Impressions of Poland

This is not complete but I realise it's absurdly long and hopefully I will go back and edit it later. It's randomly edited a few times already.

Hey all,

I realise this is fast becoming something just for me to remember everything and will probably bore everyone else but last time I travelled I didn't keep a detailed enough diary etc and forgot stuff so I am now trying to improve this.

I hope everyone is going well. I'm finally getting over jetlag and moving onto starting to enjoy myself in Poland. So Poland...

On the first night I was here the guy I was staying with (Pawel, every second guy here has the name Pawel or Piotr(ek), which makes things easier) had a party in his apartment. It was pretty fun, or it would have been if my tiredness didn't kick in just before it started. The party at least didn't last to long and I went and slept while everyone else went to a club. I would like to have gone but I was wrecked from the flight.

The next day I went into the city with Helen (the other Australian) and Ala, the girl she is staying with. After we bought a few things that we needed (such as getting more Polish currency) we didn't really know what we wanted to do so we decided to grab some lunch and a coffee. We went to this cafe and had these pancakes wrapped up with meat inside and covered in sauce (apparently a Polish dish) with a Sauerkraut Salad. It was quite good actually. We knew we had to go to the university in a few hours to meet people so that we could go to a pub and weren't sure what else we wanted to do so we just went back to Ala's place and just chilled out for a while. The pub was interesting, got to meet quite a few of the people from the Organising Committee (OC) for the project and a few of the trainees.

Tuesday

After waking up quite early I made sure I put on heaps of clothes (5 layers on top, jeans and thermals and 2 pairs of thick socks to go with my Gortex boots) to be in SGH by 9 in the morning. We were doing this day what was jokingly referred to by the OC as the 'Running around Warsaw in a snow-storm game'. The idea of the game was for us to see a bit more of Warsaw and to learn a bit of the history and culture. We were put in teams of 4 and given a list of tasks we had to complete at 2 places around Warsaw. My group had Thiago from Brazil, Marina also from Brazil and Xiaochen (Anna) from China. The places we were sent to see were Łazienki (a famous old park in the middle of Warsaw) and the Column of Sigmund II in the middle of 'Old Town' in Warsaw. The weather on this day was quite cold and we got a lot of snow. Łazienki is really cool. It's this old park in Warsaw with a few old palaces and statues (with quite a large one of Chopin). Polish people are really nice. When we first started looking for Łazienki we had maps out and this Polish guy came up to us and asked us where we were looking for and walked us to the bus stop we needed to take. Then when we were on the bus this Polish lady asked us where we were looking for and we told her the street and she knew what park we were looking for and showed us where to get off and then where to walk and even told us what bus and what bus stop we had to take to get to Old Town. When we first arrived at the park we ran into this old Polish guy who didn't speak any English or German (Thiago speaks German and I speak a very little bit) but he was really nice. We managed to tell him where we were all from and he gave us food to feed the squirels and the birds and helped us find what we were looking for in this park. Because it has been so cold in Warsaw there is thick snow everywhere and this park looked very beautiful covered in snow although the ducks and other animals looked very cold. What was probably the most surreal is that there were Peacocks in this park and I never expected to see a peacock in Poland. After that we went into 'Old Town to see this column and were again helped by random Polish people without even having to really ask. Marina didn't have proper shoes for the weather and by this time her shoes were saturated and she was really cold. We quickly tried to get everything we had to do done. The statue on top of the column is pretty impressive. It's the old king of Poland carrying a sword and a cross in the other hand. He apparently fought a famous war with Russia to make them Catholic. Pretty crazy stuff. After this they gave us a run-down of the different types of sub-cultures and stuff you are likely to encounter in Poland and the types of people you should probably try to avoid.

That night we had global village. The idea is that everyone from different countries has a stall with different foods, drinks and cultural things from their country. Helen and I had a flag, blow up kangaroo, koala puppet, bunch of photos, Vegimite, we bought some Australian export wine from a bottle shop in Warsaw and also cooked Pavlova. That was an interesting experience because neither Helen or I had cooked Pavlova before. I got mum to send me the recipe but wasn't even sure about some of the cooking terms but fortunately Yvonne from Switzerland had done a cooking course and knew all of them. Finding the ingerdients was also a challenge as the Polish people didn't know the name for some of the ingredients. Using a dictionary we eventually managed to find everything quite easily, except we coudln't get vanila essence anywhere. We tried a few shops and they were either sold out or didn't have it at all. We asked a Polish girl to check a shop for us and she couldn't find any either but came over with cooking rum. We managed to get everything together and it actually turned out really well and was quite well received. We also made everyone do Aussie Aussie Aussie and sung beer is best as our national anthem. Other peoples stalls were really cool and heaps of effort had clearly gone into making it as fantastic as possible.

Wednesday

Today was quite a good day although after Global Village the night before, everyone was out really late and even though we started later today (10:15), everyone was really tired. This was the day that we had the sessions with the guys from the UNDP who were talking to us about the UN Millenium Development goals and the things that they wanted us to cover with the students. It was good, however most of the information was not new to me but it's always good to think about the current reality of the world. The first part of the day we were taught about some facts about the state of the world and the targets for the MDGs. After coffee break which was another absurdly huge meal from KFC this time (another member of the Partnership for Corporate Social Responsibility) we then were broken into groups as to how we would work to help a very poor girl in Africa from the point of view of NGOs, private sector etc. It was OK, it just seemed very disorganised and their was quite a lot of confusion as to what our actual task was. After that we had quite a good session about travelling in Poland where they went through the process we would have to take to get transport in between the cities, towns and villages we are travelling to in Poland. They also told us certain things about laws in Poland and that you can't drink in public and you can get into a lot of trouble if you provide alcohol to a minor. They also told us that we couldn't have sexual relations with people under 18 years of age. Someone was apparently arrested and taken to jail 3 years ago after the father of the girl (who was hosting this guy) accused him of having sexual relations with his daughter. I made many bad jokes about my disappointment but mainly before we were told this.

Arrived in Poland

Hey All,

Am safely arrived in Poland after way too long in airports and on aeroplanes. It was very random in Brisbane. The plane went to leave and then realised they'd left some business class passenger behind so went back after being at the runway. I feel like making some comment about them eviscerating the proletariat but communism is apparently dead. Or I can't be arsed. Probably the latter.

I'm pretty tired. The flights were actually quite good. The flight to Singapore had heaps of entertainment on it with awesome movies like the Motorcycle Diaries on it. Then I got frustrated with the free internet in Singapore because it kept logging me off every 15 minutes. But then again I wasn't really supposed to be on there longer than 15 minutes and I think MSN is probably strongly discouraged.

Got into Poland a few hours ago. Met at the airport by 2 Polish people. I've been so impressed. All the Polish people I've met have been really, really nice. I've loved every minute so far. I was really quite nervous getting off the plane but within 5 minutes I was laughing on the bus on the way back to the flat I'm staying at. So yeah, at the moment I'm really loving Poland and Polish people, but that may just be the adrenalin keeping me awake speaking. No. They've been genuinely fantastic so far. Anyway I may go. Will try and keep this updated with photos and info as much as possible.

Keep it real guys,

Daniel