a night of fortune-telling and wodka

Breslau was beautiful and far warmer than Berlin. Robert and I went to that bizarrely sparse city-museum on Saturday that I mentioned in another blog-entry. We spent time in the altstadt (old city) that afternoon, working at a dark candlelit café before drinking mulled wine at the Christmas market and going out for pizza. The next day we went to a different café where they had delicious and untraditional borscht (beet soup) and then we walked a bit along the river just as it was getting dark.

Has anybody every heard of St-Andrew’s Day? Anybody who knows anything about Scottland perhaps? Well, I’m still not sure how it made its way to Poland considering it skipped some pretty major countries in between: France and Germany for example, which do not partake in these traditions. But in any case November 30th is a charming holiday of superstition and hospitality. The main idea is that on no other day but St-Andrew’s day do fortunes become true. Girls play different games to find out who they will marry, what his name will be, what they will do when they’re older, and more.

We were invited to a St-Andrew’s day party that night. Robert’s Tandem-partner (a sort of language buddy organized by the university), Kasia (pronounced Casha), was nice enough to invite the both of us to her apartment. She lives in a part of Breslau that Robert had never been to before; unlike some cities she said that students are spread out and do not all live in one area. She explained the traditions in German so that we could partake in the festivities too!

We were eight people, and there were eight balloons hanging from the ceiling lamp when we arrived. Our first “activity” was to pop a balloon with a needle and read the fortune inside. Of course they were in polish, in very dainty girl-writing. They all agreed that I should go first (being the female guest) so one of Kasia’s roommates read it for me, much better than having me butcher the polish language by trying to sound it out. They all giggled while she read it. I looked around asking, what? What? What does it mean?!? Apparently it had something to do with expanding my family… I will not repeat the exact translation ☺ Robert’s fortune, I believe, had something to do with having luck in travels… He will have to buy a large suitcase because he will be traveling a lot in the future. In any case, even the two guys joined in and popped a balloon, and Robert and I were pleasantly surprised that even the guys were having fun with it. Robert commented, where else would a bunch of students keep up these sort of silly cultural superstitions even after moving away from home?

Of course the evening began and ended with vodka, lots of vodka. Good vodka, too. A little less burning and a bit more taste, or at least the little bit that I drank...  

The two guys offered Robert shot after shot, and he said he would have been ashamed were he to turn them down (it’s not bad when girls do it, but he just had to oblige them…). About six shots later we started the second “activity”. Kasia brought in a big bucket of cold water, and her roommate followed with a pot of something blue. She also brought an old key with a ring on the top. Hmmmm... key, cold water, blue liquid.... I had no idea what we were going to be doing. One by one we poured the wax, carefully so that we could do it through the ring on the key (I guess it had mysterious powers, being an old key and all), into the cold water. We let the blob cool and then took it in our hands. Against a candle, we tried to guess, “interpret”, what shape the shadow of the blob made. Somehow this translated to a fortune, but I didn't quite catch how. Robert’s looked very much like a fish. Mine looked very much like a blob, especially since I was not as meticulous as the others about pouring it through the key (lack of skills). I said that it was a starfish to stick with the ocean-animals theme.

We heated, added some orange peels to, and then drank the bottle of gluhwein that I had brought from Berlin and of course the guys offered Robert more vodka. For a few hours we just chatted in German and English and some Polish 

(not me, obviously), just sort of eating and drinking and chilling. Kasia, who is working on her masters in Germanistik in Breslau, told us about her thesis, and how much easier it is to study literary expressions in a foreign language than in one's native language. Our spoken-German was at about the same level, although clearly after writing a 40-page thesis in German on idioms and expressions her written skills far surpass mine. But just hearing about life at the University from her perspective was something new. In general it was our first time really spending time with Polish students, and finally we got a sense of the polish-styled hospitality that we have so often heard about but never really experienced. 

After St-Andrew’s night I understood much better why Robert wanted to come to Poland in the first place. As a final example of their friendliness, they insisted on accompanying us to the tram stop in the freezing cold when we were heading home. Luckily we did not have to wait very long. The tram that was supposed to have come in twenty minutes chose to come fifteen minutes early (typical, according to Robert). Kasia promised to have us over again, and even give us a tour around her hometown, which is an hour to the south of Breslau.

This night also convinced Robert that Breslau would be drastically different for him if only he could get out of the dorms, which have been invaded by a particular philosopher-of-the-Northern-enlightenment, commonly known as Erasmus. And what I call "Erasmus-English" is not a very pretty English (but very, very funny: see Robert’s blog, robertinpolen.blogspot.com). So the apartment search for Robert continues… and I am looking forward to going back to Breslau a few more times next year.