Polish Roads

Tuesday 12th of October was a terrible day on the roads in Poland, 18 people in a mini-van, driving from Drzewica a small city in the Lodz state to a harvesting job, died in a head on collision with a lorry, and even more locally a young woman in the city center of Lodz.

The 18 people in the mini-van were seasoned harvesters on their way to an apple picking job, they were traveling in a 6 seater Volkswagen Transporter with seats made of logs and wooden boards making enough seats for the remaining passengers in the back of the van. The accident happened at around 6am on Tuesday morning and Police have said that the most likely cause of the crash was fog that caused the driver to miscalculate the distance between the van and the lorry. 16 of the passengers died on the scene and the other two along with the driver were airlifted to hospital, but unfortunately the passengers died not long afterward.

Although speeding isn’t thought to be a factor in this particular incident, this sad tragedy happened on Sensible Speed Day, that is held to mark road safety in Europe.

In Lodz a young woman while walking her dog was dragged in front of a tram, I didn’t hear very many details about this but people on the street said that she had lost her leg but that she was still alive, but then the next morning my host parents told me that on the news it said that she had died, but they didn’t tell me what the cause was.

The incident in Lodz aside, Polish roads are terrible. In the same article providing information about the accident involving the mini-van this piece of information was included.

“Only last weekend, there were 350 collisions in which 33 people died and over 440 were wounded.”

While I couldn’t find any recent statistics, here is some information from 2003

Poland: 51, 078 traffic accidents with 5, 640 deaths and 63, 900 injuries

In Australia: 1,621 deaths and 28, 422 (I couldn’t find how many crashes, fatal or otherwise, occurred in 2003)

These are some pretty terrible figures and after driving on Polish roads VERY believable. Everyone in Poland is in a rush to get everywhere and don’t seem to care for anyone else around them, I have been in the car when my host father has tried to overtake while turning, I have been hurtled down the highway at 210kmh in a 110 zone, 2 way streets but only one lane is drivable because the other half has parked cars. My English class had a discussion about this sort of behaviour on the roads and one of the girls had a pretty good theory that I think is pretty consistent with the attitudes of drivers, she said that for such a long time in Poland, having a car meant you had money and were important and didn’t have to worry about anyone else, and that has continued to be the mindset, but now with just about everyone owning a car and having that attitude, it’s just calling for danger on the roads.

New Family

On Thursday 7th of October I moved to my third and last host family. They live in a pretty small two story house by Australian standards and it is only a 5-10 minute walk from my most recent host family and a 5 minute drive from my first family.

They are extremely nice people and have definitely taken to treating me like their own child. These people are the grandparents of a girl named Marta (on her father’s side) from Łódź that went to Canberra on exchange. Their names are Hannia and Szczepan Miłosz. I think these are the correct spellings.

Since moving to the new family I have limited access to internet so right now I’m sitting at McDonald’s and stealing internet, with an Ice-cream while the weather outside is 5c so I have recieved some weird looks, but I have been getting them all year.

Other things that are new: I talked to the English teacher at my school about me doing the work while I’m here and then he will send a letter to school in Canberra and see of they can give me some marks for it. I will be going to Rome from the 25th to the 28th with my cousin before she goes on Venice for a work related thing.

Warsaw Wanderings

Yesterday I caught the train to Warsaw for the day. I arrived at around 11am and decided to find someplace for a coffee while I waited for my friends, but the Gloria Jean’s coffee that I would have gone to had been replaced so I had to go looking for somewhere new. At 11:40am I met some people and then we had to wait while others showed up.

Once we had all arrived we took a look at the map and decided to go to the Palace of Culture, just as we did, it started to rain. As interesting as the museum was we managed to skim it in under an hour, with the highlight being the Lego room, with models of ships, a war and a ‘Star Wars’ space ship.

