Emergency Help for Language-Learning Ear

It's Polski Piątek, you lucky people. Did I mention yet that when I was in Krakow a couple of Sundays ago, I passed by the Dominican church near the Main Square and the kneeling crowd spilled out the door?

I myself had been to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass at Holy Cross (Kosciół Swiętego Krzyża), which began at 7:15 PM, so it was probably 8:30 PM when I passed by the Dominican Church, its congregation kneeling through the Canon. I had two thoughts about the huge, devoted crowd. The first was, "Hooray for Catholic Poland, ever faithful!" The second was, "Last Sunday Mass in town, eh?" Both thoughts engendered in me a lot of fellow feeling.

The results of studying Polish for two hours daily for a solid month, plus spending five days in western Poland, were apparent in my first Polish class this term. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Polish class last night. Alas. Although I could explain that I did not have a classmate's phone number, I could not articulate my thoughts, in a clever and inoffensive way, on Mass Migration and why I did not think fictional Pan Jurek in our homework was necessarily a racist for fearing a potential  mass migration of Muslims. (In the story, there was no protest that these were bona fide Syrian and Iraqi Christian families fleeing Islamist persecution, i.e. the people Poles really do want to help.)

 I was extremely annoyed that this was to be our topic, so I did not feel badly that the teacher was taken aback by the un-PC sentiments coming from our mature-student class. "Maybe Pan Jurek remembers Simon Mol," was my outrageous remark whereas another student reflected on a very nice, terribly lonely, old lady who is the last Englishwoman in her London neighbourhood. She did not elaborate if this neighbourhood was Ealing. Ah ha ha ha ha!

Home, sweet home.

Speaking of migration, if anyone wants to know what the mysterious sign outside the Polish shop on the Rough Bus route said, it was "Fresh Milk from Poland." Personally, I am extremely sensitive about foreign-language signs which so obviously exclude the host population. Here's a photo from my neighbourhood back home:

But I am totally off-topic, to say nothing of writing about one of my least favourite, and most trouble-making, subjects. I shall cut to the chase and try to get my Polish skills back to their October 5 level by posting a video of a singer singing "Hej Sokoły", a traditional song which all Poles seem to know and sing at the top of their lungs at weddings.

Speaking of the Ukraine--in which Poles used to live in vast numbers (and now live in very small numbers), Poland has taken in thousands of Ukrainian refugees. There's sort of this war going on in Eastern Ukraine, which everyone in the West seems to have forgotten about.