Birthday in Poland

Well I think it is time to write about my Polish adventures for the month of December. Of course the first thing I have to mention is my birthday, as it is first chronologically. Sorry in advance though, I didn't expect to really celebrate my birthday, so I don't have any pictures. Surprises usually make it hard to have a camera on hand.

Anyway, that morning luckily I didn't have school since it was a weekend. So I got out of bed at roughly 11, something that hasn't changed whether I live in Poland or in the US. Then I showered and tried to go to the kitchen for breakfast. My host family told me to stay the hell out of the kitchen and handed me a bowl, cereal, and milk and told me to eat in the living/dining room. Then I spent most of the day goofing off at home, watching movies, or other random ways to kill time, as I didn't actually plan on doing anything for my birthday. My friends had a lot of tests the following week so all of them were busy studying for the weekend.

Still, later that day I had obiad, which is kind of like dinner eaten at 3 o'clock or so. It turns out my host family kicked me out of the kitchen so that my host brothers could cook pizza. It was completely different than the idea of pizza that popped into your mind. A normal pizza in Poland doesn't use tomato sauce and has odd ingredients, like corn. Still, the pizza was really good, and I still didn't realize that they made it for my birthday. So I went back to goofing off once more until several hours later, my family walks into the living room and asks me to turn off my computer. After I do they bring in a home made cake and start singing "Happy Birthday" which was really surprising because no one in the house really speaks English except one of my host brothers, and even his English is about as good as my Polish. Anyway, they then had me blow out the candles, served the cake, which had my name and 17 written on it. Sorry I can't give you pictures, but it was a really nice cake, it had several layers and was all kinds of little chocolates on top to decorate it. Then while we all had cake and tea (in Europe everything is eaten with either hot tea or coffee) they gave me presents. Those I'll look forward to showing people when I get back, because they gave me two books, both in English. One was about Krakow and has some pictures of my city that I can show you, and the other was a book on Poland which is my favorite because it has a lot of beautiful pictures of Poland, plus it is even cooler because looking at it reminds me of the times I saw those places in person. I also got a scarf that had Polska written on it, which is one of the several ways to say Poland in Polish (sorry but I'm not explaining why). By now I'm starting to get a pretty nice collection of scarves, except I only wear one of them because they others I don't want to get dirty or lose.

After all this they explained that while doing something at my school my host mom saw my birth date on a piece of paper which is how they learned that it was my birthday in the first place. So I spent my birthday happily surprised and, as always in Poland, full of cake. Still, I then felt the need to personally celebrate my birthday, so the next day I went into the city alone.

For the most part my trip to the city wasn't extremely eventful. I went around the Christmas market in the Square for the most part. This is basically like the Potpourri (or however it is spelled) in Parker, except with wooden stalls, hot wine, kielbasa, and a lot more traditional things sold. I ate dinner in the city that night, a big kielbasa from one of the several meat stalls. I listen to random plays and singing that was done on a stage in the Square, and I also looked around for Christmas presents for my host family. Not a completely exciting night, but it was fun, even if it ended with me waiting for my bus for an hour in -5 to -10 degree (Celsius) weather.

Next y'all will get to hear about my Class Christmas, which wasn't too exciting, but I found it funny so I figure I'll write about it. Look forward too it, hopefully I can get it out soon. :)

Sorry

Thank everyone who has been waiting diligently for me to make another post. The reason I haven't posted in a while is simply because there wasn't much happening that I thought worthy to tell all of y'all about. But the funny thing about an exchange is that one month can be completely uneventful, and the next is so busy and crazy that I barely get an hour to sit down and type about what has happened. This is being posted on Christmas day, because I got a little bit of time while my family is sitting around me singing Polish Christmas carols, but since I don't know the words I just get to listen. Christmas lasts 3 days in Poland, and I have one more day to go, so I won't get around to posting about it for a couple days, but after that I have a few days of Christmas break to talk about all the things that I've done this month, like my birthday in Poland, my trip to Wroclaw, the concert I went to, and of course Polish Christmas. It might take me a while to write about that all. But I wanted to let everyone who is still looking at my blog know that I'll be getting back to informing you of my exploits soon and to apologize for leaving you in the dark for so long.

