There are kurczak z rożna (roadside rotisserie chicken booths) all over the place. The chicken's generally fantastic quality, slow-roasted and stuffed with these amazing green spices. I don't know what they are but they're green and delicious. It's about 16 Zł for a whole chicken. It's great for a quick evening meal for two or a particularly gluttonous after-bar snack. (I have been known to buy the last chicken on the rack at 6AM, long after Tej has run out of kebab fixin's.)
One particular kurczak z rożna has a kickass story behind it. It's located at the intersection of Półwieska and Święta Marcin, which is a really big intersection. It's been there for a long time... longer, actually, than Kupiec Poznański, the large downtown shopping centre that literally is built around it. That's the stand, underneath the ad banner. I took the picture standing across the intersection.
When Kupiec Poznański was first planned, they tried to buy the owner out, but they obviously didn't offer him enough. He refused. As you can see, the outer walls of the mall are cinder-blocks and they're ready to fill in the missing chunk of mall as soon as they get the chance, but it's been over 15 years and the chance still hasn't come! The owner remains steadfast.
It hasn't been easy for him, but get this. The Kupiec Poznański owners tried some dirty tricks. They stored their smelliest dumpsters out behind his stand! Wanna know what he did about it? He waited until the day the dumpsters were emptied... then that night, he got some friends to flip the empty dumpsters upside-down, and then poured concrete all around the dumspters so they could no longer be moved, and neither them nor the space they were taking up could be used for anything. Brilliant!
So the Kupiec Poznański people have put a large billboard over his stand, but that's about all they can do. The siege on kurczak z rożna is at a big stalemate, which is exactly where its owner likes it!
Again I'm late updating this. But this time it was because I left my camera in WUCASH's car and I didn't want to write without having the pictures to go along with the story. I've also been quite occupied with various social stuff. But more about that later.
So WUCASH provides free soft drinks for his guys. We go to this store called Lidl every few weekends and pay the equivalent of $30 for two shopping carts full of pop and bottled water. (The picture's fuzzy because this insanely thick fog was reflecting the flash.)
This supermarket is kind of crazy because it's just aisles of boxes-- nearly everything they sell is pre-packaged. There is no cheaper place to buy food, though. A litre of ketchup for 19 cents, etc. It's fun to pick up packages of brands I've never heard of, like Snacky Cracky Chinese Rice Snacks, and see that they're actually made somewhere in Czech. But the beer takes the cake... the signs say, "It is cheap." No kidding! The stuff in the red crates is 0.95 Zł which xe.com tells me is just under 37 cents Canadian. Tax is already factored into that, too.
So half a litre of Finkbräu will set you back CAD$0.37. I've tried it before, and yes, it's awful, but it's not undrinkable.
There isn't much going on here-- I've been really into work lately, trying a lot of new things. The NYSE has been gradually switching stocks over to a very different system, more electronically based. I've been taking a lot of overnight positions, going in to work early and staying late and being active on discussion forums... oh yeah, and making pretty good money. It's an exciting time to be a trader (but when isn't it?).
The most recent cultural event was the Poznan festival on the 11th. I'm not sure what it's called other than Jedenasci Listopad (November 11th) but Poznan has a parade and a big event in the castle courtyard. My pictures from last year were so great, I couldn't match them this year.
Also, since Halloween I've been mowing down on Rogale Marcinskie. It's the traditional festival pastry. They're sold everywhere, and on the 11th, they take over the city... the bakery at my grocery store has nothing but rogale on the shelves! Rogale are huge poppyseed croissants with icing and crushed peanuts on top. When they're hot and fresh, they are unbelievably tasty! They're sold by weight, and they're expensive by Polish standards... a small one will cost about 3.50 Zs and I've paid almost 6 Zs for a massive one.
...but not as big as this one I saw in a booth near the castle. Holy crap! Compare it for size with the ones in the boxes to the right.
