would go up from thousands of throats at the same time, led by a few designated cheerleaders. In between these cheers, there was this awkward silence. A typical American stadium has a constant din to it, a kind of low-level hum, at more or less all times with particular events such as a home run or touchdown sparking louder cheering which settles back into that humming. Here, the loud cheering after some event would settle down into silence. It was kind of unnerving and vaguely reminiscent of Fascism: massive, organized chants led by a few, that start and stop on command, extremely dedicated partisans who simply must go to these kinds of events even if not coerced, only that instead of chants pledging undying allegiance to a leader (Mussolini, to pick one entirely at random), you hear chants pledging undying allegiance to a soccer team.

Speaking of Il Duce, I actually saw his portrait in a couple of prominent locations, including at one point on a calendar hanging over a cash register in a cafe. Now in the States at least, if people think of Mussolini at all, it is as a half-comical figure: if there's a joke you'd love to crack about Nazis but can't because it's a little too dark or politically-incorrect, such a joke can usually be made at the expense of the Italian Fascists instead. For example, Woody Allen, in a film-within-a-film segment of Crimes and Misdemeanors, has the Alan Alda character rave out with a jump-cut to Mussolini raving out. Had the cut been to Hitler, I think most Americans would not have found the scene as funny. One of the coffee stands at Pitt has what is very obviously a pastiche of an Italian propaganda poster that encourages people to drink espresso. In Italy the feelings towards Mussolini appear more complicated. I once heard an Italian talk about how he killed "millions" of people, and while that's probably an exaggeration, Il Duce was not a nice guy, and he also chose some rather unfortunate allies in 1940. However, the fact that people can publicly display Mussolini memorabilia in Naples, in a country where everybody knows who that guy is, suggests that a number of people probably still regard him fondly. If I had to hazard a guess, that kind of affection could be analogous to the feelings that some Yugoslavs have for Tito, for instance: he may have been mean and nasty, but at least the country worked for a change when he was in charge.

Italian driving is all that it is cracked up to be, namely, absolutely insane. I saw a couple motorcycles use a pedestrian crosswalk. Another motorcycle featured a guy with a rather large golden retriever lying on his lap. At one point I stood under a "senso unico" sign, and apparently the Italians don't know what that means either. Three or four motorcycles came roaring the wrong way down this narrow one-way street with nobody batting an eye. There is a large, divided boulevard near the U.S. consulate by the sea, and there are breaks in the divider between the directions of traffic to allow people to turn left by first turning right and pulling a U-turn down the street somewhere. Well, one guy wasn't willing to go through all that trouble, so he just turned left into the left lane of oncoming traffic, rolled about 50 meters to the next gap and went on his merry way. Considering that nobody so much as honked a horn, this was a normal-enough maneuver. In general I found that as long as a driver (or a pedestrian, for that matter) was clear in his intention, aggressive enough to carry it out, and correctly judged that it wouldn't disrupt the flow of traffic too much, even if such a maneuver was completely crazy the other drivers would adjust. To cross a street, for example, it sometimes paid to not wait for a particular "break" but just to walk into traffic and hope for the best. I don't think I want to see the kind of driving that would actually result in the Italian police giving somebody a ticket. In an amazing coincidence, car insurance premiums in Italy are the highest of any EU country. 

Surprisingly, English was largely between very bad and nonexistent, even in the tourist areas. I got the impression that this wasn't out of a desire to seem "authentic", out of the pride in linguistic ignorance sometimes displayed by some Frenchmen and some Americans, or out of a desire to screw tourists by erecting an artificial language barrier. In general I found that people genuinely tried to understand me when I spoke, would throw in what words of English they knew, and between my very bad to nonexistent Italian, their very bad to nonexistent English, and the hand-waving that accompanies fluent conversation in Italian we were able to communicate simple things like the fact that I wanted one canolo and that I owed 1.50 Euro for it.  Also that we all liked the Napoli soccer team.

Strangely enough, on a number of occasions I met people in the street who steadfastly refused to believe that I did not speak Italian. At least twice, someone asked me something in Italian on a bus or train, to which I replied "non parlo Italiano" with a look of what I hope was pleasant confusion. They just kept right on talking. Once I decided to respond in Polish, and that quieted the fellow right down. He must have assumed I was some kind of crazy person making a bunch of odd noises! 

The first time I was in Italy 3 years ago I was able to communicate by speaking Spanish but throwing in what Italian I was able to pick up. Unfortunately this plan didn't work as well this time for two reasons: 1) I haven't spoken or studied Spanish in years and 2) I kept thinking in and speaking in Polish by mistake. My Polish was never so good as when it did me absolutely no good. 

