Perfectly Marvelous

“Perfectly Marvelous”

Written: September 27, 6:54 pm
Posted: September 29, 11:15 am 

A brief update of every detail of my life since I last wrote.

A Kyle Shook Production

September has historically been my least favorite month. The heat of summer still hovers around and it makes dressing a hell, alright? A living hell. It’s also historically been a period of transition. Although school began in August for me growing up, September was the settling month where the novelty of a new setting wears off and the wolves finally stop sniffing and decide whether to let you hunt caribou with the pack or go for the throat.

I remember distinctly when I was in 10th grade buying a jacket in August that was on sale. It was grey, enormously comfortable and looked like some vintage letterman jacket from the 1950s.

This was also the summer where it was in the 80s until mid-October. However, I insisted it wasn’t too hot to wear and so I showed up to school in it in late September. I spent the entire day with a red face and mopped sweat off of my face, insisting that I wasn’t too warm. I still have a picture of me wearing it that day (it was my younger sister’s birthday) and I looked uncomfortable, unfashionable, and nothing so much as the kind of guy that the guys wearing letterman jackets in the 1950s would shove into a locker. 

This September probably takes the cake for most transitions in a single month. A week ago, I was at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, waiting in an ungodly line for tickets, feeling myself sunburning, and wondering where I would be a week later. Two countries, three cities, two train rides, four cabs and one confession with a priest explaining the dark things I had to do to get tram tickets in Poznan later, I’m sitting in my first Polish apartment (dorm room? I’ll explain later) with the window open. The wind is colder than any September that I have ever known and smells like burning leaves. I swear to God, if I could bottle this smell and wear it always, I would.

Brief pause to talk about the smell of burning leaves. Isn’t it delicious? I don’t think I can imagine the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy the smell of burning leaves. My darling Granny H used to tell me that smelling burning leaves caused cancer and out of everything I believed I was now barred from smelling (birthday candles, incense on Easter, over-cooked burgers), leaves was the most traumatic.

A few months later, however, she informed me that eating ice shavings out of the open freezers at the supermarket also caused cancer and I realized quickly that maybe she didn’t always know what she was talking about.

It’s probably a little too cold to have the window open. I’m sipping hot tea and am increasingly relying on it for warmth. As soon as I finish typing this, I’ll probably have to close it and wrap up in the old-fashioned floral blanket the school provided and settle in to finish Girl, Interrupted. But for the moment, all I can think about is that jacket from my 10th grade year and how I wish I had it now. 

I will take this opportunity to transition into more concrete ramblings for those of you who have survived the onslaught of schmaltz I’ve just exposed you to.

Warsaw.

Oh, Warsaw. 

There are few cities I’ve ever encountered and been totally in love with. Jerusalem falls into this category and that’s about it. Before I came, I was told that Warsaw wasn’t worth visiting. Krakow was better, I’d been told. It was prettier, happier, and Warsaw just looked depressing. This person could not have been more wrong. My initial thoughts while driving from the airport to my hotel were focused on rainclouds and concrete and overwhelming grey. This was probably what the Soviets planned. Big, elaborate houses with tiny allies are opulent and wasteful. Practicality usually trumps beauty. I hate to say that I find validity to this. You might not have grasped this by my previous posts which have probably overdone it to some degree. Yet, there is a lot to be said for inexpensive and functional. However, splashes of color began to pop up. It’s like those posters we all had in our college dorms where there’s a field of tulips in black and white with only one red one standing out. The people on the streets had found a way to manage looking both practical and beautiful. The outfits were meticulous, tailored, neat, colorful, fashionable, etc. I looked at my frumpy flannel shirt, grey sweater, and oversized jeans and felt horrendously out of place. At the same time, I was immediately fascinated.

I’m still fascinated. 

My side-research and Fulbright commitments (Holocaust education in post-communist Poland) will undoubtedly take me back to Warsaw so I will lay off much more explanation and switch the focus to Poznan after a short picture break. 

Random pictures from Warsaw. 

The Old Town is mostly reconstructed. For those who don’t know much about Polish history, almost the entire city was destroyed by the German army prior to the Soviet invasion in response to the failed and catastrophic Warsaw Uprising. 

