Recovery

I am recovering from my jet lag at an alarmingly slow pace. Or perhaps not, I haven't even been in Warsaw for forty-eight hours and I expect my jet lag to be gone already. At any rate, I have been able to establish some cultural conclusions since my arrival:

1.) Many, many Poles speak English (especially those my age) if only a little, but many are very proficient which makes life that much easier when acclimating.
2.) Poles are an incredibly industrious people who are basically reaching the end of their recovery with regard to the Soviet era of occupation (if they haven't recovered already). More to the point, everything is getting rebuilt, refurbished, or recycled. From the photo below, you can see they perhaps are attempting to rival the financial cities of Zurich or Frankfurt:


3.) Much of Warsaw is confusing in infrastructure, albeit this city was around long before we had city planners who had a large field to draw their lines across and create neat little grids where the streets are alphabetical.
4.) Polish is a strange child of Slavic and Latin. As many of us learned in language classes, one can generally (with some intelligent thought) infer the meaning of words with English (given of course, the language is Latin-based). Unfortunately, in Polish, this is probably true for a fraction of the words. Thus it is, buying shaving cream and a bar of soap this morning proved challenging, but certainly not impossible as I can now rid myself of this three-day beard I have.