False Friends

This evening, my boss gave me a ride home from school. He is a great man. He speaks the Queen's English and has one of those enormous Slavic heads I'd read about before but didn't believe existed until I saw his in its entirety. His past is a series of conflicts: conflicts with Russians, Germans, Czechs, Americans, conflicts with Polish radio executives, conflicts with technology. I suspect he had some prominent role in ridding Poland of the Soviets and installing the late Pope as Master of the Universe.

"And of course, szukać is the Polish verb for to search," he said as a gaggle of attractive Polish women bustled into the teachers' lounge. He lowered his voice, then stopped talking altogether. He bid everyone goodnight. I bowed, momentarily forgetting which continent I was on. The boss and I stepped outside, where it was, as it has been, as it shall remain: fucking cold.

"Sorry," he said, "I didn't want to give you a Czech lesson in front of all those young ladies. Where were we?"
"Szukać," I said.
"Yes, szukać," he said. "In Czech, szukać means to fuck!"
He was gesticulating into the wind like a drunken peasant from an old Russian novel.
"So, these poor Czechs, they come to Poland, they go to the grocery store, and the nice girl behind the vegetable counter says, 'Please wait one moment, I must go fuck the cucumbers!'"
I laughed.
"Would you like to go shopping?" he asked, indicating the big-ass hipermarket across the street. I didn't say no, so we crossed the street.

I figured I would be doing the shopping while the boss tagged along to recommend spiced goat cheeses and Ukrainian lagers and carrots. But he grabbed a cart and started loading it with kielbasa. So it was I who was tagging along.

"The Czechs are the greatest civilization the world has ever known," he said.
I shrugged.
"I say that because they have given to humanity two things for which we will forever remain in their debt." He found the goat cheese he was looking for and dropped two, no three, no four blocks into the cart. Then he turned to me and held up two huge Slavic fingers. "(1) Pilsner, from the city of Plzen, and (2) bramboráky, a savory snack to go with your pilsner."
The shopping cart was piled high with meats and cheeses and now we were coasting inexorably towards the beer aisle.
"Other cultures have contributed to the great body of human knowledge in the fields of science, art, philosophy," he grunted dismissively, "but all such things pale in comparison to this." He swept his arm across the wall of brown bottles before us. I opened my mouth to say something irrelevant, but just then he started shouting in Polish. It wasn't until he turned around that I saw the Bluetooth in his ear. In the meantime, I browsed.

"Original Budweiser. Czech imported lager, beer from Budweis," I murmured, taking a bottle down from the shelf. "No shit."
I squinted at the red label, the Masonic American beer conspiracy shattering all around me. Then, after he had duly owned whoever was on the other end of his ear, the boss started stocking the cart with long, dark bottles of Czech beer.

I waited on the other side for my boss to check out. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I elbowed a passing Pole square in the face.

"Sorry," I shouted. "Er. Przepraszam. Er. Shit."

Skończył się dobry fart

So it's the last class of the day, twenty minutes to go, right? I'm dashing around the room trying to keep the deflated conversational beachball aloft. I learn all about Magdalena's dead hamster and the specifications of Piotr's washing machine. Then this smiling, blushing obese kid tells me to call him "Finger Boy" from now on. He is twirling a pencil between the fingers of his left hand.
"Because of that?" I ask.
"No," he says, "because of this."
He holds up his right hand to reveal a gnarled triple- or quadruple-jointed thumb that he proceeds to wrap around his wrist several times.
"Okay," I say, stifling a dry heave. I take out my attendance chart and mark it accordingly: "Finger Boy."

I start to sweat. There are ten minutes left and I can't make fun of Finger Boy for all ten of those minutes. I reach into my bag of shitty questions and ask if everyone likes the local soccer team, Korona Kielce.
"Um, yes." Shrugs, puzzled grunts.
"What other teams do we have here in Kielce?"
"Viva Kielce is handball team," volunteers Krzysztof.
"We have wallyball team," says Adam. "Fart Kielce."
I blink and clear my throat.
"Fart. Kielce."
"Yes," shrugs Adam, "Fart."
I take a deep breath and try to slow my galloping heart. Easy, Petit. These Poles have a way of clogging everything with consonants. Fart = Szfrzyrzt.
"How do you spell this Fart?" I ask, scrawling an "Sz" on the board.
"No, no," says Krzysztof. "F."
"Okay. Then what?"
"A," the class chimes.
"Yes, yes! And then?"
"R."
"And? And?" I bite my lower lip.
"T."

And I lose it. I spray a confetti of nostril fluid all over the whiteboard. I don't pee my pants but I'm not far off.
"What means fart?" Adam asks when I have regained verticality.
"Well," I sniffle, "when you eat too many pierogis – "
I draw a bent-over stick figure with a smoke cloud emanating from his behind. The class and I both dissolve into hysterics for five minutes. Finally, I summon enough of my voice to ask what "fart" means in Polish.
"Lucky," says Finger Boy.
Five more minutes of insane laughter. Then class is over.

