Another post about Starbucks...

That's right, here we go again. Starbucks: fount of inspiration and moderately priced coffee. Yesterday, until noon, the price of a tall latte or cappuccino was this:

Name = complementary new 2-shot beverage. I'm a bit perplexed as to why this is happening at all. It's been common practice in the US for ages and at the Prague Starbucks branches since they opened (NB: knowledge that these exist does not imply unequivocal endorsement). Last weekend I got a latte at Liverpool Street and the barista asked my name. It's hardly revolutionary, yet it's being rolled out like it is, equipped with neighbourhood coffee house rhetoric ("come and introduce yourself!"). I've previously explained my view of the coffee market and niche Starbucks fills for me (and, I suspect, most others). It's never going to be a neighbourhood coffee house, so why bother trying? That said, despite my experience of lovely neighbourhood places in Philly and Prague, last weekend's experience of being summarily ignored by staff in two Spitalfields coffee bars (as result of which I ended up in Starbucks), has me feeling an alarmingly rightwing wave of antipathy towards local and alternative purveyors (don't even get me started on the holier-than-thou incompetence of Cafe Crema in New Cross Gate).

But back to Starbucks.

Admittedly, it's somewhat disappointing to know that my name is worth only £2.25. I also felt somewhat sorry for my barista, originally from east Asia, as she struggled to spell our names. Is this really part of her job description? On the other hand, perhaps interacting with language in this way will turn the Starbucks staff into brilliant linguists, pronouncing Greek, French and Polish names with equal aplomb. With enough time, this might even trickle up to the native population, though I wouldn't bet a latte, free or otherwise, on that one.

This strikes me as a post that should end with a slew of questions. Accordingly...Did you offer your name for a free latte? Was your local Starbucks shunned or inundated in response to the offer? Could your barista spell your name? Did you learn theirs?

Fidlovačka, or No Tag and No Joy

In a week of milestones, which included my first completely successful Czech language phone call, last night was my first trip to a non-subtitled Czech play. I went to see Fidlovačka, aneb kde domov můj? at Divadlo na Vinohradech. Fidlovačka is a nineteenth-century Czech play by J. K. Tyl with music by František Škroup. It was first performed in 1834 when its nationalistic content and championing of the Czech language in a German-dominated cultural sphere caused quite a stir. The performance was banned for a time and Tyl considered it a failure. It was later resurrected and enjoyed great success, its greatest achievement being the adoption of the fourth act aria, “Where is my home?” as the Czech national anthem. The subtitle of the original production translates to “no anger and no brawl,” but the one playing at the Vinohrady Theatre invokes the national anthem and juxtaposes the original text and story with debates in EU Parliament concerning the adoption of an EU symbol, flag, and/or anthem. Impassioned debates about collective and national identity ensue. The Czech delegate is particularly outspoken – he is tremendously concerned with the preservation of Czech national identity and ends the first act with a rant concerning the importance haček, a diacritical mark that essentially ads an „h“ to Czech consonents (š is pronounced “sh”, for example). His final (hilarious) point was “Čapek neni Capek!” – a reference to the frequent mispronunciation of celebrated author Karel.

The performance was also remarkable for the appearance of the dignified and formidable Jířina Jirásková as Parliament chairwoman. Born in 1931, she’s performed at the Vinohrady theatre for an amazing sixty years. As always when I got to a “stone theatre” (read big, official) in the Czech Republic, I am struck by the sheer number of bodies on stage – there must have been thirty people on stage last night, about twenty of them playing Euro-MPs, lending credibility to the Parliament scenes and chiming on the songs as Tyl and Škroup’s text increasingly dominated proceedings in the second act. It makes me long to have been born in such a system, in which a career as a theatre actor is a reasonably attainable and financially viable goal in a way it just isn’t in countries that lack repertory systems.

The only hiccup in the evening was my interaction with the lady who ran the šatna – the coat room. When I checked my coat prior to the start of the play, she chided for me coat's lack of a tag that would facilitate hanging. Here it is, in all its barren glory:

I don't know what this is called in Czech (or even if there’s a specific English term) and I’m not up on my tailoring vocab, so I’m not sure if she was cross with me (admittedly in a pleasant, good humored way) for failing to sew one in, or with my beloved COS for failing to place one in the coat. As I waited for the play to begin, I couldn’t help wondering if there’s a correlation between a country’s degree of coat-check obsession and the occurrence of hang tags on locally available coats. My coat is manufactured by a Swedish label and I purchased it in the UK, where coat checking is nowhere near as common as it is in central eastern Europe, though I would think that there’d be a high incidence of it in Sweden, given the length and severity of the winters. Considering the Czech (and Polish) dedication to coat-checking (which I quite like, when I'm not getting in trouble), I wonder if a coat’s check-ability is considered when deciding which brands to import. Have I finally discovered why so many of my favorite labels have no foothold in the Czech market?

