Monthly Challenge

My Unforgettable St Andrew’s Celebration

How could she know what would happen in my future?

Every month, with great anticipation, I wait for the next topic of the Globetrotters monthly challenge, and every time when the topic finally gets revealed, my first thought is the same “Oh… there is nothing I can write about it…”. Yet every time I submit an article to the challenge.

And so it was also this time. I read the topic and… What should I write about? I have never seen a ghost. Oh, except for the time when as a teenager, I decided to watch a horror movie that ended shortly before midnight. I swear I saw someone looking at me through the kitchen door, but… most probably, this was just the creation of my petrified imagination…

Then, there are all the stories about weird occurrences when someone close to my family dies. No, we don’t see any ghosts, but unexplained things happen. Like the porcelain lamp in the bathroom, which was perfectly fine in the evening, but in the morning, I found half of it lying on the concrete floor. It was as if someone had cut the lamp in half and placed the piece on the floor. My dad immediately knew it would be his uncle who passed away, and so it was. But these stories have nothing to do with travel; they all happened in our home (and no, I wasn’t living in a haunted house — lol).

When I think about travel, then… Maybe the experience I had in the dilapidated town of Wilcannia when I travelled across Australia. The abandoned ramshackle buildings with walls covered in graffiti, and the shops with windows filled with steel bars had some eerie feeling to them. But though the town looked really scary, the incident was more a racist act than something spooky…

Or maybe I should share my experience in Christchurch, which I visited not so long after the devastating earthquake… But, no, this was more heartbreaking than ghostly…

In Poland, we don’t even celebrate Halloween… I know about the event, but somehow I have never joined any celebrations, so I don’t have stories to tell. Maybe I could use my “ghost photos” and make up some stories? This would be an idea, but I can’t find the photos (except for that title photo), and anyway, that’s just a photographer’s trick while playing with the shutter speed and exposure.

And so, while trying to find a topic to write about, I came across an article written by Susan Wheelock that reminded me of an event when my future was predicted and, in some respect, this story not only is a bit spooky, but it also relates to travel.

The unforgettable Celebration of St Andrews’s Day (Andrzejki)

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It was during my first or second year at grammar school. I was eight years old. The celebration, which included divination, was slightly modified to adjust it for children.

The class was adorned for the celebration with simple decorations made from blotting paper and some pictures. Each kid would melt the wax from a candle through the hole of an old-fashioned skeleton key. The wax would land in a bowl of cold water, and the cooled wax would take shape. The teacher took the wax and held it in the light where it would cast a shadow upon the wall.

Like yesterday I remember the shape of my wax figure. It was clearly a huge hiking boot. The teacher examined the shadow, and after a short while, she said to me, “You will be a traveller. You will leave Poland, travel the world and live in foreign countries”. Well, for you, this doesn’t sound like a big deal- everyone travels the world, so there is nothing special about that. But let’s take a step back to where I came from.

It was November 1982. At that time, in Poland, we had martial law. Travelling in our own country was bordering with miracles for many reasons, like the curfew or the fact that you couldn’t buy food anywhere except in the town of your residence (we had coupons that were valid only in our town).

Furthermore, since the end of World War II, from the moment the Russians took the regime over our young country (Poland gained independence in 1918), nobody was allowed to leave the country. Some tried to cross the borders illegally, but many of them paid with their lives for that or got arrested (and prison in a communist country means torture).

All I knew about life was that there are other countries, but we must not talk about them. We need to show our respect and gratitude to our saviour — Russia. No other country is as great and marvelous as Russia. (I feel a shiver down my spine just thinking about it).

I knew that being non-catholic meant we were from a religious minority, and for us, going to church was a criminal offence, so we needed to be careful not to get caught. I knew not everyone was healthy, and there were disabled people, but I never saw any because they weren’t allowed to be seen in public. Being disabled was… criminal offence. And so on.

Anyway, I think you got the picture of my life when I was eight years old. So when my teacher told me that I would travel the world, it was as if someone told me, “You will travel between various planets and live on the Moon or Mars”. It was simply beyond something I could imagine.

Times changed, and when I was 23 (after going through many difficulties in life), I left Poland for Germany, where I was Au Pair and later stayed to study. I travelled through Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and now call Australia my home (I’m Australian by choice). Nonetheless, until today I remember the special St Andrew’s celebration, and I wonder how my teacher could know my life would take that turn. This is still a mystery to me and, in some respect, spooky.

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