the queue

I was born before 1989, in fact even quite some time before the '80s began, which might not be an advantage if I was a model living by the scheduled catwalk appearances, but it has granted me at least some partial experience of the unforgettable "lean years" of the communist era in Poland.

Unaware of my parents' toil to organize the daily life when no consumer goods were available - not even powdered milk for babies - I remember those times as rich in unexpected surprises. As a child, like all the playground friends, I used to collect chocolate papers. That's right. We had no idea how the "Suchard" or "Milka" chocolate tasted, but we could smell it on the paper it'd been wrapped in. So we kept the papers in boxes and traded them each day for somethng new, but I don't think I'd ever spoken to the first-user, who might have had been lucky enough to receive that chocolate from an uncle in West Germany or to buy it in "Pewex" - a shop selling delicatessen for US dollars. But yes, sometimes we too got a parcel from abroad - and now imagine how we used to cherish each bite, each munch of marsh mellows. Or take that coconut, the frist I and my brother had seen in our lives, that we kept so long before tasting it that it went completely dry.

So, I was unspeakably happy when I found on the BBC news today that you can actually go back in time by playing a new Polish board game - "The Queue". It is about shopping when all the goods were rationed there was nothing to shop for except for vinegar on the empty shelves. And only when "they" (government administration, since nearly all the business was state owned) "threw" something onto those shelves (like for example toilet paper or coffee), your parents would take you to the shop as well, as each of the "queuers" was allowed to buy only one item. Therefore, each pair of hands was an advantage. That's how the gigantic queues were formed, like the one from one of the popular "crisis" photos of the crowd in front of the butcher's:

I've already bought the game and will play it - with my friends and kids. And I love it's stylish box design.