If you're standing in an airport or a railway station and find yourself face to face with a sign with words that have one or no vowels, you might be in Poland.

I had not stepped off the plane five minutes in Warsaw when it hit me that I had no clue about the Polish language. It doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard, and it's impossible to look at a word and know what it means.
No point in trying to pronounce it either. Take the city where the 12th IAAF World Junior Championships were held, for instance. Bydgoszcz is pronounced Byd-gosh-ch.

A view of the Brda River from the city's main bridge.

No matter how good your own English is, if you end up in a place where the natives don't speak it, all of a sudden you find yourself speaking in broken sentences, monosyllables and using sign language and body signals that would make any traffic cop worth his salt proud.

After a while, though, even if you can't pronounce them, you understand what the words mean.

For example: wyjscie means exit; some words are spelt the same except for one letter - centralna and centralny both mean central, but the one ending in 'a' is feminine; some words appear to be a poor attempt at English - toaleta (self-explanatory), but then there are the just plain incomprehensible words such as chrzaszcz meaning beetle.

The country has embraced democracy and is now part of the European Union, but there are still a few remnants of the former communist system - the multi-block high-rise apartment buildings - many unpainted - sprinkle the skyline, the trains are practically ancient and trams still in operation.

Bydgoszcz, a city of around 400,000, was founded on the banks of the Brda and Vistula rivers sometime in the 13th century. The old town is quaint with a cobblestone marketplace, dotted with small restaurants with outdoor seating. One can take a motorised boat tour from the bridge, which joins the main town and the market, up the Brda past the opera house and the old mill which sit on its banks. The hallmark of the city is a sculpture poised high on a tightrope across the Brda which commemorates Poland's entry into the EU on May 1, 2004.

I don't usually have any hang-ups about trying new foods when I travel. In fact, I believe it adds to the experience, even if you hate it, but there are some intricacies in Polish cuisine which can take some getting used to.
I was served a UFO (Unidentifiable Food Object) for breakfast one morning. It seemed to me to be a cross between Spam and pate.

The German tourist who sat across from me at the dining table said it was liverwurst. With that, I was served four stalks of the bottom end of a scallion, or what is called 'spring onion' in Europe.

There was pork patty for lunch one day. Not anything like Jamaican patties, but rather something that looks like hamburger meat, breaded and fried. It caught Jamaica's world junior team technical director Jerry Holness off guard and he nearly ate it thinking it was chicken. Bless the gods he discovered in the nick of time what it was and carefully scraped it off his plate.

The Poles do eat a lot of meat including deer and other game, and they serve them with an abundance of accompanying sauces. Abundance of food appears to be part of the culture. The International Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF), by whose magnanimity I attended the WJC, hosted a small dinner for the media covering the event. We were served mountains of fish, beef, pork, vegetables, rice, and chicken, and just when we thought it was over and were preparing to go, the hosts brought out a suckling pig. Yannis, the IAAF's Greece-born media manager, insisted that even if we were full we must at least eat a little to be polite.

The oddest idiosyncrasy I found, though, was with the pizza - which Poles eat a lot of. They eat it with ketchup, in much the same way one would eat French fries or a hamburger with ketchup.

Best of all, for a Jamaican like myself, Poland is good for boosting self-esteem and self-confidence. It may have something to do with being in the middle of Europe and not being used to peoples of other cultures and races, but I attracted a lot of attention, especially from the children who were adorable.

Most Poles too I found to be very polite, pleasant and helpful, and it wasn't strange to have someone shout "hello" to me whenever they passed me in the street.

Communication was not easy, though, because most people I encountered spoke little or no English, and though I learnt a few words of Polish close to the end, I woke up to the realisation that as English speakers the world doesn't revolve around us, and there are places in the world we may find ourselves one day where no one will have any idea what we're trying to say and we'll still need to get by.

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