40 degrees. Friends, fires and the hell in the cell match. Chronicle of a short polish break.

Sometimes I feel so damn young

The Poznan airport looks different from the one I remember.
I'm now sitting in a very modern waiting area, with a wireless internet connection that doesn't seem to like English credit cards.
Around me I'm not seeing the usually polish faces (skinny sad looking guys going back to London to spend their days on the building sites and skinny blonde girls hoping for find some fun in England).
I'm surrounded by tourists. I can't believe this.

Still no luck with the wireless connection. Damn. Well, I've just been stopped by some weird Italian dude who asked me something in English.
I could've replied in Italian I guess, but now the world cup is over, I'm still happy we are world champions but there is no more need to pretend we all love each other.

As usual, at the end of this short 5 days break it is time to make some balance of my 2006 experience in Poland.
If I'm correct this is my 25th or so travel to Poznan, in less than 30 years. And this my third report on the subject, after 2005 and 2004.
It's a pity that while I used to spend almost 3 months now I'm down to 5 days.

Finding time to see my grandparents and friends is always a difficult task, and I wish I could do better.

Back from a holiday, and I'm listening to some cheesy Italian hits from the 80's. Dominik, my polish friend who actually loves and knows more about Italy than me, convinced me again to cook for the whole gang Italian food, listening to Italian music and eating under an Italian flag.
We even talked in Italian, and I must admit then his Italian got way better since last year.
Al Bano and Romina Power and now Ricchi e Poveri.
Stuff that would probably make anyone cringe down in Italy. Anyway in few days I will probably be sick of it and remove it from my "recent" play list on my ipod.
But for a while is nice to be transported back to an age when communism was, well, everywhere and I didn't give a shit about it.
A time when all I cared was football, and cheesy Italian hits listened on some old tape recorder.

Damn, the whole World Cup fucked me up with the nostalgia thing. 

I guess is unavoidable. Without your present around you (internet, email, work, mobile phone contacts, people etc...) and your whole past on a wall in my grandparents' living room, thinking about the future is impossible.

My grandparents, still kicking and alive, live in a time warped flat in Poznan, where everything looks and smells exactly as it did for all those months I spent throughout my summer vacations. Pictures of forgotten holidays with my family hang from the main wall.
Sometimes I really have problems remember when they were taken.

They still treat me like a 8 years old kid but they are after all open minded, for people who have spent their life living so many different historical events (war, occupation, 40 years of communism) and now stepping in a world that goes way too fast even for me.

Once I'm out of the time bubble, I got my old friends, friends from my parallel world that no one in Italy knew about it (or didn't really understand). I've introduced them all in this article. I still like them, and I know they make a special effort (especially Dominik) to make my stays always be memorable...

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