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| A Monk Abroad - amended from e-mails of Cabryn Gurdo '07, studying abroad in Poland.
Feb 15 Okay everybody, I've finally gotten the chance to send out my first mass email about my adventures in Wroclaw (pronounced vrote-suav), Poland. I sure didn't get off to a good start. I had to wait for my mom to go get a gate pass (they do that). But my mom didn't have time to get a gate pass. My flight was boarding, and I had to get on. So I didn't get to hug her goodbye. :'( :'( :'( After crying all the way to Dulles, I had to rebook myself on all my original flights and had 5 minutes to get to my connection. I made it to Munich , and being unable to find "Wroclaw " listed on the screens, I got on a plane that had the same flight number as mine. Luckily I was right. How was I supposed to know that the Germans still refer to Wroclaw by the name they gave it when Poland wasn't an actual country and all that fun stuff??? They call it Breslau. Yeah, for SOME reason, I didn't make the connection... I arrived in Wroclaw, but my luggage didn't. It took a day to show up. After SOOO much redundant and pointless paperwork, forms, offices that are only open for a few hours, building managers and front desk people who don't speak English (it is the only language all the international students speak, and this is the international dorm), it took until last night for me to get the Internet on my own computer. So about how I'm doing, uhhh yeah it changes by the minute. I hate cities, with a passion, and have no idea what in the heck I'm doing here right now. I have an old friend who spent a year abroad and is nice enough to try and reassure me that it'll get better. Through e-mailing him almost daily, finding a super-cheap phone arrangement so I can talk to my mom everyday for only 39cents a min on her end (here, everything that's incoming on your phone is free), and finally having AIM, I'm slowly getting better. But it changes by the minute. March 5 I'm over being homesick, oddly enough, it just sort of struck me one day that I was suddenly more concerned with things other than missing you all and I couldn't even tell you when it happened. Weird, but good. Maybe it's due to the fact that right now I'm listening to FRANK online, since 90s American music is quite popular, but classic rock is sadly absent. Classes finally started last week, and the way classes are taken here is completely different than in the States, and it makes it incredibly easy to go class shopping. There really isn't a better way to describe it. I have to find 2 more classes this week to take, I found 2 last week but the third had a really odd teacher. For starters, he completely changed the subject of the class from "Poland and Central Europe 1795-1918" to "Poland between the World Wars" and decided to not inform the University about this. Yeah, so, I'm in the market for another class or two... But I have a bus pass, so the trek out to the other part of the University where they've decided to put the Institute of Sociology will most likely be on a 40+ year old yellow and red jalopy of a bus. Amazingly, I've only seen one ever break down... March 27 I am adjusting to life here okay, and right now am in the midst of attempting to plan a trip to Prague for our Easter break. I have my Polish tandem at 11am tomorrow. Agnieszka- or Agnes, she's Polish- teaches me Polish while I help her prepare for a big English language exam. I also have a Spanish tandem, where I help Monica -from Spain- improve her English conversation. I know very little Polish, but can read Spanish and understand a slower conversation. So, I will most likely start talking to people in three different languages. Be warned! :) . Ok, well it's very late/technically very early so I'll say 'dobranoc' which is 'goodnight' in Polish, and I will keep in touch! April 19 I am doing okay now. On Saturday, we went on a day trip to Klodzko, Poland (southern Poland) where they have a really cool fortress on a mountaintop. 40 kilometers of stone tunnels in and around it. There was one that was barely a meter high, and let's just say it was definitely smaller in the middle. Yeah... thank God I'm not claustrophobic; getting stuck in the middle of a 50 meter stretch of stone tunnel in a mountain when you have no choice but to CRAWL out would probably scare the heck out of most people. This weekend my friends and I are planning a trip to Berlin for the weekend. Sorry I've got to run, the laundry here is an experience that makes me miss MacGray and I must attempt to claim my jeans from the basement. I have a paper to finish and I have Senioritis, so I have to find motivation somewhere, lol. Miss you all, see you in July, I have less than 11 weeks to go before I'm home :). April 25 I guess my favorite part has to be the people I have met. It's not like there are too many Americans here, there's only 8 of us. I only hang out with 2 of them, and it's really amazing meeting so many new people. The EU has this program called 'Erasmus' where every student in the EU can go to another EU country to study, so you can really get to know students from all over the place. I have made friends here that I know I would NEVER have met otherwise. May 16 I have at the very bottom of this, a bunch of links for sharing my facebook albums with non-facebook people. Try them! :) We took the train from Wroclaw to Berlin. We found, once we arrived in the train station in Berlin, a DUNKIN' DONUTS, and a SUBWAY with BEN AND JERRY'S !!!! OMG we totally ate dinner at Subway, and then paid 2.50 Euro for a tiny little cup of Ben and Jerry's. Mmmmm. SO worth it. We had to wait for Peter to meet up with us that first night (he got stuck taking a bus cuz he couldn't make the train). We actually had to cross where the wall used to be (just a little plaque on the sidewalk), that was part of our