Wednesday, May 30, 2007

polish connection US

Polish people abroad tend to look for the company of other Polish people. I do not fully understand this phenomenon, but my feeling is that the motivation that drives that sort of behavior is the basic human need to find people with similar to our own mentality, views on life and values.
After arriving to San Francisco I also looked for Polish friends (e.g. using my favorite craigslist), but somehow that did not work too well. And then, purely by lack, I met Natalia. She was a waitress in the restaurant to which Lev and I went for a dinner and she was as happy to meet me as I was to meet her. We exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, but somehow we did not contact each other for around two months. The occasion to meet finally came last Saturday when Natalia was celebrating getting a BA degree.

Natalia is an artist/painter. That's the party invitation she sent to me:


I couldn't stay at Natalia's party for too long as Jochen was visiting me during that weekend and he did not feel like going there. Anyway, even during the short time spent there I enjoyed myself a lot and got to know yet another Polish girl (called Monika ;-)).

The party was mainly taking part in the garden decorated with colorful lights and Natalia's paintings:


During the party I also met Natalia's mother (Iwonka), whom I instantly liked a lot (I realized that if I like somebody a lot, I also always like their parents equally strongly). Iwonka must have liked me as well, as she asked if I wanted to take part in the video clip that Natalia and her husband (Matt vel Mateusz vel Muzeum) were shooting. Of course I agreed.

On Monday I got a call from Natalia: Can you be in 1.5h there and there, wearing this and that? Sure I can.
This is how my "ladder" adventure started. My role was very small: basically I was asked to carry a ladder from point A to point B. Few pictures from that evening you can see in the post called ladders. But still it was a very interesting experience for me to see how these kinds of things are done, and I was very impressed by the level of professionalism of everybody involved in the shooting of that video clip. I also got to know many interesting people and all along had lots of fun. Once the video clip is ready, of course I am going to share it with you (unless it is truly embarrassing for me ;-)).

On Tuesday we were supposed to shoot another scene in which I was supposed to "perform" again, but that had to be cancelled as the previous scenes took more time than Matt and Natalia had expected and their camera time run out. Thanks to it I had more time to document the process of video making. Here are few of my pics:











The song for which we were shooting a clip is called "Window" and was written and performed by Bajzel. You can listen to it here or live in "W starym kinie" in Poznan.