We've had a nice stretch of home-time in Wroclaw, enjoying the Christmas market and dance classes and lots of quiet time at home. Here are a few random notes about life in Poland....
We went to this vegetarian place for lunch a few days ago - Zle Mieso - and it was really really good. Really good. Funny things about it include: 1) its name means 'bad meat', 2) it's located on 'Victims of Auschwitz' Street :( 3)there was no sign outside the building but Peter remembered the address number so we went into the building, through to the courtyard and poked through 2 doors before we found it. This is not entirely unusual in Poland - signage is... just not as big a thing here. Makes you feel like you've found some secret restaurant that only people in the know go to.We met a nice couple from Wroclaw at the lindy hop event in Krakow and we've met up with them a few times. The woman's name is Jagoda which is a kind of berry in Poland - a cousin to the blueberry of some sort. I don't know why her name makes me so happy, but it does. I guess it's the equivalent of the English name Cherry.
Polish people have adopted a few English words into their every day speak. The best is 'super', said with a Polish accent. It's wonderfully endearing to hear people talking in Polish and end with "Super!". I love it.
Lisa, your fondness for the Polish 'super' and its brilliant unexpectedness reminds me of when I heard someone in Canada talk about a writer called Jersey Kahsinsky. It took me a good while to figure out who that was(Jerzy Kosiński!) The Polish pronunciation is dramatically different and uttering it out loud around here would be a nice and easy way to earn a laugh from a Pole. By the way, some of the very few words in English that have supposedly Polish roots include: gherkin, yarmulke, the suffix 'nik' (as in 'beatnik') and... horde.
Jersey Kahsinsky - that's funny. English people mangle Polish far more than the other way round, that's for sure! I feel like it's taken me 6 months of living in Poland just to say 'dzień dobry' even close to correctly.
The other thing I love about Polish is the pan/pani - which has no equivalent in English (it seems less formal that sir/madam which are very formal and hardly used in English).