walk back to the hostel, which was equipped with a TV SET that had the SIMPSONS in German. Lol. It was great to see CNN and BBC news in English, since we've all been reading online newspapers for the past few months. The next day, we wandered around Berlin as a bunch of tourist students (there were 5 of us). It was not until we returned to Wroclaw that I learned there was a FREE, 5 hour walking tour of the city. Whoops. We saw Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Siegessaule (Victory Angel), some Palace, and lots of other probably famous places that we don't know the names of. But it was really a cool weekend. We had an interesting trip back, especially since we 1) were brave/stupid enough to think that we could find something decent to eat at the 24h bar (bar means restaurant here) next to the train station in Poznan (we had an hour btwn trains), and 2) managed to get on the wrong train back to Wroclaw and thank God Peter speaks Polish, cuz we got in trouble and had to pay like 230 zloty to cover the price difference (on the spot to the conductor) because our real train came into Poznan exactly 5 mins after this one had. The next weekend, I left on a trip to Krakow that was through the Polytechnic University here in Wroclaw. Everyone else was from non-English speaking countries (Germany, Spain, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Poland). It was actually kind of funny to see the others making bets about what was the correct way to say something in English, then they would ask me. I paid 340 zloty (about $115 US) for a 4 day, 3 night trip in the greater Krakow area, which included meals, trains, hostel, admissions, and ENGLISH guides. The first day, we walked around Krakow's Rynek (city center). There is a park surrounding the Old Town that follows where the actual defensive walls were around the city back in the days of cities with walls that were separated from the surrounding areas. Parts of the old walls and some gates are still there/have been reconstructed. We also saw Wawel Castle, which is this gorgeous castle on a hilltop, complete with its own cathedral housing the tombs of 'a bunch of royal dead guys' (to quote Timon in the Lion King). The next day, we went to Wieleczka, home of the world famous salt mine. We went on a 3 hour tour, which was amazing considering it has been in operation for hundreds of years, has HUGE chambers (hundreds of feet high/wide) and until very recently, was completely mined by hand. It was really cool, it has 3 chapels and a restaurant, a ballroom, and a bunch of other things. Like we walked down 805 stairs to get to the lowest level we went to. The next day (we're on Tuesday, May 1st) we went to Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz, and Birkenau. It was completely unbelievable, I mean, it was so incredibly tragic to see what was left, it is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to BE there. All in all, it was definitely worth it to go. Places like that NEED to be visited, lest people begin to forget that they are there. The horrors that occurred there are, in fact, history. It was impossible to not become emotional there. Or so I thought... I nearly clocked this jerk (it is the nicest name I can think of for him at the moment) from Romania. The Romanians (there were 3) were constantly taking pictures of awful things (like 2 TONS of human hair that was taken from murdered women, and a roll of the 'hair cloth' that was made from it) in the museum parts, laughing and joking and talking loudly in supposedly silent buildings -no pictures inside were allowed, for example- despite several guides telling them to STOP...there are signs everywhere telling people that the entire area is the final resting place of some 400,000 innocent people, and to please not show any disrespect towards the deceased, etc. . We had lunch in Zakopane, which is this gorgeous mountain town tucked in the Tatry (or Tatral) mountain range. Beautiful snowy peaks all around... Anyway, we took a mini bus/glorified van into the mountains. Our guide told us we would take "a walk up to a lake," and have a picnic. It was a 5.5 mile trek- each way. Up a very steep mountain range. I can't say it was an actual hike, it was mostly a paved road that wound its way up there, with horsedrawn wagons taking the smart people (who paid 30 zloty each way) to be carried up/back. It took 2.5 hours of brutal hiking/walking up steep roads to get to Morskie Oko, this beautiful lake in a crater between the mountains. It was awesome, the mountains were so HUGE, there was a chalet on the lake. The way back was a lot easier. Unfortunately, it was also pretty late when we started out, and it was just about pitch black when we made it back to the mini bus/glorified van. Then we realized one of the Spanish guys was MIA. Uh oh. Most of us ran around, in the dark, in the mountains/woods, in Poland , yelling ..Juan, all the while, wondering if he had wandered into Slovakia . .He had missed the parking lot, and another Spanish guy grabbed a bicycle and found him (Juan didn't own a cell phone). By that point, our leader was in tears. We make it back to Zakopane, but then most places were closed. That meant no dinner. Fortunately, there was a Tesco- aka an attempted imitation of WalMart- that was still open. This gave me a chance to get a Coke and a snack... Ok, well I'm tired, and although we went on another little but thankfully uneventful trip to Ladek Zdroj the 4th- 6th of May, I'll stop here. A friend and I have planned a trip to Italy for a week at the end of June, just before I come home. I am going to Paris on June 8-10th to see Nancy for the weekend, and I hope to make one other trip to Gdansk, on Poland 's Baltic coast before I leave.
Here are links to some of my facebook albums so you can check out my pictures. |
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