From Parker AZ to Zielonki Poland: First Week With My New Host Family

Once again I’m sorry for taking so long to get another post in. Honestly it isn’t always the first thing I think about and it also isn’t always the most fun thing to. But I feel I owe it to you all so I’m going to try and catch up to where I currently am. So far I’m about 3 weeks behind. Without further ado I’ll tell you about the week from September 24^th to the 29^th.

I should start by talking about my new host family. I have two younger brothers, one is 14 and the other is 10. They have both their parents, which is actually rather normal in Poland from what I can gather. My host dad works at the post office doing something I don’t really understand, and my host mother is a stay at home mom. Since I’m at school most of the day I’m not always sure what she does while we’re all away. And the biggest fact about them is that they don’t speak almost any English. This is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because my Polish is improving a lot faster than before because I use it whenever possible. If I speak in English I often just get “Ok” which is kind of like when I smile and nod when people speak to me in Polish. On the other hand, if it is any kind of complex question or conversation we have to go on Google Translate and hope that it doesn’t mess up the understanding, or I just have no clue what is going on.

My youngest host brother is very intelligent, he is very good at playing the piano already and his normal hobbies are doing projects on different cultures around the world. His English is amazing considering the fact that he is only 10. My other host brother is my “official babysitter” since he is the only one who speaks a fair bit of English in the house. This kind of annoys me because I don’t like a middle schooler telling me what to do all the time, and his lack of language skills makes him sound arrogant most of the time even though I know this isn’t the case. At the same time he is very nice, and doesn’t sound at all arrogant when speaking in Polish, I just rarely know what he is saying. He is a huge fan of Legos and Star Wars (the animated Clone Wars ones. I’m not even sure if the kids have seen the real movies). My host mom cooks a lot and is always doing some kind of house work it seems. Poland sometimes reminds me of America in the 1920’s with how my host mothers have acted. Still she is very nice. I don’t see much of my host father because he works from dawn till dusk and he speaks absolutely no English. It is awkward talking to him, and he teaches me random Polish words that I’d almost never use so I end up forgetting them 2 minutes after he tells me.

Now onto the things I did this week. All in all it was a pretty interesting week. Monday was entirely uneventful. My oldest host brother’s middle school is across the street from my high school so he escorted me to school and picked me up after, taking me straight home. Honestly that is as exciting as it got Moday. Tuesday was exactly the same except for after school my host mother took my host brothers and me to the pool fairly close to our house. The pool itself was boring compared to the river as all pools have been to me for years. Also the hot tub was like the hot tub from the GCU tournament last year (that was for wrestlers, it just means the water was barely warm, kind of like a glass of tap water left outside in Arizona for twenty minutes). But the fun parts were the sauna I found, which my youngest host brother only lasted about 2 minutes in, and the waterslide which I went down and broke just about every rule they wrote about the thing….I think, I didn’t understand what the rule board said. Wednesday I finally got to work out for the first time in 4 months, though I also came to respect just how good the weight room in Parker is. Sadly I have to be careful when I work out because I have no spotter and everything is in kilos so I don’t know how much to use on everything. Still it felt good working out after so long. I’ll skip to Friday from here because I want to save the best for last. So Friday was pretty normal though in PE we finally hit the weight room even though all we did was max bench. Honestly it was pretty funny, even after only having one work out I still out benched all but one of them by 20 kilos. Also, apparently Sunday is "Men's Day" or something (my classmates translated the best they could for me) so Friday all of the girls stood up during our first class and gave us all these little bags of homemade cookies with a hand drawn card and message on the back. They were even nice enough to translate my message into English for me. I though it was really cute all in all, plus the cookies were good.

Finally Thursday, I had been warned the day before that there would be some students from other countries visiting our school because a few of my classmates would be hosting the students. They had some presentations on Thursday that were in several languages including English so I got permission to skip classes and go to the presentations with them. I didn’t know this until after, but I’m extremely lucky to have got to do this. There were several presentations but you could only sign up for one of them. I just signed up to the one my classmate went to (the host siblings went with the other exchange students to the presentations, partly for translation). This turned out to be a meeting with a Holocaust survivor and an insurgent from the Warsaw Uprising, which is why he was in the concentration camp. Honestly it is one thing to read about the events in a history book, watch someone on a video, or any of the other ways we’ve heard about the Holocaust, but it is an entirely different matter to shake hands with and hear the firsthand story of someone who went through that hell while he is sitting across the table from you. I got to see patches from his uniform in the camps as well as several drawings done by an artist in the camp (he went to great lengths to get the paper to draw) and heard stories about the cruel things down in the camps.

Though I don’t like being lighthearted after saying something serious, after that we had a lunch break. I took this time to talk to the British people I who were in the school during this time. I’ve now come to the opinion I don’t like British people. (I know I shouldn’t characterize a whole country, but since they are the only British people I’ve met, I can only form my opinion around them. Similar to the way people forming their opinion of Americans after meeting me here.) After talking for a few minutes the conversation ended up turning to how I don’t speak English correctly because I call things trashcans instead of “rubbish bins” and how I’m a warmongering psychopath because my family owns weapons. Luckily for the UK later I talked to their teacher and he was much nicer and less snobbish, so some of my opinion of the race was saved.

And lastly I’ll skip to Sunday, because I did absolutely nothing but sit on my butt or sleep on Saturday. My host family decided to try and entertain me by taking me to a few places near Krakow. The first was a large cave that was pretty cool, and luckily this time I didn’t hit my head on the roof. I’ll show some pictures of that in a moment. After that we went to this very pretty area that had an old castle, which had a museum inside. By the time we were done though I was pretty worn out, and I was tired of my host father’s Polish lessons so I pretended to sleep on the ride home.

Now I’m sure after reading all of this you’ll be happy to hear that the next couple entries will be much shorter than this one. Or maybe you’re thinking “shut up and get to the pictures already”.

The Holocaust Survivor