And the weekend classes start up again

Saturday and Sunday were the first of my weekend classes. My syllabus was rather intense. Not in the school work way. Rather in the "Don't mess with me" way. I gave them a lecture about plagiarism. I figured I wasn't clear enough last semester that they WOULD fail the class if they cheated. So, I tried to emphasize that this time.  I think having a syllabus was helpful just because it's something the students can read in case they don't understand something I say. So I'm going to work on that in the future.

As I mentioned before... we played a lot of pictionary. It worked pretty well on my Saturday class, but I sent out  the list of idioms to all my classes that night. So, imagine my surprise when nearly all of my students had the list for the Sunday classes. So, when they got idioms like "One smart cookie," They would just draw a cookie and wait for their classmates to go through the list and find the idiom that uses the word "cookie."

After work on Saturday, I grabbed an early dinner with Sarah. Then she joined me down in Mokotow for brownie making and Glee. The brownies were a nice addition to...

The Fulbright potluck!

That's right, we had a Fulbright potluck, hosted by one of the professors. It was just a small group of us, but we spent 5 hours chatting and eating and having a generally very enjoyable time. I really really like this new group of professors. The ones based in Warsaw are particularly awesome.

In other news, a ton of movies are leaving Netflix on the first of the month, so I've dominated movie watching while updating the blog and adding comments to my papers. I've seen some great American classics - Scarface, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Odd Couple, and the Valley of the Dolls for a few...

Cara - Our Czech Friend

Thursday morning started off.... early. I rolled out of bed around 5 am to pick up my friend Cara from the nearby bus stop. Cara and I met when we were in Sofia. She's a pretty chill girl, and she decided to mosey over to Warsaw from Berlin on her school break.

After getting some sleep, Cara and I went to the hot spots of Warsaw. So, of course, we started at Charlotte for an extended and delicious lunch. Then we headed to Nowy Swiat. With a stop at Blikle for paczki we were too full to eat, we wandered down Nowy Swiat towards Plac Zamkowy. We stopped off at some essential spots - like the Plac Pilsudskiego where the tomb of the unknown soldier is and the church where Chopin's heart resides.

Cara seemed to appreciate my rather spotty history and "best of" the Old Town of Warsaw.

That night we headed to a pierogi place near Plac Konstitucji. I hadn't been there before, but it was an awesome decision.

Cara had to leave around noon on Friday, so we woke up early and went to Wilanow - where there's a palace. But we didn't go to the palace... we went to the Poster Museum. This would be awesome, right? A museum full of posters? Well... there was a special exhibit that took over the entire museum. And it was a calendar contest. And I'm not talking adorable dogs. I'm talking like - if CVS and Apple made calendars. Then some super weird high concept things. Then the occasional "naked women painted to look like they're wearing clothes" (a classic calendar...).

So, Cara was a bit disappointed, but I put her on a bus safely to the train station where she made it back to the Czech Republic.

Cara's visit was a nice way to stay occupied as I am getting a bit anxious about grad school. Just a bit anxious. I can control it. But now that I have one great offer on the table, I just want to know if I'll have others. If that makes sense?

One of the highlights of the visit was Cara's total appreciation of some of the ridiculous aspects of Polish society - aspects that I'd internalized. Such as the man who dubs over every voice on TV - as in, he is all of the women on Sex and the City, he is all of the characters on Law & Order, he is every person in almost every television program ever. It's great.

Mardi Gras!

So, in Poland, they don't really celebrate Mardi Gras. Instead, they have "Fat Thursday." During Fat Thursday, you eat lots and lots of paczki. I managed to roll out of the apartment (where I was diligently working on important things related to my teaching, of course), in time to meet Sarah for dinner. We got Indian food. It was delicious, as Indian food usually is. Afterwards, we parted ways. I did one of those things where I got to the bus stop approximately 2 minutes after the bus was supposed to be there. Thus arose the life long problem. Do you wait a half hour for the next bus? Do you wait fifteen minutes in hopes that the bus is running late? Do you walk to the next bus stop? Do you catch the metro? Some very serious issues. While I was making up my mind, the bus pulled up - only 10 minutes late. Thus, perfectly situated for me.

