You think your journey was bad: An eventful train ride to the Baltic Sea

Returning to my arrival to the Village. Recap: I was installed in my Archives room at PZU, I had met Misiu and unfortunately his girlfriend and had more than 2 weeks to kill before school started. What’s a girl to do? Go to the Baltic Sea!

One of my university friends had been to Poland on a student exchange and had sent my contact information to her best Polish friend. He lived at the Baltic Sea and true to Polish hospitality invited me for 2 weeks.

I set out on my journey which involved one short bus ride and then another longer bus ride to Poznań where I needed to change to the train and continue on to the sea. I was very proud that I made it to Poznań by bus, but realized that I did not know where the train station was. I asked some college students and not only did they show me the way, they also helped me buy a ticket and got me on the train. I thanked them profusely and then I was off!

I was really stressed on the train. I was worried that I wouldn’t get off at the right stop (I didn’t realize that my stop was the last) or that someone would rob me. I started my journey in a compartment full of older people. I felt as if I should have my name and destination pinned to my sweater like a child. The older people slowly departed and a group of painters returning from work got in. They offered me a shot of vodka, but I thought it best to decline.

Then the painters departed and I was finally alone and could relax. The conductor had been around a few times to check everyone’s tickets and since he had already checked mine more than once, I was surprised to see him again. He was saying something to me in Polish, but I didn’t understand anything. That’s a shame because maybe if I had, I could have avoided what came next.

The smiling conductor closed the door to the compartment along with the curtains and locked the door. I straightened up in my seat. I started to protest when a large hand struck me across the head and face. As I had never been hit in the head before, accidentally or on purpose, I was out for a moment. As the little birdies flying around my head dispersed, I could feel the conductor grabbing me between my legs and opening his belt. I knew that I had to react and save myself from whatever he was planning. I had taken some self-defense course required at university, and had always had a mental blockade to screaming and to hitting someone. The blockade goes out the window when you are being attacked for real, not by some self-defense instructor in a padded suit. I kicked, hit and scratched the conductor and jumped up and began screaming and banging on the door. Luckily for me, it was only about 10 minutes to the last stop and people had already began congregating in the corridor of the train. The other passengers began screaming back and in a matter of seconds the door was unlocked by the conductor and he was scurrying away clutching his opened zipper and belt in his hands. The other passengers asked me if I was ok and if someone was waiting for me. I was never so happy to see the smiling face of my new friend waiting for me and I think the first thing I told him was that this country is messed up and that I wanted to go home.

PS If you get lost in Poland and need help, I recommend asking some young people. It worked for me in Poznań. Another time it didn’t work out for me as I asked a young, handsome man, “Do you speak English?” to which he replied, “Yes, only. I’m Dutch.” Oh, well.

PS2 Return the favor and help someone out who looks lost. Once I helped some tourists in the City. They were lost and couldn’t find the Market Square which was visible from where we were standing. Their problem was that they had a map that only included the Market Square, not the surrounding streets, and it was a pop-up map no less.

The first time I met Misiu

Do you remember the first time you met your spouse? I do. I was sitting in my room at PZU writing a shopping list in Polish and trying to learn how to pronounce the words before going out.

My shopping list looked something like this:

chleb – hlep (bread)

herbata – hair-bought-a (tea)

mleko – mlake-0 (milk)

masło – mass-wo (butter)

ser – sair (cheese)

cukier – tsook-air (sugar)

Don’t judge me. It was my second day in Poland.

Then my intercom rang and somebody said, “Rebecca? I’m a teacher from school”. I was so excited that I didn’t even tell him my name was not Rebecca. I went out on the landing to see who it was and I heard heavy foot steps climbing the stairs. Then as a head appeared, I said hi and this guy, my Misiu turned around, looking up from the stairs as I looked down and said hi back. I remember what he was wearing – green/grey Levi’s trousers, a t-shirt, black shoes and a black belt. It was August and he was also very suntanned. Sounds romantic but it actually was not because the next thing I said was, “Do you speak English?” Misiu replied, “Yes,” and I said, “Great. We’re going shopping. By the way, I’m not Rebecca.”

Who would have thought we would end up together?

By the way, Rebecca was a teacher who was supposed to come to “my” school. She got ill at the last minute, and I came in her place.

Arrival

My arrival to Poland was a big deal for me. It was the start of a new chapter in my life. My grown-up chapter. Not that I hadn’t been living as an adult already, but it seemed more real than before. Maybe because if I screwed up there was no one to bail me out, not that I couldn’t ask my parents to bail me out of a sticky situation, but it’d be pretty difficult with the ocean and all between us.

