Planes, Trains, and Other Polish Transportation

So my friends and I have decided that we can add to the Benjamin Franklin adage so the quip now reads, “there are three things in life that are inevitable: death, taxes, and your train in Poland will always be late.”  I have yet to have a travelling experience in which everything has gone right (either the train was late, my international student ID card didn’t satisfy the ticket puncher, or we got on the wrong train and were kicked off at the next train stop).  It is a learning experience and I’ve found myself taking the, in the end, things will always sort themselves out approach to living in Poland.  I feel like I’ve being winging it since I left home almost three weeks ago.  When dealing with trains, Polish bureaucracy or lack of any organization, I find myself simply thinking, “well… this is Poland.”

            If I’ve learned anything in the three weeks I’ve been here, it’s that you shouldn’t plan more than 45 minutes into the future because beyond this window, you’re setting yourself up for either frustration or disappointment.  On the train to Krakow this past weekend, another American that I was travelling with and I were planning what cities we would like to visit in the coming weekends.  When we got three weekends out, we realized that we were getting rather ahead of ourselves considering we didn’t even know what hostel we were going to stay at that night.  In the end, like they always have, things worked themselves out and my friends and I found a great hostel right in the city square and I consider the weekend to be a great success.  We visited the major tourist sites like Wawel Hill, the old Jewish Quarter, and a few museums and churches.

            I think this was a good, “first trip” in Europe because Krakow is a touristy enough of a city for 6 foreigners who don’t speak any Polish to get around quite easily.  I felt like everybody knew English and was amazed by how many Americans I saw/heard.  And I look forward to more travelling as well.  The university has planned a trip to Śniężka and Karpacz to go hiking next weekend and then some friends and I have planned a trip to Prague for the weekend after that.  I have a bet with another American who is studying here concerning how many times we have to ride a train in Poland before he have a, “perfect train-ride” (a train-ride in which everything happens as scheduled) and my bet is mid-November so I’ll probably have more stories for you in the upcoming posts.

Until then, do widzenia 

Two Cultures Meet...

Wroclaw is quickly growing on me.  As I now approach my one-week anniversary in the city, I have begun to understand the complexity and nuance that makes the city unique.  It is very clearly an Eastern European city that has an exotic feel to a Westerner but it is also a city that is in quick pursuit of the future.  The mall across the street from my dorm really could very easily be switched with Oak Park Mall at home.  The Polish that I’ve seen are very conscientious about their clothes and I see movie posters for American movies like Harry Potter and Columbiana at the movie theater across the street. 

There does seem, however, to be a part of the city (and maybe all of Poland for that matter) that is stuck in the past.  Apparently, the schools here require the students to study English in an attempt to prepare them for a future in which they will almost inevitably be require to use the language.  In fact, when I look for restaurants to eat at and stores to buy things, I look for the stores with young (under 27 or so) people working at them because there is a much better chance that they know English.  It is very apparent that the city used to be under the soviet bloc with its socialist style apartment complexes right out my window (see picture) and the always-evident poverty of the city that seems to indicate growing pains from communism to capitalism.  This said, homelessness that I see involves a crowd over 50 years old and the young seems to be anxious to move and out of any ways of life of Poland’s recent past.

The Soviet style apartment complex outside my window

One of my favorite activities this past week has been to simply walk around the city.  I like to get the feel of the city and the people and I feel as if I can almost blend in perfectly with the city and the people surrounding me.  I like to simply walk because it allows me to keep my mouth shut and I feel everyone around me takes me as one of their own; as if there is no difference between them and me.  At the “milk bars” that many of the students buy their lunch, I really do feel somewhat Polish… that is, until, I get up to the front and order and my foreignness becomes apparent.   But for the most part, Poles are very welcoming to strangers and foreigners.  It is not hard to make friends at restaurants, in the halls of the university, or even at the laundromat (details to come probably in the next post) and I have found that a little Polish, along with a little English from the other party, can go a long way.  In the end, this past week has not been about two cultures clashing but two cultures meeting, not without a few bumps here and there but relatively peacefully and quietly.  I feel blessed by the experiences I have had this past week while I look forward to the future because like the young Polish I have seen this past week, I am optimistic about the things to come.

The First Few Days...

Phew… I am now sitting here my Ladka XX (the temporary dorm facility the university is housing all of the international students in) room at 8:15 on Monday night and I looking back, I have realized that I have not had a single moment to sit and update this blog since the last Thursday evening. I have to keep reminding myself that I have only been here a few days because it feels like an entire week has gone by rather than just a weekend.  Let’s start at the very beginning of the trip and I’ll take you up until 8:15 on Monday night where you could find me sitting on my bed and opening up my computer.

Woke up early on Friday morning to see Lauren off to school and finish my last-minute packing and if memory serves correctly, Dad, Mom, Claire, and I were out the door by 7:45 or so.  We spent a couple of hours waiting for my plane in the Kansas City Airport and my plane departed on time (I might ad that all of my flights were on time) at 10:40 to Chicago.  It felt like the plane landed as soon as it got in the air because an hour and a half later, I was standing in O’hare airport.  But I really only had time to get a quick lunch in Chicago before my long flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany took off.

