Friday: Hili dialogue (with extras)

September 25, 2015 • 2:31 am

Professor Ceiling Cat is under the weather today, having caught some kind of grotty virus, undoubtedly from confinement in a plane with a gazillion people. This means that posting will be light as I lie abed trying to recuperate. In the meantime, I’ll show not only Hili, but first a picture of Andrzej’s and Malgorzata’s property in Dobrzyn where I’m staying. The house and grounds are outlined with a rectangle in the satellite photo below, which Andrzej found on Google Earth. Click to enlarge.

To the right in the photo is the small village of Dobrzyn, population about 2,500, located about 2.5 hours west of Warsaw. As you see, it’s situated on a river: the Vistula, the longest and widest river in Poland. (It’s very wide at Dobrzyn because of a dam in nearby Wroclawek.) You can see the driveway heading south to the house from the road, and the orchard on all sides. To the south of the orchards are some woods where Hili likes to hunt, and these run down to the river.

imageedit_4_5857810512

I’m honored that today’s dialogue features yours truly (and yes, some reader will surely reprove me for using “yours truly” instead of “me”):

Hili: Reading is a great pleasure.
Jerry: You are right, but what do you get out of it?
Hili: The company of well-read people.

P103z

In Polish:
Hili: Czytanie to wielka przyjemność.
Jerry: Masz rację, ale co ty z tego masz?
Hili: Towarzystwo ludzi oczytanych.

32 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue (with extras)”

  2. I see you’re holding your own well against Cyrus…

    Cool map, and what a wonderfully located piece of property–on a river, countrified, but so handily close to a town!

    Looks like there may be rapids upstream?

    Also–pamper yourself and get well soon!

  3. I was in Krakow last weekend, also on the Vistula, and can’t recommend Poland and Polish hospitality highly enough. Just beware 13-hour wodka-fuelled barbecues.

  4. Nothing wrong with ‘yours truly’ –
    Thackeray, Pendennis (1850) I. iii. 31 “Give the young one a glass,..and score it up to yours truly.”
    OED Online

  5. In Australia, we call a grotty virus, the ‘dreaded lurgy’ and lots of us are ‘under the weather’ here. Humans in confined air conditioned space, brought me undone as well. Take care – rest, rest, rest…….

  7. I flew to Poland once. I rembember being impressed by how the land use patterns were suddenly different as we passed over the border. Property boundaries (farm fields) became the long and narrow patterns you see above. I assume it reflected some sort of inheretance that divides the land among offspring combined with the absence of practices of large-scale property ownership by corporations. I’d love for someone to tell me if I was right or not.

    1. Well, it is a long story. All over Europe peasants farms were divided in small bits because of inheritence and some other factors. At the second part of XIX century all protestant countries in Europe experienced deep agricultural reform which resulted in changes in structure of small farmers farms. (Catholic countries in Western Europe dragged their feet but later did it as well.) All those small and divided plots were united. Poland was divided in that time between Germany, Austria and Russia. This farm reform was done only in the part occupied by Germany. During short time of independence between the wars there was much talk about land reform and peasant farm reform but very little was done. After the WWII communists promised real land reform, but quickly decided to nationalize all land and create socialist agriculture. Polish peasants opposed it with all their might and the structure was practically frozen. Government didn’t want to make farmers stronger, and peasants didn’t want to give up.
      Now the structure of Polish agriculture is rapidly changing, but still you can see the history of this struggle from the air. (Now small farmers rather sell their farms then unite their divided plots.)

        1. Yes, thanks for this interesting commentary. By creating ‘socialist’ agriculture, do you mean the government would own the land the farmer’s used? I’m used to the term ‘socialism’ to mean the people (farmers) own the land with government oversight or something similar. I know ‘socialism’ is one of the words in the acronym USSR, but I always thought it the anti-thesis of communism. Anyway, I’ve probably opened a can of semantic worms.

      2. Very interesting, thank you Andrzej!

        GB, here in the Midwest US there are lots of plots like that to be found side by side. I was told they were sectioned like that so that more houses could be close to the road–much cheaper utility hookups. It also allows for bigger fields and fewer roads, as the “blocks” can thus be pretty deep.

        When we were house-hunting we wanted a bit of property, but not a section like that (because of the close farms on either side) and we had to bypass several otherwise lovely homesteads before we found the more or less squarish 20 acres we have.

        1. Some, maybe. But nothing like the pattern I saw in Poland. Most of our Midwestern land use reflects the Township-Range layout of the early 19th Century. Farms, from the air, are mostly combined 40 acre squares, with variation tossed in by geomorphology.

          1. True. The plots we were looking at were smaller, and could easily be such squares cut in half or 4ths.

            Yes, here our county is composed of a 4 x 4 square of 6-mile square townships, within which the divisions originally tended to be the 40 acre ones you describe. And the county is technically divided by roads every half mile, although very few cut all the way through; many take a perpendicular turn at a road and resume sometime after they turn back the other way. Thus, by knowing that I live on 43rd St you would know I live 4.5 miles from the east end of the county. 😀

            I couldn’t get over all this when I first moved here.:D

          2. As a young man, working as an archaeologist doing field surveys, I got used to thinking in the odd terms used to describe this all…

            “N 1/2 of SE 1/4 of NW 1/4 of NW 1/4 of Section 7 of Foobar Township”

  9. Boss,

    I can’t express to you how glad I am that you have taken some quality time off to be with friends again.

    That, and how much I look forward to the food pics. And all your discoveries and experiences in and around Dobrzyn.

    More pics please!

    Much pleasure and relaxation wished to you and yours.

  12. Get well soon Jerry…sucks to be under the weather on vacation. I used to get sick as well on long flights. Nowadays, I overdose on vitamin C before a flight. Don’t know if it’s woo magic, but I haven’t been sick from flying for a while now.

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