Unfortunately, my relationship with the keeper of the coats did not improve post-show, when my exit from the loge revealed the fact that I’d had the audacity to check my troublesome coat when there was ample space and coat-hooks in my box. I only realized this was what she said later, as I replayed it in my head…at the time, the surprise at being publicly dressed down over a hang-tag and my lack of suitable vocabulary for the situation conspired to render me mute and unresponsive. While it is now an amusing anecdote, the entire encounter makes me long for spring, when it will no longer be necessary to take a coat of any description along for a night at the theatre.

PS - Curiosity and a desire to avoid writing a conference paper on hybrid-form theatre has led me to explore the hang-tag issue further. I'm now back in Warsaw with the rest of my coats, which I have now surveyed, along with some of Mr P's. Coats and blazers with tags (by brand and nation of purchase): Wilson's Leather (US), Brooks Brothers (US), J. Crew (US), Zara (PL), Superdry (UK). The only other coat sans tag (apart from random vintage ones) is my black and white full-length Zara wrap coat, purchased, unlike Mr P's peacoat, in the UK, lending (admittedly inconclusive) credence to the theory that tags are added and subtracted according to market. Fascinating.

And you shall know her by her left ear….

Happy New Year! (How late is that still an acceptable way to begin a communication and/or to explain away with three words one's complete lack of productivity over a period of time which encompasses, but is not limited to, the festive season?)

This mid-January day finds me in Warsaw, where it is particularly January-some in the most depressing way: unrelieved grey skies coinciding with the uninspiring sight of dirty snow melting to reveal just how many cigarette butts, tram tickets and other discarded items were dropped in it over the past month. Nasty. At least the Christmas decorations have remained up, which ameliorates things somewhat. In praise of Poland, I must admit that it's lovely to be once more in a country where people do not believe that Christmas decorations left up past January 6^th transform magically into harbingers of doom and general bad luck. I'm not sure quite how widespread this belief is – I first encountered it in the UK, but I don't know where it originated. In my family, we tend to leave the decorations up for as long as possible, in part because my mother completely redecorates the house for Christmas – after so much work and creativity, it seems churlish to tear it all down immediately. Given the shortness of the days here (it's dark before 3.30pm), I'm glad the Poles share my mother's approach and have the left the lights on a bit longer:

The festive lights are of particular comfort to me on this week of bureaucratic tasks. I'm off to Prague for research-related adventures at the weekend, so have only this week to sort out visa-related hiccups. Thus far, I've been to get a medulnek (a sort of local residency permit, a bit like a Czech ubytování, which allows you to then get a visa) and to have my picture taken for my eventual visa. The picture-taking process has given this post its title: Polish official portraits require that you show your left ear, while your body is turned slightly to the right and your head tilted to precisely the right angle to display said ear, and the rest of your facial features, simultaneously. You can also smile, slightly, like this:

To get this image, the photographer and I communicated using my new system. The longer I'm here, the more I realize that I can actually understand the gist of basic conversations, provided I keep calm and don't start mentally hyperventilating the moment someone addresses me. In fact, it works best when I imagine that they're speaking to somebody else. This strategy dovetails nicely with my approach to making up for the fact that I don't actually speak Polish. In preparation for specific encounters (like the one with the photographer, or a trip to the drycleaner after I'd lost my claim ticket) I write down exactly what I need or what has happened, in Polish. Google Translate and/or Polish friends are very helpful in this regard. Upon reaching my destination, I explain, in Polish, that I do not speak Polish, and hand over the note. Assuming the person I'm speaking to doesn't speak English, I handle anything else that comes up with a combination of Czech verbs (most basic verbs are similar) and miming (I don't trust the nouns to overlap as much as the verbs do). So far, this seems to be working. I managed to communicate with the photography shop man quite effectively – I was even able to convey the fact that I'd left my hat in the shop's coat closet and needed him to retrieve it for me. I also find people respond better to this approach. I'm not sure why – perhaps it's better not to include English and, by doing so, imply that I expect them to speak it, or perhaps they actually think I'm from another Slavic country. I don't know. But so far, so good, in any case. The photo-fetching scenario had the hallmarks of a potential Polish disaster written all over it, but went down much better than Monday's attempt to reconnect the internet, which saw myself and Mr. P spend ninety minutes running maniacally back and forth between the post office and tp, with Polish friends on speed dial, clutching stacks of bills and receipts and trying neither to cry nor swear very loudly and at great length.