In general I found the people to be very gracious and friendly. I may have been overcharged or cheated a couple of times, but the amount was so small and other party so pleasant I didn't really mind too much (and lest I be accused of perpetuating stereotypes I should stress that the overwhelming majority of the people I dealt with were perfectly honest and/or transparent about trying to get me to buy more stuff, e.g. "are you sure you don't want fries with that?") However, there is a slightly darker side to all this: people just seemed a little too friendly. And in fact I understand that one downside of living there is that you're never quite sure who your friends really are. Someone could pat your back one day only to drive a knife through it the next.

Naples definitely has a dark undercurrent to it, and has had that undercurrent for some time. Indeed, Al Capone's family originally came from the outskirts of town. My grandfather went through the city during World War II, and said that Naples was the only place on earth he knew of where entire trucks could disappear as if into thin air, with nobody seeing anything or saying anything. More alarmingly, I understand that today from time to time people disappear into thin air with nobody seeing or saying anything. When we went out for dinner one night we went into the Spanish Quarter, which I understand is a Mafia stronghold. When we got to the restaurant it was interesting to note a guy standing about 100 meters from the door, kind of half-blocking the street. We bade him good evening and walked on, but this guy was either watching the cars that had been parked in the street or otherwise functioning as some kind of picket. After dinner, once we had gotten to a main shopping street that borders the Spanish Quarter, it was interesting to note police patrols roaring up and down the deserted street. On this Monday night around midnight we were approached by a group of street toughs who could not have been more than about 15, with one guy who wasn't old enough to shave strutting like a bantam rooster and trying to bum cigarettes off of us. I saw one of the kids light up. He could not have been more than 11 or 12. Further along, I was surprised by a great deal of commotion and shouting behind me and to my right. Before I got a chance to look around, two punks around 18 circled our group like a shark would. Apparently one of our number had looked at those guys the wrong way. Just looked, not said anything or gestured, just looked the wrong way. They buzzed off, content to just intimidate as ultimately there were 5 of us and only 2 of them.

On the train to Pompeii and Herculaneum the half-hour train ride featured about 8 beggars making the rounds up and down entire train cars, some while playing accordions. At least 4 of them were kids one of whom was probably about 6. I've never seen anything like it in Poland. This is not to say there aren't panhandlers in Krakow, only that all of them are at least 18. Across from the National Museum under the arcades of what is by day a shopping mall and gallery about 20-30 homeless settle down for the night. I saw another one or two sleeping in one of the side-chapels of the Cathedral.

Cassie also let me in on one of the great contradictions of Italy: despite the fact that when it comes to driving and pretty much everything else anything goes, the society is very rigid. Not only is upward mobility difficult, but things like what grades you get in school are based largely on what kind of reputation you have. She said she had had trouble with a school administrator when she gave higher grades to certain people than that administrator believed they deserved. This was not a case of the administrator actually looking at any of the work and disagreeing with how it was graded. It was more along the lines of "Giorgio is a C student. Why did you give him an A?" Furthermore, young Italians are usually expected to be only one thing when they grow up: Giuseppe is one of our prize first-graders, an A student, he's going to be a doctor. Giorgio is a C student and will grow up to be a no-account. Furthermore, the opportunities to become rich in Italy are generally limited to those with the necessary connections and experience, i.e. those who are rich already.

These are only some of the impressions I carried away from only 5 days in this city. As I said, it is rich, complicated, and absolutely fascinating.

Where No means Yes: Handy Polish Expressions

It's high time we had a "colorful" post, and considering I just talked about the Polish language I should stress that, yes, there are swear words here and yes, people do use them. That's not going to be the only thing I talk about, but I should warn the faint of eye that some of these are going to be about PG-13. I also can't exactly "bleep" the vowels because those of you following along in English won't know what it is, exactly, that I bleeped.  So, here are some handy, versatile and uncensored expressions I've picked up.

Spoko- short for "spokojnie" or "calmly" as far as I can tell, but used for a lot more than that. Depending on context it can mean "relax", "cool", "shut up and let me finish" or "it's all good." It's sort of a student expression, and I think I've gotten a few chuckles by saying it to my boss on occasion.

Kurwa- the great Polish five-letter word, appropriate for all occasions except polite ones. I would say it's about as strong as "sh*t" in English but as versatile as "f*ck" in its many usages as verb, noun, adjective, adverb, interjection, pronoun and possibly preposition, and in the fact that some people's conversations seem to consist almost entirely of this word.