I found myself easily entertained on this flight watching free episodes of the TV show Scrubs and the movies, Midnight in Paris and Kung Fu Panda 2 on the small screen in front of my seat.   They turned off the lights in the plane and made all of us close our windows but, as one who cannot take naps during the day, I wasn’t able to fall asleep.  At 10:00 Central (Kansas) time, and 5:00 Europe time, we landed in Frankfurt.  I had a five hour layover in Frankfurt which I mostly spent reading in the terminal I would be flying out of.  In Frankfurt I was pleasantly surprised by the number of Germans that spoke English who I could ask directions on how to get to the right terminal.  Frankfurt seemed to be a popular European crossroads and I could hear quite a few different European languages just from my seat.  Most signs were written in both German and English and I did not feel out of place at all sitting in the terminal and watching others walk by.

The last leg of my trip (from Frankfurt to Wroclaw) was a different matter entirely.  At 10:50 Europe Time (3:50 AM in Kansas) the polish airlines (called LOT) had us walk up stairs, down stairs, through part of the airport, across a small runway, and take a short bus ride to the little plane that would take me to Poland.  It was here that I began to understand that Poland (and probably most of Eastern Europe) would not be like Western Europe and the Frankfurt Airport.  I easily could see that I was the only American on the flight and all the others spoke fluent Polish.  A flight attendant walked by and started talking to me in what I presume to be Polish (although it could have been any language because I didn’t understand any of it) and it was here that began using what has become my number one tactic for these types of situations; wiping the blank stare off my face, smiling, and nodding my head.  When the flight attendant remained standing there after I did this, it became apparent that she wanted something else.  I handed her my boarding pass, she looked at it, and this seemed to do the trick.

We landed at 12:40 PM and my Polish “buddy,” Kamil was waiting for me at the small airport in Wroclaw.  All of my traveling took a total of 22 hours plus the four hours I had already been up which made for a total of 26 hours without sleep.  But my day was for from over.  Kamil took my to Ladka XX where I met one of my new roommates, Laurens, from Gent, Belgium.  After we had a quick lunch in the mall across the street, we met our other roommate, Julian (sp??) from Luxembourg.  The rest of the day was filled with figuring out the tram system, meeting more international students including three Frenchmen named Axel, Eryk, and Medhi, who have become three of my closest friends here in Wroclaw, and eating dinner at a wonderful restaurant in the town rynek (central square, pictures to come).  When I crawled into my (two feet too short) bed that evening, I had been awake for a total of 34 hours and I had absolutely no trouble falling asleep.

The next morning was filled with walking to the main building of the University, eating a wonderful Polish breakfast food, beginning the first day of my Polish language class and meeting more fun and interesting friends from all over Europe.  I have found it rather hard to write all of this down because the past 72 hours really have been quite a blur and now as I finish writing this post (On Wednesday afternoon… two days after I started), it is hard to believe that I’m approaching the one week mark on my trip.  Well… I’ll be off but expect another post within the next couple of days.

As I learned today in my Polish class, Do widzenia (bye bye).

Editorial Correction:  In the first post I said that Wroclaw is pronounced Vrawklawf.  I have come to learn that all C’s in Polish are pronounced with the soft C sound so Wroclaw is pronounced Vraw-slawf.

And So It Begins...

As I am now approaching my 10 hour countdown to my departure on my European Adventure, I can’t help but compare all the preparations I have made the past couple days for this trip to the preparations I made about a year ago when I was about to depart for college.  I vividly remember the pile of everything I was taking to Manhattan lying on my living room floor including a giant (by dorm room standards) 12’ by 12’ shag purple rug, a fridge, bedding, and trash-bags full of clothes I was planning on taking.  This year, the scene in the living room is a rather different.  I am no longer worried about how we are going to fit my things into the car for a two hour drive to Manhattan but instead wondering how I managed to fit everything I need for a whole year into a suitcase, duffle bag, and backpack.

I find myself waffling back-and-forth between relief that I have finally gotten this trip off the ground and anxiety about what comes next.  I already feel extremely well taken care of by the University of Wroclaw (as near as I can tell, you pronounce the first W with a V sound and the last W with a F sound so this is pronounced “vrawklauf”) with the email updates they have been sending me and the Polish “buddy” I will be meeting shortly who will pick me up from the airport and show me around the city.

I depart from KCI at 10:30 tomorrow morning for a stop in Chicago, then on to an eight hour flight to Europe with a five hour layover in Frankfurt, followed by a short two hour flight to Wroclaw.  If all goes according to plan (and of course, it will), I will be arriving in Poland at 12:40 PM Polish time (for all of my Central Time Zone friends, Poland is seven hours ahead of you so 12:40 PM is 5:40 AM here).  Updates will come tomorrow about how the flights are going along with more thoughts about this eight-month Euro-trip.  For now, I better hit the hay and get some sleep before my 17 hour marathon itinerary to Europe tomorrow.  I will leave you with a St. Augustine quote that the study abroad office at Kansas State has turned into tagline for its department: ““The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

Goodnight.