Tag: life
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You weren’t there to linger. You were there to take part in a ritual that had existed long before you arrived and would continue long after you left.
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“This last thing is not a meal… it’s a container for food if you want to take it away.”
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A few wore grand, floppy mushroom toques—traditional baker’s caps so oversized and ballooning they seemed to hover above their heads rather than sit on them,
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So I stood by the door, doing my best to look as though this was how I preferred to travel.
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Then there were the plastic seats — back-to-back rows that discouraged comfort and punished optimism. I tried one once, briefly, before realising they were designed for people who had already given in.
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But the flicking of peel, the laughter, the sense that I had no footing at all… that tipped me over. It wasn’t the fruit. It was the sudden realisation that every instinct I’d relied on for two decades was useless here.
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For a dear and special friend — who steadied the moment, translated the chaos, and answered the phone as if she’d been waiting for it. I’d been living in Silesia for only a few weeks, and it was the first time I felt truly out of place — I was tired that night. A bit…
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I often thought of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit — except for me, they were.
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Cake isn’t Bread One of my earliest misunderstandings came when I wandered into a cukiernia near my hostel in Łabędy, I was determined to buy something — anything — other than a banana and a self-serve bułki from Biedronka, just to prove I could manage elementary Polish. I can still see the trays of cakes…
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Half-awake most mornings, I found myself wondering whether they ever swapped places just to confuse the guests.
