the proof of our love for matter as such

a crumbling house between bus stops

the logical thing to do, at this point, would have been to cross the street and wait for the bus in the other direction. alas, we were not being logical, and i apparently had some steam to walk off, so we just started walking back in the direction from which the bus had come. this required heading up a very steep hill, dragging a small but noisy suitcase, and my angry but determined mom. i’m not actually sure either of us was thinking at that point, there was just movement towards a destination and some grumpiness and the idea that we were at least off of the constant stream of buses, for a little while. it was almost 5 pm. we had crossed the border almost 6 hours earlier. we were in drohobyć. we didn’t know where the hotel was, but we were pretty sure of where the bus had gone after the stop we were supposed to have gotten off at, and that was something.

in front of us on the hill was a young woman with small child, pushing a stroller. we bickered for the sake of bickering until the small child realized our presence and told his mom to make room for us to pass.

at this point i realized we may have to ask directions anyway, because even if we made it back to the stop for the center of town, we still didn’t know where the hotel was. i had the name of the hotel written in latin and in cyrillic, as well as the cheat sheet of ukrainian phrases that brendan and i had printed out for our trip to kiev over a year before. i pulled out the sheets and desperately tried to find the pronunciation for the word for “hotel” while my mom suggested that we ask the mother. i told her she seemed to have enough to worry about.

shortly after a gentleman passed us going in the other direction. i want to stress the fact that he had been walking AWAY from the center of town when we stopped him to ask for directions. the other important fact at this juncture is that the ukrainian pronunciation of the “h” in “hotel” is closer to to a guttural “g” sound. my mom had stopped the man before i could find the exact piece of paper that contained the pronunciation for “hotel” so there we were, the three of us on the sidewalk, my mom having completely forgotten all of her ukrainian and russian at this point, asking the man in polish for the hotel tustan. he smiled and spread his arms in the international signal of “i have no idea” seconds before i found the sheet with the pronunciation and blurted out something that sounded like “gotel! gotel!” his benevolent smile became a benevolent expression of understanding as he said, “ah!” and decided that he would walk us there.

he abandoned his earlier trajectory and headed back towards the center of town. we quickly passed the stop where we should have gotten off the bus, and i gave quiet thanks that the next stop was really so close to the center. thus began a ten minute walk where my mom tried to talk with this smiling older gentleman and i tried to understand what either of them was saying as we headed into the town proper.

the main square of drohobyć is on a small hill, so we had to walk uphill again to get to the rynek. the man excitedly told my mother about his family in Poland while both of us wished we had learned more ukrainian. i could tell he was telling us his family’s intricate Polish/Ukrainian history, but there was so much that i couldn’t make out. my mom asked him questions but also seemed to be periodically at a loss. he pointed out a church on the cusp of the hill that would become the market square, but neither or us seemed sure, later, what he had said about it. i just kept thinking that the man seemed like a professor, which turned out to be the case. we walked through the main market square, and down another hill, through outdoor market stalls, the man telling us about himself the whole time. i was half listening to him and half marking the route to get back to the market square, as it started to become clear that the sandwiches we had eaten on the train that morning were definitely not enough food for continued existence. we passed tables full of hats and socks and tights and gloves, to the side a small car parked on the grass with the skinniest dog ever either sleeping or dead in front of the driver’s side door. we turned at the possibly dead dog, down a short path, and another left turn into a square dominated by a statue to the right side, a scary grey building to the left.

the front of the hotel. (this was actually taken two days later. oops)

this is where our third angel of the day pointed to a door and told us we had arrived. he hugged us and kissed us each on the cheeks and wished us a pleasant rest, and then was gone before i could even get a picture.

there was no name on the hotel, but there were the latin letters “hotel,” so we were sure we had arrived. we went up the steps and into a hallway, into another doorway to the right, and then more confusion. there seemed to be a few kiosk-type businesses inside the main hotel, one of which seemed to be an internet cafe of sorts, though that interpretation was not evident right away. we paused in confusion and then continued farther into the building, up a few more steps. there we found another window, one that looked more like a hotel check-in. i don’t know how long this confusion lasted, but it feels like a full 10 minutes in my memory before we finally decided that this was the right window. we approached tentatively, and eventually a woman sat up visible behind the glass and told us that, yes, she did in fact speak a little Polish.

thank fucking god.

