Poland and the 3rd of May
So I am in Poland, came yesterday and am still going through adjusting to the new time, the new place, new customs, new language and a new situation all together. I woke up at the proverbial 3:00 am but for me it was still Australian 1pm, the time difference is 8 hours now. And a nice surprise, at least for me as I like white nights. It was light already! This will be improving, meaning the light will last longer and longer till 23rd of June.
Sometimes my important life events coincide with globally important days of my nations Poland and Australia. I arrived in Australia at the Australia Day, some years later I became an Australian also on the 26th of January, returned to Poland on the day when the country joined European Union and this time I arrived on the very long weekend of the 1st of May, The Day of Polish Flag and 123rd anniversary of Polish Constitution. Some more history on the subject from Wikipedia.
The Constitution of May 3, 1791 was drafted between October 6, 1788, and May 3, 1791, when it was adopted as a "Government Act" by the Great Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (a dualistic state of Poland and Lithuania ruled by a common monarch).The constitution sought to supplant the prevailing anarchy, fostered by some of the country's magnates, with a more democratic constitutional monarchy. It introduced elements of political equality between townspeople and nobility and placed the peasants under the protection of the government, thus mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. It banned pernicious parliamentary institutions such as the liberum veto, which had put the Sejm at the mercy of any single deputy who could choose, or be bribed by an interest or foreign power, to undo all the legislation that had been passed by that Sejm.British historian Norman Davies describes the document as "the first constitution of its type in Europe"; other historians call it the world's second oldest codified national constitution after the U.S. Constitution, which had come into effect on March 4, 1789. The 1791 document remained in force for only 14 months and 3 weeks. Yet, despite the King's capitulation, the Second Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1793), and the 1795 demise of Poland, the Constitution of May 3, 1791, was seen over the next 123 years as an important step toward the eventual restoration of Poland's sovereignty. In the words of two of its co-authors, Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kołłątaj, it was "the last will and testament of the expiring Country."
Next to me a big bunch of tulips and a cup of tea, life is good even when I am in Poland.
