TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

POLAND - PART THREE

I lived in Poland from March 2002 until March 2004. I wrote regularly about my time there and I have decided, as the first of my travel blogs, to split all these writing into 4 parts, which will appear weekly from 4 September 2016.

This third post is generally about life in Poland.

In 2003, after 18 months on and off in Poland, I began to notice that Poznan was heading toward a change in its shopping habits. New shopping centres had begun to appear and others were seemingly under construction. The latest, four floors of designer fashion, cosmetics and wine and coffee bars, opened in November 2003 with a Laser light show that effectively blocked off one complete street for about 300 metres with a vast crowd. Despite many of these shops being of Scandinavian or German parentage, sadly, the resultant show still showed its Polish heritage. It was 50 minutes late in starting and didn’t actually live up to its billing.

Time does not seem to matter to the Poles when attending a performance. I have been to a theatre where the doors were not actually opened to the auditorium until 15 minutes after the advertised start time and I have been to several music concerts where the artists were still arriving and tuning up well after the time I had expected to be listening to music. There was also the memorable case where a so-called icon of Polish punk music, Brulewski, started his concert and was well into the first number before I realised he was not still tuning up but that maybe says more about my understanding of punk than his tardiness.

But to return to the shopping centre. It was obvious that a good deal of thought went into the building and, on one occasion when we were there, getting decked out for a TV performance I think, I noticed that, down on the ground floor, they had a space where parents could leave their children to paint or draw. It was always very busy and I have noticed that Poles do not walk on escalators. Having spent over 11 years of my life commuting in London, I have to walk, or even run, up or down an escalator. I hate being late and after time on a tube train in the seventies I usually was; hence the need for speed. Not in Poland. You get on and stand where you landed until you forcibly get off.

One of the things I really love about Poznan, in winter and in summer, is the old market square. Most large towns have one of these and they really are a square. Remember I arrived in winter so I would walk around, through snow covered streets, and see all these bars and cafes, with heaters on the wall, and people huddled in heavy coats, gloves and scarves. By then I may well have been wearing a thickish jumper (Geordie remember) although someone once tried to make me borrow a heavy coat which may well have seen service with the Russian Army in Crimea. It was like a suit of armour. Once I had it on I could hardly move. But, those winter walks around the old market place helped me fall in love with Poznan. The centre piece is the Town Hall and, at night, it is certainly a major attraction

But it was when summer came that I fell in love again. Suddenly workmen started to build decking outside the bars, cafes and restaurants. Then seating appeared, tables were set out, umbrellas or sunshades, weather dependent, sprang up and soon, every day, you would see crowds of people taking the sun, a rest, a meal, a drink or even all four. This would go on well into the night. I can remember one night in late June, about midnight and we were out. As we walked into that square it took on a whole new feeling. I could have easily been in Antibes or Cannes, except the beach wasn’t there. I loved it. One day, quite suddenly, all these sculptured figures appeared. I have no idea what the significance was and I never found out. A poor piece of journalism for which I apologise.

There is still quite a lot of live music here too. Interestingly, most of the groups perform in English and there is always a good attendance. The music owes much to the seventies and names of the venues, such as Lizard King, which opened its doors (haha) while I was living there, show where that influence tends to be. There are also quite a few cellar type clubs around and I must admit the whole atmosphere is very good. Indeed U2 played here a few weeks back. Now does that say more about Polish music or U2’s career? I wonder.

By 2003 I had moved more into the centre of Poznan, not far from my beloved market square, and the apartment blocks there were far older than the 1970’s built ones I had been living in. Whether those will survive as long is debatable; I was told they were only given a 30 year guarantee by their communist builders. But the old ones have character and convey a feeling for a time gone by. They are very sturdy buildings with high ceilings and three or four floors. There is an entry staircase, no lifts, and, in the one I stayed anyway, two doors on each floor. Enter these and you are in a long hall with doors leading off each side. In many cases, ours included, two families will share these apartments. I am told that not that long ago you would sometimes have as many as 15 people living in three rooms.

I always get a feeling that I would like to make a period film here or just go back in time. I watched the Polanski film, “The Pianist” in Poznan this year and it felt strange. Firstly because I was among the people, or at least their descendants, who had suffered in that time, and secondly, because the atmosphere he had created felt so real.

I mentioned earlier about my new career in television and the 3 pilot programmes we made, the interviews we did, the documentary we made and the concert we held. I realise now that, if one of us had not been so keen to leave Poland, and Europe, we could have succeeded here. “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can, found always in a woman and seldom in a man”, as my mother often quoted. Wrong there, mother.

