Kraków in winter

Perhaps you are wondering why on earth someone would be crazy enough to go to Poland in January.
Well, it's actually rather pretty.

Here are some pictures:

Snowy saints outside the church of St Peter and Paul on Grodzka

The Wisła was totally frozen, how cool is that?!

Not actually a concentration camp, but leftovers from the film set of Schindler's List

Although Wikipedia says there was a labour camp here during the Second World War.

Interesting obwarzanki-based hanging decorations in Nowa Prowincja. Incidentally Polish Christmas decorations stay up long past Epiphany and were very much in evidence around town.

Encounter on Szewska

Walking down ul Szewska, face turned down against the cold, I was accosted by a man in a navy blue uniform.

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi!

-Excuse me?!


I pushed back the hood of my ski jacket and nudged my hat up a fraction so I could pull the headphone out of one ear.

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi!

- Przepraszam?!
My interlocuteur was wearing a heavy navy blue outdoor jacket and matching trousers, with stripes on the shoulders in the style of one of the many private security firms working in the city centre. He could well have been part of the Straz Miejska - a civil order service in the city. Was he inviting me to hit the floor? Was I about to be subject to a strip search?!

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi, repeated the guy, a little exasperated: 'do klubu!'

Finally the penny dropped: he was trying to advertise a club, on ul. Szewska, well known for being a party street. 'Rece i nogi' was the name.

I declined and moved on, wondering a little: nothing about the man's outfit or general attitude did anything to evoke the party atmosphere. And why on earth accost a lone girl (even that doubtful from a distance, given my thick winter clothing), wearing a ski jacket, jeans and hiking boots and listening - although he could not have known this - to Mozart. What on earth was he thinking?!

Zimno mi

Wizzair airport bus, around four in the afternoon:

Eventually the bus pulls away and, sitting in the corner of the back seat, I can see colours and shadows outside but little else. The window steams up quickly with the passengers packed so close inside and when I try to wipe it clean, I find that the condensation has frozen on the glass. Ice has actually formed inside the bus.

Somewhere near Teatr Bagatela:

My friends live in an old kamienice with high ceilings and tall windows and a storage heater system which doesn't stand a chance against the sub-zero temperatures of a Polish January. The old thermometer on the windowsill outside shows minus eleven, but it seems to have been like that all day. The cat has not moved from the top of the heater since morning.
I take my teacup in shivering hands to the window and look out, over the silent snow-clad rooftops, towards the pale echoes of the sunset. Trails of chimney smoke curl gently into the dusk. Through the blackened branches of the bare trees, the sky is a wash of soft lilac and salmon shades and wisps of dove-grey cloud.
I stare past the houses and trees and catch a glimpse of a lost winter fairytale, long-forgotten, or perhaps never told...

This is getting silly now

Mamy dość zimy!

At the end she says it will start to get warmer on Friday. Fingers crossed...

Bowl of credit crunch, please, skinny milk

Wow, Sterling airlines is the latest budget travel company to go... uh... into a tailspin.
I flew to Sweden with them six weeks ago, booking my ticket rather nervously on the recommendation of the group I was volunteering for and wondering whether or not my return flight would actually take off. However, when I called their UK helpline, a polite young man with polished English answered and I felt rather relieved: it looked like a case of clean Scandinavian efficiency all the way.
Unfortunately it seems a lot of their shareholders hailed from Iceland. Uh oh.

Iceland: a whole country has gone bankrupt! (it's been a while since I got my highlighter out over the Economist). I suppose that's what happens if Kerry Katona is heading your advertising campaign. Where's Mum going to go now?!

This credit crunch lark is mad! I mean - I have absolutely no idea what it's all about. Friends who work in the City are starting to cut down on the heady social life and acquaintances in accounting look a little more nervous than before, but other than that...

Here's Pinolona's guide to surviving the credit crunch:

1/ Housing crash.
Apparently lots of people will end up in negative equity. Mortgage lenders are going bankrupt. General woe abounds. The solution? Rent a flat - in Poland, with students. Or, go for the option favoured by any red-blooded Italian male and live at home with your parents. Ensure they are suitably distracted - e.g. by fitting a new kitchen - and they may not notice you are there (thereby omitting to charge you rent).

2/ Increased food prices.
See no. 1, part two.

3/ High cost of heating.
Make sure you live in a building with permanent communal heating which is included in the rent (radiator knobs not included; fiddling around with wrenches and getting covered in black grease compulsory). This will probably take you to Poland (or your parents' house, see no 1, part 2).

