Bingo Night and Field Night

Hello friends! Sorry I couldn't post yesterday, but my access to the internet was limited and I needed to spend some extra time tweaking my lessons. I'm glad I didn't plan them out in too much detail before I got here, because I'd probably end up changing them anyway. The kids here are all really smart, so I think I've got to challenge them more with more debate and interaction.

Anyway, what have I missed? Oh yeah, FOOD PICTURES.

We had a kind of breakfast for dinner type thing two nights ago with giant rolls and, oh yeah, kielbasa!


The next day we finally got some fresh fruit (some of the teachers have been wanting more than what they're giving us) and we had this delicious tomato soup with vegetables.


We also had some sort of meat dish, but I'm only taking pictures of my more interesting food. For dinner that night (the smaller meal) we were all really excited because we heard we were getting pierogeis and were expecting them to be filled with meat and served with onions or something, but these ones were sweet and filled with some sort of desert cheese and drizzled with a buttery sauce on top. It sounds good when you hear about it, but it was actually kind of sickening to eat. I hope we get the other kind of pierogies sometime here too.


Okay, now that that's out of the way, I can talk about some of our activities. Wednesday night we had bingo night with the kids.


And here's our table of fabulous prizes -- mostly free promotional items that teachers have gotten on business trips and stuff, but we had some T shirts and hats with American high school team logos on them and other cool stuff like that.


After bingo night, me and two other teachers finally got together and went on one of those floaty boat thingies that I saw earlier on the river. Guess what? It was nice. Just like I thought it would be. I drank a Polish beer called "Lech," which was good.




Yesterday, instead of doing our normal afternoon activities with the kids (games, crafts, etc) we were taken on a tour of Torun. The tour guides didn't speak any English, so the camp assigned us all students to translate for us (it's good practice for them so that's a bonus). It was raining for most of the tour so I couldn't take as many pictures as I wanted to. Here's a couple from towards the end:


This is a statue that sits in the market square of a donkey with a sharp rail going down its back. In medieval times, shopkeepers who were found cheating their customers would have to sit on a donkey like this and ride around the city and sit on it all day, which would be incredibly painful.

This is a beautiful and ornate building which houses the museum of East Asian art, which we got to go inside and see!

This is a town hall type building. Up in the balconies is where kings who visited Torun would sit to watch tournaments between different knights happening in the square below.

This is a big Franciscan church that we got to go inside. The inside walls used to have religious pictures all over them which were then painted over when it became a Protestant church during the reformation. It's back to being Catholic now and art history students from the local University are working on stripping the white paint uncovering the original artwork, which was a cool process to see. There was one big part of the wall that was all gray though and our tour guide told us that one student made a mistake while stripping the white paint and ended up destroying a huge section of a painting. Eeeesh, I'm glad I'm not that person.

The rain cleared up by the time we got back, and last night we had field day activities with games like limbo, races, and throwing contests. The kids in my homeroom confided in me that a lot of them were afraid to do throwing contests because there aren't many sports in Poland that require hand-eye coordination and they don't really know how to throw or catch. It was okay though, cause all the kids were basically on the same level there.


Here's my homeroom. As you can see, it contains kids that look like Polish versions of my friends Tristan (far right) and Travis (middle). You can also see that the "wear red" directive was not quite followed completely.


Here's a picture of all the kids lined up for a game that involved passing an orange with your neck.

The Red Rhinos are trying to strategize.


The girls in my group were some of the best at limbo, but one girl fell when I was trying to take the picture.

And here's me with my group! We tied for second-to-last, but we won the obstacle course event! I'll take what I can get. Tonight we're going to be doing a talent show (Poland's Got Talent, which I guess is a real show here) so expect to see some funny pictures from that! Thanks for reading!