saving ink

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m writing an entire blog post on the ancient Chinese game of Mahjong, or at least the digitalized, solitaire version of it. I first played this game as a teenager, probably in middle school or maybe the first year of high school, when a Chinese-American friend taught it to a bunch of us and we would play for hours on her dining room table. Right away it reminded me of Rummikub, which was unknown to most Americans but familiar to me, as I had played it in Germany with my uncle as a little kid.

Nostalgia aside, I had forgotten about Mahjong for over a decade when I found and downloaded a free solitaire version of the game for my laptop. Then I found a free phone version as well, and it quickly became my go-to procrastination tool during longer periods of work. But unlike taking Facebook breaks or catching up on my Reeder feed, Mahjong breaks felt refreshing, not draining, and after a game or two I was actually ready to get back to work.

Anyway, why is any of this important enough to write about (and what does it have to do with writing, for that matter)? By playing Mahjong only during prolonged stretches of work, I managed to condition myself to work longer. By allowing Mahjong to be my only acceptable form of rest, somehow the temptation to procrastinate in other ways was significantly reduced (though not completely eliminated yet, I am only an ADD-prone human).

Playing Mahjong is also an excellent gauge of current brain functioning for me, which is an important thing to be aware of when intoxication and sleep depravation are regular occupational hazards. If I can’t complete a game in a timely manner, if the tiles are starting to blend together, I know it’s either time for sleep or more coffee. It’s a fail-safe; if I can’t put two Chinese characters together, I have no business writing anything.

My point is, over the last year I’ve learned to develop these systems that allow me to work in spite of myself, even at times when I’d much rather be out riding bikes or occupying a bar stool or even watching cheesy TV shows. Mahjong breaks are part of the system. Another trick is listening to the Battlestar Galacta soundtracks while working - something about Bear McCreary’s gorgeous classical battle compositions puts my mind in a place where it needs to create, be productive, fight battles (“Prelude to War”, anyone?), aspire to greater heights, even if it’s just translating magazine copy or writing website articles.

I wish I could say that my job is always exactly what I want to be doing, that work always feels like play, but that’s bullshit. I love my lifestyle, and there are days when I love my work, but more often there are days when it feels like work and no amount of sugarcoating will make it otherwise. Deadlines leave no room for mood swings or deliriousness. So I put these systems in place so I can work through the work until there’s less of it and more of the type of work that I do love. And even then, I have no illusions that that work will always come easily, but if I can manage to ingrain these little mind tricks, even those days won’t be as hard anymore. At least, so I hope.

In the freelance writing biz in the U.S., there are two ways to get paid: by the word and by the hour, with the first being more common in my experience so far. The rates vary from the abysmal (half a cent/word) to the half-decent, but there’s something that has always struck me as wrong about getting paid by the word.

For some reason, in Poland (and probably other parts of Europe) the pay is per character instead. Perhaps that’s a bit more fair, as it’s hard to imagine the word “convoluted” costing the same as the word “the”. But it’s still a system that emphasizes quantity, not quality, which runs counter to every piece of advice seasoned writers have given: cut, cut, cut. Hack off every piece of unnecessary flesh down to the very bones of the thought.

Pay per hour is great for journalism, when the bulk of your time is spent on research or interviews. But if you want to charge for any creative writing, pay per hour is an absurd concept. Do you put the time in the shower when that idea hit you on the invoice? Do games of Words with Friends in between bouts of writing count too? How does one bill for creative procrastination? And once again, quantity of time doesn’t translate to quality of writing.

Granted, there’s quite a quality gap between Tolstoy and SEO copywriting; maybe a quality Mariana Trench is more accurate. But as a firm believer of doing everything to the best of your ability, whether it’s washing dishes or writing a paid blog post, I tend to dislike systems set up to encourage laziness, because despite my current pontificating my natural tendency is towards the easy road, and taking the hard way is, well, harder when the game is rigged against it.

So our systems of compensation are vastly inadequate, but they exist because writers need to eat (and drink) too, and quality alone is too subjective to remunerate. Maybe in the future machines will recognize quality by a mathematical formula and pay in accordance. Though at that point, those machines would probably be doing the writing anyway.

All that aside, I still find myself rubbing my eyes in disbelief at the fact that other people pay me any sum of money for the words that come trickling out of my fingers. What a world.

I hate that question. And I hate the way most writers answer it. “I was six years old and couldn’t stop writing stories about Superman in the red leather journal I had swiped off my father’s desk…” There’s always that level of detail that no actual six-year-old would have remembered. When I was six years old, I wanted to be wall ball champion during recess. When I was seven or eight, I could have probably said I wanted to be a professional reader, because between wall ball and riding my bike and playing in the dirt like every kid did, I was reading a hell of a lot. But the occupation “writer” never popped into my head - it was always “archaeologist” or “astronaut” or “FBI agent”.

