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.