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).

Real Polish Tacos, Pieogies, and Poland's Got Talent!

So whenever my Mom would make us cabbage rolls for dinner, we would jokingly call them Polish tacos. Well, my friends, I have experienced real Polish tacos. On Friday our Polish cooks decided they wanted to make tacos for us, and what we got was a crepe (or more like a German pancake) with ground beef? pork? and corn and beans inside, with sour cream on top and ketchup that had been turned into hot sauce by adding some spice. It was actually pretty good, if not much like a real taco. I put some tomatoes on mine. We get a plate of tomatoes with just about every meal here, and they have been AMAZING.

The strawberries have been awesome, too.



I also had my first non-cafeteria meal here. We decided on Friday to go out for pierogies. There's this place we saw advertised, and I got chicken and cheese ones with a mushroom sauce on top.



For our evening activity on Friday, we hosted our own version of "Poland's Got Talent!" in the gymnasium here.

Bob, one of my fellow teachers, acted as the host.

These are guys from my homeroom. The kid on the right did some fancy pen spinning and solved a Rubick's cube in 20 seconds. We also had some musical acts:

She sang that "Mad World" song from Donnie Darko and I thought her voice kind of sounded like Bjork.

These girls sang a really nice song in Polish.

And these girls sang a song in English but it wasn't one that I knew. We also had some dancing:

These girls did a really cool intense hip-hop dance.


And this girl did something that was a little bit more like ballet/interpretive dance.

We also had this girl named Claudia who did that thing where it looks like you're pulling invisible strings on your face, but she was really really good at it.

And then finally, these guys did a comedy sketch that is really famous in Poland. The guy in the tie translated it into English, but I still didn't quite get it. It was something about a guy buying a washing machine? My students all assured me that the original bit is very funny, but it probably just doesn't translate well.

Another cool thing that's been going on in town here is that they've been playing movies outside on a big screen over by the castle. I saw "Vicky Christina Barcelona." They had it in English with Polish subtitles and the only bad thing was that when Penelope Cruze's character spoke Spanish the Polish kids got subtitles but we couldn't understand it at all.

Well that's all for now! I still haven't gotten to my pictures from this weekend. We had a 4th of July picnic, went to see a castle, and got to see a house that Chopin lived in. Stay tuned for that!

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!