1 week away

Just when things are getting nice in Inowroclaw, Casey and I are about to depart for another adventure. That’s right, we are finishing up teaching this week, saying good-bye to friends and students and packing up our home that we lived in for 7 months. (I still have this habit of collecting things, so we will have to give a lot of things away to friends or donate them to the salvation army).

We are not actually leaving Poland right away, but we are taking a trip to the famous Polish mountains, the Tatras, for a week to do some hiking. And then we are hopping on the train to Romania, and will be helping out with a Christian organization in a remote village in the mountains by teaching English and helping out with some building projects. So we will be back in Canada on July 7, to enjoy a Manitoba summer.

As I type this I have mixed feelings, we have really been blessed in Poland with meeting alot of new friends, having good jobs and living in a different culture. Sure, the language barrier has given us a little grief, but it has given us the understanding of what many people deal with when moving to a different country. My perspective has changed a lot since the first day we set foot in Poland. The generosity of people has overwhelmed me, we have felt welcome here the entire time by people inviting us to their houses and taking us places. So, Casey and I have decided that we would like to find some Polish people in Winnipeg to keep us in touch with Poland.

These past few weeks we have been trying to see everything that we can around our area now that the weather has been nice. Friends of ours, they took us to Biskupin, a prehistoric settlement from about the 8th century.

We also had the opportunity to go to Malbork this past weekend with some other friends. It is biggest Gothic castle in all of the World built in the 1300s, it also had a tower so we climbed it.

Well, okay I better go and start packing up or at least thinking about it.
Chris.

get the combines ready?

One of the wider roads, lined with trees, and you can see the canola is already blooming.


Our neighbors took us for a hike on sunday... an area fairly close to here with lots of forest, lakes and wild boars. No, we didn’t see any but trying to communicate through broken Polish and English is a sure way to make any trip more interesting.


There are some pretty neat vehicles here, and this one would wake us up almost every morning during winter as it struggled to start. The other day I saw a man push-starting his own car, by himself, which I thought was pretty cool. I guess the benefits of having a Fiat.


These tiny garages are everywhere.


Just trying to leave my mark here.

Empty Nest Syndrome

So, it’s just Casey and I now, Codi left on Friday to continue her adventure. We will miss having her around especially because she always did the dishes for us and she was great company and a better shopper then Casey. Our first and last visitor in Poland.



After our trip to Prague we worked for 2 days and then headed to the Baltic Sea for the weekend. We were really impressed with Gdansk, a sea port town widely known for its amber and nearby beaches.

We got to climb the church tower of Virgin Mary, the biggest brick church in all of Europe. The 407 steps were a little bit of a challenge, but we had taken it upon ourselves to see how many towers we could climb when Codi was visiting. It is funny usually Casey and I have bad luck, and all the towers are closed when we want to climb them, but we had no problem with Codi.

We went for a meal of pierogies, I think that I was the only one that enjoyed them. I suggested Codi and Casey try something a little different other then the usual potatoe and cheese. I guess that they shouldn’t have listened to me.

On Sunday we had a bit of a disappointing day. It all started at about 2am in the morning when Codi and Casey were consistently woken up by some rowdy people. (I was sleeping). We headed to the sea side in Sopot only to find that everyone else had the same idea, and it was so busy, you had to wait in-line half an hour for ice-cream and it wasn’t even that good. The one highlight of the Sopot was the Wobbly House, based on the architecture style of Antoni Gaudi.

After fighting the crowds, losing a jacket, we got tired and caught a train back to Inowroclaw, the train was really old and shaky.(4 hours long) So shaky that you couldn’t read a book or even sleep without falling off your seat. To top the day off, we had a run-in with a fake cop that demanded that we pay him money or he would arrest us, after arguing in broken Polish he finally left us alone. We were relieved to be back at home, I guess there has to be one bad travel day.

Chris.

someone is on our couch..

Well, chris and me have had a little visitor for the last few days… yep, and we’re not sure if she’s gonna leave. No, it’s not a cat, or a mouse… but worse… a little sister. The giggle-meter has been reading a little higher than usual too, but it’s been great to see codi again, yes, despite all of the giggling, and chris and her seem to enjoy ganging up on me… ohhh, life is hard.
for those not in the loop, we met codi in prague. it was around a 14 hour train ride, but definitly well worth it. the one nice thing about the slow polish trains is that it gives you lots of time to enjoy the scenery. but prague was awesome, and kept us busy oohing and ahhing and taking pictures. these are just a few random ones.