we asked for a room, and the woman was glad to oblige. she showed us the price list, and the price that sofia had quoted us was on the botton of the spectrum. the equivalent of $20 american for one night, two people, no problem. my mom took the opportunity to tell her all about our family search, the village we were looking for, everything. the woman was happy to help us, but she had never heard of the village we were looking for. this had happened earlier with sofia, but we had just assumed that maybe sofia didn’t know the village. with a second rejection we started to worry, but it was not a priority at the time. the priorities were quickly becoming putting our stuff down and getting some food.

the woman gave us a key and said she would be up in a minute to bring us something.   we were directed even farther into the building to the staircase. no elevator for my mom ‘s hips. so up we went

the stairs were on a far end of the building, with windows onto a side street. the first floor had closed doors off the stairwell, covered in notices, and the second floor also had closed doors, but without notices. it later became clear that the first floor consisted of shops, the rest of hotel rooms. we had to go up the third floor, european style (fourth floor american style). the doors were also closed, so we were nervous about opening them. when we finally did, we found ourselves in a large lounge-type room full of couches and tables and dead plants. two hallways stretched off this room, to the right and to the left. our room was to the right, all the way down.

the “lounge”

we opened the door to a simple room with two beds and one of the most decrepit bathrooms i have ever encountered. we had just put our things down when the woman from the desk came bustling in with a space heater, explaining that we may need it. it was true. the dankness of the room was palpable.

once she had gone, we got our bearings for a minute, let the space heater do its thing for a minute, and then stashed the only thing we had with us that was worth anything, my mom’s computer, in some piece of furniture before deciding to head out onto the town again to find some fucking food.

there are things than cannot ever occur with any precision

view from the bus

our first real view of drohobyć was this dirt lot, crowded with buses, both parked and pulling in and out every which way. it was beginning to feel like a familiar sight. the lot was surrounded by construction, as if someday there would be an actual bus station there. in front of the construction were concrete platforms with numbers ranged around, each one with a space or bus in front. we went looking for space number one, and found it in the back left of the lot. we stood there for a moment, looking around for any indication of information. the sign indicated that this was the space for the bus to truskavets, which told us nothing.

we were there for only a moment when the bus pulled in and the other few people in the region started getting themselves together. we apparently looked lost enough to attract the attention of the older woman in front of us. i will repeat that. we were so anxious and lost that she could sense the trouble behind her and turned around to ask us if we were ok. my mom asked her if it was the bus to the center of town, and, with a little bit of back and forth, we finally got through and she nodded her head vigorously and told us how many stops and how much it would cost.

at this point the bus was fully parked in front of us and the driver had opened the door. our new angel pushed us on to the bus and started pointing a finger at the driver and giving him commands in a loud voice, leaning through the door to make herself really heard. my mom was able to translate and give me a play by play. the woman was telling him where we had to get off, and then said, many times, “you make sure to tell them! they don’t know where to go, so you HAVE TO TELL THEM! make sure to tell them!!” the driver shrugged and came to collect our money, which was when we realized that we had only large bills and lots and lots of change. he stood over us while i slowly placed small coins in his hand, and i was still digging when he got impatient and started asking with his hands if i thought this was supposed to be enough for both of us.

it became clear that the bus driver was not going to be one of our angels.

finally i got enough coins in his hand or he gave up on waiting and moved on to the other people on the bus. we took off, and i marveled at the fact that the woman who had just helped us, who had seemingly been waiting for the bus, was not actually on the bus with us. had she just been standing there to help people like us?

she had said it was about two stops, so we looked out the window and waited for the first stop as i bemoaned our choice of seats in the very back of the bus. how could he tell us when to get off if we were as far away from him as we could possibly be? we only went about two or three blocks before we stopped for the first time. the street up until then had been straight, but after the bus started moving again things moved closer together and the street started to twist in serpentine constructions. soon we were at the second stop, but that first stop hadn’t looked much like an actual stop, and this one didn’t look like any sort of center of town, except that there were more people milling about. we were both unsure, so we sat, paralyzed with indecision, as the bus started to fill.

the doors were open for a full two or three minutes while the driver collected money and very obviously did not tell us anything, or even look in our direction. i had a feeling this was the right stop, but clung to the idea that the driver, like almost everyone else so far, was a good guy who would help us when the time came.

