Fatalnie

Fatalnie.

That’s what my Polish teacher, Pani Paulina, was forced to exclaim when she heard the changes that have come over my family since we came to Poland.

After all, she knows what Americans are like – everyone does. Americans drive around in big SUVs and eat at KFC or McDonald’s. Americans watch a lot of television, buy their goods at Walmart or over the internet through Amazon.com. Americans are constantly on-line.

Amusing when you compare this capitalist habit to the “lines” of the former Eastern bloc: Poles and Soviets used to be “on line” constantly too, but for entirely different reasons. On line for hours to use sugar ration coupons in the late 1980s in Moscow, or on line for seven or more years at a time to receive an apartment or a car in the 1970s.

But “on-line” in the 21^st century means that Americans are toggling between devices: iPods and iPads and MacBooks and Kindle Fires, listening to music through earbuds or noise-reducing headphones; snapchatting and instagramming; surfing the web; interacting via social media; streaming movies and television sit-coms; blogging and commenting on the blogs of others.

Fast food, fast cars, fast internet access. Prepared meals and preservatives spell fat-assed Americans for the rest of the world.

We were not those Americans.

In the U.S., I bake my own cookies – with half the sugar. I am more likely to bake a pie than a cake, and I stick with fruit only, unless I need to sweeten the rhubarb a bit. Fruit and a little bit of pie crust – practically health food.

In the U.S. we have no television reception, and we can’t get our minds around a monthly cable bill. We commute to work 100 miles round trip, it’s true, but when we return home we park the car in the garage and walk to the grocery store, to a friend’s house, to watch the sun set over the Riding Centre, to play practice and violin lessons and board meetings and track meets. Sometimes we bike – even in the rain.

The children are so “lazy” that they bike to school in winter, braving the cold winds and occasionally icy or snowy conditions, because walking takes too long, and their parents resist driving them unless there’s a downpour.

In the U.S. Steve makes stir-fry or curried chick peas up to three days a week. He makes his own sauces, rarely choosing any canned or bottled goods, preferring fresh ginger and chopped garlic. If we have bread, then it’s from the Emporium and supplements the soup I make from homemade stock – but for lunch the children and we pack leftovers in tupperware to heat up or eat cold, rather than buying lunch meats and making sandwiches.

Poland has changed our lives. And not necessarily for the better. At home I occasionally drink black coffee along with the daily loose tea Steve brews for me in the morning. In Poland, I drink a cappuccino almost every day. (In Warsaw they make great cappuccino.) At home I do make scones in the afternoon if I’m working at home, but they rarely have more than a tablespoon of sugar, and they can’t compete with the butter content of the croissants I can pick up here in Warsaw. (The Poles make fantastic croissants – both their own brand of “rogaliki” and the French version. Last week I ate one advertised as 27% butter.)

Sure, at home I drive my car like a regular American three or four days a week to work – but I also swim in my university pool once or twice a week, try to go for a hike on the weekend, take “post-prandials” with my husband to get our blood flowing and talk through our day.

But Warsaw has the most fantastic public transportation system, and we have what one of my Fulbright buddies calls the “All You Can Ride” card. Some days we come home and compare notes: I took the bus 5 times, plus two trams and a subway ride. Really? My transportation count came to 11 different rides. What that means is that we get around everywhere in the city, but until the weather improved (which it did for a few days last week), I sometimes jumped on the bus to go two stops rather than negotiating the sidewalks and/or construction to walk the several blocks between my Polish language classes and my job at the University.

In addition, we came over here with almost no printed books. We get our newspapers – both local and national – on line, and we read on our computers, Kindles, or iPods. Which adds up to hour after hour of screen time; it means you are always only a click away from some question you were wondering about, or investigating a trip to Rome or Paris, or trying to finish that blog post, or checking Facebook.

Yes, I’m on Facebook. I joined to be a part of the Polish Fulbrighters network, and of course I can check on (and interact with, though she’s 15 feet away in her bedroom) my daughter and chide her if she’s posting too much on Facebook. It’s fun – I’ve read my Fulbrighter buddy’s blog and explored his impressions of Poland, I’ve read the blog of a dear old friend who has relocated to Singapore – but of course it is also a colossal waste of time.

And in the U.S. we only slightly modified that toddler rule of “15 minutes of screen time a day.” Our kids were rarely on the computer – only if they were researching or typing an assignment, writing stories or (after China last summer) blog posts, or doing a little bit of email with relatives. They did go to the public library to get on-line, and I’ve been told they have been seen playing computer games and doing other things we don’t permit on our machines, but still – in order to do that they had to either walk or bike to the library, and walk or bike back. We had family screenings of Jeeves and Wooster or Downton Abbey, but we mostly had control over the amount of time our children spent on devices.

In advance of coming to Poland, knowing that we were dragging them away from their friends, we got them netbooks, and their aunts got them iPods and Kindles. Which means that now they go into their rooms and disappear for hours – watching One Direction videos or remixing Skrylyx (I admit that I have no idea how to spell Skrylyx).

So when Pani Paulina was teaching me expressions of time, she asked “Czy Pani ogląda telewizję? Jak cząsto?” [“Do you watch televsion? How often?) and I was forced to admit that in the U.S. we never do, but now my son is addicted to Monk at 6 p.m. every night. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Screens-Я-Us. We have all four gone down the rabbit hole of the on-line world – so much of it that when there was construction in the neighborhood and our internet went out at home, we all panicked.

And when I used my new vocabulary word of “gróby,” fat, to describe my family at the moment (never mind that it’s warming up, we’ve brought out our running shoes, and we haven’t completely lost hope…), Pani Paulina was horrified at what Poland has done to us.

It has turned us into Americans.

Fatalnie.

It’s a disaster!