Freshman Orientation

Well it is about time to get my butt in gear and catch up on this blog. But one of the reasons that I haven’t written in so long is because there are very few things to write. A lot of my time is spent at school where I sleep and read because other than me everyone has to do classes. I’ve learned I hate trying to learn French even more than Polish and I’ve explored the city a few times. But even then there was nothing specific to really say went on. But at one point of walking around the city I realized that what makes a foreign exchange great isn’t the big events such as meeting Holocaust survivors and visiting different parts of the country, but the small differences that emphasize that you are in a different country and culture. Of course the big events are still more exciting and fun to do.

So I have decided that I am going to start giving you guys some of the differences between Poland and the US. And because the Monday of the week I am writing this blog post for (October 14th-20th) was my Freshman Orientation in my high school (Here I was demoted to Freshman again.) I will talk about the difference between my Freshman Orientation in America and the one in Poland.

First I’ll explain what happened in Poland since I’m sure most of you know what my orientation in America was like. The first big difference is that we were asked to wear formal clothing to school on the day of the Orientation. That itself can tell you a lot of the differences of how schools are run here versus how they are run in America. At the end of the day we got out of class about a fifteen minutes early and we were taken to an auditorium that the school had rented in a big conference building. At the time I was helping one of the English teachers with her advanced English class so I at least got to talk with people pretty well. The actual ceremony is hard to describe because my Polish still isn’t great and I couldn’t really tell what was going on. They made some people swear oaths to the school and then they made each class of the school say a little thing together, which I managed to do even if my pronunciation was a little off. Then when everyone wanted to leave we had to wait and sit through a mini art show of paintings by students and one little orientation video some of the Seniors (called third years here) made.

During most of this time I kept pointing out the differences between this and the Freshman Orientation for Parker High School, personally I prefer the American way of doing things. The formality doesn’t work well with most American teenagers (how often do you see kids in Parker High School all wearing suits, and I mean the entire student body, not just the wrestling team before a bus ride). Beyond this is the fact that we did it before high school, which really didn’t matter much between here and there. And the biggest difference between American Freshman Orientation and the Polish one is that the American one was more fun, the student council dresses up like idiots (I still have the picture of Mr. Daly dressed as Peter Pan on my phone and my classmates couldn’t believe a teacher would show up to school dressed like that, though they said the same thing when I showed them a faculty picture from the Parker High School website.), there are interesting games, and it gives you a sense of school spirit, something that completely doesn’t exist in Polish schools. Though I was also told that one high school in Poland did do a little game thing, but theirs was gross. They had to lick whipped cream off the knee of the headmaster or a priest, which got the school in a lot of trouble from what I understood.

Anyway that is about it. Not much else to report, but I’m going to try to get caught up this weekend and manage to write about All Saints Day which happened a couple days ago.

Nothing to Report

Like I said last week, there wasn't really anything special that happened between September 30th and October 13th. I simply went to school, learned a little Polish, once I went biking and saw some beautiful countryside but I didn't bring my camera so I didn't grab any pictures for you. I've continued to lift weights, practice MMA, and wander around the city. The only thing slightly interesting that happened was my host brother wore a suit to school for teacher appreciation day and I knew my school was supposed to wear a suit on some day that was close by so I decided to wear one too. I went to school and found out that it was the next Monday so I was really happy I brought back up clothes in case this was another case of me getting dates mixed up and making a fool of myself. So I changed into normal clothes and had to iron the clothes I wore when I got home. Hope Parker is a little more eventful than Poland, but I've been there too so I know it isn't much different.

Things calm down a bit.

Honestly there isn't much to write about. This will be about two weeks because very little has happened in two weeks. So the blog post will be from September 30th to October 14th.

