Sunday: Golub Dobrzyn and Chopin's House

Hey everybody! Sorry it's been so long since I last posted, but I've been pretty busy this week with classes and activities that it's been hard to find time to sit down and blog. So I'm only finally getting to my pictures from Sunday, when I went to the town of Golub-Dobrzyn and visited the Teutonic castle there. I apologize if I can't quite fill in all of the historical details -- once again we had a Polish tour and had the kids translating for us, so it was kind of hard to fully understand the history. I know it was the residence of a princess of Finland for a while, and the outside and inside walls are from different eras, but that's about it. Now they do tours of the castle and the area around it is kind of like a Renaissance fair.





When we first got there we watched the guys practicing for the joust. I thought the attitude here was pretty funny because I know that at the Renaissance Festival in Minnesota all the staff there tries to stay in character as much as possible, but here I saw the jouster guys out smoking, talking to their (modern dressed) girlfriends, and getting stuff out of their cars in the parking lot.




The castle was really pretty and was perched in an area with a really nice view of the town below.

Here's Bartek, who was my translator for the tour of the castle. Standing next to him is Kelsey, one of the American high school students.

They had stocks there, and a guy acting as a blacksmith.

The inside of the castle was mostly white walls, but they had some cool historical artifacts.

Here's me! I bet I could fit in that armor.

They also had an archaeological exhibit there too, and they had this creepy display set up.

Here's some cool windows from the area that used to be the chapel.

After the castle, we went to a house that Frederick Chopin lived in for a while.

The tour wasn't very long, but I guess he wrote some music here and now it's used for concerts and art exhibitions and stuff.

They had a room full of different busts of Chopin and I took a picture of this one because I thought it looked like Professor Snape.

After the tour, we had some extra time to explore the grounds of the house. They had some very beautiful gardens.

And a beautiful pond with some lily pads! Yeah, I'm kinda like Monet, except with a digital camera instead of, you know, talent.

Monday night the two dormitories played against each other in basketball.


And on Tuesday night there was a sing-along where the kids got to sing rousing songs such as "Old MacDonald" and "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." You know there's nothing that a large group of 15-18 year olds love more than that!

Yesterday the Polish kids challenged the Americans to a game of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" where we had to answer questions about Poland. I did pretty well, but got out on a question about which political party held a majority in the Polish parliament.

Our audience.

And here's some of my fellow teachers answering questions.

And then for dinner, to get away from the cafeteria food for a while, we had dinner at a crepe place. I had a crepe with chicken shoarma and cheese inside, with garlic sauce on top. See? Only one food picture!

And that's all for now! Tomorrow I go to Gdansk so hopefully I will be posting some pictures of that soon!