End of April: Where Does the Time Go?

TL;DR or Quick Summary 

1. Things are going well! I am realizing that I actually have very little time left in Poland and Białystok. Even though I am looking forward to coming back to the US, I know I will miss things here. 
2. I'm a terrible person for not posting sooner. I have gone from about one post a week at the beginning, to one every two week, and now we are at about once a month. 
3. Classes are about to start winding down. We have about a month left and I feel like it's just going to fly by. Which means that I will need to start preparing for finals soon. It's a shame that I will not get to continue working with my students after this year. 
4. Adventure-wise, I have been many places since my last post: Dresden, Berlin, Poznan (again) Budapest, Krakow, Vilnius, and now I am on my way to Riga! In between that, I have also spent some good time in Białystok with friends. 

So I only have about 2 months left; I return to the US on July 3rd (just in time for fireworks and BBQ). While 2 months is still a long time, I feel like it will go by quickly, especially as I prepare my students for finals. Fulbright has been a experience unlike any other. I have talked to several Fulbrighters coming to Poland next year and when they ask what Fulbright Polska was like, it's hard to give any type of succinct or coherent answer. 

Students at the board

Classes

After so many months of working with my classes, I really feel comfortable with my students. I never really felt uncomfortable with them, but now classes have a warm and congenial feeling. 

Due my attendance at the Berlin Fulbright conference, Easter holidays, and the May holidays classes in April have been pretty spotty. I have really only seen my students about once every other week, which has made classes interesting to teach. Over Easter break, I decided to hold an online class. For each of my classes, I recorded a 10 - 20 minute video lecture and sent them out to my students. There was an accompanying assignment for each lecture. While I had to re-record some of the videos several times, I thought that overall the lessons were fairly effective. I have linked to the videos below if you would like to take a look. 

For Integrated Skills, students read a NYT article about 23andMe, a service that provides genetic testing to consumers. Until recently, 23andMe could only provide information about a person's heritage based on genetics. However, the FDA recently granted the company approval to test their customers for certain genetic dispositions, including a disposition for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Student then discussed their thoughts about the matter. 

My second year writing class, focused on vague pronouns and faulty parallelism. First, students completed several different practice and example sheets where they identify and correct mistakes. After that, students corrected a wonderfully written story by me. In the story are many pronoun and parallelism mistakes. Most students did fairly well and many came up with very amusing edits.

Finally, my fourth year writing class, wrote a short essay on the different types of bias that appear in media sources. They had a two part homework assignment. First they had to choose three issues/events/topics that were in the media. For each they had to find two different news sources and compare how the same event was presented in each. Then, for the second part they had to formally analyze how each source is biased. While I still have not gotten around to grading those essays, I am very much looking forward to it. 

List of different adjectives 

This past week, students read (or rather attempted to read) The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It a poem that explores the difficulty (and sometimes complete insanity) of English pronunciation. Do you know how to pronounce victual? It doesn't rhyme with actual. After students struggled through the poem, we heard the correct pronunciation from a video. My students were pleasantly amused that I could not correctly pronounce everything . It was a great lighthearted lesson to break up class.  

Next week, when classes resume I will start talking with my students about their final projects and essays. 

Travel 

Over the past month, I have had quite a few great experiences, both in Białystok and not quite so close to home. 

Germany - Berlin Conference

View from a German National Park just out side of Dresden

The last week of March, I was lucky enough to be one of five chosen to represent Fulbright Polska at the annual Berlin Fulbright Conference. Fulbrighers from all over Europe were invited to the conference. It was a great opportunity to network, compare experiences, and discuss the purpose of a Fulbright grant. I learned that Poland is very unique in how it uses its grantees; nearly all other European countries have their grantees in primary and secondary schools. I did not meet anyone else who was teaching at the university level. Hearing about everyone's different experiences was incredible; people were placed in large cities and small towns. For many Fulbrighters, their local population does not speak any English. I also heard about interesting and exciting programs that many Fulbrighters are implementing. 

Outside of getting to know other Fulbrighters, there were several interesting speakers, presentations, and small group discussions. Topics ranged from how to best integrate into your community to discussing sensitive issues (i.e. politics) to refugee resettlement in Germany. Personally, I most valued the small group discussions, especially when they included people from multiple countries. 

While we did not have a ton of time to explore Berlin, I did manage to make it to the Berlin zoo with a mix of American and German Fulbrighters. For zoos, I suppose that it was okay, but nothing fancy. I did learn the in German, polar bears are called ice bears, which I think is a much better name. 

Easter Break - Budapest, Krakow, and Zakopane 

Eating Zapiekanki in Krakow

Budapest 

For Easter, two of my friends managed to escape their tedious and uneventful life in the US to visit me. In Poland, Easter is one of the biggest holidays of the year and as such, we had 4 days of classes canceled, which allowed for some convenient traveling. They landed on Saturday afternoon and we spend a quick evening in Warsaw. An introduction to pierogi was mandatory as was a walk through Warsaw Old Town. 