Kurczak, kurczy - Chicken. Usually used in place of "kurwa" when in polite company. It is the rough equivalent of  "darn" or "fudge" or "fiddlesticks."  

Załatwić - Another great Polish concept. It means literally "to ease" but idiomatically "to take care of something." It can be implied that the manner of so doing is in some way under-the-radar. If you took care of something by calling in favors, pulling strings, or by doing something on a handshake, that's an example of something that was "załatwiony." When "załatwić" is used to describe something done to a person, however, it usually means that that person was in some way "taken care of" as in taken advantage of : "ale mu załatwili" - "they sure took care of him" or "they sure screwed him over."

As a side note, a Polish word for hiring someone for a job is zatrudnić, which I think might actually mean "to difficultize" as "trudno" means "difficult."   

Jasne - Literal translation is "bright", but it generally means "sure thing."

Cholera (jasne) - Just like it says, cholera, intensified by "jasne." As far as I can tell this is actually a pretty heavy swear word, about on-par with the f-word in English. It's a testament to the fact that public health has not always been as good as it is today.

Szlag, szlag trafi - Roughly "damn." Translates as "lightning bolt" or "may a lightning bolt strike it." It's usually pronounced more like "szlak", which is a different word meaning a trail. I think I'm going to see if I can get a reaction by exclaiming "szlak handlowy!" (trade route) sometime soon.

Jak musztarda po obiedzie - Like mustard after lunch. When something is already redundant or unnecessary/"overtaken by events."

Gdy się człowiek spieszy, to się diabeł cieszy - Someone in a hurry makes the devil cheerful. An explanation for why we can never find something when we most need it, or when we're most in a hurry things go to pieces.

Akurat - Apropo of something. Can also mean "well" as in the sense of "well, I was down at Wawel today and...." or "now that you mention it..."

No - Well. Can also mean "yeah", "of course" or "yeah, and?"

(ma) ręce i nogi - It has arms and legs. In other words, when something is in a workable condition.

(To) gra - (It) plays. Figuratively, when something is working.

The 'ol handshake

One of the most noticeable etiquette differences between Poland and the United States concerns handshakes and physical embraces. I still don't have all of the finer points down yet, and I feel like I should learn them quickly lest I appear unpleasant, stand-offish or rude.

Interestingly enough, I haven't really noticed a difference in other physical aspects of etiquette. For example, the sense of personal space and a personal "bubble" is about the same here as it is in the States (and thus very different from, say, Latin America). Straight people of the same sex will walk arm-in-arm here or women will hold hands in public, though it seems to me that most of the men who will walk arm-in-arm are older. However, the biggest single difference is that people love to pump the flesh over here.

Generally, if you are a male in Poland you should shake hands with another male, regardless of setting:

1) When meeting someone for the first time ever.
2) When seeing someone for the first time today.
3) Any time you enter somebody's house.
4) When you see somebody you see regularly for the first time on a particular day.
5) Before you leave for the day and/or part company with someone on a particular day. Generally applies to somebody you work with or share an office with.
6) With every other male in a group of people that you plan to be with for longer than about 5 minutes. Doesn't matter if all of them except the guy you want to talk to are strangers. Doubly important if you're doing something like choir: go down the line and shake with people!
7) If you are simply in doubt as to whether to present your hand or not.

Make it a nice, bold hand offering. Stick it out there like you're proud of it. For the two-handed handshake, it seems to be more in the style of grabbing your counterpart's right elbow with your left hand than cupping the other party's hand in your own. 

With women it's a lot trickier. As far as I can tell, women shake hands when they first meet somebody and/or in a business setting, but that's about it. They also seem to tend to affect the "limp mackerel" style of handshake. Older people will engage in hand-kissing, but that's considered weird if practiced by anyone under about 50. Women tend not to go hugging each other in public, or at least not as much as they do in the States. I get the sense that men and women don't hug as much as they do in the States, or if they do so it is on a much more thorough acquaintance. Indeed, I think I've surprised a number of people by hugging them when parting. I'm not so sure if the "bear hug" between men has caught on here or not. In theory, Poles do the whole Euro-cheek-kiss thing, but I haven't actually seen that much of it around. Schoolchildren walking in the street walk in double-file and hold hands while doing so.

