4th of July!

On Saturday our Polish hosts wanted to give us a good 4th of July, so in the morning they prepared a reception for us with fruit, champagne, and snacks.



Yes, I'm aware that this blog is becoming mostly just food pictures, but you know what? I don't care.

We had a lot of people give toasts on freedom, independence, and how America and Poland have helped each other achieve those goals so much over the centuries (tear!). After that, we walked down to the river to catch a boat to an island in the middle. On the way, we saw that the streets were lined with some sort of children's art project. I thought it made the streets look nice.

Then when we finally got to the river, we waited for our boat to come pick us up.

The guy walking in front of the boat is one of the students, Igor, who is only 18 but already DJ's clubs in Warsaw.

I thought this might be our boat, but it wasn't.

Hey there's me! I decided to bust out my X-Men shirt in honor of 4th of July. A shirt that cool needs a special occasion.

It was a mix of students and teachers on the boat.


Once we got to the island, we were treated to a beautiful view of Torun from the other side of the Wisla river.

I guess the island used to be where all the prostitutes lived in the middle ages, and there were ferries to take people to and from the island. That's right, I spent 4th of July on Prostitutes' Island.

Now they just have some buildings and sports training facilities and a recreation type area.


This is where they can practice rowing indoors, during the winter. I guess a member of the Polish Olympic Crew Team who won a gold medal trained right here.

I think the kids appreciated having some down time to just socialize.



And they had a band playing polka music. In between their sets, that Igor kid would DJ for us, playing a lot of European electronic type music.

And then they started laying out the picnic spread.

I think I lost track of how many kinds of sausages they put out. There was also a bunch of ham, pickles, and bread.

I even ate some bigos, which is the national dish of Poland. I was expecting it to taste like sauerkraut, but it was more like stewed cabbage and tomato sauce.

Like every good 4th of July picnic, there were three-legged races...

...and a marshmallow roast! Most of these kids had never tried marshmallows. Some of them liked them, the others preferred to roast sausages over the fire.


And that's all for today! I still haven't gotten to our Sunday trip, but I'll do that later. I'll leave you tonight with some pictures I took on our walk back into Torun (we didn't take the boat, we walked across a bridge that was over 1km long and through the town).