Conversation among the Ruins

Romantic neighbors in Wrocław-Śródmieście - it seems that my neighborhood has quite a few fans of subfenestral grafitti. (I have another example of this that so far has only found its way to the German version of my blog, just like the canine digestive literacy from the last entry here has not yet been re-used in a Germanified version.)

So - yeah, ever since I moved here, I must admit that on my way home, I have had this melody playing somewhere at the back of my head, "Gentrify.... gentrifyyyyy meeee" sung to The Doors by, I assume, some part of my subconscious that feels safer when walking through streets with painted facades. The effect is really quite surprising and not too reasonable: Gentrification has very suddenly reached Śródmieście, with a new restored facade unveiled almost every week. Stucco heads smile down benignly at passers-by, roses bloom anew even now that autumn is here, and I walk down feeling much more relaxed than when everything was still in a state of decay. Interestingly, even though the crumbling balconies were quite a real danger, there is a greater atmosphere of threat, especially in the dark, and even more so in the rain. Somehow, even to the calm and confident mind, there seemed to be dark creatures lurking in every crack and badly patched hole in the wall.

Now, examining the people on my street and their love for spending their time urinating into doorways and yelling at pedestrians, the threat may not have been all that imaginary. Also, the reflex to feel safer after a few buckets of paint and plaster have been put to good use along the street does not seem all that wise if life behind the facades has not changed...

And lastly: That facade poetry above - it just does not have the same effect on a freshly-painted wall.

In Which I Wonder About My Four-Legged Neighbours

My neighbors here have long been the cause for many a confused moment - why, lady across the yard, do you scream each night? Is it really all in Polish? Why does the number 33 play such a crucial role in your nocturnal rants? Dear vodka aficionados in the backyard, where do you congregate now that last summer's red velvet couch next to the trash containers has found a death of rot and decay? And lady of the lime green acrylic wool skirt and the pink child's jacket and blue hat and the tennis socks in sandals, where do your baby steps lead you each morning?

One thing that I do not have to speculate about, however, is why this lady stares to the ground with such concentration: I do the same, as does everyone else in this street. There are some unexplained holes, yes, but mostly, it's our canine neighbors who adorn it with their digestive products. And they do it with great joy and productivity. (I have tried to find it endearingly similar to my old Berlin home. I failed.)

(At this point I have to add: Should you be reading this through a facebook note, I don't think you can see the accompanying photos, so I might not be making much sense. Please click on "Read original post" or whatever it says below to get the full experience.)

So: One and a half years here, and I thought I had seen all there was in the dog poo market nowadays. How very wrong I was! I was walking there, lost in thought, thinking "Oh, look, an 'F'!" but actually having my mind on other things, when I realized that letters on the sidewalk are not a common sight outside Sesame Street. So I turned back.

I must say, I am impressed. Domestication has reached new levels! Literate dogs! I sense a whole new target group for advertising. Someone should do a market study.

[Excuse the public display of feces above. To make up for it, have a prettier sidewalk catch below.]

Overliteral service

Odd moment:
I only had one set of keys, which can cause unnecessary logistic complications when you have visitors. So I set out to get copies. Hala Targowa seemed like a good place to go: It's pseudo-ancient outward appearance houses many different stands and services under a bravely curved concrete roof.

I had a helpful native speaker with me - anything to appear respectable and deflect all uncomfortable questions about security and permissions and certificates necessary to receive a legal copy.

But there were no questions asked. Instead, I received a 1:1 copy of my keys. Upon closer inspection, the new set gives the same instructions as the originals: "Nie kopiowac" - "Do not copy".

Gigantic Pixels

I somehow didn't manage to go in person but Tomasz documented the event for posterity:

A student dorm, transformed into a giant screen! (More videos are in his youtube channel.)

This is a really, really cool idea. :)

Welcome to the (sur)real world

There is something to be said for living in an environment where language barriers mean that sense routinely escapes you to some extent. My idea of what there is to be said for it varies, depending on how exactly I fill in the gaps of understanding and how much I like my resulting interpretation. On some days, I will happily assure you that it is inspiring and amusing and surely boosts your creativity and/or repertoire of anecdotes with which to bore potential grandchildren. On other days, I just silently plot my escape.

Examples?

1. Today. I walk home from a bit of shopping, the sun slowly setting, a park across the street, through the nice part of my neighborhood. An old lady moves toward me, she has trouble walking despite the cane, and from her toothless mouth, she tells me "Niech pani SOUND SOUND SOUND SOUND nie tak czysty!". I detect a certain level of urgency but I have no idea what she is trying to tell me, except that she advises me to do SOUND SOUND and if I don't, something runs the risk of not remaining so clean.
Well, I have been monitoring my surroundings for sudden dirt since. Nothing so far. But I still wonder which dangers I am so blissfully unaware of.

