How it all started!

Someone asked me how this all started so here's the story......

We lived for the last 11 years in Itasca, Illinois. Both my wife and I worked for the same market research company in Chicago called Synovate. I worked as a progammer and she as a mail clerk. The plan started in 2005 when retirement was 2 years away and we were looking at options of where we could afford to live on only our SS checks. We thought about buying a small house in some little town in southern Illinoisbut decided it would be boring with little to do. My wife suggested Poland because at that time our money would be worth much more and houses cheaper to buy. That was before Poland joining the EU was really taking effect. Of course it's different now. Prices here are almost like the U.S. except housing prices here continue to go up while in the U.S. the are dropping. We had been to Poland in 2003 and 2004 for a month each time to meet relatives I never knew I had. Both of my grandparents were from Poland but my mother, aunts and uncles never said a word about Polish relatives. When my mother died in In 1999 I decided I would start putting all of my pictures and CD's with names and places for my son to have after I'm gone. I didn't know some of the people in pictures and my curiosity drove me to find out who they were. I had one aunt who was a nun, Sister Redempta, passed away in 1977. I wrote to the mother house of her order and asked them to send me any papers she had left behing. In the packet I recieved was a letter from an address in Poland from the 1950's. I knew that the writer must be dead by now but I wrote a letter and sent copies of old pictures to the address hoping some family member might still be at that house. I waited and waited and one day when I came home from work there was a blue envelope in the mailbox from Poland. What a thrill!! At that time I couldn't read Polish so on Saturday I went to the Polish Museum in Chicago to find someone who could read it to me. As it turned out, it was from a daughter of my grandfathers sister left behind in Poland with my great grandmother. My great grandfather came to America with his sons and oldest daughter to avoid conscription of his sons into the Russian army, occupiers of their part of Poland at that time. My great grandmother and youngest daughter were to join them but by greatgrandfather died before he could save enough money to come over so they remained in Poland and that's how the family started in Poland. I wrote back immediately and thus began our mail correspondence. This cousin, Kazia, told other member about the letter and one day about 5 months later I recieved an letter, from a cousin Małgorzata, in English. She gave me her email address and we began corresponding frequently and she told me a lot about my family there. Then we switched to Instant Messenger and everyday we would talk for and hour or two through that media. After a year I decided I had to go to Poland to meet everyone. In 2003 we made the first trip and it was incredible. When the month was over and we were sitting in plane at Poznań airport I actually tears in my eyes because I had to leave. It was a strange feeling. i love America but I felt i was returning to a strange land now and didn't want to leave. When my wife saw my eyes she said not to worry, wewould return the next year and we did. For me, the decision to move to Poland was not difficult. I have many relatives in the States but we now live all over and so far apart. I miss the young days when all of my uncles, aunts and cousins were in the same town and we always saw each other. In Poland it may not be the same town but the distances are much much shorter. family still has more meaning here. As for speaking Polish, I hadn't spoken Polish since I was 8 years old but we bought some books and started to learn. For the last year and a half we studied with a private teacher in Chicago from Lublin. I can communicate somewhat better now but still have a long way to go. It's a little more difficult for my wife who has a Austrian/German background. We have enrolled at Mickiewicz University here in Poznań to take their Polish for Foreigners course, 3 -2 hour lessons per week for the school year beginning in October. There will be ten people in a class and it's not far from where we live. Plus, everyday we have to speak Polish now so I think we will learn much faster. OK, that's my story up to this point. I hope this is what you wanted to know. David