My parents spent most of my childhood teaching me (and my sister) how to be independent and self-reliant. They had always taught me that I could do anything I wanted to do and be anybody I wanted to be and that everything I needed to achieve my goals, I had inside me. They had also always told me that I had to go to college and I had to get a job. And I did just that after graduating from high school. (My sister did the same and left home for good at 20.) So when university graduation rolled around, I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d soon be a cliché - a college graduate working at the mall and living at home with her parents. Also my manager didn’t take too kindly to my farewell statement to our customers, “Thank you for shopping with us and please come again. I’m 22 years old, have a 3.9 GPA and need a real job. Call me.” I was also pretty sure that my parents didn’t want me sponging off of them either. I mean they had been pushing me out for so long, I thought I had to go somewhere, anywhere.

I didn’t expect to make a big splash in the small town in Poland where I had been sent to teach, but I thought that at least maybe somebody might notice that I had arrived. An English/German teacher from the school had been sent to the airport to pick me up and deliver me to my apartment (ha, ha, ha) and show me around. Except she didn’t. I mean she picked me up and delivered me to my apartment (ha, ha, ha). Then she took me to a shop where I bought a few things. She brought me back to my new home and pointed to the school which could be seen through the window a block or two away and told me that I should show up there for the first day of school which was in about 2 weeks. She commented on how dirty my apartment (ha, ha, ha) was running her finger along the top of my dirty fridge, gave me a cup, plate, spoon, fork and pot from her home (that was very nice of her) and left. I was alone and pretty scared.

I mean being alone wasn’t scary. I like myself and I enjoy my own company but being in this apartment (ha, ha, ha) in a foreign country where I didn’t know a soul, I had never felt more alone in my life. I decided to try to unpack and go straight to sleep. I mean, everything looks better in the morning, doesn’t it? I looked at the piece of furniture in my room which I supposed was to be my sofa/bed for the next year. I had been provided with a comforter, pillow and bed sheets which seemed to be hermetically sealed together and quite possibly starched. I somehow unsealed them and got the pillow inside the pillow case and the comforter inside the cover. Then I looked again at my sofa/bed. How to get it to the flat position? I tried everything I could think of to get this thing in the flat position and finally gave up, sleeping on it as a sofa. I was just too tired. Later, I was quite amused to find out that this kind of sofa bed is called an Amerykanka (an American). I was also amused to find out that the local pizzeria’s “American” pizza had hard-boiled eggs and corn as toppings. I only confirmed for them that this was the right direction by ordering it every time I went there.

Anyhow, the next morning I decided to hit the town. I was terribly afraid of getting lost. Now that I know this small town very well, it is kind of funny to remember my fear, but I really was scared. I lived near an old church with a tall steeple and I used it as my point of reference. I walked 15 minutes in one direction and then walked directly back to the church. From the church, I walked 15 minutes in the other direction and then straight back to the church. After a couple of hours of that game, I was right bored and tired. I went home think what I was going to do with myself for the next 2 weeks.

As I left my apartment (ha, ha, ha) that morning, I did find it strange that I only had a key to lock my room, not the main door to my apartment (ha, ha, ha). My apartment (in my view) consisted of a room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a hallway/foyer. So to be clear, I could lock the door to my room but not the door from my foyer to the main hallway. When I got back from my excursion, I learned why.

I lived in an office building, PZU to be exact. (PZU is one of the largest Polish insurance providers) Are you jealous? “My” kitchen wasn’t mine. It was for everyone working at PZU. “My” bathroom wasn’t mine, either. It was the bathroom for all of PZU. But as I said above, the floor plan was like that of a small apartment so it was strange to find people congregating in what was for me my foyer, right outside my living room/bedroom door. There was nothing I could do about it, so I decided to suck it up. I went to my door, unlocked it with my skeleton key went inside and waited for everyone to go home. Luckily for me, Polish people who work at PZU like to go home from work on time, so I didn’t have any problems with stragglers in the evening. I did learn that right below me, the building’s maintenance man and his family lived, so I was not completely alone (except when they went on holiday for Christmas and left the building with no heat - Merry Christmas!).

That evening I decided to explore the building. I left my room with a flashlight and a dictionary. I didn’t even lock my door or turn off the light in my room. Who was going to go in there? I wandered the halls of PZU translating what I could find written on the doors. I found the conference room, the president’s office, and the accounting department. Later, I would discover that some people don’t lock their office doors at night and also that my skeleton key fit all the rooms on the top floor. As I wandered back to my room (downgraded from apartment, ha, ha, ha) I decided to check for sure what it said on the doors there. Sure enough on the kitchen, it said kuchnia and on the bathroom it said łazienka. On my room, it said archiwum. Archiwum? What’s that? It can’t be? No, it couldn’t be. It was. My room was the Archives room. They simple moved out the archives and moved in the American girl. That would explain later why PZU employees often burst into my room carrying some binders to be filed and left surprised to find me there.

PS What can you fit in an archives room? Well, I don’t know about your archives room but mine had a sofa/bed, a wardrobe, a table and two chairs, a night table, a small lamp and an old radio. All the luxury you could want in 9 square meters.

It was a gray August day

It seems like a lifetime ago, that gray August day I arrived in Poland for the first time. The whole long plane ride from New York or was it Newark, I can’t even remember now, I kept thinking What am I doing? This is crazy. I looked over for reassurance at the three other American folks I met at the airport but they looked as unsure as I did. The plane was also pretty under-booked. This doesn’t bode well, I thought, nobody wants to go there, so why am I going there? I was really tired from the two domestic flights it took me to get to NY. No one in my family would drive me to the airport :( Fortunately, I had two seats to myself to spread out, but I was still uncomfortable. A reason for my discomfort may have been my shoes, cowboy boots! Yes, I was wearing cowboy boots, but not the fashion kind, the real ride- on-a-horse kind. I must have looked like such an arse, a totally conspicuous American out and about in the world.

After about 9 or so hours, we reached our 1st destination, Warsaw, and collected in our new survival group - 2 sisters destined for the City (Curly and Red), me destined for a small town and the Man of our group destined for a town about half-way between the City girls and me. We began searching for the domestic terminal. We looked all around the ground floor of the airport and couldn’t find it. We packed all of us and our luggage for one year into the elevator and went upstairs hoping it was up there, but it wasn’t. We packed ourselves and our stuff all back inside the elevator and went down to the information desk. Unfortunately, no one working on that shift could speak English and we were not adept enough at foreign language charades to get our message across. Finally Red wanted to have a cigarette. I stepped outside with her. We both leaned our backs against the building in silence but surely thinking the same thought - what are we doing here? I turned to look at her and say something when I saw it - DOMESTIC TERMINAL. I forgot what I was going to say and cheered triumphantly that we had found it, accidentally but who’s counting? To get from the main airport to the domestic terminal (which is all located in the same building) you had to go outside and come back in another door. Triumphant I was, but I felt a little like Mr. Bean.

Our next challenge was to get on the right plane. The domestic terminal had one waiting room which all flights boarded from. At that time, they did not give you a boarding pass and there was no sign to indicate which flight was boarding. The only way of knowing that your flight was boarding was to listen to the loud-speaker announcement. Imagine the Charlie Brown teacher wah, wah, wah-wah-wah waaaah but now in Polish. We couldn’t understand anything. We devised a plan. Most people had their tickets out. We decided to split up and sidle up to different passengers until we found one going to the same place we were going. When the Man finally found somebody, he gave the thumbs up and we diligently watched that passenger’s every move until we were safely on the plane. You may think that this is very funny or even sad but a teacher from the same program who was headed to Wrocław (which used to be Breslau) got off the train in Breclav in the Czech Republic and almost didn’t make it for the first day of school.

With all that activity, I had almost not even noticed that it was cold, gray and raining in the middle of August. On the short flight, I stared out the window wondering if the weather was always like that, what my town would be like, if I would make any friends, if I would do a good job teaching English at high school, if I would be able to learn Polish, where I would live, if I could survive on a teacher’s salary, etc. I also wondered why I had not thought about any of that prior to coming to Poland. There is such a thing as selective memory. Is there selective worrying? The plane landed, and we anxiously collected our carry-on bags. We got off the plane to the still cold and gray day and found that we were on the tarmac with, as far as I could tell, no airport in sight. We (I mean the whole plane of passengers) stood around unsure of what to do when the flight attendant shouted something at us from the door of the plane and pointed in the direction of 2 buildings which I will call barracks to be polite. There was a bigger one and a smaller one. We headed off in the direction of the bigger one which we figured had to be the airport. That caused the flight attendant to start screaming again pointing to the smaller building. (She probably wasn’t actually screaming but when you don’t understand a language you get the impression that everyone is screaming or fighting.) We headed in that direction and it was quite a way away.

We finally made it and each of us found our contact teachers right away because then there was no barrier between arrival/baggage claim and the waiting room. An English/German teacher and her husband were waiting for me. After some time, our baggage arrived but there was no carousel so it was a free for all of people tearing the bags off of the trailers. I got my things as did my new friends and we departed as if we had known each other for years and we may never see each other again. We gave heartfelt promises that we would find each other again somehow. Sounds dramatic but give me a break. I was really tired and I was wearing cowboy boots. We packed into the car and I began the journey to my new life for the next year.

I had no idea what to expect.