I then made sure to stop by a bakery for packi. Because - hello - it's fat Thursday. And ... for the record... I had real, delicious paczki. Not the (admittedly also delicious) crazy weird non-paczki that they serve at the Dainty Maid bakery in South Bend, IN. Boom. Burned.

At this point, I have the apartment all to myself because Lola's doing crazy interviews in London. Which, went very well. Because she has been admitted to a great art history masters program (yay).

ANYWAY, the next day was pretty exciting because there was  Fulbright get together. There are new professors in Poland because (I think) the professors only stay for one semester. The new professors are super legit. There are really great people in Krakow, Wroclaw, and, of course, Warsaw. After a fairly long orientation (not that long compared to ours, which lasted 10 days...), we had obiad! It was awesome, delicious, FREE food & wine. Thanks, Fulbright!

After Fulbrighting, Sarah & I went to Charlotte for a glass of wine and some chit chat. It's been nice making more friends in Warsaw so I'm not only going out with Lola - as great as she is...

I kept things pretty low key that weekend. Friday, I found out I got a really amazing fellowship. So I spent most of my weekend drafting e-mails to professors, grad students, and admissions departments. Also, I spent quite a bit of time searching for... what else - a trivia night wherever I might be going. This is an essential component to future me keeping my sanity in grad school! So not a little thing at all.

Then Amanda Hung Out in Warsaw

My birthday went really well. After Amanda and I returned to Warsaw, we went out to dinner at Jeff's American Diner. That's right. It was awesome. There were cheesy tin signs over the entire restaurant, the kind that you know some company replicates and sells to restaurant chains that want to seem extra American. There was a giant bottle of ketchup! Not any ketchup... Heinz! The best ketchup!

Friday night, I had lekcja. I was so excited about getting into Polish classes, but one thing led to another. First the teacher was sick. Then I was out of town. So, I got back to class as soon as possible. They didn't have a book for me still. And the class was doing things that made sense to me grammatically, but my vocabulary was just not up to the right standards. So, it was my turn to participate, and I didn't know the phrase for washing dishes. Because I don't ask anyone to wash dishes in Polish. I just do it. If I needed to order tea, I'd be good. But washing dishes? So, the teacher gives me about three seconds - maybe not even that - before she starts telling me the way to conjugate the word "robic" - which is a super basic verb in Polish. This really frustrated me, because I couldn't even get a word in edge wise to explain to her that I did in fact know the word - and it's conjugations. I couldn't explain that I need to know how to say "washing dishes." Then she proceeded to say "You don't know that?" Before looking through her cards to give an embarrassed me an "easier" one. Which... wasn't that easy. But I stumbled through it.

Saturday and Sunday I was required to go into class to sign indeks. The other teachers told me I was very dedicated and that they wouldn't do that much work. So... I guess that's good. The indeks are the stupid replacements for an electronic transcript because Poland can occasionally be very impractical.

Sunday night, Lola, Amanda, and I went to get some Thai food before seeing a Polish play, Nasza Klasa. Nasza Klasa is based on a pogrom that happened against the Jews in the small Polish town. I won tickets to see it because I knew the name of the town because I had to read Jan Gross's "Neighbors" for my 21st century Polish history class at ND. Anyway... The basic point of it is that Poles were complicit in the killing of Jews. This isn't to say that Poles are bad. When Jewish people first moved to Poland, it was because Poland was one of the most tolerant states. But, after being partitioned for hundreds of years, then suffering through the ravages of two world wars and decades of communist rule, well... things change. Anyway, the play was very interesting. It was about a group of classmates and who were the killers, who were the killed, their entanglements and lives. Luckily, it had English supertitles. So, I understood all of it. Otherwise things would've been a bit confusing. I could've followed the general concepts, but not the particulars. And there were a lot of particulars with a play that depressing and intricate.

