To start off, the first Thursday of Language Camp we had a test on everything we had learned up until then. If you know me personally you can already guess that I did pretty well on the test, I got a 95 of of 100. Honestly though I would say that had more to do with me being good at testing than Polish. But because of this I was moved into the advanced group with people who more or less knew what was going on. One of my new classmates had already been here for 6 months (Southern Hemisphere has their seasons at opposite times of the year so their school year is different.) and another kid who fluently spoke 4 different languages and could speak Polish well enough to have conversations with random Polish people cutting grass. My new teacher was nice but she taught almost the entire lesson only using Polish so I almost never knew what was going on. The only English she used was when she was translating a word directly for us because she couldn't really find a way to do that in Polish. But towards the end of the week she just had the people who knew a fair amount of Polish translate the word for her and kept speaking Polish. I learned a little bit, but my classes were really difficult and my lack of understanding made me space out more than a few times. But on the last Thursday of Language Camp we had another test and I got a B so I guess I was doing better than I though.
Now enough of my difficulties with the language, the only thing you really know about Polish is that it is really difficult to learn if you an English speaker and that there are a lot of rules that pretty much make no sense. So, the more fun parts of the second week were the events we got to do. Rather than taking us on little trips every day, we had a little more free time and generally had games, or something else to do during our nights.
One of them were kind of like the Polish Camp Olympics, they split us up into our various countries, though the US had two teams, the USA team and the International team which was the extra US kids, Canada and Taiwan. I was on the latter one. The games went from medicine ball throw, egg toss, tug-a-war, dressing men up like idiots (I'll go more indepth in that one later because it was funny), and a water ballon fight. The USA team won almost every single event, though Brazil won one, and Mexico kept up with them. My team was so far behind that in the last event, the water balloon fight, we gave up on winning and ignored the rules. Basically we played dodge ball with water balloons, the tug-a-war rope made the center line that we weren't allowed to cross and if you were hit by a balloon you were out. First the USA team played the Mexico team, and the Mexico team was destroyed, making the US team the final victors. After that my team played Brazil and instead of playing dodge ball, my team grabbed balloons and stormed over the line, throwing our balloons at them even after we were hit and even taking some of their balloons to throw at them. It was a lot of fun and the looks on the RA's faces were priceless.
Now to explain the dress-up contest. Basically each of the four teams chose a guy and the idea was to make him look as stupid as possible. We all spent a while trying to make these guys look like women, idiots, or a combination of both. We all did really well. At the bottom I'll post a picture of 3 of the 4 models, you'll hear why the last wasn't in the picture in a moment. Anyway, after we dressed them up, each had to have either their team introduce them to the judges, or they had to themselves. The catch was that they had to introduce them in Polish. So the first few did a few awkward sentences we learned from the week before but my team had the guy who basically spoke fluent Polish as our model. So we had him go up and he spoke really well. But at the same time he gave the judges a strip show, pulling off everything we had worked so hard to put on him. Honestly it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He ended up in just his boxers blowing kisses to the judges. And since he wasn't all dressed up that is why he wasn't in the picture.
Other than that, we watch another Polish movie that I mentioned before. This one was a chick flick call "Just Love Me" but the title was in Polish. To me it seemed like a less funny version of the Adam Sandler movie "Big Daddy". But anything beats Suicide Room so most of us didn't really complain.
Another night we went back to the mall, where my group decided to make a McWhopper by putting a Big Mac into a Whopper. The two who did it said it was delicious. We just kind of messed around at the mall other than that and it was actually kind of cool. Since bread and cheese gets old when you have it twice a day for nearly two weeks I brought a couple McDoubles back from the mall for supper.
The biggest thing we got to do is one night they said that they had a surprise for us and they pulls us all out to this little pasture. We found out that we were going to make lanterns that worked as hot air balloons. If you've seen the movie "Tangled" I think they have lanterns like I'm talking about in those. It was so cool to light each of our lanterns, hold it until the inside filled with hot air and then let it go into the sky.
On our final night of Polish Camp we played some random games with German kids. The first was called "Emergency". It was basically freeze tag but to unfreeze someone four people had to pick them up by their arms and legs and carry them to the mats that served as bases. It was really funny to watch the mall German kids try to lift me, they ended up needing 6 people to do it and they were still pretty much dragging me. The second was kind of stupid so I'm not going to explain it, and at the end we played volleyball, but I played basketball with some of the kids from Mexico instead.
On our last day of Polish camp we had a little ceremony were a girl from my Rotary club (one of the only two times I've seen her.) came down and basically handed us a certificate that said we finished the Intensive Polish Curse. (In Polish course is kurse so the translation got mixed up in a really ironic way because the polish language is a curse.) We all got dressed up in suits and wore our blazers, except for me because I left my blazer with my host family on accident.
Then last Sunday we all returned to our host families, most people having about 10 hour train or bus rides to get home. I was with them all until the end because my host sister had to stay until they were all gone and I stayed with her.
The "Models"
McWhopper
Lanterns
No comments:
Post a Comment