Arrival, Amnesia, and Astonishment

 As I wrote earlier, I lived in Warsaw from 1993 to 1995.  I arrived about 18 months after our bureau opened up there, which was facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Poland's exit from the Warsaw Pact.  As a child of the Cold War, I recall sitting in Jordan and hearing about the new office in Warsaw, and how I actively lobbied and sought out an assignment there.  I relished the idea of living in an Eastern Bloc country, particularly one as it "broke free" from totalitarian rule.

When the bureau opened, it was the only such office in my old program that had a language requirement, meaning that you qualified for language immersion training if desired, given the difficulty of living/working in a country without speaking the language.  At the time, I liked this idea and thought I would be sent to the Department of State's Foreign Language Institute or the Monterrey School of Languages to learn Polish BEFORE I left for Warsaw.  Alas, that did not happen.  As I did a lateral transfer from Jordan to Poland, there was no time for either of those programs.  I was, instead, enrolled in a six-week program at the University of Warsaw, which I entered as soon as I arrived in Warsaw in the summer of 1993.  Let's just say that that experience was "less than stellar."  In fact, I recall it was pretty much a nightmare.  The entire program was taught in Polish, with absolutely no English (or any other language) used.  I was the only native English speaker in the class, which included at least two North Koreans, several Syrians, and Africans from assorted countries.  It was extremely challenging and frustrating and I hardly felt confident in the language when I was finished.  I recall it being a very challenging tour in general, given that English was spoken by so few people, and day-to-day living was often a chore.  My German was no help and, at the time, Russian had been the mandatory second language in the schools.  English was not offered; French was, but only as a third language, behind Russian and Polish.

I provide that overly long backstory to help set the stage for the shock I would receive when our flight finally touched down in Warsaw.  The airport looked somewhat familiar from the airplane window, but you could see that they had greatly expanded. I recall going to the airport and literally parking in a grassy field next to the terminal, which was open for diplomats.  The airport was never busy and I could even get into the baggage claim area -- ahead of immigration -- by just flashing my diplomatic passport.  My, how times have changed!

The airport was packed, with flights arriving and departing for points pretty much everywhere around the world.  Every gate was occupied, and we had to bus into the terminal.  I remember two luggage carousels and now there were over 30.  As we'd cleared immigration in Berlin (Poland has been a member of the European Union for 20 years and a Schengen common immigration country since that agreement was signed), we had only to get our suitcases.  I searched the interior of the airport for anything that looked familiar, but I could find nothing.  It was a bright, shiny, cosmopolitan airport that could have been anywhere in Europe.

Our Approach to Warsaw

Arriving in Warsaw

I had booked a rental car so we could explore the city for our extra day.  I, of course, had a car when I lived there and had no initial qualms about driving or getting around.  Seeing that there was now an entirely separate car rental wing at the airport, with lines at every counter of arriving passengers, quickly told me I was no longer in proverbial Kansas.  

Inside the rental car, which itself was inside one of two massive parking garages -- that obviously weren't there before -- I had a sense of amnesia.  Nothing seemed familiar.  I felt like I should know something, but yet everything appeared new and I'll admit that I was thrown.  I also recall the airport being outside the city proper, with a long dedicated road leading there, with a police checkpoint on the far end.  The airport was now surrounded by shopping malls and suburban developments, and if the billboards lining the road weren't in Polish, I would have been hard pressed to guess I was even in Poland.  Well, certainly not in the Poland that I remember.