Day 3: The Life

It’s been more than 48 hours since we landed and I’ve learned more than 480 things. Or at least, I’ve heard them, and tried to permanentize them in my memory. From the code to enter the building to how to say tomato. It’s been a lot of habit making. 

The apartment we live in is beautiful in it’s own way. An art historian lived here after her two children left for college. Just the profession of an art historian gives you a sense of what the interior is like. The wall colors resemble the deep ocean on a day with clear skies, and the furniture looks as if it’s from a 1960s movie. A chandelier drapes from the ceiling of the living room. The bathroom tiles are checkered yellow and white and the sink, toilet, and shower are turquoise. A piano stands in the left corner of the living room. There are three cupboards scattered around the apartment completely filled with books.  

My room only consists of a dresser, an oval mirror in a rusted-looking silver frame, a polished wooden desk, an old desk lamp, a cupboard, a twin sized bed and two door-shaped windows that open to a charming view of houses and the green tops of trees. The dresser, desk and hutch all match in the light color of wood. The hutch consists of three shelves of polish books ranging in all colors and sizes while the bottom shelf possesses books in English. I recognize multiple novels on the last shelf that I’ve read at different times in my life: The Princess Diaries, When You Reach Me and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. But there is also more advance literature poking through the midst of Polish literature such as Silence of the Lambs. I also spot books that I’m interested in reading such as Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. 

My things are unpacked. My books lay on a shelf in the corner of my room. My few pieces of jewelry and my glasses remain on the top of my dresser. We’ve discovered an organic food store just down the street, a bicycle fixing shop/cafe, two regular grocery shops, and a beautiful park in which there are an abundance of willow trees along with a little pond and ducks. 

The grocery stores here fascinate me. They are so small and compact, but hold everything anyone could ever want. Rice, quinoa, granola bars, honey, chocolate, pork, trout, red wine, orange juice, multigrain bread, white wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, magazines, you name it, and it’s found in a 100 square foot space. At home, grocery stores position products in such a way that doesn’t conserve any space. 

Also, there is a different system of meals here. In the morning, people eat a large breakfast, called śniadanie which includes various cheeses, bread, tomatoes and meats. Then lunch, called obiad, is the most important meal that occurs around two or three in the afternoon (or fourteen-fifteen o’clock in military time). It’s menu consists of what people would normally have in the U.S for dinner: fish or meat, a grain, and vegetables. At seven or eight o’clock, people eat a small dinner, called kolacja, of a slice of bread and cheese or something similar. This way of eating is designed for better sleeping and healthier living as people eat the majority of their food in the day time, allowing their bodies to digest the food before bed so no one is sleeping with a full stomach. 

Fruits and vegetables are bought on the street. At strategic locations where one can park a car, or at a busy corner, people set up crates of every fruit or vegetable anyone could ever desire for buying. The woman we bought bell peppers, mini cucumbers, eggs, lettuce, and fresh raspberries from sat on the back of her car model from 1999 with an open trunk. Behind her she kept a food scale and a plastic cup for change. The fresh produce distinctly differs in taste from the produce we bought from Stop and Shop back home. There is also something so personal about buying fruits and vegetables from an older, wrinkly woman because the money goes to supporting her life, instead of supporting a billion dollar super-market chain. 

Recycling is also a phenomenon here. There are much stricter laws regarding the subject  than in the U.S. You must pay for a plastic bag in a grocery store or for a cup instead of a cone in an ice cream shop. In our apartment complex, there is one giant green bin for recycling, two giant ones for trash, and one cardboard box in the corner of the fly-filled room filled with old bread. When I peaked inside it, one loaf was moldy but the rest just looked hard and not appetizing. My father’s friend referred to this mechanism as “post-war syndrome”. Even seventy years after World War II, no one throws away bread. If it goes stale, you throw it in the cardboard box for it to be fed to animals. 

Public transport seems reliable, unlike Boston. The buses and subways travel fast on a schedule that is precise down to the minute. People of all ages take public transport, including ten and eighty year olds. Elderly people walk and do errands throughout the city in peace. It’s a normality to see an old lady with short but colored hair, with a long, black skirt that goes down to the ankles and a white shirt with a colored shawl covering her shoulders strolling back to her home with vegetables from the corner in one hand and a jug of milk in the other. 

I could rant on and on about my amazement with this different system of life but this would become ten pages long and no one would bother reading the whole thing. All I can say from the past 2 days is: so far so good.