2. A while ago. One of the little Zabka supermarkets down he street from my house. They are open until 11pm, as the windows announce in bold letters. It's around 9:30 but the door is locked, and an elderly couple stands in front of it, banging on it. One of the Zabka ladies emerges, unlocks the door, looks left and right, lets the couple and us inside, and locks the door behind us. There is no explanation. As we wait by the cash desk, one guy who was already locked in the cupboard-like shop stuffs his pockets with candy that he clearly has no intention to pay. We leave. They lock the door behind us. Why?!

3.


4. A few months ago. I have a note from the police stuck to my door, asking me to contact them immediately. A coworker calls them for me as I assume correctly that they will not speak English. I am informed that my neighbor has complained about me: I am too silent! He thinks I am just imaginary! Someone only told him that he had someone living next door when in fact I am never there!
I met him once, and he did not actually seem too concerned for my well-being but just went right at it again: How I'm never home! How I haven't been around in months!
The police had suspected the same because they never found me at home when they checked on me. "She works during the day. She's only home in the evenings", my coworker explains. They remain incredulous. (Truly, what an odd thing for me to do, "work"!). But I do not hear from them again - despite the loud SLAM when my neighbor closed the door on me, after I explained that I could not quite follow his monologue because of my limited Polish.

5. Seems that there are some fans of Düsseldorf right around the corner in my neighborhood! Now, the fact alone that you might like Düsseldorf enough to spray it anywhere seems surreal to me >;). On a house somewhere in central Wroclaw, above a third-floor window, this seems even less likely.

6. Jehova's Witnesses fleeing my door. The fact that I couldn't follow their speech (and that I pretended to know even less Polish than I do) did not lessen their enthusiasm one bit: The young man ventured boldly out into the world of spoken English. He was going to save me! Only that I, unknowingly, still had the power of making them flee in an instant: Upon discovering that I was Not Catholic but in fact Lutheran Protestant, they left within seconds. They were back a week or two later. When I opened the door, the young man just mumbled something about "Oh, I remember you!" and dragged the lady by his side with him, away from the... what? Am I a threat? Never before have I felt like I was perceived as a member of a dangerous cult! Heh.

Winter Wronderland

I am quite fond of my new desk - our teams switched desks recently, and this move changed my view of an unexciting, yellow-brown Polish town house to a view of Wroclaw's skyline, including a bit of Odra river, several Odra islands and a couple of church steeples.

The sudden frost (-20°C!) adds some extra beauty, especially if you can admire it from the +22°C office!

My current approximation to home

There is this gigantic mess of threads - some tangled, some woven together, some shiny and some scratchy - that makes up my life at the moment, and I don't quite know how to bring them into a presentable shape.
Where to pull first? Knit? Crochet? Weave? Cut?

In typical procrastinator's style, I usually leave them for another day and walk away.
Not wise: The heap has been growing, knots getting pulled tighter.
So I'll start with the first thing I can reach: Location.

So I have been living in Wroclaw for nearly four months now.
As is typical for me, let's first address this from a linguistic angle: Wroclaw is neither "wrock law" nor "raw claw", it's "VROTS-wahf".
It is one of the larger cities in Poland (about 600,000 inhabitants), in the South-West, close to Germany and the Czech Republic.

It looks like this

and also like this

When I go out, things are centered around this square

and it is pretty and inviting, people are well-dressed and numerous, and all is well.


Once you leave the immediate center, the traces of socialism and 60 years of neglect jump at you again. The house across from mine (with this photo taken off my balcony) looks like this:

(My house, by the way, is pleasantly intact, and much younger.)

Wroclaw (then still German, and called Breslau) was a rather peaceful place for most of the war, with only few bombs being dropped here and most houses still intact. Then, in 1945, however, there was the Siege of Breslau, Germans inside, Soviets outside. Since the house appears to have been built somewhere around 1910, and there weren't any battles before or after the Siege that I have heard of, I could probably date all those charming bulletholes in the neighboring facade down to within three months.
The historian in me likes that.
The architect's daughter, however, winces. Not that this was a particularly pretty house, but around it, there are so many that still have bits of stucco, amazing ornaments in some cases, and it is a shame to watch the layers of decay (from paint peeling off down to bricks crumbling away) in what could be a breathtaking part of town.


