There is a place in the closest shopping mall from where I live that I usually can call and book an appointment for a haircut.
Today however, after the girl on the phone introduced herself in Polish and I introducing myself in English over the phone I was met with silence.
After some awkward moments of not understanding each other I said to her 'moment... moment....' (meaning wait, wait in Polish) and I tried to google really fast how to say 'haircut' in Polish on my phone. Meanwhile I hear her saying really loud and clear 'NO SPEAK ENGLISH' :)
At this moment I had found the the word which to be honest is quite hard to remember 'ostrzyżenie', and I tried to pronounce it in somewhat broken Polish for her. After that and little bit more struggle somehow we managed to get a booking settled for 18.00... so I thought.
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I walk in to the place at around 18.05, and I'm greeted by probably the same girl. Again we have the same awkward introduction in Polish, and then me in English, but this time in fully live awkwardness 😐
I try so say that I just called you 2 hours ago, and should be in the booking system. She stands there like a lit candle just looking at me... I try something like 'teraz' (means now in Polish), and 'dzisiaj' (means today) and resort to classic body language communication by pointing at my watch and giving her the full charades by even showing how my hands are cutting my hair above my head (btw, throughout my journey in Poland I've become explicitly good in body language communication).
But the message doesn't get through. We are at a standstill. Then suddenly comes a dude from nowhere and I ask him 'You speak English?', he answers 'Yeah sure' in perfect English. He helps me to translate and it turns out my name is finally not in the system, meaning that my phone call failed before (maybe I should have expected that 😉).
While arranging a haircut for the next day by the help of this guy, another man walks in and hears our conversation. He says in perfect English 'Hey guys, what's up here... they're full today?'.... and this girl at the reception looks at us all like we are from Mars and just smiles and shakes her head.
She ask's this third man if he speaks Polish, and he answer in something that even I understand, something like 'Tak, mowie trochę po Polsku' (yeah I speak a little bit Polish). So I also say 'ja tez, trochę... trochę...' (me too, little... little..), and then I add 'but fucking trochę...' and they all laugh. The third man then teach me how to say that in Polish 'zajebisty trochę'... but probably that's wrong also but I appreciate the effort 👍😃
To finish the story, I managed to get a time to a haircut the day after, thanked the guy for helping me with settle my business and even shook his hand.
Mission accomplished.
