Poof!

And just like that...

we're off to Spain!

When I haven't travelled in a long time, especially by plane, I tend to forget how easy it is to enter 16 digits online and suddenly have the right and near future ability to travel anywhere in the world. No wonder credit card fraud is such a lucrative business!

So Jill and I had been wondering what to do for xmas, as prices for a trip back to the states had nearly dooubled after we snoozed over a weekend to think about it all...so we loozed.
I'm not sure where the idea came from, perhaps Jill's desire to use at least some of her Spanish language background before we leave Europe for good, but came it did, and after perusing some stuff online and reading over one of the climbing guidebooks we picked up from Rick and Carolyn Nelson from last year, we decided on going to Costa Blanca!

Costa Blanca is a region on Spain's south coast, southwest of Barcelona by about 4.5 hours drive by car. Here's one web shot of one of the places we hope to climb, Peñon de Ifach. Yep, that's multi-pitch rock climbing territory, right over the water and within rolling distance of 2 beaches.

Sweet

So more on that later, but if you'll be in the Costa Blanca 'hood between December 17 and 27th, let us know, we'd love to share xmas with ya!

Adios amigos!

(Yes! Another language I get to butcher!!!)

The Book

No, not the bible, rather the thing that sits kattywhumpus on a table, leans at a funny angle when it doesn't have enough support from its friends, collects all sorts of crumbs, body hair, and coffee stains, gets rubbed raw at the edges, occasionaly torn and written in and fortunately, oh, so rarely, gets burned.

I have been a horrible book reader in my life.

By the age of 16, I think I had read (on my own, with no help from mum): Where the Wild Things Are, all the Curious George books, some of the Dr. Seuss books, James and the Giant Peach (wow, big step, eh!?), a few of the Narnia Chronicles (Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, etc.) and topped it off with Conan the Barbarian (after I had seen the film, so no imagination necessary). I hated Dickens and anything else forced upon me in high school. Pathetic, eh?

I don't know what it is with books and me. Once I'm in a good one, I love it, but it's so hard to start a new one. I usually feel too busy to start...and this thing called the internet hasn't helped my behaviour, either. So, what's a lame-bookreader supposed to do? My friends always talk about the books they're reading (how do people read 3 or more books at once?), but I can't say they always enjoy what they're reading...so why bother? I really do like books, I want to read more, but I don't want to be stuck reading something so-so when I could be reading something wonderful. So, when I remember, I try to ask those book lovers what are/were their favorites (top 3 or 5 or 10, they often get flustered when asked to narrow it down so!). I then try to compile the lists of said favorites...if one or more people agree on the same title...bingo, we have a potential winner for me to add to my 'yeah, I'll hopefully read that one someday' list.

So what are your favorites? (feel free to enter in the 'comments' section at end of post)

So, what spurred this post? Well, this year's been good for me as far as book consumption goes. This summer I had a chance to read Lance Armstrong's Every Second Counts (while watching Le Tour de France in person, that was cool (le Tour was better than the book!)), the famed Da Vinci Code, the Dave Egger's Gen-X A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the truly wonderful The Big Open, by Rick Ridgeway. (the latter was bought by Martin in Warsaw, passed on to Tessa in Trento, Italy, then passed to me this summer and returned to Warsaw!) 4 books in one summer, that's a lot for me. (Shows how much crappy weather we had in the mountains, too!)

But the latest is another gem for me, as thanks from Dawn for helping her move from one flat to another, she gave me Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it is. Really.

I like historical books, films and documentaries and this one tops the cake. His understanding of the sciences is as lame as the rest of ours (minus my dad) so he truly tries his best to convey in as simple of terms the history of us, the Earth and the universe. There's too many one liners of comedy and horror to post here now (maybe later), but here's a brief history of the earth if viewed as a simple 24 hour day (note: Earth is roughly 4,500,000,000 years old):

"Life begins very early, about 4 AM, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. (!) Not until almost 8:30 PM, with the day 5/6ths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed 20 minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia (see book). At 9:04 PM, trilobites swin onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 PM plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than 2 hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

"Thanks to 10 minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 PM the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 PM and hold sway for about 3/4ths of an hour. At 11:39 PM they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and 17 seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime, barely an instant.

"Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or larger (we're talking MASSIVE). It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummelled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."

Us homosapiens really don't matter much in the cosmos, eh? But all things are reltive, right? But my dad was famous for once saying, "Relativity sucks!"

:)

Happy Turkey Day

How many turkeys will Bush pardon?

God only knows.

Just over a year and a few months here in Polska, and we're slowly ignoring and forgetting about more and more American holidays. Our Labor day doesn't affect us here. And the Poles really don't care about Columbus, either. Halloween is gaining interest, but this year it fell at the wrong time-when Jill's school was on their autumn holiday week-and no parties were had (unlike Russ and Kim's bash last year, see October '04 archive). But Thanksgiving is upon us and it has enough popularity here that several of my students have wished me a "Super Thanks day" or a "Merry Turkey day." It is, as far as I know, a holiday that is truly unique to America. There's no shopping for gifts for others, no real reason to get dressed up. Your mission is to eat.

So American, indeed!

But here in Polska we have to work today (unless you work at the US Embassy, where they get every American AND Polish holiday off! What a deal!). My students in my 4 classes today are getting to learn more about real American values (food) and the meaning of 'appreciate,' of all the things that we find we're thankful for-for that day, for the week, month or year.

Since we all have to work today, there's no time to cook a turkey, or a tofurkey for us veggies, so in honoring our pseudo-tradition as of late to semi-ignore American holidays while abroad, we plan to have a scrumptious meal of hot, spicy Indian food at Tandoor Palace tonight.

It won't be turkey, but we'll still be bloated!

Happy Thanksgiving to y'all and smacznego! (smach-NAY-go = bon apetit!)

jr

c3Po

Wiwa la Polska!

Oddly, in this modern world, where everyone has mp3 players, died hair and purposely misspelled middle names, there seems to be an abundance of bloggers, not just in the world, but here in Warsaw. Without having met a single one of those involved (Martin excluded, he just got his site up and running 2 months ago at PolandExplorer), I've been invited to join a new Warsaw-based expat community weblog, titled none other than Pijemy po polsku, which, for you who passed Latin but not Polish, translates to "We drink in the Polish way (or style)." Choose your meaning of drink, or the phrasal verb, "to drink in." Sure I've had my fair share of rough nights and mornings in this fine country of the plains, but I prefer the latter definition, as being a foreigner in this unique place allows one to absorb everything with more interest and intensity than dealing with the day to day life back home, and what you soak in is some fine Polish traditions and the occasional outrage at the well-ingrained bureaucracy...but not that we don't have our problems back home...

Perhaps I'll even meet these other mystery P3 bloggers in person, as they seem to attend a piwo(a) enjoyment festival weekly at the Warsaw Tortilla Factory!

However, it's a small world in blogland, and it turns out I do know one of the writers, Aaron Fowles, as pictured here 3rd from the left from my CELTA course back in August 2004.
Crazy.

So feel free to click on the little P3-PiwoBlog link on the right to see what a few other expats from the states and the UK are thinking, planning, laughing and crying about a few thousand miles east of y'all. I'll probably be too lazy to post to both sites...
:)

Bonus points to anyone who can see how many languages (or references to) are used in the subtitle of this post! :)

Czesc!

Tamara/Krakow/Auschwitz

Two weeks ago we were fortunate to have our second Seattle guest, Jill's good friend, Tamara.



She was already flying through Amsterdam enroute to Africa for a photography course and some photo work in Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, and used some flyer miles to hop over to Warszawa! It was a quick weekend visit, but here's some of the sights we got to see... Well, first off, our trusty rusty Ford Escort Kombi died, and we had to quickly purchase this alien Fiat fireball so we could all get down to Krakow in a jiffy!

just kidding, thankfully! These cars are all over Poland, and Jill wants every one of them banned from the highways-with one person they can max out around 55-60 mph...but they always seem to be packed to the gills with 4 or more people, and usually large people...then they max out around 40 mph...

