My Memorable Christmas times

It is the morning of the Second Day of Christmas. I feel in a particularly reflective mood. This has been a very good Christmas and I say it before it is actually over, but for me, the festivities are done, and now it is time for some reflecting and reminiscing. This Christmas was unusual from one perspective. I have not experienced any sadness that typically came over my Christmas moods. The sadness related to changes, departures and missing something. At times I could not understand myself as such moods came over me at the peak times of my life, times when actually nothing was missing. Maybe I have eventually accepted the rhythm of life, its seasons and reasons? Maybe I do not desire my life to be better than it is as it is actually as good as it gets? Anyway, it has been a very good Christmas without a feeling of loneliness that I experienced in the past.

I reflect on the memorable Christmases, the ones I not only remember but the ones I treasure and the ones that shook me up n some way, not necessarily positive. My first memory of Christmas is not particularly happy, I was very small then, and according to some psychological science, I should not be able to remember it. I must have been about two years old, and I got a big teddy bear as my Christmas present. I should have been happy, but the cuddly toy seemed to be too big and scary. My parents put it in my arms for a photo, as they thought that he will be my friend. I endured the process, but I do not look happy on the photo. Do I really remember the event? I think so when I think about the big teddy I the feeling of terror arises in me.  Not too brave girl, hmmm…

The second memory is almost a spiritual one. I was in my early twenties, and after the family dinner at my parents on Christmas Eve, we all decided to go to the midnight mass. My parents, grandmother,  brother and my husband Ryszard. My family was never particularly religious or musical, and I am not sure who made the suggestion to walk to the church for the mass and singing Christmas carols, but it was a brilliant suggestion, and the event stayed vivid in my memory till now. It was Poland in winter, the fresh snow covered the streets and that brought this very special peaceful silence of placed muffled by the snow cover. One has to experience this type of silence to understand my spiritual feelings while walking across the little park to the church. We were all silenced even if a moment earlier we talked and joked being bouncily happy. The only sound was the crispy sound of our steps in few centimetres deep snow. Nobody but us in the streets and this absolutely white and sparkling snow around us. Silent night…

Forgive me for being maybe even pathetic in my writing, but this is such a special memory…

The next memorable Christmas was again at my parents. This was a few years later, there was a new man in my life who insisted on marrying me and he wanted to go about it in a traditional way formally proposing to my parents. We were driving from Warsaw to my parents’ place some 200 km away passing the snow covered landscape, both being nervously excited and happy. Suddenly Hans said, give me the ring, give me the ring! I had been already wearing my engagement ring, but now it became clear that it has been premature. So I took the ring off to receive it back after my parents' formal agreement to the marriage with a foreigner! Now, armed with the sign of his commitment and affection with a huge bunch of orchids for my mother my future husband was ready to face the future in-laws. Boy, we were a sweet young couple with the whole happy life ahead of us.  He got accepted, needless to say, the ring went back on my finger a few hours later. It all happened on the Christmas Eve of 1973. Or was it 74?

Even if the marriage ran its course some years ago as the love lasts and passes, I still have this ring on my finger, and I wear it with sentiments of remembering the love of my life.

There have been many lovely Christmases since that time. The Swedish one in Hilversum in Holland, the very hot one spent partly in our swimming pool in St. Ives, actually many hot ones in Sydney, and then another cold one returning to Poland. This was a very special one as well, reuniting with my brother and his family and then moving on to the second Christmas Eve dinner with my best friend Basia, I wrote about before.

I will remember this year Christmas Eve for the mature feelings of acceptance of turbulences and changes in life and appreciation of friendship.

Bali - People

Before I left Sydney, I had to prepare myself for facing the people and the culture I was about to meet, but I had a very vague idea about. The first contact with Indonesia was going to be at the Denpasar airport and then a taxi trip to the hotel. I assumed that the Denpasar airport is like any other airport and I seem to have quite a lot of experience in this field. I decided that once I am in the hotel, I will be on a familiar ground or I will ask for help my friend and the organiser of the Bali activities who should be there before me. So I needed only to figure out how much money I will need for the taxi and where to change my Aussie dollars to Indonesian rupiahs. I googled to find my answers, and sure enough, the answers were there. I am not certain how correct the advice was, but I was warned against money changers cheating but this, later on, was not my experience. I did not seem to observe any underhanded dealings. Maybe they were so good that I just was not aware of their tricks. Anyhow, if I was cheated I have not lost much money in the process, but I received many lovely, warm smiles from the locals as a part of the deal.