On Tuesday, my classes were cancelled because the third years don't have class during the first week of school. Why? I have no real idea. But that's the way it was. So, Amanda and I went out for a Valentine's dinner with Rachel and one of her friends who was a Prague researcher a year or two ago. Dinner was at an Italian restaurant that's known for its pizza. Unfortunately, I didn't know it was known for its pizza until after I'd ordered something else! I'll have to go back now! Dinner was fun, and it was nice to get out of the apartment on Vday, which is a holiday I actually enjoy unlike many unattached females.

The next day, Amanda peaced out shortly after I returned from teaching my first class to my first years. I actually made a real life syllabus! And then we played idiom pictionary. Which seemed like a great idea at the time. However, it became increasingly less great as I played it with EVERY class I teach... Lesson learned. Mix it up in the future.

Barcelona, Flamenco, and More...

So, Amanda and I did quite a bit of walking over all of Barcelona, so we kept things pretty low key the next day. We started with a late lunch then rambled down La Rambla. This is a major pedestrian thoroughfare.

There's an amazing market right off the street. So we wandered around. Then we continued our walk. My goal was to get to the big mass of water. It's not an ocean. Even though it's connected to the ocean. It's a sea. I don't really understand that. Because it's connected to the ocean. But I guess rivers are sometimes connected to oceans, and they are still rivers. This is just confusing for a poor little girl from a landlocked state like me.

Of course, the other major thing to see that day was the Columbus statue. Since we're in Spain, it's not vandalized the way it could be in the USA. I love that Americans are bold enough to vandalize Columbus statues, even though I don't support vandalism. The main thing is that people are aware that Columbus did not truly discover America, and that when he arrived, the original inhabitants of this land just suffered.

Down on the boardwalk, there were some pretty legit public art pieces.

After this, we went to a restaurant called "Cheese Me." Everything had some form of cheese in it. It had a really delicious fixed menu, and there was much enjoyment. As you can tell, food was super important for me in Spain. This was probably due to the fact that I was traveling with Amanda. I hardly spend that much time or attention on food when I'm traveling alone.

The next night, we went to a Flamenco show (with tapas and sangria). Flamenco is not native to Barcelona. Rather, it is native to southern Spain. It was a pretty interesting show. It kept Amanda and I wildly entertained, even if we were just mocking certain aspects of the performance.

The coolest thing about the flamenco show (for me) was that it was located in the Spanish Village, a whole area full of buildings that replicate different styles through all of Spain. The complex is divided into regions. So, while we saw flamenco in Barcelona, technically, we saw it in the southern Spain section of the Spanish Village.

The Spanish Village was built for... dun dun dun... A WORLD'S FAIR!!! Spain really rocked that way.

Anyway, the next day, Amanda and I braved the Air France strike and managed to make it back to Warsaw. Where it was much chillier than it was in Spain. However, it was much warmer in Warsaw than it had been.

I'm glad I chose Barcelona. While I'm sure there were awesome things to do in Lisbon, Barcelona was shockingly different than any other city I've been to in Europe. Not that they're all the same, but many of them have similar features. Thanks to Gaudi architecture, Barcelona was nothing like, oh let's say... Brussels or Budapest.

Espana!

Amanda and I arrived in Barcelona fairly late. So we settled in at our apartment, then went out for some awesome tapas. Even thinking about the food in Barcelona makes me hungry. It was so divine.

The next morning, Amanda and I woke up early to head out on the town. We did outdoors walking things. We started at a Barcelona park where there was a fountain designed, in part, by a young Gaudi.

Check out how incredibly sunny and warm it looks! So different from Poland, which was suffering -20/30 degree temperatures.

