the principal traveler: buddies

by the Principal Traveler

One of the best parts about living abroad is making friends with folks who, back in real life, wouldn’t otherwise enter your world. Like the bonds formed during summer camp, expat friendships are bound by an intensity forged from shared experiences on new turf.

My first mission upon moving to Poland was to find such folks. I had only one month to cement connections with the people in my English teaching program before we were dispersed to our respective towns. Former volunteers from the program had stressed how essential it was to have other Americans to visit throughout the year, since chances for English-speaking companionship in small towns were rare. I set my sights quickly on Pam and Annie, if for no other reason than the fact that we all rolled our eyes whenever Alexa, Carrie, or Ellen from our group whined. We were also the only ones to eat what was put in front of us, no matter what part of the beast it had come from. We could deal with whatever and usually laugh about it, and that was enough.

Unfortunately we ended up spread out across Poland in such a way that we only got together three times that year. In October we met at Pam’s in Nowy Dwór Gda?ski. The first few moments we just hugged and made squawking noises. After weeks of over-enunciating and speaking at half-speed, it was hard to get the English out in a normal rhythm. Our stories were coupled with elaborate hand gestures and side-bar definitions (“So my brother has this conflict, you know, a problem”) as if our struggling students were also part of the audience. We practiced our Polish pronunciation together, especially the elusive czysta trzydziesci trzy (“333”) with our necks craned, the thought being that putting your whole head forward would somehow guide your tongue better.

We compared notes and realized both how good and bad we had it. Pam didn’t have a sink of any kind and had only Belorussian marms to speak English with. She also had that disease where you can only see peripherally. Her town had the old Polish stores where you couldn’t actually touch any of the items you wanted until you had paid for them — everything was behind one giant counter. So shopping was tough when you couldn’t tell a carrot from a tampon from 10 feet away. It also forced her to write on the blackboard facing the window, which meant she could also see the kids out the other side. On the other hand, she had access to a big city (Gdansk) and good produce.

Pam had friends who were our age and one couple had a Communist-era Trabant. The steering wheel was about as big as tea saucer and they even let her drive it in a clearing while camping, though they made her wear a helmet. It was the first time she had driven in years.

Annie lived in a part of the country were there were no trains and folks outside of town still used outhouses. She also had a principal with an Amish-like white beard who refused to speak to her in any language other than English. As it turned out, he could only say: “It’s…niceeeee” but Annie was amazed at the range of emotion he was able to express to her through those two words over the last two months. She had a big apartment and a wild Polish gal pal named Anka who was just biding her time before taking a one-way trip to London. Annie was our PKS (the bus system) go-to.

We spent a rainy day in Gdansk and spoke of hard times too — the people we missed, the lack of conveniences and the foods we craved. It was only after becoming hoarse that first day of catching up that I realized how little I actually spoke in life, at least outside of work. I spent most nights planning lessons at a small card table in my room, chain smoking. My evening treat was watching American made-for-TV movies dubbed in German. You could also watch American fare on Polish TV, but they layered in the Polish track over the original, slightly louder. It was annoying not only because you kept turning up the volume thinking you could ignore the Polish, but because only one older man read all the actors’ parts. Imagine Morgan Freeman doing all the lines from “Roseanne” in a flat monotone voice. I was terribly lonely.

Although our experiences had all been uniquely bizarre, they each possessed enough idiosyncrasies of Polish life recognizable to the other two to make them feel like we had all seen and done them too.

The moment Annie peed her pants our second night together was the moment I stopped feeling lonely. Pam had asked us to wash the dinner plates on her “shower platform,” a tile box with a ratty polyurethane curtain encircling it in the middle of her kitchen. Annie and I looked at each other as we both knelt down. We had stolen a few shared glances earlier that day whenever we encountered daily “life in Poland” scenarios that were hard for us, but doubly tough for Pam because of her eyes. She couldn’t count her change in zloty or read small signs. “The drain hole is big enough for everything to go down,” Pam announced over her shoulder, though as we looked closer at the bottom of the shower, we noticed rancid bits of food stuck to the sides, a chronicle of her diet the past few weeks. We started laughing hysterically and a big bright wet spot formed on Annie’s crotch. In some ways it wasn’t funny, but in that moment I realized that while we were all making our way as best we could, Poland was still getting the best of us. How could you not laugh?

tagged under:europe, living abroad