The World You Never Thought to Explore

There are few things quite as wonderful as a guest.

This is a fact as universally acknowledged as more popular assertions perpetuated by Ms. Austen.

After 6 months of dividing life between Poland and America, my dear friend Tory Johnson visited me for a week of fun and games.

I am notoriously awful at playing host. Ask any of the prospective Mercerians from North Hall High School who visited me. They will tell you about my lackluster ability to talk up things that have become common.

Sample dialogue includes:
-"And what is this?"
-"Oh. It's the quad."
-"It's beautiful."
-"Yeah, I guess."

Even now, Poznan has become base camp, ordinary, and unremarkable (to me). It's a beautiful, historical city. However, existing somewhere long enough for the loveliness, the novelty to fade causes an attitude of indifference that one can only have when showing the place s/he lives off to someone who has never been there. I struggle to think of what one must see versus what one could see. There is the gorgeous town square, the Baroque churches, the vast public spaces where the modern and the classical blends against the medieval like patches of earth viewed from an airplane, cafes with sipping chocolate, pierogi... How could it fill a day?

However, the following two days were something of a Jolly Holiday with 76 trombones. It felt wonderful to have someone from the states visit, the excitement of showing them around places that are new to them, seeing spaces as if they were brand new...getting kissed on the head by a stranger probably asking for drug money, and the satisfaction of not totally screwing up someone's time in Poland.

From there we went to Warsaw, staying in the Old Town and walking around the streets that have hosted John Paul II, Chopin, and Marie Curie (the trifecta of must-know Polish historical figures). We enjoyed warm weather. We ate in a restaurant that looked like it had been drawn in sharpie and searched through antiques for pins, medals, and posters. From there, we went to the Jewish Museum, cramming over 1000 years of history into 4 hours. Exhausted, tired, but entirely satisfied, we schlepped our way to Lublin, Mary, spinach tarts, and my first non-undergraduate conference.

The wonderful thing about all of this was that I, too, was able to experience new things in Poland. The delight of learning about a place you'd dismissed as familiar is incomparable, even more so when you are discovering it side-by-side with a devoted old friend.

 I mean, who else would quote Disney on top of the Palace of Culture and Science?