After work today (which happened to be my best day ever-- I made US$1385!) Lukas and I went to the graveyard for All Saints' Day. Specifically, the huge public cemetery at the northern end of the centrum, or the downtown core where we live. It's a big holiday in Poland and everything's closed but Zabka and kebab places. In the morning you attend mass beside the graves of family members.
We went to this specific cemetery because last year we discovered quite a few Canadian soldiers buried there. So we figured it would be a nice gesture to revisit these guys who are buried so far from home and plant a little Canadian flag on their graves.
It took us awhile, because neither of us brought a flashlight... fortunately there were candles everywhere, so we borrowed one from the big monument in the picture, and walked around the rows looking for our buried compatriots. It was dark, and freezing cold, and snowing, but the air was crisp and quiet, and being surrounded by candles and trees like that was really, really beautiful.
There were noticeably fewer candles than last year. It was also not snowing, and not freezing cold, on November 1st last year. We only had nine flags, and as sad as it was to find a tenth Canadian grave and not have a flag left for him, we were pretty glad to get out of the cold. Hey, maybe I'll be back next year, bringing an armload of flags, and wearing something more than a thin hoodie in subzero weather.
I'm sure somebody out there would have a problem with the politically incorrectness of my "limited edition sexy" juices made by the Polish company, Frugo. I'm gonna try and butcher translate the Polish parts of the slogans on each one (leaving the English part unitalicized).
Frugo WHITE INNOCENT. She's only yours. Don't fear her. You did it already a lot of times. She wasn't. Carefully...open your arms...
FRUGO BLACK TEMPTATION. Black idea OUT. Before your trip. Don't pack a storm. There's black land. There's fruit. Juice trickles, and sun shade covers. TRUST THE LUST. GO DEEPER.
There are some idiots hanging out on the balcony next door and up one floor. They're being really loud, and I don't even think they're having a good time... it sounds like they're just arguing. I fell asleep despite them, but then they did something stupid which caused a power surge in my apartment and shut off almost all my fuses. The power surge was audible and it woke me up! Good thing all my hard drives are connected through a surge protector.
When I heard it trip I woke up grumbling and reset my fuse switches. It took me two minutes. But as for them, they're even louder now. They're too drunk or stupid to know where their fuse box is, and they want to keep on partying, but they have no lights. And it sounds like they're all getting madder and madder at each other.
Too bad I can't hear them because my earplugs are in. I hope they lose all the stuff in their fridge. I'm goin' back to sleep!
There's an interesting double standard I've noticed in Polish attitudes towards gay people. On the one hand, you have everything you'd expect from a country with solidarity in its Catholic upbringing. Nobody is publicly out of the closet in daily life. "Gay" is still a common, and perfectly acceptable synonym for "lame" or worse. If a drunk guy wants to fight someone, he'll call a random guy gay, because it's guaranteed to get his ire up enough to make him want to fight.
This goes kind of hand in hand with a celebratory attitude towards masculinity which is pretty much subsumed in my shower gel and deodorant combo.
But me and WUCASH observe certain weird things that run counter to this attitude. We call it the "It's OK to be gay in Poland, as long as you aren't actually GAY" phenomenon. And I'm not just talking about Europe being the birthplace or inspiration for metrosexuality. We've observed many guys-- the same type of guys who were harassing the gay rights protesters last year-- doing things that no straight guy in Canada would do, even a guy who was comfortable with his sexuality and had nothing against homosexuals. Here are a couple examples.
Suddenly, a STR8 guy at the gym will take off his shirt and flex in the mirror. This only happens at the smaller gyms with no cardio equipment and nearly always no female members. So only guys are around when this happens. Sometimes the friends of the shirtless flexing guy will compliment his muscles and even TOUCH the guy. And remember, these are generally juiced-up-with-crazy-steroid-mimickers-smuggled-in-from-Russia guys, with plenty of drunken roid-rage they'd just love to take out on any guy who steps to their "you gay or something?" challenge.
