One of the new experiences I had as a Fulbright scholar in Poland was to join a Facebook community.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually join Facebook. My daughter is a teenager, and I had dragged her across the world, far from her friends and family. I am fortunate that she agrees to my monitoring her FB activity (also known as being her "friend"), and I enjoyed the terrific pictures and funny notes she posted about our life in Poland and our travels in Europe.
But the first reason I made a Facebook page was to be able to join the "Polish Fulbrighters" Facebook group. I was able to use it to get help before I even arrived in Poland with my family, but the truly fascinating aspect of the group was sharing our experiences during our time abroad. One highlight was the Fulbrighter who posted an article about a Catholic school in southern Poland where the administration had been censured for their rite-of-passage ritual. (It involved licking whipped cream off the priest's knees. Not sexual, he insisted, just good clean fun.) I would never have found that article by myself, but more importantly, it gave me insight into what the "Fulbright kids" found interesting and important.
(I must have accidentally called the younger Fulbrighters "the kids" once to my daughter -- the nickname stuck in our family. In fact I loved seeing how twenty-somethings use Facebook; it was a way for me to understand the genre and to get to know some of the post-college Fulbright scholars and English teachers whom I hadn't yet met in person. I'm not sure the feeling was mutual -- I still can't seem to make a comment in fewer than 30 words, so my posts may have annoyed the younger folks rather than amusing them. I hope not.)
In addition, our Fulbrighters Facebook group gave me a great appreciation of fellow Fulbrighter Bryan Zygmont. (Happy Birthday, Bryan, as you head back to the US -- Facebook tells me your birthday is this week.)
Bryan, as his blog tells us, is a "thirty-something" professor of art history, recently tenured at a fairly small liberal arts college in Iowa. In a rather harsh bait-and-switch, the Fulbright Commission told him he would be posted to the Jagellonian University in Krakow, one of two elite institutions of higher learning in Poland in that amazingly beautiful medieval city that was *not* destroyed by the Nazis.
Just weeks before he left, Bryan learned he would be headed to Łódź. I've written about our family's trip to snowy Łódź, where we had an amazing afternoon at the Radegast Station museum, the MS2 art museum, and at the Wedel cafe in the Manufaktura shopping mall.
I didn't write about the grotty train station -- truly one of the nastiest I have ever experienced, hard to find amidst a tangle of roads and on-ramps, smelling of old cigarette butts and the guys who were collecting them to salvage crumbs of tobacco and roll into new smokes.
Nor about the 70-something taxi driver who had lived in Łódź for 40 years but didn't know where the ghetto memorial was, nor could he read maps because he had misplaced his reading glasses. Nor about what must have been quite a hardship for a non-Polish speaker -- bad signage and very few pedestrians who might answer questions in English. Nor about Piotrkowska Street, which has such promise when you read the guidebooks, but was empty and torn up with construction at 6 p.m. on a Saturday night when we went to check it out.
Bryan has written at length about his experiences with the University of Łódź, his disillusionment with the student culture in Poland, his disappointment that the educational opportunities he had expected to offer were in many cases not a priority for his students. But as far as I recall he had very few negative things to say about Łódź -- except perhaps to recognize that as a native of sunny Arizona he should have followed his doctor's advice and taken a "happy light" with him to Poland to combat the long, cold, gray winter.
The word I think of when I think of Bryan is "insouciant." The dictionary definitions cast a negative light on the word ("blithe unconcern" seems cold and insensitive). But there is nothing negative about my usage -- only admiration. Bryan's attitude toward Poland and his Fulbright was one of upbeat adventurousness. He really let nothing get him down -- and he had a set of tactics ready in case he was feeling blue. One of these, I think, was his "in praise of" columns, columns that kept him on an even keel despite the inevitable frustrations and disappointments of daily life in Poland. Often he was praising his Lovely Wife, sometimes the dog he had left at home, but also his shoes, his trusty leather briefcase, a favorite film... And beer. FB posts and even a blog post (at my request) about beer. I came to look forward to the "in praise of" posts and to think about what in my life was worthy of praise.
