It's OK, I understand. Once one of my best friends, with whom I was writing something -- thankfully never published widely -- wrote some radical stuff that my mother read. My mom famously said: "How can such a nice man write such terrible things?" It made me think. That's good; it sounds like your parents are/were intellectuals. When I announced at dinner one evening that I wanted to be a poet, my father simply said: "That's stupid." It turns out that my father's instincts were correct And I had to abandon the stereotypical, Bohemian life and move into a more practical profession. But I never abandoned my idealism, which is why I'm still corresponding with you all. I'd like to meet your family someday. Even if they punch me on the nose it would be cool.
Man, it's never too late for poetry. In fact I'm more amazed of the young writing poetry than of the old. Probably due to the experience with my own brain, which ripens very slowly, being still quite raw. Thanks. I assure you my folks are revoltingly peaceful people.
There's a family of Ukrainian refugees from Odesa living in the same building with my parents, with three very young children. They're the most well mannered kids I know, always saying "Bună ziua" well before you have any chance to do it. I sometimes exchange a few words with their parents and they're speaking more and more Romanian words, with the greatest pronounciation. Thanks Putin for building bridges.
Sputnik is locked in EU and you know it. As far as refugees are considered - there are some 1.5 million left here in Poland. At first you noticed a larger number of women with children, or elderly with grandchildren on the public transport. Every single day I go past a UNHCR centre for refugee relief, and the queues in front of it stopped in June - there are still people who need blankets, or pots for their new homes here, cause they left Ukraine with a single bakcpack, but their number decreases. As the refugees have the same rights that Poles do, so most of them got their jobs (our economy is similar to those of Germany and Russia in that it needs a lot of foreign labour to keep going). The sole exception (as far as granting rights is considered) is that they can only vote in local elections, as all residents can, and not in national ones - as only citizens can - so the local authorities do everything to get some votes from them too The children went to Polish preschools and schools (for example there are 2 boys and 1 girl in my son's group, and 5 children in total in my daughter's class (6th grade) - that class has a mathematics profile, and it was less popular at my daughter's school than other ones with general profiles - hence their had more "free places" there), their parents got the corresponding education benefits (PLN 500 a month for every child aged 0 to 18). There's almost no unemployment in Poland, so whoever wanted to work, found their work. There're also schemes to include Ukrainian teachers and doctors in our system, giving them opportunities for better careers than a minimum wage job (the minimum wage in Poland is still very low - with PLN 3k gross (EUR 640) a month - still the tax on that is almost nil (the first tax threshold is PLN 30k a year - you don't pay any income tax below it), so you only pay little of taxes on that).
For everyone's sake, let's hope that Poland and other European countries have a warm winter. It's an interesting time. It's possible that Europe can experience a 15% reduction in industrial capacity this winter, not to mention domestic/civilian energy capacity (for heating of homes and private businesses). The USA will experience similar hardships. So now there's a calculus: how much cold and suffering will the West suffer before they have political problems? I don't want to be cold, but I have a good fireplace and an axe.
I also have a fireplace and three cubic metres of well-dried wood (plus two cherry trees I've cut last year, which are already dry, but it would be a waste to burn them in the fireplace - they're better for smoking meat). Fuck Putler, we'll make it without problems here
I also own several axes and enough trees in my yard to last my whole life. But they'll never have to. I use some of the dead wood and cuttings for an outside traditional bread oven, in which I also slow cook food like stews and meat. Unbelievable taste and a delight for our guests. You heat the oven for hours, pull the burning coals out, then put the food inside and seal the oven. Kids go crazy for this kind of stuff.
I bet if they hit at last, my next dog is going to wag tails, both of them Terrorist motherfuckers. That's what Russia has become.
I too wonder about my next batch of goat kids. I'll probably get an entirely new breed. To be called Putinskaya.
Same here, huge demand of workforce. Some refugees are still working for the Ukrainian businesses, online. Which is great. I think the pandemic helped getting people used to working remotely. But there are some who don't speak other language than Ukrainian and Russian (notice the majuscule). So there's the language barrier, since Romanian is incomprehensible to them, so they can't find jobs here. But many have started to learn it, with beautiful pronunciation. Although the languages are very different, I think the phonetics are a bit similar.
That's the main difference between Polish and Romanian. Romanian is closer to French than to anything else. Polish is relatively close to Slovenian, but also not that much different from a few other languages. The proper Belarusian (not the Russian version thereof advocated by Pührer) is the second closest. Slovak and Czech are also not that distant (it will be difficult to understand a thing from a longer sentence, but you would understand most simple sentences). Poles hearing Bohemians and Slovaks think they're making fun (and the other way around- Polish seems funny to the latter). Ukrainian is somewhat different (eg. most of the numerals are Russian) but if you learned Russian and know Polish, you will be able to make yourself understood.
The old Romance vocabulary in Romanian is closer to Italian, but the new Romance vocabulary is made up of French neologisms. I've heard that Romanians without any foreign language knowledge, who go to Italy or Spain for work, get to speak fluently in about three months, without studying. I think people have various abilities in grasping a related language. I've asked some friends living in Sweden if Swedes understand German. They said that some understand quite a bit, but others don't understand a thing. A cousin of mine, exceptionally ungifted, lived for six months in Italy without understanding anything.
To everyone: It's strange that we're even speaking of these things. You all are reminding me of how my grandparents talked about sacrifice for Germany in World War Two. Oh, and they certainly sacrificed. I'm not making a direct comparison, man, but everyone is taking sides and "othering" (as the university kids like to say) the people that live under the governments we don't agree with. I suppose we humans just have innate flaws let us go from soaring heights of joy and compassion, love and understanding to the blood-in-the-mud killing of each other with our bare hands and feeling good/justified about it. We're all just savages/pigs fighting in the mud, really.
You're wrong, Uncles. It's about compassion and solidarity and pointing to the atrocities russians do in Ukraine. Nice try relativising and comparing us with Nazis. That's Putin's rhetoric. Try to turn the working eye towards russia, if you got any. If there are any savages, as you say, those are the russians supporting the war. Feel free to join them for all I care.
A very young Ukrainian neighbor, who went back to his home town Odesa for a week, then returned here, brought us a souvenir. A fridge magnet with symbols of the city. Among them, a chair - one of the twelve chairs of Ilf and Petrov, who were both born there. In their memory, there is a chair shaped statue in the city. And that's the winning chair that Putin will never get. And he will have the fate of Ostap Bender.