we started to move again, and i finally broke my paralysis to ask my mom if we should have gotten off there. luckily we were both hyper aware of our surroundings, so we watched every turn of the bus as it twisted and went over a hill and got farther away from what must have been our stop. we were both quiet, uncertain, until the bus stopped again and even more people got on. since we were in the very back, a few of the people who got on decided to sit down and block us in, one of which was a woman who was quite large and basically sat down on mom’s leg. this seemed to be the thing to make her stand up and take action, but she didn’t seem sure of what action to take. i started prodding her to ask someone, which manifested in her asking everyone if this was the stop for the center of town, in Polish. the large woman next to her ignored us at first, and then seemed to notice my frantic hand-motions and mom’s darting eyes and desperate voice. she listened for a little while, and then her and the man next to her started to nod their heads and tell us frantically that yes, we had missed the stop. this bus was about to go 11 kilometers outside of town, to the spa town of truskavets. we would have to cross the street and wait for the next bus going back in the other direction. they had to say it many times. we grabbed our many things, pushed ourselves through the crowd, and rushed off the bus.

this is where some sort of american idea of justice grabbed onto my brain and would not let go. i’ve talked to people here in poland about this trait, this very american thing of demanding satisfaction, and they have often shown confusion. if there is a movie playing on the bus and you think it’s too loud, why would you complain? if the train is too hot or too cold, what can you do about it? it’s just the way of the world. there are more important things to complain about. if the bus driver didn’t tell you where to get off the bus, that’s just the way the bus driver is.

but my brain was clinging to the thought of having to take another bus back to the center, and we didn’t have any more change. it was the bus driver’s fault, so he should give us a refund to get back in the other direction. i quickly ordered my mom to demand some sort of refund, or at least to let him know he had failed us. it was stupid and futile. my poor mom was hanging out of the open bus door, yelling at the driver in Polish, that he was supposed to tell us when to get off and he hadn’t. it quickly became clear that he couldn’t have cared less, but still she hung on and told him how he hadn’t lived up to our expectations. soon it became clear that he wanted to close the door and move on, so pulled on her sleeve, said “forget it, sorry.” and gathered ourselves for … some sort of continued action.

 

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

i can’t believe i’m still writing about the first day. here’s the beginning of this story. oh, my.

this post concerns the second and third legs of this bus journey here:

 28 october, 2011

so there we were, in the center of sambir, but still not at our destination, when traffic thickened to a point that we were stopped, then we inched, then we were stopped again. i watched a man dig through the trash behind a building, marveled at graffiti that read “fuck cops” not only in the latin alphabet, but in english, and slowly went crazy with wanting off that bus.

once i got bored of staring at the trash picker, i moved my attention to the back window to stare at the man in the car behind us, his head on his steering wheel, seemingly napping while waiting for traffic to move. i tried to get a picture, but he decided to pick his head up just as i was pulling my camera up, so i had to pretend i wasn’t at all interested in him as he stared back at me.

fuckcops

and still we inched, and inched, and stopped, and inched. if waiting for the bus was annoying, waiting to get off the bus was torture. and we still had one more bus to go before getting to our destination. i tried to continue compartmentalizing the trip by not thinking about how long we would have to wait for the next bus, but the thought was lurking behind the bundle of impatience that was taking up most of the space in my mind.

sofia and stawek sat next to us, stirring with mild impatience themselves. and we waited.

finally, finally, traffic started to move. slowly. i looked back and realized that we had only gone about a block from the center of town that had been our last stop.

argh.

as we get off the bus, i continue to document.

but the last few minutes went quickly, thankfully, and i was shaken from the fugue state caused by my mad desire to get off the bus by people beginning to get off the bus. we found ourselves in a dirt lot, but i barely had time to look around before sofia was pointing and verbally pulling us, “there!” and i sighed relief. the bus to drohobyć was there, waiting, and it was newer than the one we had just gotten off of. we had to wait a few minutes to board, so i took a picture of our hell bus as it peeled out of the dirt lot away from us, and my mom asked what those tanks on the top were. i explained to her how gasoline is really

hell bus takes off to torture more people elsewhere

expensive in many countries due to exorbitant taxes, so people use hybrid vehicles: gasoline and compressed natural gas combined. she was a little shocked to realize that we had been sliding back and forth and from side to side, barely avoiding capsizing, with giant tanks of compressed gas on top of our heads, kept off of us by the most tenuous of structures.

i shrugged.

getting on the last bus.

soon we were on the bus; we paid our 10 hryvna ($1.25) each and we were on our way.