One of the first things a visitor in Warsaw notices is the Palace of Culture and Science. “Noticed” is an absurd understatement. It’s like going to Washington and “noticing” the white limestone phallic symbol sprouting from the center of town. It’s no secret that most Poles spent years hating this building because it represented the hated Soviet occupation. On a bus tour, my fellow Fulbrighters and myself heard a story about a woman in an apartment near the Palace who wrote to complain that the antennae on the building were exposing her to radiation that caused her to have frequent and enormous orgasms. We all thought it and our tour guide said it. What the hell was she complaining about? 

This was the previous Communist Party headquarters and today it is a stock exchange and the ground floor houses a Ferrari dealership. This contrast is what is most striking to me. The concept of a building designed to display the ideals of the socialist movement, a freedom from materialism, a statement for the cooperation and equality of all (which was not the reality of communist Poland and I am in no way endorsing the communist governments of the former Eastern Bloc) now houses easy symbols of wealth and status. The contrast is too damn screwy not to make note of. 

NOTE: I didn’t take any pictures of the former Warsaw ghetto. Driving through it, you wouldn’t know you were there. There are a few notable monuments but nothing that I was able to photograph.

I think back to the sensation of sitting in the middle of Washington Square Park two years ago. It was a warm day and I was re-reading Fun Home for the thousandth time and I suddenly remembered what Washington Square park used to serve as for the early citizens of New York. I looked around and saw people jogging. Some students were tossing around a frisbee. A man was playing a cello near by. The life, the electricity of living in the city struck me as such a bizarre contrast when I considered that Washington Square Park, as well as Bryant Park and a few other notable public spaces were cemeteries. If I’d cracked through the pavement with a shovel and tossed enough dirt around, I would have shortly hit bones. Not just a few. Not like the movies where someone digs in a garden and comes across a skull. It would be a forest of bones. And yet, it wouldn’t matter. The necessities of progress mandated that the potter’s field be plowed and paved over. It next mandated a fountain, statues, a marble arch, NYU students, the Asch building a few blocks away (formerly known as the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory).

The Warsaw Ghetto was the total opposite. The ground is saturated with the bodies of those murdered by the Third Reicht whose religion mandated burial within 24 hours of death and forbids the disruption of dead bodies. There are apartments, shops, tattoo parlors. A sense of historical distance may be present for non-tourists but all I could focus on was the fact that this is the location of the atrocities which shaped the history of the world. The pictures of the Warsaw ghetto flashed in my mind at every turn. I had no way to locate these images geographically. Even if someone put pictures of places in the Warsaw ghetto to the current locations, I would simply have to trust that person’s honesty. I would have no possible method of verifying whether or not they were telling the truth.

Poznan. Or, Where We Are Now.

My dormitory is located a ways out of Poznan’s fabulous city centre (roughly 20 minutes by tram, not including a 10 minute walk to the tram station). However, that did not deter me from scouting out the down-town area today and exploring. Granted, I was on a mission to get at least a basic supply of groceries (which came to include a loaf of bread, oat milk, tea, Nutella, pasta, goulda cheese, strawberry yogurt, and some apples) and a couple of towels. Also, I am now the proud owner of a Polish cellphone which makes me feel slightly more settled. I visited two malls (one by the train station and a much cooler one in a building that used to be a brewery. I also instantly realized that being in Warsaw spoiled me in terms of English speakers. In Warsaw, I only encountered one person who didn’t speak English. Today, I have used English, broken Polish, broken Czech, broken German, broken Hebrew and Google Translate to communicate with people (mostly ineffectively). 

Below you will find a sample conversation from the melodrama that was me trying to get from my dormitory to the city centre. 

Me: (in Polish) Hello. Tickets for tram where buy?
Woman with wicked cool haircut: (in Polish) lwetrbiuf bdifvweyvf @%@#1dgubdb.
Me: *Tina groan*
Me:(in Polish) Do you speak English?
Woman: (in Polish) No.
Me: (in Polish) German? 

Woman: No.

Me: Other?
Woman: Czech.
Me: ....
Woman: ...
*tram comes. Everyone leaves*

Me: That's okay. I'll wait for the next one. Surely someone on it will speak English.
*dies alone* 

I’m honestly amazed that my limited social skills have served me as well as they have in the US. It was only bound to get worse when I spilled the banks of English. 

In short, the past week has flown by yet seemed as though it has taken years. It’s an odd combination of everything going quickly at yet seeming stagnant at the same time.

We’ll see what the next week has in store. 

Always,
Kyle