But we made it to Krakow and unfortunately didn't arrange a place to stay, thinking tourist seaason was ending...so we got a swanky room at the 'nearest hostel to Old Town', an interesting, young person-filled pinkish/reddish thing west of town, and close to where our half marathon started last spring.

To make up for it, we found a nicer place for her and Jill to stay on night #2, right off the Old Town square, while I headed back to Warsaw to teach in the morning. So we saw the usual sights in Krakow, then on Sunday we catched an hour + van ride, 60 km west to Oswiecim, also known the world over by its German name, Auschwitz.

Not only is it the scene of the largest experiment in genocide in human history, it's also the world's largest cemetaryThe 'town' is split up into 3 camps: Auschwitz 1, 2 (Birkenau) and Monowitz (Monowice). A1 was originally a Polish miltary camp, conveniently converted to a prison camp, torture chamber, and the fist gas chamber for the Jews, Roma (gypsies), and Polish, Russian and even German political prisoners. But it wasn't big enough to hold (and to process) the incoming trainloads of workers and victims, so Birkenau was built in 1941/2-solely for the elimination of human beings. Eventually 40 camps were created in the region, all for the same purpose. In the end, 1.5 million, yes, 1,500,000 human beings from 27 nations, including 1.3 million Jews, 150,000 Russians, 75,000 Poles and 21,000 Roma were wiped from the face of the earth here, just at Birkenau. The total loss in all the camps for WWII was 5 million, 3 million of which were Polish Jews.

With the Russians hot the on the heels of the fleeing Nazis, the Germans had little time to destroy their evidence of their 'experiments' in genocide. Much of the architecture still stands, yet the 4 largest gas chambers were dynamited-a disgusting set of buildings where the Jews were led into thinking they were about to all take a group shower before they started their new life in this temporary camp, until they were gassed en masse, 2000 people at a time, and incinerated on the spot.

The camp's original Polish Army barracks still stand, and if you didn't have a clue about the place's history, it's actually a nice looking place, full of orderly red brick buildings, lined with tall trees, leaning slightly and dropping some of their colorful, golden leaves. But the barracks have been converted to museums, each representing different parts of the camps and what the Russians 'found' after the liberation in 1945, including TONS of human hair, used for weaving hats, scarves, jackets and wigs for the fashionably conscious back in Deutschland. And I don't mean 'tons' as an expression, I mean it literally. There were also rooms full of the luggage the Jews had brought with them, the last of their possessions after leaving their homes or the walled ghettos. Rooms full of glasses (spectacles), shoes, shoes, thousands of shoes. Whatever the Nazis could re-use for their own gain, they did. What we saw was what was left. There's no way to fathom how many of these kinds of items passed through these places.

The barracks were also full of various types of 'sleeping' chambers. They displayed the progression of the structures and living conditions the prisoners lived in-first on wood floors with some hay, then mattresses, then cots, then bunk beds stacked to the ceiling, with as many bodies squeezed on as possible-both because so many people had been shipped there, and for those who hadn't been eliminated yet to try to stay warm and survive the freezing winter nights. Dysentery was the norm, as was starvation. Those who couldn't work were eliminated (the old, young and female). Those who did anything out of the ordinary were eliminated, if not tortured first.

"Work makes free"-entrance to Auschwitz I camp and the exit for very, very, very few

:( We joined a large group for an English guided tour. The group was so large that we only heard half of the stories, facts and tragedies. We'll go again, and if you ever get out here, it would be worth the price for a private, small group guide, and allow at least 4-6 hours, this place and its horrid history can't be rushed, but shouldn't be missed, either.

Six to ten to a "bed." No heat, no blankets, no toilets. Over 300 of these occupied the camp, which was able to house up to 200,000 prisoners at a time. Only the brick barracks remain standing