Not literally I'm guessing...

The Polish language gets me rolling on the floor, haw-hawing, with tears streaming down my face and an arm clutched to my side where it hurts from the laughing, on a fairly regular basis.

The latest such episode was the result of an article about Polish hero Adam Małysz, who whizzes down very high slides with skis attached to his feet and then flies through the air until he lands what look like terrifying miles later, better than pretty much everyone else at the moment.

The phrase that caused my attack of hysterics was this:

Małysz znokautował rywali

To those of you who don't speak Polish (hi!) I realise it looks like a bunch of gibberish, although the quicker ones will have recognised his name as the first word (gold star for you).

To those of you who speak Polish and are all 'it's not that funny', just shush.

Look at the second word, and then think 'knock out' and then just accept that if something is in the past tense in Polish it very often starts with a z and ends with ował, then look again.

Małysz znokautował rywali

Małysz knocked out his rivals. It's AMAZING this language.

I think I should start yoga

Dear Mr. bus driver,

I'm awfully sorry I don't know your name, but I think you may recognise yourself as we go along. Do stop me if I get anything at all wrong.

I'm the girl from the bus stop at centrum. You were driving the 522, and it was at the bus stop, oh, around 18.22 or so? Yes, I know there were two of you, but I'm really talking about the second one. Second bus, second driver.

As I ran up to the first 522, puffing and red-faced from the arctic temperatures and the fact that I had run at all (something I take care to avoid doing usually, especially with heavy bags and on snow-covered pavements) the driver there showed me that there was another 522 bus right behind. As he was pulling away from the stop, trying to forge into the dense traffic that was a bumper to bumper for as far as the eye could see, I followed his hint, and ran back to the next bus, YOUR bus. I think you should know who you are by now.

I can see you're very proud of your bus, with its fancy illuminated lettering and clean new lines. It's obviously quite new, and maybe you are too. That may explain your bizarre behaviour. It was half empty (probably because it was directly behind another 522) and I thanked my good fortune. I really needed to sit down. I had had a long stressful day and I had to get back as quickly as possible to feed the dogs I'm looking after this week. As I ran up to your front door and showed you I wanted to get on, (and this is where you may need to correct me as I may have misunderstood) you seemed to shake your head.

Huh.

Admittedly you were about 47cm away from the stop and you had already closed the doors. Maybe at bus-driver-school they tell you that once the doors are shut that's it! No turning back! No soft-hearted wussiness opening the door to frozen puffing girls. Maybe. Or maybe the power of being mighty bus driver man just went to your head. Maybe. Or maybe, and this is the theory I'm tempted to go with, you haven't quite got the hang of the button that opens the doors.

I'm quite sure the button exists, and the new buses seem to be all bright! and colourful! so I imagine you know where it is on the dashboard thing, but for some reason you really didn't want to push it. You stared ahead, moved the bus forward a centimetre, and ignored me.

You may have noticed my mouth opening and closing in astonishment, although you were doing your best to look straight ahead and not at the increasingly frustrated and wild eyed girl who started walking along with you, demonstrating the stupidity of being able to walk next to a bus stuck in a traffic jam NEXT TO THE STOP with a driver who REFUSES to open the doors.

Ignoring me was probably wise, as it turns out, or the fizzing hatred sparks that started shooting out towards you may have caused your stupid little goatee to catch fire, one hair at a time. If you had looked at me I may have been egged on by your smirk to smash my hand through your frosty glass door, rip off the steering wheel and crash it over your head. If I had caught one glimpse of your bald shiny head looking my way, I may have taken out my lunch fork from my bag and walked around the entire outside of the bus, sticking it in each tyre. Hard.

As it happens, I just turned around, swore under my breath and raced you. You may not realise, but the next metro stop is two bus stops away and you were in a jam and the metro came just as I got to the platform. The fact that I came out the wrong side of the road, in time to see your bastard bus pulling merrily away, does not take away from the fact that you were VERY close to having an out-of-breath foreigner shouting obscenities at you in stuttering Polish. I know some choice Polish words my friend. Be warned.