So here's to you on your birthday, Bryan. Like other Fulbrighters, I am processing my experience, which I expect will take some time. But in the meantime I want to praise my fellow adventurers -- including my family, who all found things they loved about Poland -- and I'm afraid I need to praise Facebook as well, for permitting us to have a closed community that delivered on the promise of the virtual. We were located far from one another geographically across all of Poland, and we represented a variety of age groups, religious persuasions, and political viewpoints, but in our FB group we could share thoughts, ideas, problems and opportunities without fear of too many repercussions. And we could get to know each other -- an opportunity I will treasure for a good long time to come.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually join Facebook. My daughter is a teenager, and I had dragged her across the world, far from her friends and family. I am fortunate that she agrees to my monitoring her FB activity (also known as being her "friend"), and I enjoyed the terrific pictures and funny notes she posted about our life in Poland and our travels in Europe.But the first reason I made a Facebook page was to be able to join the "Polish Fulbrighters" Facebook group. I was able to use it to get help before I even arrived in Poland with my family, but the truly fascinating aspect of the group was sharing our experiences during our time abroad. One highlight was the Fulbrighter who posted an article about a Catholic school in southern Poland where the administration had been censured for their rite-of-passage ritual. (It involved licking whipped cream off the priest's knees. Not sexual, he insisted, just good clean fun.) I would never have found that article by myself, but more importantly, it gave me insight into what the "Fulbright kids" found interesting and important.
(I must have accidentally called the younger Fulbrighters "the kids" once to my daughter -- the nickname stuck in our family. In fact I loved seeing how twenty-somethings use Facebook; it was a way for me to understand the genre and to get to know some of the post-college Fulbright scholars and English teachers whom I hadn't yet met in person. I'm not sure the feeling was mutual -- I still can't seem to make a comment in fewer than 30 words, so my posts may have annoyed the younger folks rather than amusing them. I hope not.)
In addition, our Fulbrighters Facebook group gave me a great appreciation of fellow Fulbrighter Bryan Zygmont. (Happy Birthday, Bryan, as you head back to the US -- Facebook tells me your birthday is this week.)
Bryan, as his blog tells us, is a "thirty-something" professor of art history, recently tenured at a fairly small liberal arts college in Iowa. In a rather harsh bait-and-switch, the Fulbright Commission told him he would be posted to the Jagellonian University in Krakow, one of two elite institutions of higher learning in Poland in that amazingly beautiful medieval city that was *not* destroyed by the Nazis.
Just weeks before he left, Bryan learned he would be headed to Łódź. I've written about our family's trip to snowy Łódź, where we had an amazing afternoon at the Radegast Station museum, the MS2 art museum, and at the Wedel cafe in the Manufaktura shopping mall.
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| The "In Your Pocket" guide charitably states: "With Łódź Fabryczna on hiatus during renovations Łódź Kaliska has seen an uptick in traffic." |
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| Promises unfulfilled - Piotrkowska was utterly unwelcoming the night we were in Lódź. |
Bryan has written at length about his experiences with the University of Łódź, his disillusionment with the student culture in Poland, his disappointment that the educational opportunities he had expected to offer were in many cases not a priority for his students. But as far as I recall he had very few negative things to say about Łódź -- except perhaps to recognize that as a native of sunny Arizona he should have followed his doctor's advice and taken a "happy light" with him to Poland to combat the long, cold, gray winter.
The word I think of when I think of Bryan is "insouciant." The dictionary definitions cast a negative light on the word ("blithe unconcern" seems cold and insensitive). But there is nothing negative about my usage -- only admiration. Bryan's attitude toward Poland and his Fulbright was one of upbeat adventurousness. He really let nothing get him down -- and he had a set of tactics ready in case he was feeling blue. One of these, I think, was his "in praise of" columns, columns that kept him on an even keel despite the inevitable frustrations and disappointments of daily life in Poland. Often he was praising his Lovely Wife, sometimes the dog he had left at home, but also his shoes, his trusty leather briefcase, a favorite film... And beer. FB posts and even a blog post (at my request) about beer. I came to look forward to the "in praise of" posts and to think about what in my life was worthy of praise.
So here's to you on your birthday, Bryan. Like other Fulbrighters, I am processing my experience, which I expect will take some time. But in the meantime I want to praise my fellow adventurers -- including my family, who all found things they loved about Poland -- and I'm afraid I need to praise Facebook as well, for permitting us to have a closed community that delivered on the promise of the virtual. We were located far from one another geographically across all of Poland, and we represented a variety of age groups, religious persuasions, and political viewpoints, but in our FB group we could share thoughts, ideas, problems and opportunities without fear of too many repercussions. And we could get to know each other -- an opportunity I will treasure for a good long time to come.
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