Happy News and Poland One

The very happy event to have happened just prior to the Easter holidays was the birth of Lisa Hailey, daughter of Robert and Janet, happy parents of Carrickfergus fame. I got to see her just before Peter, Liam and i went off on our Poland adventure and she is very cute. My father thinks she looks like his mother, and I can see what he means. Robert is delighted and settling in to his parental responsibilities well it seems. I got to nurse Lisa while she was asleep, and managed not to wake her for a while. It is my second experience of such a thing and no less daunting, nor less a privilege. The utter vulnerability of a child is a source of wonder. It is hard not to believe in God with a child in your arms.

Now on to my Polish (mis)adventures. I feel that to do justice to them I will have to document them on a day by day basis and may not get done till this time next week, but after having so little, and little time, to write it's not a bad thing to put a bit of a stint in now.

To begin at the beginning, we went to the airport at three o'clock in the morning, after a rude awakening from about one hours sleep. Liam didn't have hardly any sleep, so I stayed away from his corns most of the morning as I knew what this does to people. We had a hasty breakfast of inflated price at the airport, and then it was up, up and away. I feverishly tried to digest some of the polish 'everyday phrases' that I found in Peter's book, and while this is quite possible to do in some languages quickly and without too much fuss, with Polish I found it a bigger mountain to climb due to the transformations of sounds involved in some of the syllables. In the sublime words of Peter, to speak Polish you'd need a bloody enigma machine.

Anyway, about two and half hours later we were descending into Polska, footloose and all at sea. We managed to get on the bus for Wroclaw (pronounced Vrotswaf) and hoped that what we had understood the bus driver to understand of what we had said would take us into the centre somewhere near the train station. As it turned out on alighting, we were very close to the station indeed. Then 'The Stranger Hostel'. From the outside, and as we went up its inside stairs, it would remind you of a dingy set from Starsky and Hutch - just before someone gets stabbed and the incidental music comes in loudly on the wah-wah guitar. Peter and I wanted to turn back, but after conflab with Liam, Liam volunteered to brave it. Inside it was another story, there were running streams of milk and honey, not to mention clean comfy beds and computer with internet access. We relaxed and booked in properly. Then we went off on the trail of the mysterious case of the house of Edith Stein, one of the philosophers I am studying for my thesis, who died in Auschwitz with her sister.

The reception girl didn't know of her, neither did anyone at the restaurant where we got our wind back, and I wondered whether I would find it after all. We walked around, and seeing a priest talking in the street I thought I'd try my luck. He looked like a priest that only exists in the imagination of Waugh or Chesterton, for he had flowing garb and black beret, and when presented with a map he was reluctant to draw on it with a pen. Eventually, we found the street named after Edyty Stein - which the priest had said was close to the Stein house - and finally after much searching we found the house that was actually quite big and obvious. Isn't it always the way? What had complicated things was that I had the address from the time that Wroclaw was still Breslau and German. So I thought I had the right number of the street, but the street could now have been anything. As it turned out, i misremembered the number a bit as well. But anyway, we got there!

As it was Easter Sunday it wasn't open, though Peter said he had seen a man go inside just before and I could see the gate was slightly ajar. The great big wooden door was not however, but i thought I'd give it a go, and happily it opened. Then followed the most bizarre conversation I have ever had. I was met by a kind faced woman who came out into the big cold stone entrance hall and who spoke in what I presume was perfect Polish. Not having any Polish (to speak of!) I began speaking in perfect English. Neither of us could understand a word of the other, but by some strange osmosis (if that is the word for which I search) she offered to let me see round. Peter and Liam followed me round, probably wondering what the hell was happening, but room after room and up winding stairs I was allowed to make my way through Edith Stein's old family home. It is now being used for an exhibition centre and bears the names of hers sisters and mother on their own bedroom doors. I snapped a few quick photographs, touched a piece of furniture or two, and saw the tree out of a window that she may have seen whilst working. I also nearly came a cropper by trying to sit on a new kind of curved desk table to take a photograph, only to find that it didn't have any legs at that particular corner! Anyway, after that I made my thanks, which I could just about do in Polish, I waved goodbye to the woman's two lovely children who had been following her around - one of whom was a redheaded boy who looked decided Irish! - and off we went. As it turned out, we had to return about ten minutes later as i had left Peter's phrase book there, and we were quickly realising that we would be entirely lost without it. The second time the woman was as gracious as the first.

The afternoon and evening was taken up with sightseeing in the Catherdal, meeting up with my friend Ciaran - now resident in Czestochowa - and his English friend Richard, and catching up a bit. Liam and I heard Mass at a Dominican Church that had beautiful, bright and modern stained-glass windows, though both of us were drifting in and out of consciousness due to tiredness by that point. Then we meet up with the drunkards again, and drank a bit ourselves (well, i did). And so to an internet connection and a clean and comfy bed.