it was about 45 minutes, i guess, but it flew by. the bus was crowded but comfortable, though we had to keep the small suitcase in the non-existent aisle, which meant people constantly knocked it into my legs as they got on and off. sofia and stawek were sitting in front of us, so there wasn’t much talk at first. then sofia pulled out her phone and made a call to a friend of hers. afterwards, she turned to us and told us that her friend recommended a hotel that is right in the center. we had tried to look up hotels online with very little success – only one result but it was not in the center of town; sofia said it was nice but it would be too difficult for us without a car. thus we were alerted to the existence of the hotel tustań (Тустань), which was right in the center and not too expensive. she told it was about160 hryvna for two people, or almost $20. so our mad dash into the unknown had been slowed and cushioned by the kindness of strangers.

and this was the point where she told us that they were getting off before us, one or two stops before the center of town, and therefore could not bring us to the hotel themselves. she told us to take the bus to the end and then ask for the bus to the center; we could walk it, but she didn’t want us to get lost, and it was too difficult for her to explain. suddenly, after hours of having a guardian and helper, we were going to be on our own again. i felt more terrified than i had that morning at the border crossing; it’s harder to have some help and then lose it than to go blindly flying into terror without thought of a savior. but we had to swallow our fear and smile.

both of us realized that we had not thought of getting a picture with the two of them, and though it was impossible to pose with them on the crowded bus, they did allow us to get a souvenir shot of just them. the bright late-afternoon sun nearly washed out their features entirely, and sofia grimaced when i showed her, but it shows their kind smiles. my mom told them, “pamiątka z aniołami.” a souvenir of our angels.

the souvenir of our angels

and then that was it, they were gone. there was much wringing of hands and smiling sadly and waving until they were off the bus. i realized that i hadn’t been paying attention to the landscape the whole ride, being distracted by talk of hotels and being on our own. we were suddenly in some semblance of an urban-type center, with soviet-style building monsters all around.

drohobyć bus center

two stops later and we were in another dirt lot — the bus center. my mom asked our driver, back to her mixture of Polish and Ukrainian, where we could get the bus to the center. she had to ask a few times, but the driver was nice (as you will see, the only nice driver we encountered) and pointed the way — bus bay #1. we got off the bus.

we had made it to drohobyć.

nature admits of no permanence

this post concerns the second leg of this bus trip:

if you want the very beginning of the story, that would be here.  or you could just go back a few steps and figure it out, which would take you here.  ok then.

the wait was so long that i cannot actually recall the moment when the bus arrived, just that sofia and stawek rushed from our sides and climbed aboard. i was just beginning to think that they had been desperate to get rid of us after all, when i climbed on after my mom and realized that they had saved us seats at the very back. we got on just in time to see them tell a girl that those seats were taken.

we sat ourselves down on some really inadequate vinyl seats and waited to pay the 11 hryvna (about $1.37) each for what we were told was to be an hour ride. i was just so happy to be sitting, and on our way again, that i didn’t mind that i already felt like i was going to slide off the seats before the bus even started moving.

purse full of toilet paper.

soon the money was collected and we were on our way. i resumed my earlier activity: voraciously soaking up every element of scenery i could. it was harder this time, as i was sitting in the middle of the back seat. swiveling my head to glimpse traces through dirty windows didn’t work so well, especially when i tried to turn all the way around and look out the back, and really almost slid off the seat the next time the bus jostled. so instead i focused on the woman across from me, who was obviously returning from a day of shopping in the bigger town. between her feet was a pleather purse stuffed full of toilet paper, sitting next to over-flowing reused shopping bags. she held onto the handles with a mysteriously-injured finger, wrapped in an improvised fashion with tissue or toilet paper held in place with a rubber band. i became aware of just how many churches there were in that part of ukraine, as she crossed herself every time we passed one.

five or six times in the twenty minutes she was on the bus.

things start to clear out a little.

luckily our ride was not as packed as the one we had refused to get on, but there were some people standing. these thinned out somewhat quickly, though, as the bus stopped at what appeared to be randomly-determined spots on the road. we climbed hills and turned corners and passed through villages and through fields. the world outside continued to fascinate me, as did the people getting on and off the bus. the woman across from us collected her goods and toilet paper and left, exposing a coil of cable under where she had been sitting, which kept us occupied for some time, as mom and i tried to guess the purpose of it.

should this be holding something together?

an hour passed, and more people got on and off. we chatted very little with our angels, only when we passed an orthodox church and stawek showed his interest, or, later in the ride, when the driver seemed to lose all ability to stay off the shoulder, or to keep all four wheels on the road.

