You Can Find Me In Polska: 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!