some context...

After more than a week in Poland, and numerous sighs as I sat in vain attempting to articulate the things going through my head, I've finally started up again. My blog (a word which really sort of makes me cringe) has been resurrected and will hopefully continue to be a dialogue (albeit a limited one, because how much can the audience respond to a blog?) as I journey along here on this new eastern european trail.

My experience as a working photographer in foreign lands is still very limited. It's different from my earliest travel experiences, which were wonderfully without pressure and more about self-fulfillment. As a photographer, I find that I process information differently. My brain seems to naturally file things away in a more organized fashion. I wonder sometimes if this way of processing is forever a part of me now. The subconscious, never-ending visual and informational analysis of things is difficult for me to turn off.

That said, Poland has been a pretty easy transition. New and fascinating, with a steep learning curve, but fairly smooth to take it. It could be because I often think back in comparison to my last cultural emersion, when India left me speechless, bewildered, spinning, and drunk on new smells and sounds. I've met people who have traveled far more extensively than myself, around numerous continents, and contend that nothing matches the shock of India. Poland is Europe. It's modern, it's Christian, it rotates in a very "western" direction, and it holds powerful ties to a large immigrant population in the U.S. that has distinctly added to the American mash-up throughout the past century. So given that I'm minimally familiar with the culture, I'm trying to find ways (and it's not very hard) to go deeper. What has resulted is the discovery of a place that is, in fact, very distinct in history and place. And the fact that I never realized this before makes it all that much more interesting.

Someone described to us a well-known political cartoon yesterday. It features a caricature of God, looking down from a lofty cloud at Poland, while laughing with a sidekick as he says, "just for fun, let's see what happens if we put Poland between Germany and Russia." In short, it's largely what sums up the Poland that I'm experiencing here today. A country that is uniquely situated between East and West, between two nations that have absolutely dominated much of the global turbulence of the last century. And there, in the middle, is Poland. Pulled one way, then the other. Facing two polarizing, equally over-simplified labels of both victim and perpetrator.

Poland means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It brings up images of old ladies in babushkas, potatoes and (amazing) pierogies, Catholic pride in the previous Pope, waves of 20th century American immigrants, and ground zero in the Holocaust and World War II. It's a canvas of emotions from all different angles. And if I've learned one thing in my 10 days and counting here, it's that Poland is far from any of these simple, individual associations….