Airline Drama

Vayama.com (specialty: cheap, international, multi-leg airplane reservations. NOT their specialty: customer service) has an etiquette section of their website based on what is and isn't acceptable in different cultures. It's not as complete as the Canadian one I mentioned in a past post, but their section on Poland does hit the major questions.

I've only heard good things about Vayama. Which is why I surprised by my customer service disaster. I went online to check-in for my flight to LA. While I was online, I thought that I might as well verify my flight to Poland and see if I could get better seats. Alas, I wasn't able to access my reservation because there'd been a change to it. Who knows when this change happened because Vayama never notified me about it. So, I called customer service three times, leaving a message each time. When they finally called me back, it was a woman with a very heavy accent telling me that I needed to reconfirm my flights because two of the flight numbers had changed. So I reconfirmed, and she sent me a confirmation e-mail.

On the confirmation e-mail, I discovered that not only had those two flight numbers changed, but another flight number had changed, a flight time had changed (which is slightly more important), and my e-ticket number on LOT had changed - probably the most significant change, in my opinion. So, I went onto LOT airlines to see if I could finally confirm my seats. The same LOT website I couldn't access with my old e-ticket number, which was making me think for quite a few scary hours that they'd just canceled my flights and not notified me. On the LOT website, I found out that the seats I had selected when booking my flight were lost since I hadn't reconfirmed the changes to my itinerary in time - the changes that no one notified me about. So, I picked a (new and) terrible (aisle) seat, hoping that the people near the window - the best place for a nine hour sleeping flight - weren't going to want to get in and out all the time.

That, wasn't what I considered terrible customer service until I returned from California and went to check my twitter. During this process, I had tweeted my frustrations:

Evidently @vayama changed my reservation. Didn't e-mail or notify me in any way about it. Now @vayama isn't answering my calls.

At least I went on-line to see if I could change my seats today and found out even if @vayama didn't want to notify me itself.

I had to reconfirm my flights because the flight number changed. Seems a bit excessive. I'm sure @vayama has a reason? Glad it's fixed.

Oh, And they only told me about the changes to two of my flights... not to the third...

But what was worse than my tweets were the response from their "customer service."

VayamaVoice: @omahairish the AIRLINE changed your flight not vayama. Glad it's fixed now.

VayamaVoice: @omahairish you can always view the CURRENT status of your itinerary by going to www.vayama.com/mytrip

Seriously, Vayama? I KNOW who changed my flight. The issue is that I was never notified by the people who should have notified me. Also, even now, I can't view the CURRENT status of my itinerary because of this. I replied to him. I know I should just drop it, but I've never heard of customer service types being that incredibly rude.

What's sketchy about this customer service twitter feed is that it's separate from their official twitter. I thought their official twitter was @vayama. This is @vayamavoice. He's only been operating since May 6, but hardly has any tweets. Also, he only has three followers. All of this points to : NOT REAL. Sorry if I'm not going to send you the info you need to get into my account.

All this points to, I'll avoid using Vayama again. Which is too bad, because they're super cheap and useful as far as websites go.

Oh, and you should check out their Polish Etiquette page.

Grammar and Keyboards

I'm never going to learn Polish! Also, the Polish language keyboard I downloaded for my laptop is super confusing. I'm beginning to learn where everything is, but it's hard to remember to switch my y's and z's when typing.

Anyway, today's frustration results from finally completing a written exercise in Polish on LiveMocha.

The parts in orange are the corrections! And, the reviewer forgot to change "Jesteś gruba" to "Jesteś gruby" because technically it's the same "you" as in "Jesteś bogaty!" I'm terrible with subject/verb agreements. It's my downfall after six years of French, too.

Ten chłopiec jest niski. On jest młody. Ta kobieta jest stara. Ona jest niska. Ten mężczyzna jest wysoki. On jest gruby. Jestem biedny. Jestem wysoki. Jesteś bogaty. Jesteś gruba. Dziewczyna jest niska. Dziewczyna jest młoda. On jest (he's) wysoki, gruby, niski, ładny Ona jest (she's) wysoka, gruba, niska, ładna

Check out the confusing the Polish international keyboard for QWERTY US keyboards (compliments of Microsoft).

