Quarter of a century in Poland

Life catches up on you... it feels like yesterday that I arrived in Pyry, to a rented house on ulica Gajdy, our home for our first four-and-half years in Poland before moving into our own brand-new house in Jeziorki. I was a couple of months short of my 40th birthday, and after 16 years with one employer, nine years in one job, the chance to move to Poland was too good to turn down.

I arrived on 22 July (the rest of the family arrived a month later), and moved into to a redecorated but unfurnished house which I shared with a thousand blood-sucking Culex pipiens (Polish - komar, English - mosquito? gnat? midge?). My bedroom (I slept on a mattress) walls and ceiling were splattered with hundreds (no exaggeration) dead C. pipiens, each squashed onto a blot of my blood. That summer, 1997, saw record rainfall, the flooding of Wrocław, and the area around Jeziorki/Pyry had several streets under water. From memory, ulica Baletowa and ul. Farbiarska were both impassable.

Arriving with little more than my laptop and trusty Brompton fold-up bike, the first few weeks were unreal - working each day from my new office near Hala Banacha, cycling each way - the weather hot and humid, frequent thunderstorms, and the abiding memory of the smell of ripe mirabelle plums from the suburban trees that had fallen onto the pavement to ferment in the heat. With fruit too small to harvest commercially, mirabelle plum trees have since then largely disappeared from the streets. The other smell that lingers in my memory, that I can easily conjure up, is that of floor polish. The house (new-ish, built at the time of Poland's economic and political transformation, so no more than eight years earlier) was comfortable though with exceptions - the bath was about one metre long because there was no choice in the builders' merchants, the tiles were, shall we say, unfortunate in colour for the same reason. 

That first month, on my own, was strange - a feeling of being on holiday, an entirely different atmosphere to London, yet busy in my new job, working long hours, getting to meet new people, brushing up my (very) rusty Polish, and spending weekends out of town with my bike, which I could take with me by train.  As I wrote in the posts from three years ago and five years ago (see below), by 1997, Poland was no longer a 'hardship posting'. The denominisation of the currency occurred on 1 January 1995, reducing sticker-prices by four orders of magnitude (a set of kitchen chairs no longer cost four million złotys). And there were cash machines! And mobile telephony! Foreign supermarkets were opening all over Warsaw - Pyry was within easy reach of the Auchan and Géant stores, with Rema 1000 and Billa shops elsewhere. Poland was on its way to NATO and EU membership, so the future was less uncertain than it was six years earlier, when there were still Soviet troops stationed in the country.

Twenty five years, of which more than 15 has been blogged here; more than 15 years with a digital camera (I have nine-and-half years'-worth of colour prints in the attic but can't be bothered with the fuss of getting them out and archiving/digitising them all). The digital revolution has also changed my life massively.

Looking back - WHOOOOOOSH - hasn't that time has rocketed past. In hindsight, it was an excellent decision to move out of the UK and to settle in my fatherland, and watch it grow and mature. If there was one thing that unsettles me about Poland - it's Kaczyński. And of course Putin, but that's not one for the Polish voter. Brexit has shown what happens when a politician takes a gamble and dark forces bend the arc of future development in the direction of ideological obscurantism. 

This time three years ago:
22 years on the 22nd

This time three year:
A tale of two orchards

This time five years ago:
My 20 years in Poland

This time six years ago:
PiS, Brexit, Trump and cognitive bias

This time nine years ago:
Portmeirion, revisited, again
[My last summer holiday - not had one since!]

This time ten years ago:
Beach day, Llyn Peninsula

This time 11 years ago:
Down with cars in city centres!

This time 12 years ago:
8am and 26C already