Poland: Passages

A four-lane highway leads past two quiet checkpoints and across a green valley from the Czech Republic to Poland, where a boy on a bike, when asked if he spoke English, slowed and said, "Yes, of course."

The old people, the people of the Soviet years, speak a different second language, Russian. But at the edge of Poland, on a sunny July day in 2005, the boy with the soccer jersey gave clear directions in a confident English: drive down past the yellow church and the narrow bridge, to the center of the town of Cieszyn.

From there, roads fan west, north and east, toward the industrial web of Katowice, the modern capital of Warsaw, and a former one, Krakow. The terrain between is still, more or less, the fertile farmland that has defined Polish life, during centuries good and bad.

Now, though, villages are towns, towns small cities, and approaching the big cities modern sprawl merges them all.

On the outskirts of Krakow, a massive Carrefour - a French-owned, upscale Wal-Mart-type chain - sits on the site of a factory in which the late Pope John Paul II worked as a young man to earn money during the lean war-torn years.

Heading west toward Katowice, an interstate service area offers fresh bread and espresso, paprika potato chips and Coca-Cola in the clean line architecture more familiar throughout western Europe. On the outskirts of Katowice, center of a region that is home to millions of Poles, signs for Philips and other electronics companies sit atop steel and glass high-rises.

But heading toward the town center, the network of city streets woven among concrete facades keeps a dingier, industrial feel, an effect of the remaining coal mines that once defined this region. In a neighboring city, Chorzow, Sladki Stadion nestles amid groves of green and the country's largest amusement park. Up close, the stadium, low and sunken, guards its old communist charm. Hulking concrete entrances. Short, stout facades.

Indoors, with another ripping series of songs on Tuesday night that followed their script from Vienna a few nights before, U2 opened their first show in this largest of central European nations. A rain-soaked crowd rocked and rolled through "Beautiful Day" and "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," when Bono slowed the pace.

"Somebody out there who speaks good English," he said, looking in the front rows. "You, come up. I want to tell a story."

A woman scrambled eagerly onto the stage.

"This is a story about someone who grew up near here, who stole a pair of my glasses," Bono said.

A roar went up - in recognition of Bono's meeting with John Paul II - from those who understood. The woman, then, turned to her 60,000-plus compatriots and confessed, in Polish, "I don't speak very good English."

The joke was on Bono, as the crowd roared some more. But the point was made and Bono kept up his tale. Before giving a hug to the woman who translated little to the crowd, Bono asked her to pass a message to the recently departed pope: "Tell him, keep the glasses."