I Have a Pok!

Yes, this is a gleeful proclamation, meaning that, after over a year of being effectively homeless – staying at others’ homes, I finally have an address all my own.

Not that I’m not grateful that I had clean, relatively safe places to stay during my stateside sojourn – of course I am!; in no way am I claiming that I lived rough this past year, as some are forced to do.

However, there is something about having a key to one’s own domicile that is just so validating...

I have a pok., short for pokojach, which is Polish for room.

I am aware that I could have simply written I have a room but there is already an entry with that title, and its tone is a bit sad and forlorn.

This one is meant to be gleeful! 

Besides, there is also an entry titled I Have a Box, so I guess you could say I am keeping a theme about what I have – which is ironic because of my minimalist bent.

My pok is actually a 2 bedroom, one bathroom apartment on the 4^th (top) floor of a 1920’s building. There is no elevator.

The main room will function as my main room – because the apartment owner has reserved the usage of the second room for herself, for storage. I will be the sole inhabitant of these quarters; the kitchen and bathroom are for my exclusive usage – no sharing!

My room has 2 futons in it; I envision one functioning as a bed and the other as my couch. There is a coffee table and two mismatched miscellaneous tables, a wardrobe and an area rug. The room is bookended by a wall of windows on one side and a wall unit – entertainment center cum china cabinet on the other.

The kitchen is small but functional: a gas range, a small table and plenty of cabinet space. Within one of those cabinets, we discovered a juicer that has to be nearly as old as I am!

There is cutlery and dishware as well as cookware at my disposal, all included in the rent.

The rent is 600 zloty a month: about $160. Please tell me where, in the states, you could find a fully furnished apartment for that amount of money?

But then, there is the landlord’s administrative fee, to be paid in conjunction with the rent: that is 700 PLN – more than the rent itself!

I have no idea why there is a monthly administrative fee or why, in the case of this pok, it is higher than the rent. Other apartments we’ve looked at only charge 100- or 150 zloty administrative fee.

That makes my rent just under $350 per month, and I will also have to pay for gas (for cooking) and electricity. Water is included in the rent (maybe that’s where the administrative fee comes from!)

Heat is provided by the city – a welcome change from China, where there was virtually no heat at all.

I will admit I wasn’t thrilled with this pok, at first. I was ecstatic about having a place all my own, though.

I am not happy about the four flights of stairs between my pok and the sidewalk; that is going to make carrying my two suitcases up there a test of endurance.

Who needs a gym? I’ve got a stairmaster built right into my lease!

All of the little things one might buy to make a pok theirs for the duration: bed linens, shades for the window... perhaps even a microwave: all of that will have to be purchased piecemeal, unless I want to make several trips up and down.

Also, I would rather have had a bed than a futon, but I can always buy a mattress topper (and carry it up the stairs!) to make it more like a real bed. 

And, if I turn one futon this way and scoot the other one further down the wall...

Yeah, I’m starting to see myself live there.

What I’m not seeing is any sense of urgency on my part.

When I moved to China, it was all I could to do temper my impatience to learn everything I could about Wuhan, about the bus system, about the culture and how society works.

And the agonizingly slow process of learning to speak Chinese! Which, in retrospect, really did not take that long... 

In the week I’ve been here, I have met more English and German speakers than I would have originally thought: both of my lovely realtors, Luisa and Evelina, a supermarket checkout clerk named Ursula – her husband is English and has declared himself incapable of learning Polish, so she has no choice but to speak his language if she wants to communicate with him!

And, in an amazing stroke of luck, my marvelous landlady, Wanda, speaks German.

Of course, I expected to meet German speakers; Szczecin is so close to the German border and, at one time, was actually German. That is one reason I chose to settle in this town – not because it was German but because of people who potentially speak German.

One aspect of being here that I had a genuine sense of urgency about was my morning coffee.

Like everyone else, I like my coffee a certain way and, while I can live with it being differently flavored, I prefer MY coffee: mildly sweet and creamy.

The only trouble is that, with my stomach woes, the creamy part must be generated by powdered creamers; very little that is dairy sits well in my abdomen.

Compounding the problem of the pursuit for a perfect coffee was the fact that, apparently, the Poles like their coffee black.

And so, the hunt was on.

I know from living in China that Nescafe makes a delicious pre-blended coffee and I was lucky to find some here. No economy-sized bags, though; that will make drinking my coffee very expensive, in the long run.   

Some instant coffees are branded ‘creamy’ and appeared to be blended with cream but, after trying it, I found that it was merely a smoother blend of black coffee; not a blend of coffee and cream.

By now, I am doing the grand tour of grocery stores in search of coffee creamer.

Germans generally like their coffee with condensed milk and I was lucky to find some at the second store I visited. Unfortunately, it only took a couple of cups to determine that it doesn’t sit well in my stomach.

I even made my way to Metro, that fabled store of foreigner foods that I routinely shopped at in China. In Poland, it is called Makro.

A store by any other name... still doesn’t have powdered creamer or preblended coffee.

In despair, I thought of ordering creamer online. Indeed, one Amazon shipper would send CoffeeMate to Poland, but it would be so expensive!

Mind you, I only drink 2 cups of coffee per day, so I want them to be good and satisfying, and preferably not expensive.

I had just about resigned myself to drinking coffee with sweetened condensed milk – not a bad solution, but then, I moved into my pok.

The previous tenants had left a bunch of food behind: preserves, spices, rice... COFFEE CREAMER!

Indeed, I had seen the royal blue bags with gold lettering on grocery store shelves but did not want to spend money on something that might just end up being more black coffee. So, when I had a chance to open the left-behind bag of creamer, imagine my delight at finding it was exactly what I was looking for! 

Once everybody left – the realtors and the landlady, I made my way to Auchan, a German superstore not far from the house.

On the shopping list:

·         bedsheets

·         pillow with pillowcase

·         electric kettle (none of the ones in the apartment work)

·         fresh rolls for breakfast

◦  and a pastry, an essential part of the Polish diet!

·         coffee creamer

Of course, upon returning home, it being late in the day, I couldn’t treat myself to a cup of coffee and still hope to sleep but, this morning, the coffee was bliss!

Now that the coffee question is settled, I have a new urgency: to open a bank account. Rent is payable by bank transfer... and so is Internet service.

I’d better get on it...