I’m 29 years old and I still don’t know if I want to be a writer. I know that out of all of the things I’m decent at, that’s the thing I enjoy most, most of the time. I know that others have earned a living this way, and with a little luck I have a reasonable shot of joining their ranks. But I don’t know if I want to be a writer. I know that I would like some more coffee right now. I know that I want to go for a bike ride later today. I know that I want to find ways of working that are both enjoyable and keep me from starving or being stuck in one place. But I don’t know if I want to be a writer, all of the time.

There are days when I want to be a pilot. There are days when my inner 12-year-old comes out and I want to be a crime-fighter. There are days when I’m confident that if I get a little bit better at Wordpress, and if I could just get a good grasp of JavaScript, I could be a web designer. There are days when writing is the hardest thing in the world and I couldn’t get 500 words out at gunpoint. There are days when the words just spill out with little or no provocation.

The truth is, there is no when. Writing is something you do, in between eating and sleeping and just trying to get by in the world with as much freedom as you can wrangle from those who want to take it from you. No one becomes a writer because they want to write every waking hour of the day, just like no lawyer spends every minute practicing law and no doctor spends every minute saving lives. In a world with limited possibilities, it’s just one way to live, and it seems like a pretty decent option to me.

This is part of my ongoing series of articles that I’ve written for Airgate magazine, one of my glamorous freelance writing gigs. This one is especially timely, considering I’m taking off for Texas in a couple of weeks, to escape the Polish winter (or at least a few months of it). Enjoy!

So, it’s your first Polish winter, you say? How hard can it really be to survive, you wonder. Or perhaps you’re a seasoned veteran of the blistering cold and are more interested in thriving rather than merely surviving? We here at Airgate care about your well-being, so whether you’d like tips for staying warm or enjoying your time out in the snow (or ideally, both!), read on.

Plan A: Get the **** out!

One might consider leaving Poland for the winter to be cheating, but I consider it as a way to maintain your sanity (and desire to live). Of course, it may be difficult or downright impossible to migrate south for months at a time due to your job, school, family responsibilities or lack of financial resources, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a more temporary escape when you need it most.

If you have a limited amount of holiday time allowed by your workplace, perhaps consider cutting that summer trip to the Baltic shorter this year (chances are it’ll rain anyway) and reserving yourself a “sanity week” come February or March or whenever you feel that spending another day looking at dirt- and dog dropping-covered snow might just drive you to consider a swan dive off the Town Hall Tower. There are plenty of warmer destinations within a few hours’ direct flight from Kraków (but you’re reading an airport magazine so you know that already), such as Rome, Italy or Alicante in Spain. You can even catch a charter flight to North African climatic paradises such as Egypt or the Canary Islands, where the average temperature in January is 17.6°C (quite nice when compared to Kraków’s January average of −2.1°C… ouch!).

Plan B: Bundle up

This may go without saying, but I have a word count to fill so I’ll say it anyway: durable, high quality winter clothes are worth their weight in gold during the cold months. Sure, your brand new trainers may be wicked right now, but come February you’ll regret sacrificing warmth for fashion when it’s -30 and you haven’t felt your toes since Christmas and are wondering if they’re still even there. A great pair of waterproof, insulated boots is indispensable come snowfall, as are the inserts (wkładki) you can buy at any shoe store for added protection. As far as jackets go, you don’t necessarily have to pay a small fortune for branded mountain trekking gear approved for -200°C with a built-in polar bear repellent (though if you plan on spending a lot of time in the Tatras, that might just come in handy), but one solid, thick jacket that’s waterproof and durable is worth shelling out a few more złoty for, particularly if you plan on spending many more winters here.

Finally, the art of layering is a good one to master. Just remember: it’s always easier to remove extra layers if you’re too warm than hope an extra layer magically materialises when you’re too cold.

Plan C: When in doubt, stay indoors

Part of Kraków’s charm is its abundance of cosy cafes, bars and restaurants, and that charm is only amplified when you’re sitting by a fire, drinking mulled wine or beer while outside snow is falling. Winter is the perfect time to explore all of those places you meant to check out during warmer days, especially if they serve hot beverages (and most do).

However, if you decide to spend most of your time in your own flat or home, be aware that your heating bills may reach astronomical proportions. There are two ways to prepare: first, put aside extra money into a “winter fund” when your bills are low in the summer, so that even a higher than expected electric or gas bill won’t put you out on the street. Some utility companies even do this automatically, by charging an averaged bill that’s identical each month and is based on your prior usage.