i have never been more certain that the vehicle i was in was going to tip over, and i used to live with a motorcycle racer who drove cars as if he was trying to get his knee down. one particularly bad right turn left us staring at each other in wonder that the bus was continuing to go forward and was not, as we surely thought it would be, lying on its side in a ditch.

the view out the filthy back window.

this was about the time that i  realized that we were over an hour out and there seemed to be no sign of civilization approaching. in fact, the villages had thinned, and the stops were farther apart, just as the driver’s recklessness grew.

every corner seemed to present our imminent deaths as wheels left the ground and the bus skidded sideways, sliding over dust and gravel, the potholes actually saving our lives by catching the tires and setting us right again.

and then , at the height of our distress, the town came on us out of nowhere – suddenly there were houses and businesses where fields had held sway. with the advent of civilization came the advent of traffic, and we found ourselves slowing as we approached a traffic hub that was much bigger than the one in mostys’ka where we had just spent so much of our lives. we started gathering our things, making sure not to transfer the thick layers of dust and dirt that our bags had picked up on the floor of the bus onto our clothing – i usually don’t care, but i was already filthy and i only had the one pair of pants. if we were really going to meet family, or try to get information from strangers at least, i had to look slightly less like a scumbag.

still on the bus.

the bus pulled into a busy  circular street with a thriving outdoor market in the middle, and we shifted and sighed and waited for the bus to stop. fortunately, or unfortunately, when it did, sofia turned to us and said, “not here,” and i silently thanked the world that she was there to guide us. this was the center of town, but it was not where the transfer buses stopped. if she had not been there, we probably would have gotten off at the wrong stop. but an hour and a half into this, the second and most inconvenient of our bus journeys, i was ready to get off.

countless as the sands of the sea

october 28, 2011

this is the map of our proposed bus route.  you can read about it here, or start at the beginning.

this is the part of the story where i kinda become a jerk.

coming, as we do, from a place sandwiched between many regional dialects, i always considered myself lucky that i was not afflicted with any of them. a little more to the north, i would sound like fred gwynne in pet sematary; to the east, like click and clack; to the southeast, like someone from rhode island, an accent that is the exact bastard child of brooklyn and boston. and to the south, connecticut.

this is the accent my mother has. some people would contend that there is no connecticut accent, and they may have a point. it is less an accent and more an intonation. it leans in the direction of new york, but my brother always pithily maintains that it consists of nothing but yelling.

this fact, combined with what may be an impinging deafness, or may simply be an overwhelming desire to be heard, means that my mom talks really really fucking loudly.

in english.

on a tiny bus … in ukraine.

in my defense, i can only say that i have a desperate need to keep a low profile, especially in situations where i am not only out of my element, i don’t even know where my element is.

in addition, my mom and i are of two very distinct types – one of us craves interaction and conversation with other humans, the other craves solitude and some goddamn quiet time, goddamnit.

you can maybe guess which is which.

all of this is by way of introducing the fact that, while i was staring out the windows of the bus, absolutely beaming at foliage to rival the hills of my new england home, my mom kept talking so loudly that i snapped and hissed a little too cruelly that she should just stop it.

stop talking.

MOST members of my family can snap or push at each other on and on and off with little repercussion, mostly joking, somewhat relieving tension; but every now and then, with little rhyme or reason, one of us is a little sensitive, or something hits a raw nerve and it’s almost exactly like a stab in the heart. that’s what happened on the bus from the border.

i felt like a total asshole.

but the way i remember it, the silence that followed my desperate attempts to assuage the hurt i had just caused afforded my mom the opportunity to realize that the young couple sitting next to her was speaking in Polish. which means i’m a hero.

there weren’t that many Poles crossing the border with us, and they all seemed to disperse when we passed that final passport check, so we had assumed we were on our own. mom was relieved to hear Polish after her attempts to speak russian or ukrainian mostly resulted in Polish coming out of her mouth, so she engaged them in conversation. i used to cringe when my mom did things like that in my youth – every line or waiting room afforded the opportunity for her to make new friends and for her children to really really wish she wouldn’t – but now i envy her ability to reach out and make contact so easily. i was especially thankful for it then, because it turned out the young girl of the mixed-gender pair not only spoke Polish, but was from drohobyć.

fuck yeah.