3/ Job insecurity.
Waves of redundancies are rippling across the City like a scythe through ripe wheat.
Avoid the fear by quitting your stable job and becoming self-employed. Hey presto! Permanent underlying job insecurity brings no nasty surprises in times of financial hardship.

4/ Interest rates.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on with interest rates to be honest, but, since I haven't been in credit since 2003, it doesn't really matter. So why not blow all your savings on a costly (and worthless) university education?! Then you won't have to worry about not making any money on them. (plus if you're a student no-one can make you redundant. Winners all round!)

5/ In the absence of any kind of disposable income, indulge in simple pleasures. Such as... watching the snow (snow?!).
Other free spectator sports include: the US presidential elections; the queue at the Post Office; counting SUVs driven by bewildered au pairs trying to do the school run; attempting to spot a happy face among the commuters returning from central London at 8.15 on a school night.

Happy crunching!

An Ode to Woad

Winter has returned to Kraków. On Thursday morning the yard behind our building was coated in white, while itsy little fluffy flakes were floating down past the window.

It's tights under trousers weather again.*

Which brings us nicely round to the subject of clothes. Specifically, extra clothes. The ones you don't need in England. The ones I've been shedding in a woolly trail around Kraków since October.

Let's take a break for some vocabulary, since this is a linguist's blog and since I have some avid English readers back home who are both dying to know more about Poland and the Polish language.

czapka: a hat (of the knitted winter sort). Warning. Do not confuse with czopek. Consequences may be painful, and Poles will laugh at you.

szalik: scarf. Sounds like 'little shawl', so is easy to remember. From October to May, do not even think about leaving the house without one. Some days you may need one just to get out of bed.

rękawice/czke: gloves. Not easy to remember. I very rarely go back to look for gloves without a dictionary handy.

At first I enjoyed wrapping up against the cold. It's sort of satisfying- after years of permeating damp and biting wind on the east coast of Scotland- to be able to shuffle through the Planty swathed in layer upon cosy layer and resembling the Michelin man's metabolically-challenged cousin.
However it quickly becomes apparent that once you've put all these layers on you're going to have to take them off again sooner or later.
And once you've taken them off, at some point you'll have to put them back on again so you can leave the pub and go outside. Yes, I did say leave the pub.
It began at the tandem evening: I was so intent on improving my Italian** that I left hat no. 1 under the table. No amount of searching could help me locate the thing. It had clearly decided to make a linguistic journey of its own. My money's on the Swedish table.

Then I had a brief flirtation with mohair which ended in tragedy on the no. 132 bus. In my haste to alight before ending up in Nowa Huta I contrived to leave the thing on my seat (my theory is it recognised its natural habitat and made a break for freedom). I haven't given up hope though: from time to time I embark on reconnaisance missions in and out of the stalls at Stary Kleparz, in the hope of spotting the suspiciously snug-looking babcia to whose sartorial elegance I have inadvertently contributed.

Hat no. 3 was borrowed and left on top of the television at my parents' house over Christmas (replacing the star that was too heavy for the top of the tree). Hat no. 4 I don't remember losing at all, but it's certainly not where it was. I think the Starowiślna fairies took it. Hat 5 is still with me- for now- but there have been several near misses, notably when I had to wait around for someone to unlock the language lab so I could retrieve the thing, not to mention the time I left it under the seat in Pod Baranami and had to shimmy to the middle of the row and grope around between everyone's knees while the trailers for the next film rolled somewhere above my head.

As for gloves, I've given up and started buying the so-cheap-they're-virtually-disposable-knitted-by-leprous-infants-in-Cambodia variety from H&M.
And I've learnt to curb my naturally violent reaction to any male voice calling out after me. Generally they are letting me know that I've shed some stray item of knitwear...

But it's only since my arrival in Poland that I've been experiencing this involuntary striptease. In Britain we don't need all these fripperies! Wool is for sheep! We have WOAD***.

Woad's the stuff to show men!
Woad to scare your foe men!
Boil it to a brill-yant hue,
And rub it on your chest and your abdomen!

Ancient Britain never hit on
Anything so good as Woad to fit on
Neck or knees or where you sit on...

We interrupt this transmission with a warning that if you should happen to come across a raving feminist with Boudicca delusions sitting peacefully on the tram wearing only blue paint, it is probably the blogger formerly known as Pinolona. Please deliver her home and give her something hot to drink...


*NB: now, unfortunately, those pretty white flakes have become slushy damp rain. And it's still freezing. Gah I hate Poland!
** Hussy.
*** As modelled by Angelina Jolie in the new 'Beowulf' film.