A day with fast internet

I drove into town (a phrase that makes my friends laugh at me because I'm only 15 minutes away from the city, but it seems like I live hours from civilization from how I talk) in order to visit an internet cafe. I had no real purpose - thinking I might delve more into grad schools. Upon arriving at the coffee shop with its glorious wifi I remembered I still needed to download the pdf accompaniment for the Mission Europe podcasts I was raving about earlier.

Good thing I downloaded them. They're officially the coolest things ever. If I was teaching a Polish language class, I would use these for sure. They're so much fun with pictures and color and the words in Polish (but with a bilingual dictionary in the back) and little grammar break out boxes! I'm completely obsessed with it and will most likely be spending my entire evening playing with them.

Which is actually a problem, given the fact that I also received an e-mail asking me where my final report for my grant to Dublin is... despite the fact that I e-mailed her a month ago asking her if she received it. Which means, I need to spiff it up and resend it.

One of my language partners on LiveMocha suggested his website to me. It's very busy and unorganized, which are downsides. However, the website does have some cool features. On the dictionary page (I'll have to do another post on a good Polish-English dictionary online. I've had some real problems when trying do to do translations.) there is the sweetest text-to-speech tool. It looks like it's embedded, and I'm not sure who to give real credit to for this awesome feature. I know tools such as this are out there for French, but because I always found French so easy to pronounce, I never explored them. This Polish one is so useful! Granted, with these online things you get out of it what you put in. So proper spelling and use of the correct accent marks is essential!

The lessons page of his website is a joke. It looks like someone just pulled in random videos from YouTube about Polish. The grammar section is equally unhelpful. It just has a pdf of a book someone wrote about Polish grammar. I've seen the same information in more pleasing formats elsewhere online. But, for that sort of thing, I prefer hard copy text. There are some flashcards that aren't terrible, but, yet again, I'd prefer to go to the original site than suffer through the original interface. It's a great compilation of materials, but there's too much going on and the format is hard to focus on, unfortunately.

Fashion in Europe

It's probably a sign of my youth that I'm this fashion conscious about going to a foreign country. I don't want to stick out as an American, especially as Americans are evidently hated by the rest of the world. Or at the very least, we're considered rude and loud. If you heard my mother's family all together during Christmas, you'd believe the loud bit at least. I'm sure some of the rudeness is just a cultural difference. I was always of the "when in Rome" way of traveling. Recently, I've changed my mind a bit. It's so hard to find what people find socially acceptable. Forums and websites offer conflicting views - probably because of regional and generational differences. Taking this into mind, it seems a lot more reasonable that people will make gaffes that are considered rude.

Back to fashion, though. Rumor has it no one wears flip-flops - my summer shoe of choice - in Europe. I began flipping through fashion blogs to see if there's a general "style" that's big in Poland. When I was last in Dublin I noticed that women rarely wore jeans or pants. Tights and dresses were the thing. Heels or at the very least boots were required. Hairstyles tended to be wavy and look almost unbrushed, and heavy make-up was only popular among a certain "punk" group of teenagers.

My pre-departure "how to learn a foreign language" class (required) warned about dressing in a manner that fit the culture. Especially for women wanting to avoid unnecessary catcalls or attention of any kind, dressing more modestly than normal might be required. In America, mini skirts are now the size of belts, and if a skirt is an inch or two below your butt, it's considered acceptable. Understandably, I'm worried about what will be considered acceptable elsewhere.

At least the weather will stay cool - the 60s and 70s - and rainy, encouraging some of my cuter outfits. My mom keeps telling me that when she was in Poland (when she was 18, as the stirrings of Solidarity were beginning) blue jeans were very high fashion. Evidently they smuggled jeans in and sold them on the black market. Which sounds very exciting, but a little bit like it could not be true anymore.

For now, I'll just shop for appropriate summer footwear and pack just enough outfits to get by.