Google advised that I will not find the best conversion rate and airport, so I should change only that much money as I will need for the taxi and look for a better rate later on. This sounded familiar, my experience from other countries, including Poland, has been that airports, banks and hotels do not offer good conversion rates. The Goggle article kept scaring that the money changes that offer a favorable rate may cheat you. You are not to hand the money back to them for recounting as they are supposed to be magicians and can spirit out the notes without you noticing that. Hmm… I did find the place with “the best” conversion rate, and it was like any cantor I have seen in the world. The possibility of being cheated was in my opinion not existent. The article, however, created, perhaps wrong mindset of not trusting the locals.

 I must say that I am confused about this issue. I simply like the people. They are friendly, helpful and their smiles are heart warming. To me, their good intentions seem obvious. And how they all smile! I find a few things confusing, though. Let’s take the story of the taxi fares. Another advice of Internet was that I should use Bluebird taxis. I was told at the airport that there are no Bluebird taxis there but Gold Bird taxis instead. I though that maybe a bird in the name of the taxi chain is good enough, so I took a Gold Bird taxi. I paid upfront 285,000 rupiahs, and the transaction was made look credible as I received a very official looking receipt and I and lovely smiles from the girl at the counter and the driver. The driver was very friendly indeed and chatty. Being in a foreign country for the first time one does not have any choice but to go along with what one is told and use the first experiences as lessons. I did just that. The driver drove a “normal route”. That meant not via a long and spectacular bridge for which one has to pay a toll of 11,000 rupiahs, about $1A. I was not really given a choice, and the high number of zeroes made me feel that it was a lot of money. I was not told at that time that “the normal” way takes 40min and “the bus” way takes 20min. Actually, I did not mind going through the longer route as I could observe a bit of a Bali life on the way. The surroundings were not too exciting or pretty, but it gave me some initial impressions.  

As we spend more time in Bali, we travelled by taxis several times, the accepted way is to bargain the fare or go by the indication of the meter if a taxi has one. My friend struck a deal of 170,000 rupiahs for the trip to the airport. This was a significant improvement on my 285,000.  I was tempted to ask the same driver to take me there, but since my departure time was not certain, I decided to ask the reception to call my taxi when I am ready to leave. To my surprise, my fare was 110,000 rupiahs! This how much the taxi meter showed and I took the “bus” route. Go figure.

Reflecting on the fare differences, which for an Australian are really inconsequential, I wonder if I should classify such behaviour as cheating, taking advantage of dumb foreigners or way of doing business. I decided that it is just doing business and getting the best deal. My warm feelings towards Balinese could be maintained. It made me feel good.

My Bali Adventure - Bali Welcomes

Christmas time is the time of the TV repeats of the “feel good films”. I  think it may be in recognition that this is the time when people get emotionally sensitive, or there may be some less idealistic and more commercial reasons for that. In any way, I   recently saw the repeat of the film Eat, Pray Love. The last part is very romantic, and it takes place in Bali. Never mind the romantic aspect of the film, the place for westerners seems very attractive and close to a paradise. Suddenly a thought of wanting to go there came over me, but I crossed it out as too adventurous for a single woman who even has some health challenges.   A few days later my qigong instructor or should I rather say master and mentor in some areas send me an email inviting to a trip to Bali that he was organising. It was supposed to be a trip to practice qigong, tai chi, kung fu and talk about Taoism. The invitation was very timely, and it seemed like a sign that I need to go to Bali this time. I was strongly drawn to the idea. So I organised the hotel, air ticket and I am now in the Novotel in Nusa Dua, Bali.