This has gotten me to thinking about handshake conventions in the United States, and how we're actually a lot vaguer as to when one is appropriate. Sure, in business or the first time you meet somebody it is appropriate to shake, as well as in settings where you haven't seen somebody for a long time. However, the handshake is often indicative of a kind of formal or physical distance between people who know each other. You don't shake hands with people you don't really know just because they're there, and you don't shake hands with your closest friends every time you see them. If you see somebody every day, you generally don't shake hands with them. However, this doesn't seem to be a very general rule as I usually would shake hands with my friends or with my uncle or grandfather (in the latter case usually coupled with a hug). Ultimately, after having formally written down cases in which a handshake is appropriate in Poland, the list doesn't look that different from what's normal in the United States particularly as we have a very wide range of "normal". However, all I can say is that the conventions are somehow noticeably different. Ultimately, it seems like handshakes are more a thing of personal preference in the States than they are over here: there's less of a range of normal behavior.

I actually like the hand-shaking etiquette here as far as I can make it out. It just seems friendlier. What does seem strange, though, is that greetings and goodbyes between genders seem a bit more stilted here as women and men will generally nod to each other rather than shake hands or hug as they would in the States.

This is yet another excellent illustration of how sometimes the most familiar things are the most foreign, and how sometimes it is the little differences that really set places apart. In Japan, an American would expect manners to be different, but in Poland they would probably expect them to be about the same. They just aren't, in very small ways.

Fun with Snow

The Plac Matejki, looking towards the Old City

My colleague Stephanie Jackowska, who is an English Teaching Assistant in Gdańsk, recently wrote a blog post about some of life's little irritations in Poland (see it here.) One of the things she mentioned was the way that snow removal is or is not handled over here.

As I'm writing this, we're in the process of getting what is probably going to turn out to be between 3 and 6 inches (7.5-15cm) of snow, only a few days after we had had a week-long thawing out that pretty much eliminated the snow on the ground. I was hoping that that thaw would prove lasting, because there are a few things that are irritating about snow removal over here.

First, I've noticed that most sidewalks aren't shoveled, and rather than using salt the sidewalks are sanded. So, if it does get above freezing all of that turns into this sandy slush that clings to boots. Coming inside means leaving ugly brown footprints wherever you go and if you haven't banged those boots out thoroughly, you might even leave a puddle behind. In public places where a lot of people are coming in from the snow, this usually means there are ugly brown puddles that pool in low spots in the floor. Other than that, you've got a bunch of brown footprints left on, say, tile floors. To avoid this, many stores will have some poor schlep who's entire job, as far as I can tell, consists of mopping up after each customer enters. 

Many apartment buildings do not have heated hallways, i.e. the individual apartments are heated, but the block itself is not. So a stack of snow usually stays on the roofs of the buildings. It's very pretty, but once things start to thaw that snow has to be cleared somehow lest, you guessed it, the melt should pool and seep under the roof. So during the thaw there were guys on roofs with shovels tossing snow onto the sidewalk below, whilst that section of sidewalk was roped off with somebody down there both spotting for the guy on the roof and warning people. At least in theory that's how it's supposed to work. Sometimes the guy on the roof gets more enthusiastic than his spotter expects him to be, leading said spotter to be whacked in the head by chunks of flying snow.

Freezing rain is really a novelty here. We had such a storm, and nobody here had ever seen anything like it. Apparently none of them spent a winter in Pittsburgh! 

I think that the city fathers are also hoping that the snow ends soon. The newspaper had a story about a month ago about how the city had budgeted 15 million złoty for snow removal, and had about 1 million still on hand in the middle of January. Now I don't know about you, but $5 million seems like a pretty measly budget for an entire winter worth of snow removal for a city of 700,000 people, even accounting for lower salaries here. Sadly, when I asked some people about this state of affairs, they said that that particular story runs in the paper pretty much every year. 

Oh well. At least the Planty look absolutely beautiful with fresh-fallen snow on all the trees.   

The Polish Language

A niechaj narodowie wżdy postronni znają, iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój [trudny] język mają

(In all nations in all places let it be known, that Poles are not geese, and have a [difficult] language of their own )

-Mikołaj Rej, Do tego co czytał (To the Reader), 1562, my translation. 

Polish is considered one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn (about on the same level as Arabic, actually), and even among its native speakers it is not always perfectly spoken. Indeed, I find it rather humorous that Prof. Oscar Swan's "Polish Grammar in a Nutshell" is 95 pages long.  That's not "Polish Language in a Nutshell." No. That's Polish Grammar. If you really insist on getting the full picture of Polish grammar, you can find it at http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/firstyear/nutshell.pdf . I'm proud to say that when I applied for the Fulbright to Poland my Polish was evaluated by the guy that wrote this. I've been lead to believe that he said my Polish was adequate, which considering that Prof. Swan is actually a very well-known language professor in the States, it was probably only a step or two short of having Adam Mickiewicz himself say that my Polish was "jako-tako".