T-minus Three Weeks to Takeoff

The problem when most people ask me why I'm learning Polish is that I don't have one, singular GREAT reason for it. I generally go with the vague answer that it's for professional development. Some graduate schools require knowledge of two languages other than English for their Ph.D. programs. I know French well enough to get by there, so that leaves me looking for a second language. Polish does not serve any real purpose there either. While I am interested in the movement of Polish communities in America, I am fairly certain my dissertation will be on the historical and literary changes in the way Americans define and treat mental illness. Therefore, I'm stuck without a good answer.

The "real" reasons are as follows:

• In reality, my childhood heroes have mostly been Polish (with the exception of one Miss Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran): Marie Curie, Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałesa, etc.
• The poetry of Wisława Szymborska is some of the most beautiful work I've ever read.
• My mother once told me, in a fit of international pride, that we were descended from Nicholas Copernicus.
• My Polish grandfather was incredibly proud of his heritage, and I think we would have gotten along well, despite my semi-lapsed Catholicism.
• The travel bug bit me. Hard. A trip to Poland, especially one funded by my generous university, is too much to pass up.

I'm not looking to reclaim a heritage. I'm proud of my mixed ancestry, and generally, when people ask where I come from, I'm more likely to say "Nebraska" than I am to rattle off the list of countries from which my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents immigrated.

The idea of traveling somewhere by myself when I don't speak the language spooked my type A into action. I combed blogs, discussion forums, and language resources for information about Poland. I'm almost an expert on Polish language resources (in English) on the web. Mixed with my experiences in Poland will be an evaluation of those resources in case some similarly driven person stumbles upon this blog one day.

I started with cultural information. It's supposed to be impossible to get around on trains if you don't know Polish because none of the signs are bilingual except for maybe in Krakow and Warsaw. There go my plans to visit the Sacred Heart school in Pobiedziska some weekend.

I found a great Canadian resource on what is appropriate in Polish culture. As I experience more of Poland, I'll have to make my own decision about whether or not their ideas of cultural customs are accurate. I am a little nervous about the cultural customs about drinking. I don't seem to have the stomach for vodka, and evidently the Polish expect you to pound it back as well as they do. Or, at the very least, you're to drink whenever a toast is made.

My two favorite for-beginners language services are Live Mocha and an amazing podcast called Mission Krakow (Misja Kraków).

Live Mocha offers Rosetta Stone-style language courses for free - or a low cost when one advances to higher levels of language learning. You will not learn any phrases incredibly useful for travelling in the first few lessons, but it has a drill-like system that mixes audio, picture representations, and visual displays of the word itself to help one really learn the material. The program keeps the material mixed up enough to keep it interesting. Live Mocha's peer-review set-up allows those with native language capabilities to help new learners, and it's easy to find someone eager to help a newbie learn. It helps give a feel for the set up and grammar of the language. With a language such as Polish, I knew I wanted the audio help that comes with a program such as Live Mocha because, at first at least, I would be struggling over pronunciation.

Downside: the format isn't easily accessible to those of us with slow internet, and the language lessons will take at least an hour to complete. Live Mocha is meant for those who are serious about their language study with the time to devote to it. When I was fitting in Polish research between term papers and club meetings, it was nearly impossible to complete a lesson. You can, however, go back at any time to where you left off in a lesson or to redo a lesson.

Mission Europe is a series of spy-adventure themed podcasts. They are perhaps the coolest things ever. It places an agent, in the case of Poland, Suzanna, in a foreign country with a mystery to solve. The Polish one consists of 26 episodes designed to help you learn Polish along with Suzanna. Each podcast is only about five minutes long, but you'll want to listen to it more than once. Suzanna can be quite annoying at times as she bumbles along, trying to figure out what people are saying. However, it teaches essential language from the beginning - Hello, I don't understand, Please, etc. On the website are accompanying pdfs so you can learn what the words actually look like. I wish I had started with this podcast instead of some of the others I've tried - ones that we'll explore later. I find the podcast method to be the most effective for someone with a busy lifestyle. I can listen to them while walking to and from class, in the car, or even at my computer while writing this post.