On to Poland

SPREADING WING - Our free Kindle download last week went well. We gave away 682 books!
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All right. This is my first attempt to place a post on this particular computer, and I was just beginning to get adapted to the other one. No telling what may happen.
Barbara and I were still having trouble with jet lag, at this point, and we have very sore backs and legs from being jammed in there so tightly on that plane so long. But Barbara's sister, Frances, seems to be adapting quickly. Or, maybe she's just not whining about it like we are. Go figure.
Poland is changing quickly. Before 1990, and the collapse of communism, there was a 12 year wait for a phone in Poland, and one car for every ten families. Many of these Russian cars were made of cardboard. But, we still saw several of these still on the road, 25 years old. Tough cardboard. Truck drivers are not allowed to be on the road on Saturday and Sunday, and we saw lots of them just hanging around at truck stops.
From 1946 to 1991, few tourists made it into Poland, and very few Poles made it out. Up until four years ago, the borders were still closed, and using a bribe to get through the borders seemed to be a way of life. One could expect long delays at the border. And, the roads were still bad. But the borders have opened up, the new road built through by the European Union is comparable to our interstates, and the roads are filled with tourists and tour buses. But the maidens of the night were still to be seen standing along the roadsides occasionally. Someone asked, "Why don't they just hold up a sign?" The answer seemed to be, her mode of dress was her sign.
 The Poles just now seem to be beginning to adapt to tourists, and  realizing how much money they bring in,  But many were still sorta lemon-faced when dealing with us. Being squeezed in between Germany and Russia has traditionally been a tight spot for Poland, lots of nice flat land that makes excellent battlefields. Crews of men mowed the right of way with hand operated weed eaters, and others bagged up the hay.
     Poland is now 94% Roman Catholic, and the best way for a young poor boy to improve his lot in life is to become a priest, we were told. One in thirteen Roman Catholic Priests live in Poland. Personally, though, becoming a priest requires a specific sacrifice I could just never find my way clear to making. But that's just me.
We reached Warsaw. Most of Warsaw was closed, it was Corpus Christi Day, one of their three big ones. Warsaw is the largest Polish city, three million. Chicago is the second largest, 1.8 million.
Ironically, the Stock Exchange used to be the communist party building. They have one palm tree, right in the middle of town, made of plastic.Warsaw University has 65,000 students, and they go free.
Warsaw suffered a great deal under the Nazis. Much more than I learned about in my history classes in the 50's and 60's. I suppose a lot of that is because while it was under Communism, we learned very little about Poland.
During WWII,  Poland was the first of many conquered. There were two uprisings against the Germans during that time. In the first, 200,000 died. When the Jewish began to realize what their fate was to be, many preferred to die fighting. In the latter part of the war, with the Russians on the way, the Nazis punished the Poles by drilling holes in 85% of their beautiful large buildings and blew them up, while the Russians, arriving outside Warsaw, watched the destruction. Many Poles still complain bitterly that the Russians, two million of them, just stayed outside town and watched that destruction, instead of coming in and stopping it. Now, most of those beautiful buildings have been rebuilt, just like they were before, though there was very little money for the Poles for this from the Russians or the Marshall Plan after the war.
After walking and looking, mostly, for a couple of hours, our family group found a small grocery store open, and went in to buy meat for sandwiches. While looking over the meat packages, Barbara pointed out to the lady in charge that some of the meat was out of date, and the lady finally found some that was not for us. She was nice about it, but it seems a man in the back room heard all that, and got extremely mad. He came out and started shouting at us, waving his arms for us to leave. Now, for some reason, he was either getting dressed as a clown, or undressed; anyway, he was half dressed. Of course, we could not understand a thing he said, but we got the drift. I turned, looked at him, then looked down at his half-costume, and flashed him a thumbs up. But, it was with my half thumb, the one I got cut off 47 years ago. Then I placed the other thumb up beside it to show I was only giving him a half-thumbs up, which was all I could do because of his half-dressed condition. He stopped screaming, looked at me awhile, then just died laughing. That old half thumb comes in handy sometimes.
Poland became the first non-communist country in Eastern Europe in 1989.
Time to load back on  the Globus tour bus, and the entire group on our bus sang happy birthday to me, sixty nine years old today. Then the bus turned toward Auschwitz, and everyone's mood changed considerably.