We had some lunch and decided to go fro a walk, where, we weren’t too sure, but we were sure that we would end up somewhere. Maybe half an hour later we turned back and went to one of the Rotary Clubs in Warsaw’s meetings, there were presentations by some students that had just returned from exchanges in Mexico and USA. It was good to pretend to hear what they were saying, but they did have some nice photos, of their time, I particuarly liked the pictures the girl that went to Mexico had, they had so many colours and the beaches looked pretty awesome.

I got home around 10:50pm and I was feeling pretty crap, and then when I woke up today I had a pretty bad cold so I stayed home and today this made the 5 day in a row I haven’t been to school, hopefully next week I will be able to make it to school.

Toruń

This last weekend I was in Toruń for my third Rotary meeting. It is a 3-4 hours away from Lodz and I was driven by up there host parents on the Friday night; once everybody had arrived we went out to dinner. After the meal a group of people came in and play some traditional music and did some dancing and even gave us a lesson, then everybody got up and we did a group dance that was a lot of fun.

Saturday, which was our only whole day together in Torun, started with some presentations about the rules for the rest of the year, because everybody at the meeting except myself, the other Australians and one Japanese boy have only been in Poland close on a month. There was also some information about the Eurotour that would be offered…in April, so unless I can organise something on my own or with a few other people I won’t get a Eurotour and my small Capitals Tour will be all I get. When the presentations were done with we took some photos with our blazers and then proceeded with the Talent show. People did some dancing, one girl played the flute, the Australians and I did the nutbush, but I did it differently to them so I kind of ruined the look of it all. The Americans formed a human pyramid and sang a chorus of their national anthem and the winner Tom, a boy from America played the guitar and sang a song from ‘The Flight of the Concords’.

Later we went on a walk around the town, saw a few sights, like the church where Mikołaj Kopernik or Nicolaus Copernicus, was baptised, the place where he grew up and the old town square. At the end of the tour we went to the gingerbread house, as Torun is well known in Poland for its gingerbread, we were shown how all the ingredients are put together and we were then allowed to make our own ginger bread shapes and we could collect them after they had cooked. We were with a group of little Polish children and they were the first ones in line to collect their shapes, and as it would turn out, collect my shape and a few other people’s shapes from our group, I was pretty annoyed, because I saw the girl take mine and leave, it was prefect if I do say so myself so I can’t blame her for wanting it, but then again wanting and taking are two different things.

The rest of Saturday was spent at our hostel playing cards, catching up and making plans. Sunday morning every left, I was one of the last people to leave, but I was with some others from Kielce and we were playing cards, because my host parents were there we went for a walk around the town and we went to the planetarium, which I’m sure was good, but I fell asleep about 5 minutes into it. We had dinner and dessert and then drove home.

It was a really good weekend, seeing everyone again, even though it hadn’t been that long since we had seen each other and I really liked the city, I only wish they we had been given more time to explore and go walking on our own, it felt as though every second of that weekend had been planned for us and that we were 5 year olds who needed constant watching over.

Language Camp

On the 18th of August my host mum got a call from my Rotary club asking if I wanted to go to the language camp that was being offered to the new exchange students in Poland, the club said they would pay and that they thought it would be better then sitting around in Lodz until the holidays ended. The camp had actually started yesterday so I would be arriving 2 days late but it would be fine.

So on the 19th I caught the 4 hour train and was met at the train station by a Polish student that had just returned from a year in Brazil and he started speaking to me in Portuguese because someone told him I was from Brazil. The course was being held at a bording school about 20 minutes out of Krakow and I when I arrived I joined in on one of the lessons halfway through and afterwards got to meet everyone.

The plan of the day was:

8:30 Breakfast

9-1:30 Lessons, with 2x 10 minute breaks

1:30 Lunch

2-3:30 Free time

3:30-6 Conversation groups and more free time

6 Dinner

6:30-11 Free time

Everyday was pretty much the same except some days we would go on an excursion, we went into Krakow twice, once to go sightseeing, once to see ‘Inception’. We went to a Benedict monk monastery that was only 10 minutes away from where we were. We did a day trip to Zakopane which is a ski town in the South of Poland and we spent the day there, it was a nice break for everyone. On the days that we didn’t have an excursion there were other things to do at the school, there were movies, we had the option to go swimming in the nearby community center pool, there were bonfires and some group activities.