Second, be wise in your use of electricity or gas, both in terms of heating your flat as well as heating the water you use. Most utilities have “savings times” such as the hours between 10 pm and 6 am, and perhaps an hour or two in the afternoon, when the cost of that utility is half price (taryfy nocne). Ask your landlord or utility company when these times are, and then invest in a 12-złoty timer from Tesco or the like that will let you automatically set the heater or water heater to operate only during low cost hours.

Plan D: Embrace the cold!

The old adage “if you can’t beat them, join them” certainly applies in the case of Polish winters. While you cannot change the fact that the next few months may be unbearably cold at times and weeks may pass without you seeing the sun, you can make the best of the situation by taking up a winter sport such as skiing or snowboarding. There are several slopes within an hour or even half-hour drive of Kraków, and for longer expeditions there is the relative proximity of Zakopane, northern Slovakia or even Austria. Missing the sun? Try night skiing! Need a break from the slopes? Just about every half-decent ski lift has an adjacent diner with plenty of hot soup and mulled wine to warm you back up.

If you spend your time enjoying the cold rather than griping about it (and I suggest leaving griping in the hands of the local professionals), before you know it the sun will return and the cafes on the Market Square will be pulling their outdoor furniture back out from the cellars. And remember – when in doubt, there’s always Plan A!

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my few paid writing gigs is for Airgate Magazine, a high-brow arts publication travel rag published by the Krakow Airport. Occasionally I write quasi-interesting helpful articles for them, the newest of which you will find below.

While the summer is a time of travel and enjoying the weather (when it isn’t perpetually cold and rainy like this summer, anyway), now that autumn approaches it’s time to get back to work. But what kind of job can an expat expect in a country where he or she might not know the language, or be lacking a residency card? This month we’ll explore the available options as we look at the expat job market in Kraków.

Be the cliché

I admit that it would be pretty impossible to write an article about expat trades without starting with the most popular (or at least visible): English teacher. Contrary to popular belief, having knowledge of the language is not enough, at least in a competitive market like Kraków. Most schools today require a certificate showing your competence not only in British or US English, but also in communicating effectively to students. This is commonly met with a CELTA (Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults), TEFL Certificate (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), or TESOL Certificate (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) or similar. A Bachelor degree helps, but is not always necessary depending on the school, and proof of experience can often substitute a specific degree.

If you’re an aspiring language teacher, there are two places to earn teaching certificates in Kraków: the British Council or the Tischner European University. The average salary for English teachers tends to hover around PLN 3000 per month, though hours tend to be shorter and more flexible than traditional office work (which might be the greatest appeal of the teaching profession), allowing for extra income to be earned from private lessons. As an added bonus, while the recession has hurt many other lines of work, it has also shown the importance of language skills in an increasingly competitive job market, thus paradoxically increasing the demand for language schools and teachers.

Selling out

If you’d like to work for a multinational company with offices in Kraków – perhaps one based in your home country – the good news is there’s plenty of choice, and the pay tends to be well above the average. Examples of international companies with offices/headquarters in Kraków include IBM, Indesit, Bayer, Motorola, Lufthansa, International Paper, BP, Orlen, Shell, UBS, Google, ABB, ComArch, Sabre, Linde Industrial Gases, Mittal Steel Company, and, if your soul is also on the market, Philip Morris has a Polish branch located in Kraków as well.

The bad news is, anecdotal evidence suggests that securing a position in these companies is more often than not based on the same system at work in most hiring decisions in Poland – connections. Though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send in a CV when you spot a job you’re clearly qualified for, an easier way might be to be hired in the national branch of the company in your home country and then request a transfer.

In recent years, Kraków has also become a business process outsourcing (BPO) and shared service centre (SSC) hot spot. These jobs usually pay less but are more abundant, and include positions in human resources, finance and accounting, and call centres for companies based in other countries. Examples of these types of firms include Capgemini, AFS, Ahold, Communication Factory, and others.

Going it alone

If the thought of spending eight or more hours in an office each day defeats the purpose of living in a beautiful city like Kraków for you, you’re not alone. Another way to find work in Kraków is to simply create it, by starting a business. There are two ways to do this, and your personality, skill set and interests will determine what kind of business you start. I won’t go into the specifics of actually registering a company in Poland as that’s been covered by our financial guru Tej Panesar in a previous issue of Airgate.