The trip was great, I flew with Garuda, and they seem to be to still be airlines used to be some twenty years ago.  The service and food were great, I forgot that I can be treated so well and without a subservient attitude which typically deep down is not that friendly and sometimes covers resentment to those who are being served. Another strong impression was of dignity and friendliness that emanates from the Indonesians I came across. Reflecting on what might create this impression I came to the conclusion that part of it is their body posture. Most of the locals have very straight backs. When I look at them, I also straighten up immediately. Even now when I write about it, I sit straight, not in my normal slouching manner. I hope this new, good practice will stay with me for a while. Another thing is their slow and measured movements. I have not observed any jerky movements around. The hot and humid weather may be the reason for that, I noticed some slowness in my own movements since I have arrived. It is not that hot really, but it is very humid. The rainy season has just started, and it rains almost all the time with short breaks only. For some reason, I do not mind that. The first day here I did not realise that part of my room equipment is a huge umbrella. Which my current experience I know that this is one of the essentials in Bali in December. Before I gained this knowledge I went for a little walk around the hotel compound and, of course, it started to rain. There was a local couple walking opposite me. They had an umbrella so I asked where I could get one. Almost immediately their still not open umbrella was extended in my direction, and this gesture was accompanied by a respectful bow as if saying “namaste”.  I accepted the umbrella with gratitude. Coming back to my room I found my own umbrella waiting for me in the corner of the apartment entrance. I had not noticed it before. I decided then that I am going to like the place and the people. Few days have passed, and I still have this very positive impression and experience. When I walk around the hotel grounds invariably, local people smile and great me. Often they ask questions how I am and how my day has been. They behave as if they were my friends. They do it so naturally, and I believe that this is their way to be. Well, maybe there is a little of hotel training in it as well, but what their behaviour is convincing friendly and I buy it.    

The hotel I am staying in is one of the Novotels, one would think there is nothing to get excited about, but this Bali version of a Novotel is great in many ways. The hotels in Nusa Dua are located behind gates. The gates are rather symbolic as they do not close, but they are gates nevertheless. When cars entering the hotel grounds, the guards check the boots of the cars for the potential threat of terrorism. This is the lesson after the Balinese terrorist attack of 2002.

My Bali adventure started well, and I feel that it was an inspired decision to go for a holiday. In the recent years, I have travelled a bit or a lot in fact, but I have not been on such stationary holiday for ages. There is some sort of luxurious laziness about it. No wonder that Italians call it “dolce far niente” – sweet idleness. This is indeed a sweet experience for me. No guilt about doing nothing, just pleasure.

To be continued…  

I remember when computers were huge

I am writing right now on my good friend and companion Sony VIO. This is a small laptop that weighs less than one kilogramme. It is rather powerful; I can download and watch films, write and store any number of documents, communicate with anybody in the world writing emails or skyping, perform complicated calculations, read newspapers published anywhere in the world, listen to radio in any language… The list goes on. There are many functions my computer can perform that I even do not know about and I do not want to know more than I already do.  Enough is enough. And I know that my computer is already a couple of years old and that there are more advanced technologies widely available. We take it all for granted now. But the times when I saw a computer the first time in my life it was a totally different computer.

Was it in the late sixties of the last century or the early seventies? I think it was already in the sixties. I just got my seriously sounding diploma of a master of pure mathematics and did not quite know how this was going to serve me in finding an interesting job. I even did not know what would really interest me as a mathematician who did not intend to be a scientist or a school teacher. I had to have a job, though, and the caring communistic government found me one as a corrector of school manuals for math. It was a boring job and definitely did not require any serious qualifications or knowledge of mathematics. Ability to spell correctly was important here. So I read page after page with a red pen in hand marking my corrections in spelling. One of my colleagues realised that I might not be in the right job. Christine, I still remember the name, had an idea. Her brother in law had some strange job with computers and was looking for people who could be trained to be computer programmers. Would I be interested?  I did not know. Would I? I knew what a computer was; they taught me about them computers at uni, but it was a very vague knowledge.

