Or, a random collection of photos and captions

My travel blog entries have been a bit infrequent over the past month, because (a) I’m busy doing things other than exploring, (b) it’s cold outside, and (c) I’ve already discussed Poznań in several posts (23 July 2018, 26 July 2018, 27 July 2018, 24 November 2018, 18 December 2018, and 7 January 2019).

What have I been doing exactly? Well, plenty of job searching, for one. I’ve cast a wide net — jobs for English speakers here in Poznań, in any industry (as long as they’re not customer call center jobs). Jobs for Chinese-English translators and linguists (my area of expertise) back in the States.

What have I heard back? Nothing but crickets from the Polish side. Not all of the job openings directly say so, but Polish employers strongly prefer applicants who are EU citizens, have a work visa, or otherwise already have permission to work in Poland, even when they are advertising specifically for native speakers of English.

As for my search for US-based employment, well… I don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll just say, generally, that that seems to be the more promising avenue at the moment. And so the pendulum, which in my last travel blog post was swinging toward staying in Poznań, has now swung toward returning to the States, at least temporarily.

And, as a friend pointed out to me recently, I can’t stay in Poznań. Not without a visa, anyway. An American without a visa can stay in Poland for up to 90 days in a 180-day period. (For a more extensive discussion of visa-free European travel for Americans, see my recent post on the subject and my European travel table.) So I can’t just head to Romania for a few days, come back, and get another 90 days in Poland. And since it’s looking like I’m not going to find a job here, I need to be gone by 24 February 2019 (my 90th day) at the latest. I already let my Airbnb host know I’ll be departing in late February, vice late June, and he is cool with it.

But I digress. Besides job searching, let’s see… I’ve been doing some career exploration. I’m taking an online math course on Coursera. I researched the most in-demand career fields in the U.S. I looked into options for second bachelor’s degrees and second master’s degrees. I joined the American Translators’ Association and took their translation certification practice test (I’ll have to wait a few weeks before I hear how I did).

Non-professionally, I adopted a different layout for my website, with the goal of transforming it from a pure travel blog into a personal website with different sections for my different interests. (Love or hate the new look? Let me know.) Having done a little bit of that, I’m tempted to take a class on HTML and CSS to get better at web design.

I’ve also been doing a lot of cooking. Unlike my travels during the summer, when I ate in cafés every day, my priority now is to save money. That means shopping at supermarkets and cooking my own meals.

Speaking of health, that’s another thing I’ve busied myself with. I found a local clinic and got blood work and a physical exam. I found a local dentist and had a checkup and cleaning. I found a local optometrist and ordered a fresh supply of contact lenses. Preventative care is very affordable here, so I’m stocking up! The language barrier is occasionally a problem, but most medical professionals are pretty well educated, and most educated Poles, at least those who are my age or younger, speak some English.

Jumping back to my grocery shopping again, I’ve really cut down on expenses by eating a vegetarian diet and abstaining from alcohol. With that, plus the generally low prices here, I’m averaging $19 a week for food. (Yes, that’s up from the $10 a week I averaged for the first couple of weeks of my return to Poland. But at the time, I was also partially living off the modest fat reserves I put on during the three months I spent visiting my parents. Now I’ve lost that weight and need to get all my calories from food again.)

I do, however, have a bottle of excellent Polish vodka in the freezer compartment of my mini-fridge. I’ll break my fast when I accept a job offer. Which had better come soon, because my two months of teetotaling are starting to grate on me.

That’s about it. I’ll finish up with some “postcards from Poznań”: