"Japanese and Poles apart" a Warsaw Travel Page by CliffClaven

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Those of you who have followed old Cliffie's adventures on VT will know that Keiko was the former girlfriend who gave up a promising career in the Tokyo media world to become a UN monitor in Cambodia. She became involved with a Polish monitor and followed him back to Warsaw, where they got married. Old Cliffie thought that perhaps it wasn't really upwardly mobile to move from the glittering media world of Ginza and Hibiya via a UN compound in Cambodia to an anonymous housing estate on the edges of Warsaw, and so he flew to Poland one weekend to visit Keiko and her husband and to check if the situation was as bad as he feared.

It was worse. Keiko said that her husband was usually happy, but he certainly didn't seem very happy when she and old Cliffie reminisced about their time in Tokyo, about old Cliffie's frantic hunt for a flat, about the trips to temples and shrines in remote Tokyo suburbs, and about the Romanian restaurant where the waiter carried the socialist authenticity a little too far by dropping the soup on the table. As old Cliffie desperately steered the conversation to more neutral topics, Keiko's husband sat scowling and steadily fuelled his bad temper with shots of vodka.

Keiko didn't help matters when she turned to talking about her life in Warsaw: no job, no friends and no more than half a dozen words of Polish. Her husband's mood darkened, and when she said that life at the UN compound in Cambodia was more fun than life on a Warsaw housing estate, her husband stomped out of the restaurant, leaving Keiko in tears and old Cliffie in embarrassment.