Now if only I could figure out what the notice taped to my building's door says…something about personal safety and the gas meter. Oh dear…Google Translate, here I come.

From a library in the frozen north…

I'm back in Warsaw, after a quick working week in Prague. This was the trip I was always planning to take, though the excessive back-and-forth-ness has left me feeling two things: first, that I live rather more here than there at the moment, which doesn't distress me, as I continue to like this city; and, second, that three eight-hour train journeys in the space of seven days are too much, even for someone who loves movement as much as I do.

Since I'm not confined to the weekend, I've had a chance to experience the day-to-day-ness of working in Warsaw, which for me means finding a good library. I wish I was the sort of person who could read and write texts more complicated than email effectively against the backdrop of café-noise, or that I could discipline myself to work at home, but after much trial and error I've accepted that libraries just work better for me. As a result, I have quite a collection of international library cards, the newest of which I acquired yesterday:

My endeavors to photograph it haven't gone too well – it's sort of come out all blurry – but I love this photograph. The lighting is almost painterly. It was taken by a Polish undergrad-type manning the registration desk at the University of Warsaw Library, which is equipped for this purpose with a light not dissimilar to those I encountered at the London College of Fashion. The library is located off Nowý Swiat – I know which street to turn down thanks to an enormous statues of Copernicus conveniently located at the intersection. The full name of the library is Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie, which offers a fascinating glimpse of the differences between Czech and Polish, a topic currently occupying much of my attention. In Czech, the word knihovna is used for library, which can create some confusion since the word for bookshelf is also knihovna. You can alleviate this problem by using the diminutive form to distinguish between them. The Poles have avoided this altogether by using the Latinate biblioteka. This is fascinating to me, having studied the modernization of Czech in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there was much squabbling among grammarians about the appropriate sources of new words. The attitude that was eventually adopted was quite conservative – loanwords should come, if at all possible, from other Slavic languages or be created from Czech themselves. Thus, Czechs can borrow a kniha (book) from a knihovna, while speakers of Polish, which seems not to have had such a conservative loanward policy, use a biblioteka, despite the fact that the Polish word for book is książka. Linguistic analysis aside, I like this library, which looks like this:

On the ground floor there's a sort of atrium thing that contains Coffee Heaven – Poland's answer to Starbucks – as well as used book kiosks and a poster shop I want to visit today. Within the library itself, I have found a wonderful book by Eva Hoffman called Exit into History, which documents her travels through post-Communist countries in the early 1990s. It's very personal with lots of material from interviews, as well as her own reactions to her experience, which makes it incredibly insightful and unpretentious and – from my point of view – very helpful. She also talks about the frustration of being unable to use Polish in Czechoslovakia very effectively, a situation I am now experiencing in reverse. I feel an overwhelming desire to wear a badge, like those sported by Costa Coffee baristas in London – festooned with little flags conveying the information that I am able to function reasonably adequately in more than one language. It is a bizarre situation to be able to read, and even understand, (though as always, my language skills are better in written form) while being unable to produce anything. I feel profoundly guilty that I can't answer an old lady's question about which bus stop is next, even though I know that's what she's asking. I also know that this response, as I told Mr P (in an extremely rare low moment of his own last week), is irrational, as there is no way to master a complex language within one week of arriving somewhere, even if one has a good working grasp of a related language. At least the Poles are nice about it, generally. Yesterday a research student asked me to take part in her study and when I told her I couldn't speak Polish she still gave one of the cookies she'd brought along as thank yous to participants. Bless.

In other news, it's freezing here! The freezing starting on Monday, but before that it was quite beautiful, as in this picture that I have chosen to leave you with, taken at a concert of Chopin music in Lazienki Park.

(And yes, that's a stature of Chopin looking on…apologies to random girl on the right. I really need some photo editing software of greater sophistication than Paint.)