The below picture is one of the ones I insisted Amanda and I visit. It's part of a promenade made for... what else, a World's Fair! In the background, you'll see the Arc d'Triumph. Or, whatever it's called in Spanish. Which means, I still need to see the "real" one. In Paris. Which I will see. Over Easter!!! Huzzah.

Next, we moseyed over to the Gaudi-designed Sagrada Familia church. It's been in the works for about forever, under continuous construction for over 100 years. Can you imagine spending your life building something that will never be finished? How frustrating!

After that, we hiked up a serious hill to go to Park Guell. This park was designed for wealthy people to live around. But, back when Gaudi lived and designed stuff, people didn't want to live that far from the center of the city. This is also the location of a great scene or two in L'Auberge Espanol. Which probably isn't that great of a movie. But it's cool because it's so multicultural and about the difficulties of adjusting to a new country.

Next we adventured for a tour of other Gaudi architecture. It was a very Gaudi day. Amanda and I walked over almost the entire city of Barcelona.

I'm pretty sure that all of those buildings are UNESCO World Heritage sites. I'm not the type to tick off boxes of UNESCO sites that I've been to, but if I'm in a city, I might as well try to see them.

We stopped and did some shopping on our way home. Then we went to another tapas place where they counted your toothpicks to see how much you ate, then charged you accordingly.

On the way back to the apartment, we walked past Big J's. This is a diner-style joint next to our apartment. AND THEY HAVE A MAP OF NEBRASKA. I actually screeched, terrifying Amanda! Whoops.

Rome, or, at least I had a suite

This is my sweet suite from Rome. The others were jealous. The bathroom was huge. It was divine. I didn't brag about it openly, though. :) I figure it only makes up for being on the elevator lobby when in Venice. Boo.

That night I took a bus ride of Rome at night. Perhaps a walking tour would've been better for my photos. I know that Tom's photos of the night are much more interesting. Below is the Vatican. They keep their Christmas stuff up til early February. So I guess Christmas wasn't over yet. Win.

That night we went to a ridiculous dinner and show. People sang in Italian regularly while we drank wine. Very enjoyable. Especially the wine part. Then I got back to the hotel and shared a drink with Trudy and Jon. Probably should've stopped at that point. Around midnight, I returned to my suite exhausted but felt it was necessary to really use my luxurious tub. So I was lucky that Johnny had set a wake up call for the morning. Or I would've missed... the Vatican.

Above is the second coolest part of the Vatican - some sort of world-like ball that was gifted to JPII (henceforth to be called "good Pope").

The first coolest part of the Vatican is below. No. It's not the Pieta. Or the Sistine chapel. Or even the completely legitimate "hall of maps." It's Good Pope's body. That's right, folks. I was this close to Polish holiness. And I've seen Lech Walesa live. So I just need to figure out where they're burying Wislawa Szymborska (RIP), and I'll have completed the Polish trifecta. So I just need to figure out where they buried her.

They're really big about keeping dead bodies in the church. Below is some other Pope.

After the tour of the Vatican, I had lunch with Trudy and Jon. Then I retreated to my room. Outside snowflakes were coming down in giant slushy snowballs. It was miserable. My boots evidently were no longer waterproofed, either. I figured, at that point, that I'd seen most of Rome. The Spanish steps and the Trevi fountain were must dos that were going to have to remain undone for the time being.

The next morning, I headed to an outdoors tour of the forum and the Colosseum. Both were closed for liability reasons because the ground was so wet. But it was awesome to see these things in a way so few people, if anyone, ever had.

