The tramcar rings a bell every time it stops and starts. I can tell you *exactly* how that sounds. Our window is marked by the red circle.

Destination Poland: Monday

I don’t want anyone laughing at how ugly I am

I bought garlic from a street peddler today. Better that she have the cash than the large grocery chain. Her braids of garlic where quite pretty and I asked if I could also take a photo (having almost been arrested for improper photographing earlier in the day, I thought I better be careful). She said -- go ahead and take a picture, but without her in it. Then she said what I made to be the title of this post subsection.

I try not to do that – to photograph something ridiculously ugly. But she was not even a tiny bit ugly. She was just plain and ordinary. Yet, I knew what she was talking about: to me, something is normal and ordinary. To another (a blog reader?), some of the posts and photos of the ordinary may be something to smirk at. Should I avoid posting them?

Today I am not avoiding them. I am not giving a tour of Warsaw now, I am on my last day in Poland, and I want to give a run through the ordinary, the everyday.

I’ll avoid too many words because it would take too many words to say anything right.

I walked around my childhood neighborhood today – right in the city center. I moved here (from the village) when I was three. It’s amazing how little has changed. The room that I shared with my sister looked out on the tram stop. The only other room in our apartment looked out back, directly into an older woman’s rooms. We waved to her all the time.

At the side, there was a courtyard for kids to play in. Most apartment houses in Poland had those back then. The playground equipment was as sophisticated then as it is now. The apartment house, the entrance to it, the courtyard:

Entryway to "Nowowiejska 4;" I refuse to show you the stairwell... 

A playground of sorts 

In all my years in Warsaw, as a kid and later as a teen, I lived within two blocks of this square. Ugly? Not to us. Kind of grand-looking once upon a time. It was built immediately after the war, to provide a much-needed planned apartment community. Now the lamp posts are regarded as kind of retro-nice.

MDM Square: we watched it go up and replace rubble. 

I went to this elementary school, left my coat and shoes each day (kids in Poland wear slippers in school – how else do you keep the wood floors so clean?) in these cloak rooms (all schools have them), and went to first grade in this classroom (back then, each desk had two seats, same as now):

Regional elementary school 

Always a downstairs cloakroom for shoes and coats. 

A classsroom that looks remarkably similar 45 years later (note clean harwood floors). 

During my university years, my orbit grew. Every day I walked past this “Square of Three Crosses,” then past this building (then – Communist Party headquarters, now – bank), finally heading up this “New Town” street, stopping at Blikle to have this doughnut (regarded by most as the perfect Polish doughnut, with rose jam inside and glaze and orange peel on the outside):

The "Square of the three Crosses;" there really are three corsses. 

From Communist Party headquarters, to Polish Stock Exchange, to bank: one building, many uses. 

"New World" Street, lined now with Christmas trees 

A Blikle moment 

So ends the week in Poland. I take the subway to my sister’s (note an earlier post on Poles being bookish: so many people read on the subway – look, even in the second car). My nephew lets me take a photo of him with his saxophone. I want to learn to play it too, just for the kick of playing alongside him.

Tomorrow I am in Paris.

a bookish nation

Chris, inspired.