I perform a Kramerian slide into the teacher's lounge and grab the first Pole I can find. I launch into my tale with the sort of mundane preface that is the meat and potatoes of the American work anecdote: "So it's the last class of the day, twenty minutes to go, right?"
"Yes," she says.
"And I ask the kids what sports there are in Kielce and – "
"Yes," she says, "I think the students are really like sport in Kielce, I think. They are like football and wallyball and tennis and handball."
"Right. Anyway, this kid tells me that there's a volleyball team – "
"Yes, wallyball is very popular in Poland," she says. "It is something like national sport."

She wanders off to make some tea. Defeated, I slump down into my chair at the formica table and wait for someone else to come, but no one else comes. The bell rings. I pick up some cheese slices on the way home. Later, I overcook myself a grilled cheese sandwich. Then, around 10 PM, I climb into in the bathtub with Noam Chomsky and we have ourselves a nice, long sulk.

One (1) Polish apartment (used)

Contains:

One (1) cactus
Several (6) dead plants
One (1) Soviet-era MИHCK 16 refrigerator, purrs when full
A lot (8) of poopstains left behind by previous tenant
One (1) plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus, crucified, nailed into wall above garbage can
Two (2) bags of banana Cream of Wheat, one (1) box of instant rice, one (1) half-empty bag of sugar, two (2) boxes of Earl Grey tea, four (4) cryptic notes, also from previous tenant
One (1) skeleton key
Three (3) Agatha Christie novels, one (1) copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, one (1) Lassie novel, all in Polish, the most widely-spoken West Slavic language
One (1) Soviet-era Kahmama record player with CB radio capabilities
One (1) watercolor print in which guardian angel helps Polish boy in daisy dukes cross bridge from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
Seven or so (7) Russian nesting dolls, un- and re-nestable, useful for propping open balcony windows when pirating wireless internet
One (1) VHS cassette: Femme Fatale starring one (1) Antonio Banderas and one (1) Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, distributed by Polsat Films, rated R for strong sexuality, violence and language

2,500 Polish złotych OBO

The Perseus Cluster

Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on [sic] the sky. Each of the fuzzy blobs in the above picture is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. We view the cluster through the foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. It takes light roughly 300 million years to get here from this region of the Universe, so we see this cluster as it existed before the age of the dinosaurs.
- Some copywriting stooge at NASA

See? There's nothing to worry about, now is there?

2.01.08 - In Transit

2.11.08

I'm back in Poland, the land of my rebirth as a 19th century peasant. Now that I've found a stable internet connection (if I part the curtains and prop the window open with a row of Matryoshka dolls and hold my laptop out over the balcony into the westerly Russian wind at the risk of freezing all those precious, social-life-sustaining silicon innards) I'm sifting through my Moleskine notes to piece together exactly how I got here without being kalashnikoved to death by the blessed customs officials at Pope John Paul II International Airport.

* * *

2.01.08

Here in London Heathrow, my nervous system is hitting a shrill, delirious pitch. As last night's melatonin dot slushes through my bloodstream like a pillow, I'm looking more and more Eastern Bloc by the minute. The bags under my eyes are turning black, my teeth are sprouting hairs. At this, the midway point of my journey, it is best just to keep out of everyone's way, lest I be mowed down by a luggage cart or jostled aboard a flight to Kyrgyzstan. I'm hiding out in Zone 27, where all of London Heathrow's displaced peoples gather to chatter in rodentlike tongues, looking like they've been camped out for weeks in front of chronically vacant check-in counters, the airline logos stenciled in Cyrillic or worse. I'm huddled over an orange backpack on top of a black bag, chattering in a displaced sort of way to myself.

At 9 AM (3 AM CST), I enjoyed a Real Actual Guinness at a Real Actual plastic woodgrain table in the corner of a Real Actual Dublin airport pub. Later, in Heathrow, I ate Real Actual fish n' chips prepared by Real Actual Serbian short order cooks, and guzzled another Real Actual Guinness dumped artlessly into a glass by a Real Actual Polish girl named Magda. And she totally smiled at me, the first of hopefully several unprovoked smiles from Green Card-hungry Polish matkas. I can't wait! But I shall. Oh, how I shall wait.

Keep on runnin'.

I tend to avoid any and all references to Journey cover art, but:

It's just history repeating itself.

Radiohead's Hail to the Thief opens with a burst of static. Nigel Godrich says, "We're rolling." Thom Yorke remarks, "That's a nice way to start." A drum machine fires up, spits out four stuffy beats. Then Jonny Greenwood sweeps in with a wave of sinister arpeggios and the album begins in full. They are the tentative sounds of a band that has dissected itself to shreds and is nursing its wounds, sitting down to work with tempered expectations and tea. I imagine they drink tea.

