Destination: Poland, France (Tuesday)

Transitioning

I’m riding with my sister to the airport in Warsaw and we get stuck in traffic. The road is partly under construction, but that doesn’t explain the complete impasse. It’s the trucks, she tells me. There is no highway that circumvents the city center and so every piece of machinery heading north or south ends up passing through the city itself. The cars no longer pollute in the way that they did ten or twenty years ago, nevertheless there certainly are a lot of them.

We pass the dzialki, little plots of land once given over to city residents who wanted to cultivate gardens. My sister reflects, sadly, that it’s hard to maintain them now. Vandalism and theft make it difficult to leave anything behind. Things disappear.

In Paris, I take the RER train to downtown Paris. I have always liked the ads they have posted at the airport: bus to Paris: delayed; taxi to Paris: delayed; car to Paris: delayed; RER to Paris: 29 minutes. I always arrive here from Warsaw at the same time: during rush hour traffic. It is unthinkable to take the bus then – it takes too long. Rush hour on the metro with a suitcase and a computer poses interesting challenges nonetheless.

I pass suburban stations and I note the graffiti on the platform walls. Vandalism: a theft of clean public spaces. As I look at it, I am remembering the worst graffiti I’ve seen in a long time: my sister and I had been walking through Warsaw’s Old Town and we saw it there, on a wall of one of the pretty, blue buildings. I thought then –how could some jerk with spray-paint deface something that was built out of the rubble, by the bare hands of those who had the vision of a new “Old Town?”

Paris always serves as the connecting city, the city that transitions me to the US and so I make a point of stopping here for a couple of nights. Because I know that once I step off the plane on the other side of the ocean, it will be as if I never had my week in Poland. That’s the way it always is: my Polishness remains nearly invisible to everyone but myself, even as my Americanisms are so obvious to all my Polish friends and family. One country (Poland) is a scanner and a sponge for all that comes from the other (the US). And that other? Oblivious, unaware. It’s just the way it is.

Okay, one last look at Warsaw: decking out a restaurant for the holiday season, then a quick switch to Paris: decking out a restaurant for the holiday season.