sofia and stawek [?] were the first of the many “angels of ukraine” we were to meet on the journey, and they were easily the most helpful, or maybe they just had the best timing. they, too, were taking advantage of the long weekend, to get out of warsaw, where they were students, and visit her parents in drohobyć. they had also missed the morning bus, which was our luck if not theirs. my mom quickly made friends while she continued to listen to my apologies. eventually she patted my hand in acceptance, or just to tell me to shut up now, and we finished the rest of the bus journey in peace. when we pulled into mostys’ka i felt happier and more hopeful than i had the whole trip yet.

but all that was about to change.

i really had enjoyed the first bus ride – rolling hills of vibrant oranges and reds, stunning white birch, very little human life. for a minute we rode beside another horse-drawn cart full of thin birch logs, a kerchiefed “babcia” perched atop them while the driver maneuvered the curvy roads. aside from them, there were few vehicles. it was idyllic. and the transportation square in mostys’ka was the opposite – compact, bustling, filled with maszrutkas and buses and cars flying every which way, vendors selling cell-phone cases and electronics and every other tiny gadget possible, thin alleyways heading off in many directions, lined with shops. we headed across the epicenter of traffic, following our angels to what seemed to be some sort of transportation terminal.

transportation center in mostys’ka

at first we weren’t sure if we should follow them – they seemed in a hurry, annoyed at missing the earlier bus, and heavily focused just on continuing their journey. sofia ran ahead to find out what time the next bus left, and we followed stawek to a point in front of a vendor’s table, where he didn’t quite seem to know what to do with himself. so we stood nearby. it didn’t seem we were entirely welcome, though not exactly unwelcome either, we telepathically decided to at least keep an eye on them, to go where they went, because sofia spoke ukrainian, which was surely better than my mom’s polyglot mix that was mostly Polish.

sofia came out of the terminal to find us standing near stawek, but not too near, and all three of us jumped in her direction. i didn’t realize until then that he must have been as out of his element as we were. she came out beaming, saying it was just another 15  minutes before the bus to sambir. great. we chatted a little about the weather and the buses and how we would have been lost on our own. some chatting, some waiting, but mostly we swam through long moments of silence when … bam. with almost perfect comedic timing, mere minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive, sofia’s face dawned with an unpleasant realization – that we had crossed an international dateline and the time was really one hour ahead and none of us had changed our timepieces and there was no bus in a few minutes and … she had to go back in to the terminal building, and the news was not good.

another 45 minutes. ugh. she delivered this news to us and then noticed a bus farther down the line of buses, “sambir” on the sign. she took off with the three of us in pursuit, mom and i holding back a little, still unsure if we should be shadowing their every move. the bus in question was so packed that people were falling out of the open door – of course the driver would try to fit us in, but we would have to stand. out of the question for an hour ride.

the next hour passed with small talk and silence and sofia rushing off to check on one bus or another, only to come back disappointed. one was the slow bus, which stopped in every single village and took four or five hours. no way. most were not going anywhere near sambir, but the signs were often hard to read from even a short distance away. we continued to stand near the stop for our bus, casting jealous glances at the throngs of people getting on the constantly-arriving and departing buses to l’viv at the stop right next to ours.

after a while we stopped running after sofia and just waited for her to come back and tell us the bad news. 45 minutes stretched to an hour, and then more than an hour, and every bus pulling into the square was scrutinized and rejected, not the one we were looking for. sofia seemed quite anxious at first, but eventually she relaxed a little and we continued to tell each other about ourselves, what we were doing there, where we were from, how, yes, it is possible to teach english without knowing Polish, and how stawek was studying theology, but more importantly eastern orthodox theology. i wanted to ask him what he was going to do with such a degree – what was his passion? but my Polish was failing my desires and the subject was changed before i could get into the conversation much.

funny, i can’t for the life of me remember what sofia was studying. something about political science? ugh. apparently it wasn’t as thrilling to me as orthodox theology.

my mom, like her desire to be heard, loves to tell people about the fact that her father was a polish national catholic priest, which was a renegade religion at the time of his ordination; so she was reveling in the fact that she had a captive audience for this fact and all of the details surrounding it. i tend to get nervous about the types of topics that might be breached by introducing this information into a tenuous social situation, especially with a theology major, but luckily the religion question was tossed aside when it was made clear exactly why we were going to drohobyć – that this renegade priest grandfather was born nearby. she told them that we were looking for any connections, any remaining family, but most importantly my mom just had to see the land where her father had been born.

this was really the point, i think, when sofia, who had until that point been focused on getting home, began to actively focus on helping us.