EuroSavant on Extended Sojourn in Poland
Today I arrive in Wroclaw, the city where dedicated EuroSavant readers will remember I spent about a week at the beginning of June, just in time to observe and report on the Polish EU accession referendum. This time I plan to stay a bit longer – oh, a couple of weeks. Among other goals, the plan is to work further on my advanced Polish, together with a dynamite tutor whom I found there last time. In the long run, this can only benefit my weblog postings, especially to those among you looking for a window into current Polish affairs, as I’ll be able to understand the Polish on-line press better and faster.
In the short run, on the other hand, residence anywhere other than in front of my trusty Dell-with-Chello-broadband-connection in Amsterdam degrades to some degree my weblog posting ability. For one thing, now when I work in front of a Internet-connected computer, the meter will be running. Granted, it will only be running in zloty terms, but nonetheless I won’t be able to escape that feeling in the back of my mind: the meter is running. What’s more – ready for a confession? – on rare occasions I do encounter the need to consult a dictionary to get the precise meaning of some key word or phrase in a given article; my stable of available dictionaries in Poland will necessarily be rather smaller. (Don’t talk to me about on-line language dictionaries; I haven’t come close to finding any that come near the capabilities of traditional bound volumes.)
Anyway, you had a taste of my “blogging from the field” a month ago. Maybe it wasn’t THAT bad – admittedly, I had an interesting central theme, i.e. the referendum, which I’ll largely lack now. (I presume – but maybe Poland will flood again, like back in ’97, when in fact I was also in Poland.) But I’ll keep the observations and the links coming. No reason to remove that EuroSavant bookmark yet.
