October, 1996 (continued):
Late in the month I found myself in Warsaw, Poland, to speak at that country’s annual Radio Conference.
I was housed at the Hotel Jan III Sobieski, a very modern and comfortable hotel. (Sobieski was the Polish king who, in 1683, defeated the Turks in Vienna.)
I had been scheduled to speak on both days of the conference. After the first day, I returned to the hotel at 5:00 exhausted (naturally) and hungry (naturally).
The restaurant would not be open until 7:00, so I went for a walk — trying to convince myself that 30 minutes of fresh air and exercise somehow would help offset a lifestyle that recently had become woefully sedentary.
The Sobieski, alas, was not located in an especially interesting part of Warsaw.
The streets were crowded with slow-moving traffic, which seemed to be the norm for Warsaw. The electric trolleys and the buses were crowded, sometimes packed full. Virtually all of the cars were very small — tiny by American standards.
(How small? My Toyota Tercel would have looked like a luxury car there. Well, perhaps if I washed it.)
People seemed to park wherever they found space — including the sidewalks and curbs. As I crossed the street, I passed two men cheerfully (and easily) pushing their stalled automobile onto the sidewalk…where it came to rest next to another disabled vehicle.
One of the first establishments I walked past was the Alamo Steak House. I was unable to find anyone in Poland who knew what the Alamo was, but probably they have good steaks.
Next to it was Bambola Pizzeria, with its pink walls covered with graffiti.
A few steps more brought me to Komputery; its sign advertising Apple computers drew me toward the store. I wandered into Komputery both to look at their Macintosh hardware and software and in the hopes of finding someone who knew the solution to my problem of connecting to Compuserve from the Hotel Sobieski. (Remember, this was back in the days of dial-up.)
The store’s inventory was up-to-date (including the then-new Jaz removable hard drive, which I had just purchased in the States the previous month), but I didn’t see anyone who looked enough like a computer geek to strike up a conversation about Compuserve and/or the Internet.
A word about the Polish service attitude:
In my limited experience, store employees are not expected to “reach out” to the customer. When you enter a store, they don’t look at you, smile, and ask if they can help. (They certainly don’t always do that in America, either….But it does happen often enough in the U.S.)
It’s not that Poles are unfriendly. They just don’t tend to offer smiles to strangers.
The hotel’s restaurant regularly featured different themes for its nightly dinner buffet. Two weeks earlier (according to the posted calendar), it had been a Bavarian Buffet. The week following my stay, the buffet would feature a variety of venison dishes. During my stay, the theme was: ”
“Potato Revel — Wide Choice of Potato Dishes.”
Frankly, a wide choice of potato dishes sounded like a temptation I could resist, but I decided to check it out. Accompanying the diners was a Polish folk music group; the music was terrific.
And the “Potato Revel” looked pretty appetizing, too. It included the following potato-related dishes:
* Potato Noodles with Onions and Bacon
* Marinated Potatoes in Chili Sauce with Chicken Filets
* Hot Pierogi Russian Style with Onions
* Potato Swedish Style
* Beef Tenderloin and Potato Shashlik with Tarragon & Pepper
* Gratinated Potatoes with Vegetables
* Gratinated Norwegian Salmon with Garlic Potato Puree
* Roasted Pork Ham with Hot Potato Puree
* Potato Soup Old Polish Style with Vegetables & Bacon
….and a wonderful non-potato dish: Boletus Mushrooms in Sour Cream.
Oh, and there was a bunch of desserts, too. But none of them was chocolate or ice cream, so there’s really no point in mentioning them.
Like many European countries, Polish television featured numerous American TV shows (“The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Chicago Hope”) dubbed into the native language — in this case, Polish.
But I don’t think I’d ever before seen dialogue dubbed this way. The original English dialogue still could be heard, while a man’s voice (louder) translated everything into Polish. Just one guy, translating the words of all the characters.