When most Americans think about Polish, they probably think of a string of z's strung together to make unpronounceable words. That's actually not an unfair stereotype. For example, I understand that in the Polish version of Scrabble, there are 5 z's each worth 1 point. In general, Polish vowels sound like their Spanish or Italian counterparts (no dipthongs), Y is a vowel most of the time, J is pronounced roughly as "yeh", the k or hard c sound in English is always represented by K in Polish, and C is soft, like the "ts" as in "tsar." W is pronounced like in German, i.e. like the English v, except in some situations where it is pronounced more like an f. Ł is pronounced like an English w. U and Ó are both pronounced "u". Special characters are ą (sort of an "awn" sound), ę (kind of like "en"), ż ("zh"), ź ("zhi"), ś ("sh"), and ć ("ch").  X and V are not used except in blatanly foreign words. Common letter combinations include cz (pronounced "ch"), sz (pronounced "sh") and dz (pronounced a little bit like the English letter J is). The words are spelled just like they sound!

Polish is hard to pronounce if you aren't used to it, but given practice it does get easier. Apparently there's a very big focus on standard pronunciation, and "Polbonics" is frowned upon in educational settings. Ironically, this means some people occasionally have trouble understanding foreigners speaking Polish, because 1) there aren't that many foreigners who live in Poland and 2) speak enough Polish for the accent to really matter and 3) most younger people aren't even used to hearing the equivalent of, say, a Bronx accent versus a Chicago accent versus one from Mississippi.

The hardest part of the language is probably the idea of grammatical case as well as case endings. For those of you who have studied Russian or other Slavic languages, German and Latin this should evoke familiar groans. To get an idea of how daunting speaking Polish grammatically can be, I will just say there are 7 different cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. Russian has all of these cases except the vocative and German has a comparably light 4. Latin has an ablative case rather than an instrumental, but has the same number of cases overall.

 

For those not familiar with a language that has cases, think of it as a requirement to conjugate nouns as well as verbs. The closest analogy I can draw is this one: you are now reading Mark's blog. Now in English, the " 's" is tacked on to the end of a word to signify possession of something. But what if you wanted to get my attention? You could say "Hey, Mark'u" where the " 'u" would signify that you were calling to me, or "I gave the book Mark'owi" signifying that I am the direct object of a sentence: you gave the book to me. Now, Polish does not use apostrophes, so the above examples simply become "To jest blog Marka", "Hej, Marku", and "dałem tą książkę Markowi." Oh yes, and the adjectives that modify each and every one of these nouns also has to agree with the case of the noun. There are some general rules for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, however as with any rule there are exceptions. Furthermore, there are often situations where it is hard to tell whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter because in certain cases it takes an ending that is used by another gender in another case. So if you have a sentence with three nouns, each of those nouns will have to take a different case and a different ending. Oftentimes if you simply change word-order you have to change your case endings as well. Every noun is declined. You can see how this gets complicated.

Then there are things that Polish does that are just weird. For example, when you're talking about money, it's 1 złoty, but 2,3, and 4 złote and 5 or more złotych. When counting things, the case is dependent on how many of those things you're talking about. 

Oh yes, and speaking of counting, it's "ośmiu mężczyzn" (eight men), but "osiem kobiet" (eight women) and "ośmioro osób" (eight people, when that's a mix of men and women).

I'd love to meet the guy who made this language up. Incidentally, I understand that the fate of the Polish language rests in the hands of a bunch of old geezers at Jagellonian University, who are continuing to think up new ways to make the language more complicated. From what I understand there's not a National Academy (as in France and Spain) per se, but the language is governed by the equivalent of the Chicago Manual of Style.

  

Now, there are, believe it or not, some advantages to the way this language is structured. Because of the case endings and because adjectives have to agree with the nouns they are modifying, there is less potential for ambiguity than in English. Word order is also much less strict than in English. There are no direct or indirect articles, and verbs are much simpler: there's a past, present, and future tense and that's it. Of course, the verb has to agree with the gender of the noun that is doing whatever is going on, but that's comparatively not so bad. 

I will add that even Poles don't always speak grammatically. For example, I'm noticing that relatively few people actually use the vocative case, and quite often people will talk about "25 złoty" rather than "złotych." I've also heard that in grammar school, Polish children have to stand at the front of the class and recite nouns in all of their appropriate cases. Essentially, rather than spelling bees, there are grammar bees here.

Anyway, it's been a lot of, well, I guess you could call it fun, learning the language. I must say that on a good day I'm the most fluent in a second language that I've ever been in my life, and being able to communicate in that second language is one of the most thrilling experiences I've had.