Thursday, May 18, 2006

Poland

From 5 to 11 of May I've been to Poland. At my arrive I was quite disappointed when I found out that in the family hosting me no one spoke english. After all it wasn't a big problem because they knew a bit of spanish and they had a quite good translation program on their PC. The guy who hosted me brought often me (and the Czech student whom he also hosted) to meet with his friends, who were very nice to us. Some of them did speak english and translated, I thank them particularly. We were in a very small town (about 15.000 inhabitants) called Ledziny (there should be a sort of iota under the e). We also visited Krakow, Katowice and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz was, of course, very sad, and I didn't dare to take photos there. Krakow was good, but we spent nearly all our time in the salt mines, so we saw only the central plaza and a church. On the way to Krakow we met (on the train) 4 fans of the Spartan speedway team, heading to a race. I think we should thank Elena, the friend of mine who started chatting with them, because socializing is what these projects are all about. The only thing we saw in Katowice was the famous Silesia City commercial center. I bought two Terry Pratchett books in a sort of media shop (in english, of course), while my friend Francesco bought 6 CDs for something like 70 euros, and he told me that in Italy they cost lots more than this, I do not know, for I never bought a CD in my whole life. On the 7 we visited the local Gymnasium: it was nice, but it had too narrow corridors, so that they needed purpose-made rooms for lessons breaks. I also discovered that most subjects are written the same way in Italian and in Polish, though they're read differently. For example geography is written Geografia both in italian and in polish, but in polish it is pronounced like in ancient Greek. I noticed some other similarities with the Greek language, for example the article "the" is "o" in both language, ang in both of them the neutral article is "to". On Wednesday 10 we had to present our version of Frankenstein (in which I play Captain Robert Walton), but the representation was anticipated by one hour, so that we didn't any reharsal, but it went quite well anyway. When we departed some guys were so sad that they even started to weep. Generally I enjoyed the trip very much.

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