What to say about these weeks. The first week I went to the pool again and went weight lifting. Things have started to settle down though. I didn't really do much but lay around the house, use my laptop, read, sleep, and generally be a lazy teenager. During the week my family was often out of the house for church related things. I am exempt from this because I'm not Catholic and I can't imagine anything more boring than sitting in a church when you don't believe in the religion and listening to a sermon in a language you don't understand. So thankfully I didn't have to go. Sunday my host parents wanted to take me hiking but it ended up raining so we didn't do anything but stay inside.

The next week was a little more interesting. I had gotten bored laying around the house so twice that week I stayed after school and walked around the city. The first time I went to the mall to pick up some things I needed and ended up getting a yo yo to kill the time as well. Since I have found out that I hate the yo yo I bought, but it still technically works so I bring it to school to kill time while I'm there. It ended up being kind of funny because most Polish people don't even really know what a yo yo is at my school so they think I brought it from America. This leaves them more surprised when I explain I found two different stores where you could buy decent yo yos in the mall. The other time I simply walked around the city center, explored a bit, and did nothing in particular. A lot of what I saw I had already seen.

Saturday I have come to find is my family's do-nothing day. So I usually sleep 'til noon and then lay around on Saturdays. Sunday my host father took me and my host brothers to a zoo. It was similar to zoos I saw in the US though it was in the middle of a forest rather than in the city. The only really curious thing I saw there were that some of the animals were loose and walking around the zoo. Before I saw the peacocks in their habitat I saw three of them walking around in front of the bird cages. Some of the animals were hard to take pictures of because the bars in front of them were thick, so not all my pictures turned out too well. Still I was fun, though I think my host brothers had a little more fun than me. Zoos are more for little kids than teenagers afterall.

I haven't put the pictures from this time into my comp yet. So when I do I'll add them. And I haven't forgotten about adding pictures from Warsaw, but I'm still too lazy to spent the two hours needed to find pictures. So I'll post them when I get around to it.

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

Part of His ^ Uniform

The P shows what he was in the camp for

My cookies from "Men's Day"

The Entrance to the Cave

The Castle

Warsaw Meeting

Well in my quest to catch up to where I am now, I'm going to tell everyone about my fairly recent trip to Warsaw. This was during the week of the 17th to the 23rd. Monday through Friday I'm just gonna skip over, as they were fairly uneventful rather than learning a bit of Polish, and getting invited to go hiking in the mountains with my classmates, which I was forced to turn down because it was at the same time as going to Warsaw, though I wish I could have done both. Still, on Friday I skipped school and got on a train to Warsaw.

Anyway, for the third time I've taken a train now, though this was definitely the worst. Since we didn't get on the train fast enough (meaning we weren't in front of a door when the train stopped) we were forced to find a place to sit other than an actual seat. But by the time we found this out even the cart that only had people sitting on the floor along the walls was full so we were forced to sit in a big bunch in front of the door. Lucky me, I got to sit with my back against the door, getting pushed to the side whenever it opened and curling into a ball every time someone wanted to walk in or out the door, so about every ten minutes. Coupling that with the fact that I sat on a metal floor for three hours straight made this a miserable train ride. But still, when we got there I got to see a lot of my friends from Polish Language Camp, so we spent several hours greeting eachother. When everyone was finally there we went to our hostel, not hotel but a hostel. The difference between the two is you rent a room in a hotel, in a hostel you rent a bed and if someone you don't know rents a bed in the same room. We were lucky because Rotary rented all the beds in each of the rooms for us, but it was still from 8 to 12 people in a room. The rooms were really nice though, all had some kind of theme. I ended up in the horror themed room though I didn't sleep under the painting of the devil or under the painting of the girl from The Ring, so I was good. I decided to name the room New Mexico though because of the ten people in the room only three weren't Mexican. After this we basically just partied in the hostel for half the night, enjoying eachothers company and basically acting like teenagers. Needless to say we were stupid and went to sleep late, something we regretted when we had to get up early in the morning.