On a sweaty dancefloor, two guys will dance together. Ok, this sometimes happens among jokers in Canada, but they'll break after a few seconds or until they get some laughs from their friends. The longest I've ever seen this happen in Canada is when two of my friends slow danced for one entire song in Daytona, which was indeed hilarious. Conversely... two STR8 Polish guys will grind each other, grinning at each other and everyone around them, for... well, I've seen it happen for three songs straight. It's like the Canadian way, but these guys just keep going and going and going.
I've had the occasion to record (and thereby extract from my head) some songs I've written/arranged over the past year.
I'm gonna post more-- I own the undonefor.com domain, so old songs will be posted there-- as soon as I get myself organized to a degree above nil. Really, it's been a lot of fun arranging tracks and re-learning how to do guitar solos on the fly. No matter how badly the end result sucks, I've had some serious fun putting it together.
I'm learning more and more Polish. Today I stumbled across something interesting. My last name is a compound word (at least phonetically), in Polish. I don't know why I didn't realize this last year when I first learned these words.
So because of late nights this weekend, I'm wide awake at 3AM, noodling around on the internet.
Someone took a video of Hurraylien, one of the songs we played at the show that happened a couple nights before I left for Poland. JARH ED has it up at his MySpace.
The sound quality's surprisingly good, and the performance is really solid. (Unlike the other Hurraylien video from a year earlier... please ignore that one.) I hope those dudes have been practicing in my absence. UH MISS MUH BAYUND
Six days will be the longest I go without writing something here, I swear!
This month's off to a solid start, work-wise. I broke my record for most money earned in one day at the beginning of the month. I only broke the previous record by about 3%, so I'm fully expecting to raise the bar again, much further this time.
Here's a picture of me singing Purple Rain at Klepsydra!
Just a short update here. I took a walk down one of my favourite streets last weekend, holding my camera by my side the whole way. As a result the footage is kind of shaky, but you can still see some cool stuff. I start out at this sculpture of a face, on the main floor of Stary Browar, a mall that I actually love to be in... it won an award for its brilliant architecture. It's more like a modern-day castle than a mall. It's got turrets, terraces, passageways, everything. Anyways, I walk out one of the entrances and walk down the pedestrian-only section of Półwięska street. It's your average bustling weekday morning, busy but not packed like it would be on a weekend. The walk ends at an iron statue of an old dude with his bicycle.
One of the things WUCASH did to enhance his office since last year was acquire a fish tank. Everybody who's hired on as a trader gets to populate it with their own fish. KASH has a spotted one and a striped one, MASAKO has a shark, JAKREC was assigned a tropical-looking fish that always hides (because he doesn't show up for work some days), PILAJD has these little tiny ones I think. I of course had to buy my own fish for the tank. I didn't know where any pet stores are in Poznań, but that wasn't a problem, because I still knew where to buy fish.
I love my fish. His name is Super Fish. He is some tuna. He isn't allowed to swim with the other fish because his metal might rust and mess them up, but the upside to him living on top of the aquarium is that I can give him hugs and kisses whenever I walk by.
Here're some of the pictures from the fantastic soccer game WUCASH, ELJA, and DEUTSCHE-SCHWEINE caught a couple of weekends ago. The game was between our city's team, Kolejorz Lech Poznań, and GKS Belchatow, one of our city's biggest rivals and also the top-seeded team in the league.
The Poznań stadium sells out every game to a capacity of well over 30,000. It used to be you would only be able to sit along the sidelines, but they built up one end of the stadium with 15,000 seats (pictured), and construction's underway for another 15,000 at the opposite end. The cheaper seats are on the sidelines closer to the pitch. The more expensive seats are higher up at one end of the pitch. The value is considered to be in how well you can see the game unfold across the entire pitch. With a top-down view, you can see more.
WUCASH got some sad news at work today... his grandma died this afternoon. She lived to her late eighties, with WUCASH's grandpa, in a house in nearby Mosina. I saw her a couple times last year, but not yet this year. She was really sweet to me even though I didn't speak a word of her language when I met her. So weekend plans will be on hold as I keep my time free to help WUCASH out while he spends time with his family.
