Tur-Tur-Key-Key

I know I said I would post a little something before Thanksgiving, but I was sort of busy moving into my new single!!! Whooo! Here are the pictures of my new place and then I will tell you the story.

That's my bed with my new Ikea pillow and in front of my bed is a dining room table. Yes. My dorm room is big enough to have a dining room table. No big deal.

Here is my large desk with an extremely comfortable chair that even has a purse hook on the back. And of course my oversized shelves.

Right and left sides of the room from the hallway. Planning on getting a mini couch or a big comfy chair to put in the corner where the black rug is.

I know it's exciting, but this is my new bathroom! So colorful, I know!

Front door and closet. Doesn't look very big, but is fairly spacious.

Yup. That's right. That is a safe in my closet.

Mini kitchen area. One of those cabinets is a fridge! Can you guess which one? :)

As you can probably tell by the captions under my pictures, I am beyond excited to have this place. It is a dorm, but it's super fancy and sort of reminds me of Santa Clara without the whole "closest-building-to-the-lake-in-all-of-Chicago" title. I received the email on Tuesday afternoon at 1pm and was completely moved in by 2:30pm. Are you surprised? Didn't think so. With the help of shopping carts (yes shopping carts...please do not judge) and my friend Ania, we were able to throw everything into the room fairly quickly and grabbed a bite to eat at an American breakfast/dinner place called "Bagels and Friends" in the City Park shops a few feet away from my dorm.

After my trip to Ikea* the other day, I feel as though I live in a studio apartment and I absolutely LOVE it! Speaking of new apartment, my new address is the following:
ul. Rokietnicka 5E/629
Poznan 60-806

*I decided that Ikea needs to have a warning sign on it in many languages. I wish I was kidding. That store is literally like a labirynth and absolutely addicting for the common shopper that just thinks that they will use a flour sifter more than that one time they bake cookies (this was just a random thing I saw everyone buying...no offense to anyone with flour sifters! I think they're great!).

To change the topic to something a bit more exciting- Thanksgiving! I hope that everyone had an absolutely WONDERFUL family and friend filled turkey holiday. I can't wait for everyone to post their pictures and hear about the random stories from one of the best American holidays! A few days before Thanksgiving, I must admit I had an emotional breakdown and was on the verge of tears because this was my first Thanksgiving away from my family and friends. After sharing my feelings with one of my two American friends, we decided to make something Thanksgivingy before actual Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, huge amount of laziness and inability to actually make anything too fancy, we stuck to what we know how to make best- pasta. Although the pasta was probably the worst pasta I had ever had because we didn't have sauce, it helped to know that I wasn't the only person away from my family during the Thanksgiving holidays. And I'm pretty sure the pasta helped me realize that it's not the end of the world that I'm not physically with my family and friends on Thanksgiving. I'm just thankful that I have family and friends to even be thankful for from halfway across the world. So on Thanksgiving, I felt that I needed to celebrate the fact that I have so many things to be thankful for. I invited my whole program to my new place (all 10 of them) and we drank wine and got ready to take on the Thanksgiving dinner that the school put on for us. Due to the fact that the lines for dinner were EXTREMELY long, we settled on ordering pizza. Even though it was one of the most random and least traditional Thanksgiving's I had ever had, I was grateful to spend it with people who actually listened to my stories about my family, friends, Thanksgiving, America and anything else I blabbed about that night.

Oh and one more thing! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people of all ages! We have snow on the ground. Officially as of the day before Thanksgiving, the fluffy mesmerizing white flakes set foot on the ground. Everything is white and frozen. I will take lots of pictures and post them asap :)

Other than that, I hope everyone's doing very well and I canNOT wait to get home! Not that I'm counting, but 18 daysssss!

P.S. I watch "How I Met Your Mother" and the Thanksgiving episode was to die for. Let's just say that Ted decided to stuff the turkey with another turkey calling it a tur-tur-key-key. Clever, I know! Enjoy kids!

Laundry, Exam, Spelling Issues, oh and Berlin

Before I begin, I would like to apologize for my last blog as it was brought to my attention by a certain someone named Gillster that I spelled "cementery" wrong. I'm pretty sure my English skills are deteriorating.

