The shock of quasi-normalcy

Nobody is staring at me- I get some looks because I dress like an eskimo while most Poles go about in shorts and light jackets- but none of those lingering stares that made me feel like a Martian. How will I ever cope with semi-integration?
Not to mention that I'm finding out that I speak Polish. Not very good Polish mind you, and if you insist that fluency includes the ability to form complete sentences I am not your ideal, but....hold your horses....

I am able to do errands in Polish. Just today I ate breakfast, had lunch, bought supplies and asked for directions and used Polish 80% of the time. I can read menus and make change. This is a relief you can not understand unless you have been in a place where it took you four months to figure out that you were looking at a barber shop not a brothel (and vice versa). (Off topic, why not combine the two?)

They hate the EU here because globalization is a catch-phrase for "let's find some poor people and make them work for three dollars a day" (and because the population here is devoutly Catholic- my room in the dorm featured a small figurine of the crucifixion, complete with fake blood, which I took off the hook it was hanging on because images of torture are not the first thing I want to see in the morning- and being devout they don't go for the post-religious libertine Western European ideal) but it's still managing to drag the population into the world. On the train to Czestachowa I talked (pantomimed really) with an engineer who just came back from Egypt and was preparing for a spring assignment to Iceland. Oh Iceland.....