Finishing the First Year of Physiotherapy=Priceless

Here I am sitting at the airport in Warsaw using the free internet gate next to the duty free store (conveniently placed, might I add) waiting for my flight back home. And I realized that this is the first time in a long time that I have a free hour to finally get a post in so why not bust out the laptop from my very disheveled carryon and start writing! 

Let me start off with saying the following- I AM FINALLY DONE WITH MY FIRST YEARRRR! Obviously, I am very excited about that and must say very happy with the outcome of this school year except for the fact that it went by SO fast. I mean only two years left- how crazy is that? But going back to the school part- after our anatomy exam, our friends from class brought a bottle of champagne which we were sure to pop open in front of the anatomy building. Afterwards we went to the Rynek and grabbed dinner and drinks. At about 8pm, I decided that I was going to take a quick nap before I officially celebrated later that night. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I apparently have narcolepsy and am officially old, I woke up at 3:30am. Yup that’s right- I missed the whole party! Confused and ready to start my day at 3:30 in the morning, naturally I went online and didn’t know what to do with myself because well it was 3:30 in the morning and I was up! The following day was the Catalina Wine Mixer. PAH! (you will understand this if you watched the epic movie Stepbrothers) On Friday, a few friends of mine decided on doing a sort of pot luck dinner where everyone made something. There was Nathan and Natalia’s pad thai (amazingggggg…recipe in the next post) as well as classic taco dip made by Angelina and myself. To top everything off we even had sundae’s created by Sabrina and Olivia. Because our wine ran out quickly, this Catalina Wine Mixer quickly turned to a Tequila Wine Mixer (classy I know). Needless to say we had a blast and then went out in the city for one last hoorah. The next morning was slightly rough I must admit, but I was able to make it to the train station and survived a seven hour train ride to visit my family for the weekend before heading back to the wonderful US of A. Visiting the family was tons of fun, as always, and I was able to see the little kids which was absolutely perfect!

I know this post is all over the place, but I have to include my birthday celebration from two weeks ago. I hope you’re ready for this because it’s probably one of my top three birthdays. I hate to say this, but I do not have any pictures from that night because my friend Tim has them all and I was not able to grab them from him before he left to go home, BUT the second I get them, I will definitely post them so don’t worry. So my birthday this year was on a Friday so everyone expect me to go out starting on Thursday, but with all my final exams, there was no way that I would be able to do anything but study. On Thursday night, however, Fil and Adrian invited me to drinks at Poznan’s most expensive restaurant along with Wilhelm, Tim, Michal and Fil’s cousin. So we all got super dressed up (the boys wore suits and I even wore heels) and we met at Fil’s apartment. After hanging out for a little bit and waiting for Fil to change his clothes 100 times, the boys finally decided that we were going to change/spice things up a little bit. We first taxied over to the Blow Up Hall where we all got fancy drinks and the boys even bought a cigar. Afterwards we got a limo. I do realize that I am saying it very nonchalant, but that’s because I actually don’t know how to express to you how excited we really were. After we walked down expensive stairs through the expensive doors and were thanked by the woman wearing an expensive suit, we were greeted by a crisply white limo. To make a long story short, I will say this- we were going to be in the limo for only two hours, but three hours just sounded slightly better. The limo driver literally drove us around in the limo for three hours where we stopped at the dorms, friend’s apartments, the Eurocup stadium, the Biophysics building (the boys were determined to pee on it) and drove all over the Rynek. It was honestly tonssss of fun and can’t wait to see what the boys think of for my birthday next year haha!

I will end right there because I’m starting to get slightly hungry and I have a 40 zloty voucher waiting for me for lunch at the airport since my flight was rebooked and I will be getting home an hour later than expected. Gotta love those airlines sometimes don’t ya?! Toodles for now and I will post in three months! Happy vacationing everyone!

Bike and Beach Tuesday

Now that I'm warmed up with my blog posting and am trying everything possible to put off studying and I drank a large cappuccino not too long ago, I need to tell you about my Tuesday. Plus, I'm sure you're all trying to find ways to procrastinate anyways :)

After an eventful morning trying to explain to our crazy professor from Introduction to Physiotherapy (you would think it was sort of a blow off class...don't be fooled by the title- intro my you-know-what) that she is in fact wrong, I finally made my way to the bus station where I was going to make sure that we could rent bikes. I mean, that's what it said on the website, "Bike Rental at Bus Station". Unfortunately, living in Poland for a few months now, I knew that it couldn't be that easy. Let me just keep it short and say this- there is no bike rental at the bus station. After searching all over Poznan for a place to rent bikes, I finally found a place where Nathan, Natalia, Antosh and myself rented our bikes (with some difficult because Natalia forgot her state ID and only had her school ID, but after some bribing and a 500zl deposit we were finally on our way).

To be completely honest, I have never ridden a bicycle through a city. It was by far one of the hardest things I have done in a while. Between trams, people, manequins being placed in front of stores, we finally made it to the woods where we were to bike 13.5km to get to our destination. On the way, our friend Kasper joined (not the friendly ghost...he's a mean ghost haha just kidding) and we continued our adventure. It was so cool riding our bikes through the woods. Being mature medical students, there were numerous Mario Kart references and drills to get into single-filed lines, but after about an hour we finally made it to the lake. After we locked up our bikes on the pier, we had to take in all that Poland has to offer and stop for a refreshing beer- I mean we had just been riding our bikes for almost two hours, it's the least that we could do!

This is what the bike ride looked like the whole way!

Boys being Boys

Quick little piwo never hurt anyone right?

The rest of the day was filled with jumps off the pier and sand volleyball and being attacked by third graders throwing sand at us when we were in the water. Everyone had an amazing time and we were even joined by our three other friends that came a bit later. The weather was perfect- 85 degrees and sunny. I mean how was anyone expected to study on a day like that?! Natalia brought her books, but none of us allowed her to study. She ended up having a nightmare that night about failing her exams and getting kicked out of school (can I just add that she's the number one student in her class?). Me on the other hand, I dreamt about Taco Bell- well chalupas and hard shell tacos to be specific.

Jumping off the pier! Get it Antosh!

The B&B Tuesday group 

To say the least, we all had a blast and can't wait for exams to be over so we can do a repeat of B&B Tuesday. Sounds like a sandwich place doesn't it?