If your skills generally require you to sit in front of a computer to make money (i.e. programming, graphic design, writing, translating, photo editing, etc.), freelancing is a good option. There are plenty of expats in Kraków and around Poland supporting themselves this way by running a one-person company (jednoosobowa działalność gospodarcza), yours truly included. Start-up costs are low, and generally include the cost of registration of the company, including accounting help if necessary (and if you don’t speak Polish, that’s definitely a necessity), website design, and marketing in order to secure clients. The downside: as with freelancing anywhere in the world, there are alternating times of feast and famine, and you may have to rely on one of the two previously mentioned sources of employment in downtimes. Note that non-EU citizens can establish a sole proprietorship only if they have a permit of settlement or asylum.

The second option is opening a brick and mortar shop or business. The start-up costs here are much higher and generally require investors as well as extensive accounting and legal help, but the rewards can be much higher as well. Here, residency issues can get quite tricky, and it’s not uncommon for non-Poles to have Polish business partners, as their native knowledge is often invaluable to the success of the company. If you’re interested in starting a business in Kraków, a helpful resource is the Polish Information and Foreign Investment Agency website.

Anything else?

While the above-mentioned livelihoods are certainly the most common, there are some other options. If you’re highly skilled in a technical field that’s in demand (such as electronics, engineering, some programming or AutoCAD), you may be able to work for a Polish company regardless of your Polish language skills. There’s also the possibility of working for film companies as an English-speaking actor or doing voice-overs – a long shot, sure, but it pays well and is probably more fun than most other options.

Most importantly, don’t be discouraged if you can’t land your dream job the second you arrive in Kraków. If you’re determined to make this city your home, all you need is the perseverance to build your network of contacts, improve and diversify your skills and language abilities and eventually you’ll find the right career for you.

I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, and no matter how I try to rationalize it (I’ve had a lot of work, my parents visited, there was an epic wedding weekend, I had to clean up cat puke) and say I’ve been too busy living to write, I find that excuse leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Imagine me dropping dead and my obit reading, “She was doing so well but then she got too busy to breathe. Poor thing.”

So what’s the problem, exactly? It’s been eight months since I left my old job and turned freelance. I’m slowly getting to the position where I’m getting steady work (though I need to do more marketing and sort out some legal details still). My website is set up, so all that’s left is to do the actual work when I have it, and that takes far fewer hours per week than my old job required of me, especially since I no longer have to spend eight hours in an office whether I have work to do or not. I have more time than I’ve had since my first year of college (the only time I didn’t also have a job), and plenty of ideas for writing projects, not just in this blog. And yet, it seems that every part of my day is increasingly occupied. So what’s the matter with me?

I think I’ve isolated at least part of it: I may have left my old job behind in December, but I took my old habits with me.

When I had to sit in an office all day, I developed coping mechanisms. As I’m a late riser and night worker, I’d spend the first hour or two of each morning just trying to force my brain awake so I could start being productive. This involved visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, downing enough coffee to dispatch a small elephant and generally killing time until I either had to do something time-sensitive or felt like my brain was present enough to start writing an actual article.

When I used to check email at work, it was a matter of keeping my head above water during the daily flood, which meant ignoring a good number of messages, putting many off until the absolute last minute, and dealing with the truly urgent ones - but not immediately, just before it was too late.

These days, I set my own hours. If I feel like working early (say, noonish), I work early. If I feel like getting groceries and working out and making a nice dinner during the day and then working until the wee hours, I do that. I don’t have a set schedule, I have a schedule regulated by necessity and efficiency. I work when I feel I’m most productive. As for email, it’s no longer a flood but a manageable trickle.

And yet, I still won’t answer some messages for days, though they require minimum effort on my part. Worse still, I find myself spending significant parts of my day visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, drinking coffee and energy drinks and generally killing time. Except now it’s my time that I’m wasting, not an employer’s, and I’m the only one losing out.

This week was a bit of an eye-opener, in that all of my precious habits that I had developed during my years of working at the newspaper and continued into my freelance life were forcefully disrupted. My parents visited for the week, and since my apartment is tiny that meant I slept at a friend’s place while they took over my flat. That meant no computers, TV or even wifi before bed or right in the morning. Over the weekend two of my good friends got married, and since it was a proper Polish wedding that meant the festivities started on Thursday and finished Monday morning. Luckily, I didn’t have much work during that time, and none of it was that urgent, so that means I spent less time in front of my computer and more time surrounded by breathing human beings that weekend than I had in years - and I had an amazing time. Sure, it helped that the wedding party was well stocked with enough food and booze to keep a small nation-state going for weeks, and that I was surrounded by old friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, as well as my parents, who I see about once a year, but in the end what matters is that the world kept going even if I wasn’t constantly reading about it, and I didn’t die of boredom even if I didn’t constantly have a screen in front of my face.