Okay, here we go. Picture this. I am currently sitting in my bed (very comfortable because of the thick mattress pad that Matat sent me) with my computer literally burning my legs because for some reason the battery gets flaming hot so I have to lift it up every once in a while so I don't get third degree burns. To my left is a chair with a pizza box, hot sauce, ranch and a coca-cola (don't judge). And all around me is a tent of clothes. When I say tent of clothes, I mean clothes hanging off of every cabinet door and regular door and radiator and shelf and hook and everything. Let me explain to you why I live in a hut made of sweatshirts, jeans and socks. I do not know how to work the drier. I woke up this morning at 5am to throw my laundry in because Sundays are very popular laundry days so it's impossible to get a machine. And when I woke up at 6am last week, the machines were already taken, so 5am it was. The cool thing is this- the washing machines are driers too! Very cool, but not. My laundry was in the drier for 2 hours. Usually in America if you keep your clothes in the drier for 2 hours, you might as well bust your Barbies out of the garage because they would all have new outfits. After 2 hours of drying, I felt confident that I finally mastered this evil machine. When I opened the washing machines/driers my clothes were steaming, 275 degrees scolding hot and most importantly soaking wet. Therefore, tent of clothes was yet again a necessity.


As some of you know, I made it all the way to Berlin last weekend. I uploaded a few pictures because let's be honest, pictures are worth a thousand words (or whatever the saying is in English). But just to summarize, the train ride to Berlin is only 2.5 hours so we got to Berlin on Friday night and left on Sunday night. We took a tour bus on Saturday because it was raining all day and it proved to be both very educational and convenient (plus we got free pop on the bus- what could be better than that?!). The city is probably the most organized and cleanest cities I have ever been to. The public transportation was amazing and the train stations sometimes confused me because I thought we had ended up at the airport (yup that's how fancy everything was!). We didn't get to visit museums because we weren't there for long, but Berlin is definitely a place that I want to visit again. Speaking of visiting Berlin again, many of you know that some of "The Girls" will be embarking on an adventure to Polska in February. This is my time to do a shout-out to Gill, Ditsch, T and Kasia! The girls are flying to Krakow where I will meet them at the end of February and then we will be flying to Poznan for a few days and then finishing off our trip in Berlin. I'm so excited they got everything figured out so quickly! I will keep you posted on our excitement levels about the trip as well as other details when it gets closer...might even do a countdown.  

TV Tower in the background

Can't remember the name of this one, but it's pretty!

American Sector, right by the Charlie Checkpoint museum

Part of the Berlin Wall

Alexanderplatz

Awesome fountain in the center of Santa's village

Our tour bus!

Under the Brandenburg Gate

Rieschtag

Checking out the map of course

The free drinks on the bus!

Holocaust memorial

The museum district

Berliner Dom. My favorite building in Berlin

East Side Gallery

Represent!

On our way back to Poznan!

On a different note, this past week was very college-like and involved lots of pizza, not as much exercise and a common sweatpants and sweatshirt outfit (not my gray suit though). I had a physiology exam on Friday that went very well. The professor that was administering the test, however, was probably THE most annoying person I had ever come in contact with. The woman would NOT stop saying how easy the test was. Now, I don't mean that she said it once just to boost our confidence levels, I mean she repeated it about 27 times before the test and anytime someone asked a question during the test, she continued to repeat it another 27 times. Needless to say, it was very annoying and next time I'm pretty sure I will be wearing ear plugs when I step into that classroom. The reason being, anytime someone says something is easy, I get this feeling of, "If I don't do well, I will be excommunicated from this world and laughed at for year." Well maybe not that extreme, but it just puts so much for pressure on me and I just don't like that.  

One last thing- I would like to make a HUGE announcement....drum roll please.
I have officially booked my ticket to go home December 16th until January 5th! I know everyone's very excited and probably doing cartwheels in front of their computer/iPad/blackberry/whatever-form-of-technology-I-don't-know screens. And be warned...it may take me a few days to polish up my English skills. In the meantime enjoy your weeks and get ready for a pre-Thanksgiving Day post. It will be epic. Peace!

4 Days at the Cementary

Where to begin? The part where I have never been at the cementary so many times in such a short amount of time! I will definitely get to that part, but I'll start a few days back.