In exasperating news... I brought a million USB cables, but not my damn camera cable. So all my pictures are stuck in my camera for the time being. I'll pick up a memory card reader for an exhorbitant price tomorrow, and show y'all some of those pictures from the INSANE soccer game I went to the weekend before last.
Oh yeah... I had one extra postcard. I mailed it to the Silver Spur. L0LZ0RZ.
(Fire me your mailing address if you want a(nother) postcard!)
Some dudes just came to my apartment and hooked up my internet! True to Poland, they were 45 minutes early (it's either that or 2 hours late) and two people came to do something I could have done myself in five minutes. I love it!
I must furnish some pictures from the after-work party. I got some pictures of me and MŁODY storming the foos championship.
I haven't got internet hooked up at home yet... but I found an open network today. Hopefully it sticks around until I can get my own connection. This one, unfortunately, won't be sufficient for VoIP. But it gets me by. The download speed's pretty sad.
We had a kickass work party at the office! WUCASH has some pictures... I'll try and get a hold of some. We hooked up the Xbox to the projection screen and had a foosball tournament which me and my partner MLODY won. We went to Klepsydra because WUCASH had been hyping my karaoke skills to his traders for months. I didn't get to sing, but I did get a dance lesson from KAS. Which turned out to be not so much a dance lesson, really. The single traders were hitting on her like crazy. We trucked to Pod Minoga afterward but I was pretty tired so I took off home at around 3AM.
WUCASH and I went to the huge onion bar in Stary Browar last night, just to take it easy. I've never seen that bar so packed! It was a pretty amazing night. There were literally more beautiful women at the onion bar last night, than I've seen in Canada all year. But since we'd both kind of overdone it Friday night we stayed for a couple drinks and took off early. (Note: I think the real name of the onion bar is Browar Pub. But it's got this massive onion-shaped booth made from a gigantic brewing urn, with a tapped keg in the middle, and all the seats are made from smaller onions.)
I'm learning a little more Polish. I've got a new strategy which seems to be working well. First I ask in Polish if the person speaking to me can speak English, and then we kind of try and meet each other halfway. Instead of getting frustrated with me, people praise me for trying. They're a lot more cooperative this way. I can string together simple sentences although my grammar is complete crap. I'm bothering WUCASH with a lot more language questions until he gets sick of me asking.
WUCASH bought a car today! It's a red Daewoo Subira. It was cheap because it's got some stuff that needs to be fixed. It'll still be a pretty good deal after the repairs. At the moment... it's kind of sketchy.
The internet lied! The phone I brought from Canada won't work here after all... I'd bought a new adaptor and got it unlocked and everything. I guess my Canadian provider tweaks the GSM frequency of Canadian phones to keep them in the proprietary market. The phone still has the 1900 band in common with Poland but it needs more than that to work properly. So I bought a used phone from the same place I got a phone last year. This phone probably won't work when I come back to Canada but I don't care. It was a good deal and it's a tax writeoff.
We've got an after-work party with the Swift guys tonight. I'm pumped. MASAKO, ELJA, PILAJD, JAKREC and maybe a couple other guys for foosball and Xbox at the office. There are two cases of tall-can Warka beer here. Not sure if KAS, Wucash's assistant, will be staying to hang out with all the guys, but I will definitely make her feel guilty about leaving.
My Polish-speaking skills are at a level where I can make myself understood, and I speak so badly I get a lot of brownie points for trying. I got a 1Z discount on my 31Z guitar strings because the girl didn't have change. I was surprised. Usually if they don't have change (which is notoriously often) they'll refuse the sale! The girls at the grocery store Piotr i Pawel still get furious at me when I have no change for them. Even if I have change I tell them I don't, for the sheer entertainment value of seeing them get so furious about it. I'm a bastard! Yes!
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