It is upon similarly ginger footing that I make my return to TEFL, Teaching English as a Football League. To borrow a David Foster Wallaceism, Korea was a supposedly fun thing I should never have done again. But here I am, doing it again. How do you prepare yourself? By running wind sprints through train station corridors? By binge drinking Listerine? By slapping a strip of duct tape over your mouth and attempting to get your driver's license renewed at the DMV? There is no cross-training for TEFL, no preparation for the absurdity. It is a decathlon of narrowly missed trains, substance misuse, shady bureaucrats, gross miscommunication ... Coming off my five month sabbatical with Dora the Explorer bubble bath in the upstairs tub of my sub-suburban compound, I feel I am up to the task this time around, though no one is ever up to tasks such as these.

This time, it is Poland. I flirted with Peru, made eyes at Estonia, strung along Kyrgyzstan for four months before I caved in to the cat calls of Katolicka Polska. I will be teaching at an English academy called Global Village, in a middling town by the name of Kielce, infamous as the site of the Kielce pogrom, the 1946 slaughter of 37 Jews by a frothing mob of deranged Polish policemen, servicemen, and steelworkers. It is also sister cities with Flint, Michigan. We shall hope Kielce is not the ugly stepsister.

Kielce hovers an hour north of Krakow - where my British leching partners yet remain, lurking in the alleyways between cathedrals, umbrellas at the ready - and two hours south of Warszawa, a city whose name, like Omaha's, evokes a grey sludge in my mind. I find myself in a geographically familiar position, residing in an overlooked mountain town nestled between two metropolises, but I don't expect that Kielce will be as much of an eye- or lung-sore as Daegu. The train station is a flying saucer, enabling quick and easy transport to places like the Kuiper Belt and Flint, Michigan.

It is a five month gig. I will be teaching high schoolers. The contract calls for nineteen teaching hours per week, somewhat less than the forty-or-so I'd gotten used to. I can't imagine how Polish teenagers could possibly surpass the pampered seven-year-old sons of Korean bankers, but I am not placing any bets. According to my director, the thus-far charming Urszula, "we had to thank the teacher you'll be replacing after only 2 months as it appeared he had a drinking problem." How much do you have to drink to get fired in Poland? How many 9.2% Polish porters for breakfast? How much buffalo piss vodka at lunch? How is it possible to get fired without dying?

I am polishing up on my Polish. This language has seven cases. Six of them are beyond me. I suspect everything will be beyond me for a while. But I'm feeling good about Poland. In the event of a Huckabee, Romney, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Giuliani, Paul, or Thompson victory come November, I will have no qualms about my candlelit loft above the barn, in my cabbage-shaped, cabbage-scented Cathotopia across the sea.

NoKo

This is the best photograph I've ever been lucky enough to take:


If you look closely, you'll see that they probably have one of me, too.

LOOMINGS

... Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. ...

Happy Birthday

Here in Xiaoshan, The People's Garbage Trucks sing a 140-decibel MIDIfied rendition of a Communist anthem penned (supposedly) by Chairman Mao himself. Less revolutionary but more obnoxious are the street cleaner trucks, which pump out either Jingle Bells or The Birthday Song. Although they're loud enough to sterilize all the massage girls in a twelve block radius, it's impossible to tell how far away the trucks are or from which direction they're coming until one of them has already descended upon you with its 900 PSI Chinese tapwater cannon. I would advise against going anywhere near Chinese roads, in a vehicle or otherwise. But in a country overrun with bicycles and bicycle rickshaws, it is extremely worth your while to stand on a street corner with a cold version of your favorite beverage in hand, watching the bikers get tossed up onto the sidewalk like oysters in a tsunami.

Could there be a more ominous harbinger of death than a 6,000 gallon steel water tank on wheels blasting The Birthday Song as it pursues you at ten miles an hour? Only one among many in a place like this, where the pistons in the engine of random annihilation are pumping at a few hundred thousand RPM above the existential norm, where oversexed roosters rove the sidewalks, peckers at the ready; where live catfish come leaping out of buckets to chase you down the street; where restaurant proprietresses hoist their baby boys up to drop turds in the trash can at the next table over then stretch the kid out bare-ass on the glass tabletop to play pattycake; where a select few microbrews boast that they're formaldehyde free; where the cabbies won't let you buckle your seatbelt because they swear it's unsafe - everything's white-knuckle in China's more Chinese parts and it's hard on the hairline, particularly as a citizen of that half of the globe that puts choking disclaimers on its bags of pretzels. But if you're young and you've just spent a year teaching in a country that freaks out about electric fans, it's a welcome change of pace and a refreshing, life-affirming reminder of a grim fact that you'd almost forgotten about because you didn't have enough vacation time to notice it: the Happy Birthday truck is never very far behind, so you shouldn't stand around in traffic gawking so damn much.