These programmes further enhanced my view of Polish Life. The little Pott(y)ed Guide one we wrote and filmed ourselves. The Cookery and Customs one was written by us but filmed by a professional cameraman in a real restaurant. The 30 minute final result took all day to film and we had such delightful interruptions, such as the phone ringing while we were recording and, although we didn’t notice it till after, the cash register regularly rang during the filming. We did two starters, two main dishes and two desserts. It was incredible to see it all coming together but there were some fun bits. With only one cameraman, and only one camera, if we needed a close-up of, for example, pouring cream into a pan, we would do the distant shot but need another pan for the close-up as the cream was already in the first one. Seriously, this whole time taught me so much about film-making and it was fantastic that we were allowed to be in the editing room to watch a professional put together the cookery programme.

The third pilot, called “Living as” was thought up by my girlfriend who thought it would be fun to show life in two different parts of a single country, maybe comparing rural and urban families. We took the idea to a TV director she knew and he was interested and offered to work with us on this pilot. He knew a cameraman and off we went. We decided to film first with the rural family. We wrote a rough script, although the idea was to talk to them about their lives and then re-create it. I wanted it to be chronological, ie going through the day showing what each family did. The Polish director didn’t. He thought we should show one family first and then the other. So, as we filmed, this was his train of thought. I, on the other hand, was thinking of fitting urban strands in between what we were filming in the country. Matters were not helped by the fact that the cameraman thought he was a director, he subsequently edited our Pott(y)ed piece, proving he could do at least three tasks. The director also thought he was a cameraman and the endless discussion that went on about each shot meant we started filming at 7am and finished at 1am the next day.

By the time it came round to film the urban pieces, these two had disappeared and we did it all ourselves meaning essentially we could never both appear in shot. There was also a very frightening moment, for me anyway on two counts, when we had to film us arriving at the home of this urban family by means of the lift as they lived on the ninth floor of a Poznan apartment block. We left the camera on floor 9, on its tripod, filming, ran down the stairs to floor 8 where one of us had held the lift, climbed in and returned to floor 9, hoping to find the camera still there and filming us. It was, although if the lift had gone down instead of up, I may have panicked even more. But it was great fun. With this one, because we had to make the finished result our way, i.e. chronologically, we were given the editing room to do it ourselves. There is no better way to learn than to do. Maybe one day I will be able to show these 3 pilots. At the moment I only have a few stills available but a copy is around and – who knows? (2016 I now have obtained a complete copy of two of them and an almost complete one of the third – they were good)

The documentary was made just before we set off, impatiently, to Australia for the second time. Obviously my lack of command of the Polish language meant I often knew little about negotiations until things were finalised and I understood that the man who would be making this programme would arrive with his cameraman early one morning, we should have a few ideas, and he would tell us where to film. They both arrived on time but then his first questions was “so what shall we film”? We managed to put together a script and ideas, maybe the other way around, in about an hour, filmed it all that day, and the documentary went out later that week,initially on a little local channel.

Therefore imagine my surprise the following Friday, when we were sitting in a club listening to some live music and having a chat with a guy who had helped us record some songs a few weeks before we had set off to Australia, when a guy walked up to me and began talking. The day before we had attended a press conference in Poznan about the project and both TV and radio had been there and done a couple of short interviews at the end. As you do, we watched TV that night but didn’t see anything about us, so assumed we were going to be a “filler” for a slow news day.

Anyway there we were chatting away and this guy walked up to me and said something. Now at this stage I usually freeze on a smile and look at my girlfriend, hoping she will translate. My Polish needs work, in fact, it needs polish. Anyway, she duly translated and said he had seen me on TV and likes the project. With that he took my hand, fortunately it wasn’t in my pocket, I don’t like that sort of thing, and said in pretty good English “Yes, I want to thank you for what you are doing for Poland. That is why I am taking your hand”. With that, quite luckily, he gave it back and headed off to the toilets. What use would my hand have been there? Exactly.

Seriously though it made me think a bit, as I sometimes do. Was I really doing something for Poland and if so what? Wasn’t I just, with my girlfriend, trying to set up an educational project? I think it all lies in the Polish mentality and their culture. They are a very proud people. Over the years, they have been invaded, divided, obliterated, re-instated and now are beginning to have some form of stability. I will be the first to admit that sometimes the Poles can annoy me, irritate me and just plain frustrate me, but that is how they are. What I think is vital and urgent, they don’t.

I went to close a bank account I have in Poland and was told that yes I could close it, I should write and tell them and then they would close it one month later. I wanted to close it then as I had just withdrawn all my money but they said no, one month it is. Now something tells me that at the end of that month there will be some charges to add on and there will be nothing to take them from but never mind, that’s how they do it. Then I went into another bank and asked why certain charges had been taken off my account some months but not others. ‘Oh I don’t know’, they said, ‘strange isn’t it?’ ‘Put in a claim asking why and put it in writing’. No help from the bank staff just put in a claim.

What I am trying to say is that however annoying people may be, we must always accept their way of life. It’s not easy. It’s sometimes hard not to show your anger, your frustration but really, what is wrong, is just your intolerance. But when someone says what that guy did, I can stand anything. So, in return to the people of Poland, well most of them, thank you too. I love your country; I’ve enjoyed my time here and, if you all spoke English, I could tell you this personally.

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