Experimental Singing

I'm going to go out of order in my blogging (gasp!). So instead of telling you about my five crazy days in Belgium, I'm going to tell you about my week in Warszawa.

So, I got back really late on Monday, and I had to teach on Tuesday. I did interview questions with my third years, who aren't certain if there's a career center at school or not. It quickly devolved into "chat with Amanda" time. I didn't really mind because we talked about some interesting things, including Christmas traditions in Poland - which, surprise surprise, include watching Home Alone? I much prefer the carp in the bathtub tradition, but I guess I won't be experiencing any of those because I AM GOING HOME!!!

Anyway, my first years bribed me into letting them skip class with a Christmas bell filled with chocolate as a St. Nicholas Day gift. They didn't even know it was my name day! (My third years found out and told me that I should've brought them candy! Psh.) Anyway, I was going to spend a good hour of class giving them a writing assignment, so I let them do it at home instead - warning them that I'd be grading it more harshly. This is a pretty good class. The girl who I thought I was going to have to fail has stopped coming to class. So I'll definitely fail her now, but I highly suspect that she dropped out on her own. I have no real way of knowing.

I still haven't graded papers - which I plan on doing tomorrow to some extent. But I did go coat shopping. I found a lovely white/black/semi-houndstooth one, but it was probably closer to 70 dollars and wouldn't look good with most of my scarfs (maybe all). So I'll live to look another day. I meant to look at the Christmas markets at Centrum, but I forgot. Hopefully Ashley will want to see Christmas markets so we can go this weekend. Ashley is coming in for the Fulbright meeting, which should be a blast.

Anyway, today I participated in a very strange experiment in theater. Well, it was a Polish actress reading poems (that seemed fairly awesome) by this Polish guy who made up words to express his Polish poetry self. Well, it makes more sense if you know Polish to get that making up words is way more logical. He wasn't Seuss. He was creating words from words, and they added new meaning. If that makes sense. He created one from the word "dzisaij" which means "today" and it was something like "the way I am today; my being in this day, etc" So, Dara and I did some sort of weird humming in the background while Polish girl read in a very dramatic way and Erin played the harp. I hope to have interesting recordings of this soon for everyone's enjoyment.