Cultural curiosity’s a dead issue unless you’re the foreigner: then you drive everyone mad with your questions and they you with their non-responsiveness, slight shoulder shrugs and sighs.

How many Ottawans experience the Changing of the Guards? How many New Yorkers the Statue of Liberty? What about the Parisians? Do they even notice the Eiffel Tower or L’Arch de Triumph anymore? And what of the Egyptians? The Romans?

Then you’ve got the Poles. The people who emphatically concur that having a statue of a blue elephant in the home – trunk upraised, never otherwise – is a symbol of good luck. This is curious. This smacks of the Orient; perhaps it’s the Asian influence of the Russians, Tartars or Turks? These hypotheses (put forth most sincerely) are frustrated at every turn: no one, it seems, has ever given the custom a second thought, but everyone is familiar with and accepts the truth of it.

Okay,forget the little elephant. What about all those roadside altars? I was under the impression that they were tributes to highway fatalities, but have been told in no uncertain terms that I’m wrong. However, the alternate rationale isn’t really all that satisfactory: there is no reason for all those crosses and pictures of Madonna and Child, where (usually old and very young) people regularly gather to sing and pray and say the rosary. Perhaps, ventured one girl after much new thought, it’s because not many people in Poland had cars until quite recently and getting to an actual church building could prove a hardship. They built these convenient neighborhood altars to worship at regularly, going to church only on special occasions when the long walk or cold ride in a horse-drawn hay wagon was warranted.

Another theory for the statues and housed Madonnas is that the largely agricultural Poles built them in order to gather each spring and celebrate the sowing of their fields - a May Day of sorts.

Today I found out that girls give boys underwear to celebrate "Boy's Day" although the girls get food and flowers from the fellows on their day. Is there a reason behind the underpants? No one knows or remembers or cares, and the silliness continues.

But I still don’t get the elephant. I suppose I should be grateful, though, that the traditional window-painting night seems to be on the way out...