Mama Hanna and Tata Marek came to Polska for two weeks starting Halloween weekend and leaving Polish Independence Day weekend. They first made their way to Pulawy (which is where we are originally from) and I was able to meet them there for the long weekend. Monday after Halloween is All Saint's Day here in the motherland and we also happened to have Tuesday off so I was able to stay in Pulawy from Friday night until Wednesday morning. Yay! Let me attempt to explain this All Saint's Weekend to you...a week before All Saints Day (Nov 1st) everyone cleans up the graves of their loved ones and starts decorating with flowers and big candles. Due to the fact that my one grandpa is buried in one town and my other grandpa is buried in another town and uncles are in two different places as well, there was a lot of traveling and a lot of days at the cementaries. I have never been in Poland during this holiday (which is one of the biggest and most celebrated holidays next to Christmas and Easter of course). All Saints Day we went to two cementaries (Tata's hometown and Mama's hometown) and this is where I have no idea how to explain what I saw. The cementaries were PACKED and when I say PACKED, I mean PACKED. There were tons of people and everyone was visiting the graves of their close family, distant family and friends leaving candles at each one. The whole cementary was lit up by all these candles- it was actually pretty cool to see so many people remembering their loved ones in such a way. I guess this holiday is similar to Memorial Day in the States, but it's still so different. After a while, I realized that this day was sort of a social experience too. Anytime we turned a corner, there was a great aunt or someone from the family or old friends that my parents and I hadn't seen in years. Here's a picture of how one of our families graves looked on All Saint's Day:

 

Needless to say, I thought the holiday was very different than anything I had ever seen and it was definitely a unique experience. I felt like a little kid at some parts because I had NO IDEA what was happening, but Matat was there to help me!

Moving on from cementary talk. Tuesday was the day that soccer tickets were being sold at the stadium in Poznan for the Lech Poznan vs Manchester City game. We had a group of 15 people set up and even made sure that we had someone buy the tickets for everyone. My friend Ania decided to go stand in line to buy the tickets at 3am. She waited for 9 hours only to hear the dreadful words of, "Sorry, we're sold out." We did not get the tickets to see the game, so instead we caught the game at the Sheraton hotel bar where we had very American food consisting of burgers, fries, wings, and even Budweiser's. Lech Poznan won the game 3-1 and the town went crazy with people gathering in the Stary Rynek (Old Market) doing Lech Poznan chants all night. We only stayed for a little bit because we were nervous someone was going to hear us speaking English, assume we were from Manchester City and we would have a mob of 500 people chasing us back to the dorms.  We decided that we will be going to the Lech Poznan vs Juwentus game so stay tuned to see if we actually got tickets!

Sunday afternoon, Mama, Tata, Mama's sister (Tenia) and Tata's sister (Halina) came to Poznan! Just a quick summary of what we did- everythingggggg! I took them everywhere and showed the main places in Poznan and the cutest restaurants with some of the best food in the city. They loved it. I will post pictures here because I'm not sure what else to say other than we had a blast together! Oh and we got to hang out with my grandma's sister's granddaughter and her husband too which my parents hadn't seen in about 20 years. Oh and I should mention that the shopping spree we went on was THE best. Then on Wednesday I dropped my parents off at the airport where all the flights were either canceled or delayed. "Why?" you ask. There was some of the worst fog I had seen in a while. You literally couldn't see 10 feet in front of you! My parents finally flew out of Poznan and landed in Warsaw where they were 30 minutes late for their flight from Warsaw to Chicago so they were "stuck" in Warsaw the other night. Now the reason I said "stuck" with quotation marks was because I did not feel bad for them. The airline put them up in a 5 star Marriott Courtyard where they got free dinner and breakfast and a calling card too! I was so close to taking the train to Warsaw for the night! So they are currently in the air on the their way to the lovely Chi. I also dropped off my aunts at the train station because their train left on Wednesday an hour after my parents were supposed to fly out so it worked out well in terms of times and everything because I had anatomy in the afternoon.

Today is Polish Independence day which I have never celebrated. Here in Poznan, they have this legend that on Polish Independence day, this man on a white horse, St. Martin, came into the city and the horses hoof fell off and something something not sure what else. But the white horse symbolizes snow because usually it snows on Nov 11th (awesome.) and the hoof is in the shape of these "rogale marcelinskie" which are these croissants filled with chocolate and honey. And guess who will be eating those all day? Yup. That would be me! I'll let you know if they're everything people say they are!

One of more thing before the pictures from Poznan...I bought my train ticket to Berlin! Ania and I will be leaving for Berlin tomorrow afternoon and coming back on Sunday afternoon! So excited! Everyone says that Berlin is amazing so I will be sure to take LOTS of pictures!

And here are some Matat pictures!

My Babcia Wanda on Halloween :)

Robert and Zosia!!!

Adam and Zosia! Oh and Mama!

At Malta Lake. Tata, Halina and I.

Crazy kids! Crossing to the mall!

Shoppingggg time!

Look at Tata's stylish new hat!

Dinner with Ania and Adrian.

At the Veranda cafe

Stary Rynek of course

Fara church in the background...sorry I didn't flip the pic!

Matat! So fancy!

At the restaurant "The Mexican" (that name would not fly in the States haha) with Agnieszka and Tomek (on the left)