Does that mean I’m going to throw out my computers and start crashing Polish weddings? No, I like working just enough to ward off imminent starvation (though, have you ever seen a Polish wedding? Crashing those would keep me fed for life…). But it does mean that I need to reevaluate how I spend my time, so that every minute spent in front of a screen is spent doing something that will either earn me money now or in the future. I need to start creating more and consuming less. I need to unsubscribe from RSS feeds (or just delete Reeder off my Mac and phone), be content with listening to the BBC while making breakfast for my daily news fix, turn off the screens before bed and get enough sleep so I can drink coffee for pleasure, not necessity, and take back my time.

In other words, I need to unsubscribe from my old habits, and embrace new ones. It’s about time.

Last month, I posted A Brief History of Poland for Non-Poles, which had originally run in the spring issue of Airgate magazine (one of my glamorous freelance writing gigs). The natural follow-up would be a brief history of the city I’ve now lived in for nearly six years: Kraków (which originally appeared in the summer issue of Airgate). Enjoy.

While the nation of Poland had yet to exist before the 11th century, by then Kraków had several hundred years of history under its belt. According to legend (an irrefutable historical source, if you ask me), the settlement was established in the fourth century when a brave shepherd named Krak defeated the dragon living under Wawel Hill, rendering the surrounding lands safe for settlement and flourishing under his rule. Unfortunately, certain killjoys calling themselves “historians” debate this legend, citing instead a tribe of Vistulans as the original settlers of Wawel Hill.

Capital status

Around 990, the first royal dynasty, Piast, incorporated Kraków into their territories, and the growing city became the seat of the Polish government in 1038. The city gained even more prestige in 1364, when King Casimir III founded the Cracow Academy (now the Jagiellonian University), the second oldest such institution in Central Europe. The university, along with the city’s capital status, made Kraków a flourishing centre of learning and arts in medieval Europe, home to such visionaries as Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik as they called him at home). Its Jewish history was also cultivated during this time, when the district of Kazimierz was established in 1495 as a home for the area’s Jewish community.

The Renaissance came to the city in the 15th century, and with it new ideas in the sciences and further development of the arts and all good intellectual pursuits. Much of Kraków’s iconic architecture arose at this time, including the famous alter of St Mary’s Cathedral, and most of the structures of Wawel Castle, when King Sigismund I hired a Florentine architect for some major remodelling.

However, Kraków’s role as royal capital would only last until 1596, when Swede Sigismund III moved the capital to Warsaw (a demotion many Cracovians still feel angry about today).

Invasions and partitions

After several Mongol invasions left the city in ruins, Cracovians finally got smart and decided to build a wall – and not just any wall, but a 3 km massive defensive structure with 46 towers at its completion, the most famous of which is St Florian’s Gate, still standing today. However, no amount of towers could prevent the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that began in the 17th century and cumulated in the three partitions of Poland and the end of the Polish nation at the end of the 18th century. For the next 123 years, Kraków’s fate would be in the hands of the Austrian Empire.

Austrian overlords

In 1795, Kraków officially became a part of the Austrian province of Galicia. By most accounts, the Cracovians had it better than Poles under Russian or Prussian rule. The city again became a centre of culture and art, called the “Polish Athens”, after 1866, when Galicia gained autonomy and Polish became the official language of the area once again. This was another golden era for Kraków, when bigwigs of art such as Jan Matejko, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Stanisław Wyspiański and other names you’ll find in the National Museum were flourishing.

At the start of the 20th century, Kraków was a thriving modern metropolis, with a newly built tram network consisting of such wonders as electric lighting. While the First World War did some damage to the city, it was relatively unscathed and had the added benefit of being incorporated into the newly-reformed Polish state in 1919, which lasted a grand total of 20 years before Hitler and Stalin ruined the party.

Modern Kraków

The Second World War devastated the Cracovian population, especially its previously burgeoning Jewish community, but left the city’s infrastructure mostly unharmed. After the war, the new Soviet authorities ordered the construction of Nowa Huta as a working man’s counterpart to bourgeois, academic Kraków. Ironically enough, the district, now a part of Kraków, became a centre of anti-communist protests in the 1980s, and now remains a relic of communist chic since the fall of the Iron Curtain and Poland’s regained independence in 1989.

Though no longer serving as Poland’s capital, today Kraków still enjoys the title of “Cultural Capital of Poland” (and has the UNESCO status to prove it), and Cracovians certainly like to mention this fact as often as possible. And while it may not get the important state visits or high-level bankers that Warsaw enjoys, most Cracovians will tell you that they’re proud of living in an ancient city founded by a dragon-slayer.