The next day was the day when we got everything done. So it was a pretty packed day. First we got on a bus and got a tour of Warsaw, driving past a lot of well known places and hearing about the city's history, even if the history was only a few decades ago, something rare for Poland. Most of it was about the Warsaw Uprising, when the Nazis held the city and the city of Warsaw fought back. This ended with Hitler leveling the city, only 13 buildings were left standing. The reason Warsaw isn't a very historic place is actually because all of the history there was destroyed and the city had to be built new. (On another note, Krakow and Warsaw are like Parker and Wickenburg. Those from Krakow think Warsaw is horrible because it has no history and is all modern and efficient so they think it is ugly. On the other hand people from Warsaw view Krakow as old and run down without having much to do in the city. I personally like both cities, they each have their own unique qualities but I've decided not to mention this to my classmates. That'd be like going to Parker High in a Wickenburg school shirt during Spirit Week.)

We spent several hours at the Warsaw Uprising museum, which I thought had a similar feel to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. It seems Hitler's atrocities inspired a few very nice museums. After this we went on another bus tour of Warsaw and stopped briefly at several monuments. We saw the Polish version of the White House, and then we went back to the hostel for a few minutes to get our Rotary blazers and head to the orientation.

We started it by making every student introduce ourselves in Polish. A lot of the kids did a very good job, though introductions were something all of us knew well, and though it makes up the largest amount of my comprehensible Polish I have yet had need to introduce myself. When I meet people others are always quick to explain who and what I am for me. When I got passed the microphone though I choked and made a couple mistakes. After feeling like an idiot I sat bad down. After that we got a speech on the rules of being an exchange student, most of which were half common sense and half things that rarely happen. Finally we got to the thing that excited most of us, information about the EuroTour. This is the trip we take toward the end of our exchange that takes us around the whole continent of Europe. We were all a little disappointed as well as excited after the presentation. While it looked like something that would be a shame to miss, a month going through and seeing several of the most well known countries in Europe, we were all sad at the fact that Italy was pretty much skipped over. I guess we complained a little too loudly because at the end of the meeting the asked if we'd like to use the program that they did last year which went to different countries, but saw most of Italy. This made us all happier, and I've seen the new program since and I really can't wait.

After this we finished the night by going to a part of Warsaw and getting some free time. I spent this shopping for pins for my blazer with some friends (I got some really nice ones.) and we even found a shop owner who spoke fluent Spanish. This didn't really interest me but one of our group was a Mexican and another was a Mexican-American so they were really excited, as was the shop owner. They ended up taking pictures together and getting his email. After this we went to get ice cream and got utterly lost. We finally found our group a half hour after we were supposed to meet and after that we went to the Dancing Fountain. This was a really cool water show that used lights and at some points they would use a mist to catch the light of a projector and by doing so they turned the water into a moving movie screen. I would put pictures of this, but a friend took a video of it and she agreed to send it to me so I'll put that on here as soon as I get it from her. After this we went back to the hostel and since I had caught a cold by standing out in the rain I went to bed early.

The next day was uneventful, we got up and then quickly left to catch our trains at the train station. I got to see a friend from Krakow who had gone to the Coldplay concert the night before I came to Warsaw, someone I hadn't seen since the Language Camp. Then we loaded onto the train, I got the task of kicking the Polish people out of the seats assigned to us since "my English was the best" (not true considering we brought an extra American back with us.) and I also guess because I seem to look intimidating. So after about 20 minutes of convincing the people in our seats that they were in the wrong seats using broken Polish and English we sat down and headed home.

When I got back home I packed up. Because of some misunderstandings I had learned at the beginning of the week that I would be changing host families. So I had two hours to pack all of my worldly possessions (mostly clothes) and I met my new host family. My host mom talked to them for about an hour and then I left to go to my new home.

Now time for the pictures. Once again I managed to forget my camera though, so I have to steal pictures from other exchange students that were there.

And sorry if you are reading this now, it is late at night here (I'm 9 hours ahead of y'all in Arizona if you didn't remember) and my new host family only has internet in their kitchen. Considering I have to go through the room of my two little brothers to get to mine I try not to stay up too late so they won't be asleep when I do decide to retire to my rooms. Anyway I'll put up pictures tomorrow.