Next time, open the pierdolony door.

cryptic whisperings

I have a history of sleepwalking. Well, I mainly have a history of crashing my parents' dinner parties and demanding food, as well as the more standard nonsense talking nighttime wandering. That's my thing though, sleepwalking.

Marek, on the other hand, is into sleeptalking.

When I first came to Poland it was very frustrating, because I'd be woken up by some incomprehensible mutterings and, unable to remember the Polish until the morning, never know what weird and wonderful things he was dreaming about.

A couple of years later, the situation has evolved, and now I can understand the nonsense he spouts in the middle of the night.

When he's sick, when the line between reality and delirium is less defined, Marek sleeptalks even more.

The latest example was when he fell asleep in front of the tv...

him: (low throaty chuckle) uh-oh!

me: (thinking he was concerned about the fate of the animal about to get savaged in the nature programme on tv) yep

him: who's he going to be next?

me: (realising he is asleep) who?

him: (incredulous) a woman??!

me: (lost) huh?

him: (waking up) nevermind.

Understanding all this Polish may reveal some fascinating things.

what do you mean, grow up?

While I wouldn't dream of breaking my don't-blog-about-work rule, I am going to write about something that stems from differences between the Polish and English languages, that may or may not have been brought to my attention at work.

I may or may not have been editing a piece about a restaurant that had very fancy food and was proud of the fact that the chef made all the desserts from high quality ingredients 'while using no conservatives'. This has me almost choke on my tongue while I HAW HAW HAWed, imagining the line of miserable tories who had been banned from the kitchen. 'I'm sorry, you just can't come in, give Mr. Blair a go for a month or so and then we'll see...'

So, I (may or may not have) changed conservatives to preservatives and then realised that if a Pole who didn't have a great grasp of English read that sentence, they'd have their own reason to giggle.

Prezerwatywa means condom.

Heaven is a place where hair doesn't need cutting

On a scale of one to ten of my comfort level in certain situations (1 being sitting in a small group of close friends and family and 10 being standing on stage making a presentation about something I know nothing about in front of hundreds of people who hate me), walking into a Polish doctor's or hairdresser's and negotiating the situation on my own ranks pretty high.

I'd say a seven. OK, maybe just a six, but it's not on my list of things I have to do before I die, and yet I did both today.

The doctor's was fine. I remembered all the vital words and I had the safety net that she spoke English if my vocab gave out and my mind went blank. It was all quite straightforward and I came out with a minor sense of achievement.

The hairdresser's was more tricky. I have my hair cut about twice a year and I have a really hard time understanding those people who go once a week, or even more often. I put it off until the last moment and, if possible, go somewhere where they speak a language I feel comfortable communicating in (last time my hair was cut was in the States in May. I'm not exaggerating.)

Staring at myself in a (usually incredibly unflattering) mirror while a complete stranger chops away at my limp wet hair in front of a huge window that random shoppers look into regularly, is not my idea of a good time. I feel relatively confident with Polish now but when you have no idea how to explain your ideal haircut and you weren't organised enough to learn the Polish for layers or fringe, the fun rating comes down another couple of notches.

The hairdresser herself was fine. She looked about 17 and was obviously not in the mood for conversation, but she was fine. She cut it, and I said 'yes' and 'ok' in all the right places. Of course, I had this mental image of a bubbly confident me chatting away, filling in the missing vocab with hand gestures and smiles, but in fact I just turned red every time she asked me a question and stuttered out my pre-prepared phrases as best I could. The cut is nothing special. Still, I've made more progress in my personal 'practical Polish' language course.

Next in line is dinner with Marek's family this evening, as I'm leaving in a couple of days and will miss out on the Polish Christmas experience. That's fine though; well within my comfort zone.