Accidentally at a protest

The next morning, Sunday, we flew to Budapest. It was the first of several flights on a propeller plane. Getting through the Budapest airport was an experience as we had to change money ($1 is about 300 Hungarian Forint) and wait about an hour for bags to come off of the plane. After making it into town and dropping our bags at the AirBnb, we started walking through the city. If you haven't seen pictures before, Budapest is absolutely gorgeous. Walking through the streets, you see buildings of different styles that somehow work well together. 

After a while, we ended up walking along the Danube River, and saw a crowd of people moving towards the other side of the river. Like any independently thinking people, we decided to follow the crowd without question or concern. Eventually we realized that we were in the middle of a political protest of the current Hungarian government. People were protesting a decision by the government to restrict the types of universities that could operate in Hungary. After several speeches (which were helpfully translated by a friendly local) the crowd marched across the river and to the Parliament building. We decided to slip out before the crowds started leaving, but it was an incredibly unique experience (whether joining it was intentional or not).

The next day, we couldn't find any additional protests to join, so we decided to play the normal tourist role and see some stuff. We started off with an early tour of the Parliament building which was incredibly ornate, both inside and out. The only tour that still had open positions was at 8am (booo waking up earlier), but it ended up being a good thing as our tour group had the whole building to ourselves.

Night train from Budapest to Krakow

After Parliament, we did a walking tour, walked through Buda castle, and hiked up a large hill/small mountain to get a great view of the city. The weather was really in our favor and I even managed to work on my tan some! We ate at many good restaurants and explored some cool bars (I think one was rated best bar in the world by some magazine). Overall Budapest was a fun city to explore and just stare at.

The next day, we left Budapest by night train. It was my first experience with a sleeping train and I was a little bit hesitant, but it ended up being a fun and convenient way to travel! We were 3 people in a 3 person compartment, which worked out perfectly. The space a kinda cramped, but when you know the other people there, it doesn't matter so much. I would highly recommend a night train to anyone thinking about it. 

Krakow 

Blooming tree in Wawel Castle

We arrived bright and early in Krakow and immediately started exploring the city. Although I have been to Krakow before, it was a lot of fun to show it off to other people. It was Easter week and the celebration was in full swing in the Krakow market. There were plenty of booths set up (although not as many as Christmas) selling food, clothes, cheese, gingerbread, and pretty much anything else. Waiting for our tour of the city, we climbed the bell tower of the main church on the market square. 

Our walking tour was good and gave a good overview of the city. The weather, unfortunately, was not as cooperative. While it was not back to full Polish winter, I would definitely call it return of the Polish winter. It didn't stop us from enjoying the city, but make it less fun. We only had about 1.5 full days in Krakow, so we couldn't do a ton. We took a tour of Schindler's Factory, which is a now a museum about life in Krakow under German occupation. It was a wonderful museum, but I wasn't a huge fan of our tour guide. 

That evening, we needed to head back north to Warsaw so one friend could catch his flight. After experiencing the pinnacle of modern efficiency that is the Polish rail system (our train was an hour late), we made it to Warsaw and settled down for the night.  

Zakopane

On the top of the Tatras Mountains 

The final leg of my Easter Extravaganza was a trip to Zakopane, the Winter Capital of Poland. As I discovered, even though it was the middle of April, winter was still alive and well in Zakopane. Walking down the main street of Zakopane, I got the feeling that the shops did not match the feeling of the town. Every other shop was an expensive outdoors store; jackets, ropes, ice picks, helmets, harnesses, boots, skis, snowboards, and every other piece of possible winter adventure equipment was for sale or for rent. We probably weren't in the local part of town, but the main street definitely like one extended REI.  Our main reason for heading to the south of Poland was for hiking and we hiked some pretty nice trails!

The first afternoon, we stayed relatively low and did a nice loop around Nosel. It was a surprisingly vertical hike, but rewarded us with some great (and not so great) views. From the top of Nosel, we got a great view of the mountains and what we could expect for the following day. Unfortunately, we also saw several areas that had been heavily logged; it was a pretty jarring difference.

The last day, we took the lift to the top of the mountain and immediately discovered that we were very unprepared for the weather. On the lift, there were people in full ski gear (with skis) and those in full hiking gear (with ice picks). Once we were at the top, we discovered the full gravity of our mistake. We only stayed at the top for around an hour, but did manage to waddle around on the ice and snow on the top for a while. Despite (and perhaps because of) the cold I am determined to go back and experience Zakopane with different weather.



So that's all for this post! I know I tried to include as much as possible, but wanted to make sure I posted in a (somewhat) reasonable amount of time. My goal for my next post is around 2 weeks, but we will see how that works out. I apologize for any grammatical mistakes in this rapidly written post!