Warsaw Human Connections

The tram was cancelled in a snowstorm one Friday morning in Praga and everyone at the stop stood looking miserable. An old woman pulled a foil parcel from her bag, broke a baked potato in half, and handed me one half without comment. It was hot and salty and perfect. I said thank you in three languages. She said, eat. I still do not know why she was carrying a baked potato at that hour. I carry one now. Nobody has needed it yet.

I arrived with a stack of zloty and carried it around for a week, because nearly everything took a card or a phone payment, even the small kiosk near the Vistula boulevards. My flat is a twenty minute walk from the river, flat all the way, which was kinder than I expected. The kiosk owner held the terminal out before I had found my wallet. Cash was dead weight. Bring a card, keep a few notes for odd places.

Validate your ticket the moment you board, not after you sit down. On a tram ride home from Lazienki Park I spent the first stops deciding where to sit and noticed a woman near the door watching me with the quiet patience of someone who had seen this before. Nothing happened, but I felt it. The machine is by the door. Do it first, then choose your seat, then look out of the window.

On a Sunday around 3pm you sat on a bench in Łazienki Park with a small paper bag and a very small spoon, feeding the squirrels one hazelnut at a time, like a restaurant. The squirrels were queueing. There was order. I was walking past with a cold coffee and I realised I had been in a worse queue that morning. You looked up and nodded like we were colleagues. I counted nine squirrels. One of them was clearly the manager. I have been back every Sunday. You have not. The squirrels have not forgiven me.

I was freezing on a bench by the Vistula boulevards at Powiśle one December evening around 5pm when a man on the same bench poured tea from his thermos into the cap and handed it to me without a word. We talked about the river for an hour. He told me where to find the best views in the city, all of them within a kilometer of the bench. We meet at the same bench every Friday with two thermoses now. I think we are both secretly saving the cap.

It was minus eight in Praga and I had arrived from a warm country with one thin jacket. On the third morning there was a thick wool coat hanging on my door handle with a small note that said, from the second floor. I still do not know who it was. I wore it all winter. On the first warm day I washed it and hung it back on the second floor door, with a note of my own. The note said, thank you. It did not say anything else. I did not know what to add.

I got on a Warsaw tram on Thursday morning with a paper ticket and no idea that it had to be validated on board. A woman next to me took my ticket without a word, held it up, and pointed at the validator by the door. A minute later two inspectors came through the tram. I would have paid a fine bigger than my dinner. I thanked her in Polish, which is to say I said it wrong. She nodded as if it was perfect. I validate everything now.

You were throwing a blue frisbee to a dog in Pole Mokotowskie on Sunday afternoon and every time the dog caught it you bowed to the whole field like it was a show. I was on a blanket with a book, pretending to read. On the tenth catch the frisbee landed on my blanket. You came to get it. You said, sorry. I said, keep going. You did. By the fifteenth catch I had put the book down. The dog bowed too. I was not asked to.