The other
weeknight I biked down to the smaller of the city’s 2 airports, and ended up in
a Polish bar located in a bar-banquet hall (there’s a few of those in the
city).
The
elderly blocky-built (Polish) guy in a dirty t-shirt looked like any number of people from my hometown (which is
full of Polish-Americans) and was skeptical of me at first, since very few
outsiders come into the bar, I’d think, and so asked me for my I.D.
After he
saw I wasn’t a member of some sting, he got me my beer and began to chat a bit,
and asked me what I was doing there.
“Oh,” I
was like, “I worked from home all day, and I just took a long bike ride to relax
and decided to stop and get a beer.”
“Why
not?”, he said after a short pause, very deliberately, with a smile and a laugh.
I then
at some point told him that I was half Polish, and he asked me if I knew any
Polish.
“’Dzeinkuja’?”,
he was like (“’Thank you’?).
“Of
course,” I was like, and he then said that if you know “thank you” in a language,
that’s important, it’s the first thing you need to know and pretty much the only thing you
need to know.
I then told
him several other Polish phrases that I know, including “Give me the cheapest
beer” and “How much does the cheapest beer cost?”.
“Oh,” he
was like, “You know too much,” and wagged his finger once at me.
We also
went over several more phrases, and when I got to “dobra noc” (‘good night’),
he was like, “Dose brown nuts,” and when I asked him if that’s what people say,
he said that’s what the phrase sounds like in English.
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