So man-made destruction (direct, violent destruction, not the kind that happens through neglect) mostly happened in 1945.
In 1997, the Oder Flood (also known as the Century Flood) took down some more of these houses, many of them weak after all protective layers had worn off through the years.

That makes it difficult to decide which one my backyard fell victim to - the war or the water. "Backyard" actually makes it sound far too small - it once probably was a home to several hundred people. It is surrounded entirely by buildings - in fact, if you walk along the streets around it, you would not guess it is there because there are no gaps between the houses, with only narrow passages leading inside.
There, however, is a desert of dust, sand, and a few remaining floors - bits of concrete here, a few bricks there - a pointless wall leading through it, and small remaining buildings where you can still see where the other houses broke off. Much like a moonscape, including the dust - it has not been raining much, and even though my windows go to the street, there is no escaping the dust.

It's quite similar to Eastern Germany, except that Poland did not have a wealthy sibling to help it back on its feet after communism was over.


Contrasts, then.

They lead to just as extreme mood swings - when I first got here, it was rainy, cold and dark whenever I got home from work. Walking down a street of dying houses can be infinitely depressing and doesn't exactly make you fall in love with your new home right away.

It can also play strange tricks on your eyes, with all those shadows and shapes formed by holes in plaster or paint or walls. One night, walking home, I saw an old lady, hunched over her walking stick. She turned abruptly, a bit after passing a street lamp, and turned into a doorway.

When I reached the spot where I thought she'd disappeared, I found the passage had been closed with a brick wall. Years ago.

I assume that she must have disappeared into one of the shadows behind it, the next one a small wooden door that looks like it leads to a coal cellar that's unused for years, and only the one behind it going into an actual house.
It must have been the bad lighting. Or so I like to tell myself.

Sunny mornings, however, bring out all the potential instead of the flaws - you see fading beauty, flower ornaments, art deco adornments, and notice what they must have been once, and could again be if somebody put time and money (mostly money, yes) into them. Some do, and on sunny days, you see the few examples of houses that have been re-painted and repaired.

But it's not that easy.
Sunny mornings also bring out the smell.
It appears that each and every entrance to each and every house in my street is frequently used as a toilet. Not a surprise, considering the abundance of alcohol shops in my street. (Usually, they announce they sell 'alkohole' in bold letters, with "groceries" (in Polish, obviously) added much smaller somewhere much less visible. These priorities are very, very honest.) So, their clients have needs, too. The doorways cater to them. That simple.
Surprising, however, is how serious and punctual and reliable most of these clients are about their hobbies.
Every morning, while I walk to work, I see the same alcoholics gathering in their favorite drinking spots. They do get up early. One guy in a wheelchair seems to change the corner of his preferred crossroad according to the time of day - when I walk to work, he's on one, next to a small newspaper stand. When I walk back, he's on the corner diagonally across, his vodka bottle by then considerably emptier.

Mostly, they are not very noticeable.
Last week, however, my morning began by having to step over a guy passed out on the sidewalk near my house - I first thought he was dead, but he was then scratching his head on the pavement, and the smell explained without a doubt why he was sleeping there - and then meeting only people who had neither showered nor washed or changed their clothes in several weeks, despite the summer heat.
Not the ideal way to make you fond of mankind.
And always, always, the word you hear most on the street is the one you were always told never to use, the one that I have seen making adult Polish women blush.

But that, before you get a wrong idea of Poland, has mostly to do with this neighborhood. The choice of drug is certainly typical, the degree of this, however, is not.

an internet of my very own

Poland may be nice to me, generally, but there are moments when I like it a little less. Like when I hear I need permission to apply for internet. Or when I hear that in order to legally live here, a policeman will come over one day to interview me (how, I wonder? Something tells me he will speak nothing but Polish, and will be one of those people who only get louder and louder when someone does not speak their language) so this fine country can find out whether my moral and legal standards are sufficient to be granted permission to stay.

But after only a bit over a month in this apartment, I finally have something as breathtakingly modern and unique as internet access. Let's not think about how it was all already installed (a network cable comes out of the wall, from under the wallpaper, in the corner of my living room. There is a company who offers internet for this building. Period. No need to compare offers and make decisions! Socialism? Over? Rumours, I tell you!), how noone had to come here to push a button or plug a plug or anything: It was a matter of driving a few kilometers out of the city and signing a form. And then it worked. Why this took over a month to organize, I do not know.

But I won't complain! I am surfing the internet from my new home! I can boldly surf where noone has... uhm, anyway. It was reason enough to start a new blog, so this is the first entry even though I might add to the archives.
Now, off to play with the design. And sleep.

On My New Hometown

Some constructive criticism. ;-)