So one evening, the brother in law of Christine, called me and casually asked if I would like to be trained to be a programmer. He could not tell me much about it as he has only started the job himself. Generally speaking, it was to develop systems for distribution of agricultural machines, combine harvesters and such. Just what any twenty-two years old girl is particularly interested in. Hmm… However, I said “yes”. This was a pivotal moment in my life and the start to a serious computer career that lasted decades. I was to become one of the first programmers in Poland, but that memorable evening when my professional life had started I had no idea what was ahead of me.

I had a right aptitude, but no knowledge of computers. A couple of courses filled the gap, and a couple of months later I started to program. It was great fun; they paid me for something that was akin to solving crosswords, one of my hobbies.

These were early days in working with computers, and the first computer I saw was ICL 1900. It took the whole big, air-conditioned room and only special people were allowed to enter this magic place. The data to be processed was stored on punched cards, perforated paper tape and on magnetic tapes that rotated mysteriously in their boxes the size of a grandfather clock. Scary stuff and difficult to comprehend.

 

There were only a few computers in Warsaw at that time and corporations that did not have their own computers had to hire computer time by an hour from the lucky institutions that had their own machines. My employer was not one of the lucky ones and had to hire computer time. That meant that my working hours depended on computer availability. Typically we were allotted time in the middle of night. I must say that I was a brave and determined girl, getting a taxi at 2:00 am to go to work for one hour. During the hour I was supposed to load a new version of my program stored on punched cards, compile it into the form understood by the computer and then execute it by giving the command: GO 20! With some luck, the program worked and produced expected results typically in the form of a business report.

  

This was the best outcome one could expect, but typically the program had further errors that rarely could have been corrected on the spot. So, back to the office and analysing the program, punching corrections on cards like the one on the photo, slotting them into appropriate places and back to booking a new computer time. Disasters of dropping programs and spreading the cards all over the floor were not all that uncommon. Who would dream of working in such a manner these days? But it was great fun.

Today, life is so much easier as far as using computers is concerned. I can produce any report; do my income tax return calculations using a standard program like EXCEL without any need for debugging. It is just there in my PC. My little computer is hundred times more powerful than the huge ones of the sixties and seventies. There is no need to be careful with my data falling on the floor and getting mixed up. But even if I have the computer all to myself I sometimes get up in the middle of the night and sing into work or play.  Occasional insomnia may be a reason for that, but the nightly computer work is still a part of my life

Tea drinking

Tea has been my favourite morning drink for quite some time now. In my new kitchen which has four big, deep drawers one of them is almost fully taken by various teas. Black, green, red, white, infusions, herbal teas…Too many really and I am trying to manage it by not buying any new teas except refilling the essential Lapsang Souchong. This has been for few years my favourive morning tea.

                                                    

Recently I claimed my birthday present at Kikki's as I found an interesting teacup which is a cross between tea glass and a teacup. Being a stationary junkie I found my way to the local Kikki shop and enrolled on their customer list. Now each September I get a $10 coupon to purchase my birthday present in the shop. As I have all the stationary I need I focused on their home line and found this glass-cup. It says :  Dream Breath Create Inspire. The writing is unobtrusive, hardly visible really. I like it. The reason why I chose such a present is in a way related to old Polish way to drink tea.

When I say “old Polish way” I do not think of all that very distant times. The tea drinking out of  a simple 250 ml glass is still done in many Polish homes. Tea tastes best when it is hot and drinking it out of a thin  glass burnt one's fingers. Sometimes such a glass did not have a saucer underneath and as sugar was widely used in my young days I had a dilemma if I should leave the spoon in the glass or put in on the table after I was done with stirring my tea. Then my mother typically gave me a beauty lesson saying: if you drink your tea with the spoon in the glass you will look like general Rokossowski. I did not want to look like him and have one brow higher than the other so I quickly took my spoon out of the glass. Funny things we remember and the lesson was rather interesting and saying things about my beautiful mother.

                                                      

Tea drinking out of a glass rather than a teacup is rather tricky and requires some care and clever ideas to cope with it and enjoy the beverage without burning your fingers and harming your beauty forever.

