Czy chcesz pizze?

Tonight’s dinner was pizza. With all the trepidations surrounding the painting job (see post below), I didn’t have the mind nor the muscle to think about food preparation. So I went to a local pizza place to pick up my order (I am the only one in town, in the country probably, who has never in her entire American life (they don’t do pizza delivery in Poland) ordered a pizza delivery; one quick drive will get me a pie fresh from the oven, so why would I opt for a delivery?).

I wore my “Prawa kobiet prawami czlowieka” t-shirt tonight. Most people pick the next clean t-shirt in the stack to throw on. I choose mine deliberately. I wear the Polish one whenever I miss my connections to that country. [the translation of the words is “women’s rights are people’s rights.” The shirt comes from a friend who works at the Center for Women’s Rights in Warsaw and if you knew how incongruous it is to talk of women’s rights in the Polish context, you’d appreciate how much this t-shirt means to me. It is fading considerably from overuse.]

As I claimed my pizza, the young man said to me “ty rozmawiasz po Polsku?” He had a slight American accent, but he was otherwise quite fluent (translation: you speak Polish, don’t you?).

It turns out that he is a Wisconsin guy who had decided, while in college at UW-Stevens Point, to learn Polish. Eventually, he spent his junior year in Poland. Okay, so he is now dishing out pizza – not a great ad for choosing Polish as you major. But I’m sure he’ll move on to bigger and better things any day now.

I have, until this day, in my many years in this country, met only two people who had had no connection to Poland but had decided to learn the language nonetheless. Both were sociologists who chose to do research in Poland. This young man today will make it a pack of three who will have deliberately studied Polish.

I asked how it could be that he spoke Polish so well. The language is exceedingly hard for Americans, in part because of the conjugation principles (you conjugate nouns as well as verbs, so that if you say “I sit on top of the table” or “I sit under the table,” the word “table” will take on a different form; this additional grammatical idiosyncrasy drives English speaking people completely nuts). He answered simply “jestem bardzo inteligentny” (=I am very intelligent). Indeed!