I had a good time, while all of the kids were learning new words that would help them communicate with their host families better, I was learning the grammar, which I didn’t realise I knew so little of, so it turned out not to be such a break, and it was still educational for me.

It was really good to get to meet the new kids, and make friends and I felt this was a lot easier with this group then the last group, not because they weren’t nice, but because they were already in friendship groups, which can be hard to crack into. I will be sad to leave them and I already feel jealous that they will stay in Poland after I have left, they will still only do 9-11 months but I don’t want to miss out on all of the fun this they will get to do.

Speyer, Germany

On the 12th of August, I flew to Frankfurt, Germany to go and stay with an exchange student that lived in my house in Australia for 4 months.

My host mother and I left Łódź fairly early in the morning, and on the way there she told me how much she dislikes the Euro (currency) because every one who lives with the Euro pay less of a percentage of their wages for clothes and food. We got to the airport with about 2 hours until my flight and I think I could have shown up 30 minutes before hand, the check-in and security process we quickly navigated and I was waiting for my flight to be called. The flight itself was pretty uneventful and went by pretty quickly.

The drive from Frankfurt to Speyer should only take an hour, but for Bernadette and I it ended up taking 2 hours because we missed the turnoff and then had to go to the next one and then turn around. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, as we were driving out of the airport, Bernadette turns to me and says “I think I know how to get home from here.”

That night we went out to a pub to meet up with some friends but only one of them showed up.

Friday, I walked around the main street by myself because Bernadette had things come up that needed to be dealt with and that night I stayed at the house with Bernadette’s parents, Christian and Christine and we played “Wizard” which is a German card game. Saturday I stayed at the house again and I was reading while Bernadette was helping clean out the stable she rides at, but that night there was a reggae music concert on in the town and we would be going to that with some of her friends. We met everyone at the park and we sat and watched another group of people play some drinking games, which were pretty funny. The concert was a lot better then I thought it would be, I have to say that I was expecting steel drums and stuff like that, but it was really enjoyable.

Sunday we went to the horse stables and took the horse that Bernadette rides out for a walk and went out for dinner, after dinner Bernadette showed me an old German kids show that was about a small boy that was mailed to someone but he ended up being sent to an island populated by a king, three other people and a train. It was very funny, because it was a marionette show so the actions were pretty spot on. Monday, Bernadette left pretty early because she had to catch a train to Berlin, and so I spent the day packing my bag and finishing my book, Christine drove me up to Frankfurt, and again the check in and security were pretty fast.

I took a taxi from the airport to the train station in Warsaw and I had 20 minutes until the next train to Łódź so I quickly got the ticket and something to drink and while on the train I was treated to a show by some drunk guys and then they asked to see my passport, which I told them I didn’t have – even though I did, I just wasn’t going to show them – but they were pretty understanding and told me it was completely within my rights now to show them. I caught another taxi from the train station to my house and was home about 11pm.

All in all it was a really good trip, it was amazing to see Bernadette again after 2 years and have a proper conversation and this time, be the exchange student in her house.

Only In Poland 2

I get the feeling that a lot of these “Only In Poland” post are going to be about cigarettes and smoking.

My current host family is having their balconies re-tiled and so today the tilers came to start their work, my host mother shows them the design that she wants, where the tiles are and all the other general stuff. As soon as she walks inside the guys get to work, just like you would expect, I turn around for a few seconds, look back and they each have a cigarette in their mouth, and they continue to smoke all the while working, maybe this is a feat in multitasking, I don’t know. Then when they stopped working for a little breather they were no longer smoking. To me this just seems to be the wrong way around