With passing years glasses with handles appeared in Polish homes but they were typically made out of a thick glass and this was not particularly satisfying to me. There was another way and this was to put your glass in a holder with a  handle. This could be really a nice way to drink your tea especially if the holder was antique and pleasingly designed. This is really a Russian way to drink tea without burning your fingers, but also used in Poland.

My new cup satisfies my taste in many ways. The glass is thin, the shape (minus the  handle) reminds me of a regular polish tea glass. It has a simple design that looks elegant to me. I wonder if Swedish (Kikki is a Swedish shop) also drink tea out of a glass. My Swedish husband was not really accustomed to it and made funny faces expressing discomfort of burning his fingers. Very quickly he was served his tea in a little holder. My mother always tried to please her guests and her Swedish son in law in particular.

All this tea drinking thoughts came quite unexpectantly while drinking this morning my Lapsang souchong out of a Kikki glass.

New reading experience - Talk Talk

 

I always wanted to belong to a book club, and now my dream became a reality. One afternoon last week, I got a telephone call from the local library telling me that I now belong to such a club. The first book to read and discuss is Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle. I never heard the name of the author, but excited ran to the library to finalise the deal and get the book. Four days later, I finished the book, and my feeling now is that of disappointment. In a way, I have expected that the choice of books may not be interesting for me and the first book confirmed my expectations. One may wonder why I wanted to belong to such a club knowing that my taste in books may not be an average reader’s taste. Well, this is still about books and about discussing them with like-minded people. I still have hopes that the meeting with the fellow reviewers will be a good, interesting experience. I will meet new people, and I like that.  So I am looking forward to this evening in a couple of week’s time.

Now, about the book. It read well up to a point when I realized that this is all there is, just an easy read. I will forget the book very quickly; it will not leave any residue in me. At least I think so. The book is about stealing the identity of innocent people and breaking into their credit cards accounts. This may be a warning for me as I have been rather trusting not to say careless with my cards. Not that I lose them, but I use them too freely perhaps. This will change now, and I will use PayPal more often instead. This is a practical plus of reading the book, but such effect was, most likely, not intended. 

The story is told in two separate streams that at the end of the book merge. The victim of the identity theft is a deaf girl. She spends the whole weekend in jail after being stopped by police while speeding a bit. During the documents, check police discover that her records show many crimes and she is treated like a criminal, imprisoned till Monday as it is Friday afternoon. Being deaf makes it a particularly difficult and bizarre experience. The reader gets for a while into the Kafkaesque world to move later into a chasing the thief story. And this is what the book is all about. The story is about chasing the identity thief through the whole USA. From California to New York. Dana, the victim, together with her supportive boyfriend Bridger is looking for Dana, the crook.  They have  little information by which to start the chase, but there are many lucky coincidences on the way to help them unnerve the thief and upset his life in the process. So this is the story. Moderately interesting and moderately credible. If the book was written with some sense of humour, I would not be put off that much, but the writing style is very average and, some poetic descriptions of landscapes are rather misplaced. Little plugs of poetry seem to only slow down the action and not add anything to the book. Reading it was a waste of time for me.

One pleasurable aspect of the book was reading the parts describing food preparation by the bad Dana. He is a real foodie and knows his drinks as well. Reading about his cooking I felt like getting up and going to my new kitchen to prepare something interesting to eat. I even did it at one stage, but not having gourmet ingredients at home it was only a bake of  spinach covered with sauerkraut,  feta cheese and beaten eggs. When I write about it , it sounds revolting but, in fact it was quite nice.

During my days I spend time, sometimes even too much, on watching silly TV serials or bad movies that are now freely available on YouTube. I wonder why I do not have any problems with this type of waste of time, but reading Talk Talk makes me feel that I will not like to repeat the experience too often. Even if it is the price for belonging to the book club. Maybe it is because books have some magic value for me and I have particular expectations of learning from them either new facts, new better ways of living my life or being a better person? I guess that my reverence for literature seems to exclude reading “so what” type of books.

Would I recommend the book? Sorry – No.