24 January 2010 9:53am
damn, i am awesome.
but let me begin at the beginning.
polish money, by my american standards, is annoying. anything below 10 złoty is a coin, which means a lot of coins. and shopkeepers are incredibly annoyed when you don’t have anything near the correct change for them, so that means carrying around a lot of coins. this means that i have to carry my mission crap store wallet and, separately, a change purse full of coins. this is not so new a situation, really, as my sister gave me an awesome change purse that i’ve carried with me for years. the difference is that my change purse did not seem such a necessary item in the continued happiness of the people who sell me my food, but rather as something that came in handy when i needed exact bus fare.
in addition, my particularly addled brain when it comes to all things monetary has decided that when i can find my wallet then i can’t find my change purse, and vice versa. this is very amusing for ania, who laughs and laughs as i stand in the middle of the office, yet again, holding one or the other in my hand and asking her where the hell the rest of my money went.
so, i decided that i would have to get a different wallet, one that allowed for coins and meant that i only had to keep track of one thing at a time. unfortunately this went against my deep-seated tom-boy aesthetic, as the only such wallets that i could find were incredibly girly. the amount of concessions i already have to make to look “decent” for my job means that something i might have thought a necessary yet slight evil has taken on a lot more weight. i have spent way too much time and brain power thinking about this, lately, as if a wallet is a key to my identity. it’s not. but tell my brain that.
then i remembered, duh, that i am awesome.
so, i made a wallet. back in my last few months at the bookstore we got a box of free tote bags from penguin, which we were supposed to give away, i guess. they were that recycled-plastic-shiny kind, with attractive pictures of classic novels that were, for some reason, being pushed as “summer reading.” it wasn’t an overwhelming amount of tote bags, though somehow i ended up with two of them. i used one of them in prague to carry my books back and forth from school, and now i use them for groceries and the like. one of them, though, was perhaps used more than the other because it sprung a hole that was just getting worse and worse. i was using it only for recyclables, but it was only a matter of time before it succumbed and i found myself picking juice cartons and paper bits out of the stairwell. probably best to avoid having to explain that to my neighbors.
i don’t like re-fashioning things that are even the slightest bit useful in their current incarnation, so i held off for as long as i could. still, i just spent a good part of the past couple days sewing bits of plastic together and the result is … awesome.
it’s not perfect, nor even finished yet, and we’ll see how long it holds up, but i’ve never made a wallet before, so it’s a huge victory. it feels really good to remember that i can do anything, if i put my mind to it, and the fact that my sewing machine is thousands of miles away just means that it might take a slight bit longer, not that it’s impossible.
also, book nerd means excited that the inside of my wallet says “classic summer reads.”
phew.
the woman at the counter at the movie theater last night was absolutely giddy with the prospect of speaking to me. i was almost worried about how much she was giggling as she said “you will visit us more and we will learn english!” at first she accidentally said it in polish, though, which just made her giggle more. her giggling actually began when, after asking if she spoke english, i told her that i speak a little polish and she waved her arms around and got all excited. rock star. the other woman behind her seemed interested and amused, though the cultural exchange that culminated in me buying a ticket to the new Sherlock Holmes movie did not seem to unseat her reasoning faculties.
Rzad = Row, Miejscie = Seat. still, can't complain when it only costs $5 for a movie.
movie theaters in Poland have assigned seating, which is sort of annoying. when sara was buying us tickets to see 2012 back in toruń, there was an amusing misunderstanding when the woman behind the counter showed her the seating plan and told her “these seats are free,” and she thought, y’know, free, which seemed so generous of the polish movie industry. unfortunately the woman just meant “available.” i was looking forward to my own confusing interaction around seating, though at least i was armed with the knowledge that such an interaction was coming. perhaps because it is just the way things are done in tarnów, or maybe to avoid just such a confusing conversation, the woman assigned my seat to me. it wasn’t too bad, though i would have preferred to be closer.
when sara and i went to the movies back in toruń, there were a lot of ads beforehand: polish ads and dubbed english ads and subtitled english ads. we weren’t positive that the movie was going to be in english with subtitles, so each new ad gave us hope or despair, depending upon its formation. emotional rollercoaster. i also wasn’t sure last night, though i have a possibly misguided optimism that it’s cheaper for them to subtitle things so they will. when we were in the Czech Republic terry told us that kids movies are always automatically dubbed, the thinking being, i guess, that kids shouldn’t be forced to read. this also seems to be the case in Poland, as the newest Disney atrocity was still playing when i got to the theater way too early last night, and i could hear its soundtrack blasting through the lobby walls. only one theater means no need for intricate soundproofing.
the movie was subtitled, so i was good on the comprehension front, though not when it came to the tiny bit of dialogue that was in French. argh. i had spent most of the movie, up to the introduction of the French guy, trying to acclimate my ears to fast british whispering coming through inadequate speakers, while attempting to keep an eye on the subtitles for educational purposes, and then this mumbling Frenchman shows up and my brain almost melted. what is he saying? what language is that? what the hell is going on?
eventually i caught on, and spent a few minutes trying to remember so many years of forgotten French studies while comparing them to the Polish subtitles.
i truly am a cosmopolitan woman of the world.
10:56am