Johnny took a photo with me before I ran off to catch my flight. That was a miserable adventure in and of itself. The train to take me to the airport was supposed to leave every 20 minutes or so. It left after 90 minutes. I checked into my flight on time, but they were super low on other security people at the airport, so there's no way I would've made my flight. However! My flight was late. So I managed to get on it in the first place. Then, arriving in Frankfurt for my connection, I was told that a gate agent would see me when we got off the plane. I have no doubt that I would've been driven to my connecting flight had we not had some minor ground delays (some jerk parked his plane in our way and we had to wait for him to move it). Alas, I was directed to the rudest customer service people who just talked to themselves in German without giving me any notice as to what was going on or any options about anything. Alas, I was stuck in the Frankfurt airport AGAIN for another 5 hours. I officially hate Germany. It has not done me any favors. When I finished talking with the customer service people, it was right as my flight would've begun taking off. I still think I could've made it. I would've picked up my luggage the next day as I headed to... SUNNY Spain.

Assisi, or, where I got those great monk-shaped salt and pepper shakers

Assisi is a really cute medieval town built high up on a hill.

There's a church there that's really big. Saint Francis is buried there. You can't take photos inside. Boo. St. Claire is also from Assisi. There must've been something in the water.

It's a really pretty area.

The end.

Tuscany, Pisa, Florence

We left Venice at the edge of morning. Very early, is what I mean. The days in which we left a place were the days I definitely ate breakfast. Because you had to put your suitcase outside an hour before you left. Meaning I had to have my face done and my clothes on because otherwise - where would I put my makeup/pajamas.

So, we eventually managed to get off the island of Venice despite some broken transportation. Then we hustled over to the region of Tuscany. Where we stopped for lunch at a winery. At this winery we sampled (unlimitedly) five different wines, different types of olive oil, and delicious pasta and Italian food things.

They also had a really cute dog.

Our next stop was shortly after in Pisa. Our guide to the winery would refer to this as "Dirty, stinking, smelly, rotten, blah blah blah, Pisa ptooey." Some of our retired tour members took this up as the rallying cry of the tour. I've no idea why.

The tour leans.

Eventually we made it to Florence where I walked around, taking night photos of some of the sights that Tyler (from Budapest, who studied abroad in Florence) said were "must-do"s.

Above is the Duomo. I think that's Italian for "cathedral."

The next morning we woke up to a surprise from Johnny. He took us to the Piazza Michelangelo where there's an amazing scenic overlook of the city. Then we headed back into Florence to go to the Accademie where Michelangelo's David rests. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take photos inside. However, I did pick up some post cards. Our tour guide was very enthusiastic about art. While we spent most of the time talking about David, we did also examine the "prisoners" - statues that were abandoned (or maybe intentionally never finished). They're really interesting. More are in the Louvre. (Hint hint).

We continued on with our walking tour after seeing David. At the doors to the Baptistry of the Cathedral (mentioned above) was this amazing golden scene. I thought it looked familiar. GUESS WHAT. IT WAS FAMILIAR. It's mimicked at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. A block away from Amy's apartment. The place I went because it's referenced in a Decemberists song.

Florence, Italy

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

The main piazza has an outdoor sculpture garden. Some of them are statues that have been replaced. Others are originals. A striking original is the "Rape of the Sabine Women" (second photo). In the first photo you can see where David used to stand before he was moved indoors for his protection.

This is a bridge that the Medicis used to cross the city. They avoided interacting with the smelly common folk. I suddenly want to learn so much more about them!

They also created the second layer of this famous bridge so they could walk across. And told the butchers who used the bridge (for the convenient waste disposal called "a river") that they had to find other places to work so more normal gold smith people could move in.

I headed to the Uffizi after a short (delicious) lunch with Jon and Trudy and some others. The Uffizi has things like Boticelli's Birth of Venus. Despite only having American Art History in school, I really appreciate all the European art. I'm still very much an Americanist and a Modernist. But I wonder how much of that is because of my frames of reference.

Next, I headed solo to the Galileo science museum where I drew on every inkling of my science memory to try and figure out what the crazy machines on display were used for.  Some of them were very cool. Some of them were incomprehensible to a lay person like me. Other exhibits were Galileo's finger. And tooth. Not kidding. See below.