I am watching the movie Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Gere is so stereotypically leading man material. However his tendency not to look directly at his interlocutor, this shy downward glance followed by his knowing smile is a little irritatingly condescending. That being said, his acting skills and his commanding presence overcomes this. Here he is looking his usual dashing self in this  eighties film about a yuppie who is so focused on money and power that he hires a beautiful prostitute to be his companion for a difficult series of business negotiations simply because it looks so much better for him to have a date on his arm during the time he makes more millions. the bonus for this deal is here he with Robers’ character he has someone he can control like everything else, using money. Anyway the annoying thing is the entire movie is overdubbed in Polish, and my Polish is non existent. I promised myself I would learn the language, but circumstances and a little laziness on my part prevented me from doing my homework. I keep watching the movie. They don’t use multiple voices for the various characters in the film. Just the same slightly basso translator. But I can still make out bits of dialogue. This room is old and the television takes about ten minutes to warm up. You switch it on and the screen turns a fuzzy blue and yellow and then after a while you see bits of a picture and then eventually Julia and Richard appears in all their opulent Lear Jet Stretch Limo glory. I keep thinking about the name of the film. Pretty woman. The room I am in is wooden. They build houses, houses that last lifetimes upon lifetimes, out of the wood from around here. The forests surrounding are vast.  The room is warm and warmly coloured and varnished wood. The ceiling is wooden. There are two sets of windows as I am in a corner room, an inner and and outer, to keep the cold, the freezing cold, out. Its insulated here. its well below zero here. and I am in a t-shirt. I sometimes go hunting in the presses and the drawers in the room. This is because I am immensely nosy man. I find pictures of beautiful women, far prettier than the very attractive Roberts, who lived their entire lives without ever becoming iconic. One must embrace the absurdity of things, I suppose.

The thing is the camera loves Julia Roberts. Thats her gift. And the fact she is an excellent actor. She completely steals the entire movie, and I imagine that was unexpected on the part of the producers, despite the giveaway name of the film.

Christmas in Poland, especially here in the south of Poland is immensely quiet. The forests that go on for miles act as a huge sound barrier. Add to this the circling mountains, a slight blanket of icy snow and you get an impression of the kind of soft quiet I am talking about. The odd car passes, but the noisiest thing I saw earlier was a snow truck that rumbled past as I went out on a night walk. With its flashing yellow warning lights, its frontal yellow rubberized snow scoop and its tail spewing vast quantities of salt, it looked like a huge mutant grumbling bumble bee hovering over the mountain roads. I passed dogs either chained or in their little houses and see many signs inpolish that say “angry dog”. No wonder the dogs were angry, I think. Its five degrees below zero on Christmas night. One wouldn’t put a milk bottle out in this weather. I passed the Hermann Goering Hill in the nearby distance. There the legendary Nazi supposedly had a domain in South Poland during the Second World War. There are arc lights and lasers reflecting from the forests onto the sky. Surreal stuff. Like a landing signal for an alien craft. I feel my ears freeze a little and wonder if the hat I have on is warm enough. Its half ten at night. I walk back, afraid I might slip despite the ministrations of the bumble bee salt spreader.

Families gather on Christmas Eve and eat carp and herring dishes and pirogi and drink borscht and wine and beer and play games. I got a game of Monopoly as a Christmas gift. I looked skeptically at the game and somewhere remembered the game was originally designed as a moral tool to teach people the dangers of greed and the pointless accumulation of money. I don’t think that intention worked out so well – mainly because Monopoly is awesome. Also I should point out that till then I had never played Monopoly before. The problem with this game was it was in Polish and I was the banker. These two factors made for the perfect storm of hilarity where the rules of Monopoly were to say the least not strictly observed and there were many lengthy pauses where I was asked to read out certain phrases for my education and have them explained back to me in English, much to the mirth of everyone present at my appalling Polish pronunciations. I went to bed about two AM. What a great Christmas Day. I go from Karpach (where I write this) to Wroclaw in a few days. Then I fly back. I will  miss here when I go. oh heres a picture of the Polish monopoly set. (awesome, isn’t it?)