I started on Nowy Swiat, by the super fake palm tree that my roommate tells me is actually part of some art installation.
I got coffee with a friend of mine from KUL. Then headed over to Lucka for my school meeting. My school is only a couple of blocks away from the museum my roommate is focusing on. Only, I work on Tuesdays - when the museum isn't open. Otherwise we could be travel buddies.
School is still overwhelming. Evidently the kids don't know anything either. So I guess I can show up the first day, tell them with some authority which books to buy, get their e-mail addresses so I can e-mail them the syllabus (I think I'll make a big deal about being a teacher who prefers low levels of paper consumption), and make them write some stuff down so I know what level they're actually at.
I then wandered over to New Town/Old Town. I got some ice cream from a shop keeper who refused to take my new two zloty coin.
I stumbled into the Marie Curie museum. Major disappointment. And for 11 zloty! It's just a bunch of pictures and captions. They captions would say things like "Marie one year after Pierre's tragic death." But nothing explained how Pierre died! (Wikipedia tells me he slipped on wet cobblestone and then was run over by a horse and carriage. Ouch!)
I sat down with a beer to people watch and examine the books for class. I still don't really know how to teach from a workbook that would take me maybe an hour (tops) to complete. (OK. That's an exaggeration. There's a lot of reading to be done, and it would definitely take more than an hour - but the questions are so basic for native speakers. There's a reason I want to teach at the college level.)
While people watching, I noticed something super interesting. There were two different groups (a Spanish speaking family and a German speaking group of young men) who didn't speak Polish. Both of these groups had one English speaker who was delegated the task of communicating in Poland. Perhaps this isn't as interesting as it seems to me. But maybe it is.
Eventually, I purchased a bathmat (our apartment is almost complete!) and met my roommate for dinner. This is after sitting on the old wall that surrounded the medieval city of Warsaw and watching the sun go down. That is, until this lovely, Arab-Christian, Israeli man who has family in Colorado and Tennessee stopped to ask me if there was a river (of course there's a river in Warsaw! Does he not have a map?!) So I pointed in the direction of the river. I also managed to tell him that he has a lot of identity. I seriously need to keep my mouth shut. I just can't quite figure out how he managed to figure out that I speak English. The only blatant clue I have that I'm not European is that I wear my class ring on my right ring finger - so it's on my "wedding ring" finger, but it's not a wedding ring. Also, my bracelet has English on it, but it was hidden and is usually too far away from people for them to see. The whole rest of the day, I managed to have interactions with people in Polish - they didn't immediately switch to English even though many of them spoke English. :(
Then I met roommate, Lola for a delicious dinner and wandered back to the apartment. All in all, a full day. Filled with many e-mails to reply to and lots of applications to finish and lessons to plan. Everything is under control.
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