Home away from home.

After spending a weekend in Poland, Vienna couldn’t feel better.

The Medieval church in the main square of Krakow, Poland.

All we needed was a ticket back to Vienna. Though all the signs in Krakow looked mostly like jibberish, we easily found the information desk. We thought it polite to ask first if the information desk lady could speak English. But all we received in return was a stern, bordering on harsh, "No.“  

            “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” I heard Will ask. Germany and Austria were fairly close to Poland, so we assummed that the information lady at the international train station would be able to speak at least one other language.

            “In Poland!” she shrieked back at us, as if we didn’t know what country we were in. The seven of us were taken aback, but we politely moved out of the way for the man waiting behind us. Luckily for us, there was one nice Polish person in Krakow that day, who translated our question for the information lady and directed us to the correct line.

The one lady in the entire station who could speak English looked harmless enough until she got our ticket wrong, and her demeanor quickly changed. After she printed out the tickets that had us departing from a different station, she glared at us, looked back down at the ticket and cursed in Polish loud enough to make it obvious.

            “But you said, from Auschwitz to Vienna,” as if somehow it was our fault for printing out incorrect tickets. She stalled for a moment, allowing her anger and frustration to leave us wincing from the severity of her words. No one knew what to do or say. As Americans used to the mindset that  the customer is always right, it was strange to hear her so harshly accuse us of something.   

 We left the station in a foul mood, plodding carefully through the snow knowing we would soon be lost again. I looked around the square, the same one we had seen upon our early arrival the morning before, and saw it through new lenses of disgust. The sky was a sunless, grey creating a depressing winter day with no hope of change, rather than the early morning glow of the dwindling night sky that had shone when we arrived. The buildings across the square, mostly hotels and stores, which before had seemed energized by a soft glimmer, now looked inhospitable with the drab blemish of communism plainly exposed. The snow on the ground, which had gently fallen from the sky that first morning, was now slosh: grey, wet and slowly penetrating through our inadequate shoes. The signs and names of streets all written in Polish jibberish, which had seemed like an exotic secret before, were now only impedances to our enjoyment of Krakow.

I had never felt such distaste for a place before. Usually I could always find something positive about any situation. But that day, the positive juices in my mind had evaporated. I was frustrated; I was cold; my feet were wet and the fact that we were never certain of where we were going drained our mental energy. All I wanted to do was curl up somewhere warm, anywhere other than Poland. I wanted to like Krakow, but during the moments of that weekend it was hard to do.

It took me several hours before I realized that this must be culture shock, the very negative of culture shock. Right away I had easily noticed the long-lasting effects of communism, particularly in the buildings. I knew very little of Eastern Europe, and I did not expect to discern such a noticeable difference. This physical disparity, which became depressing to me, certainly fuelled my strong dislike of Krakow. And the constant unfriendliness of people made the already unpleasant situation even worse.

In the end, the only thing that kept me sane was my six fellow AHA’ers. We all had similar feelings of Krakow and most importantly, we joked about it. The lady at the train station, “in Poland,” and saying in a disgruntled voice, “I hate Poland” all became running jokes. Though we didn’t like where we were, we were all in this together. And eventually, no matter how many people gave us nasty looks or rudely refused to give us directions, we still always made it to our destination (even if it was several hours later than originally expected). And we all knew that the moment we left Krakow, we would look back on our weekend in Krakow and laugh.

But more importantly, Vienna now seemed so easy and comfortable. In the back of all our minds, we could not wait to return. From Poland, Vienna seemed like a warm, paradise with beautiful buildings and facades, an easy public transportation system and a language that did not have z’s, j’s and y’s multiple times in practically every word. No more homesickness; the mere thought of Krakow made us thank our lucky stars that we hadn’t chosen to study there instead. And we could look around with new found appreciation of the gorgeous city of Vienna. The city we now truly embraced as home.