i'm home

yeap i arrived yesterday night. as usual the trip was full of incidents and suprises, starting from staircase i had to take with my 58 kgs of luggage (boy was i happy to find a well raised dutch guy at the bottom of it ;) ) ending at meeting rami chami in the plane (an old class mate that i went on a field trip to egypt with). anyway being back home is a rollercoaster ride when it comes to memories. today i had the polish community come over for a welcoming dinner. it s a custom with very old traditions that were based on the fact that in the "good old days" we were cut off from the rest of the world. internet is very new and so are cellular phones. but a few years back we didn't have phones at home. we made phone calls back home on very special occasions and very rarely. we would call home about twice a year for 3 minutes at a time because it use to cost a fortune. i remember when we had to order a call back home to poland. and it would take 3 days before we got through. we would go down to the calling office a few times a day. well people who went away on vacation were our connection with the outside world. they brought in the letters from our famillies and they took the letters out. it seems so unbeleivable to me right now, cause now i'm sitting online chatting to my friends all over the world, even from nigeria

so the journey begins

  or it is about to begin. step 1 behind me. had to take a trip down to the nigerian embassy in warsaw to get my visa. they should probably give me a long term visa so that i don't have to come down there everytrip i take. i already feel at home there. the big minus is that to get the visa the same day i leave my passport i have to be there around 8 30-9 00 am meaning that i had to leave lodz at 5 30 am. i hate waking up in the morning. well i got there and i bumped into a guy getting his visa to go work on one of the platforms in the area of warri. since we had a few hours free we decided to get a coffee somewhere in town.  we got chatting, and it hit me that i'm gonna start travelling again. meeting people on territory that neighter one of us has the upper hand on,people i ve never seen and probably will never see again, you talk everything and nothing yet you don't worry about what you say. you find out things about yourself and about the world that surrounds you. that's the great thing about travelling.

prefer to leave the title out

 

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then - in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.-E.A.Poe

new years

another year starts and new resolutions have to be made. here are mine 1. leave poland as soon and as fast as possible. (and i don't mean for a vacation) 2. get in shape 3. start taking life easier ( there's no point in getting angry at polish politicians it's not their fault that the majority of the people who vote in this country make the choices they do) i am really curiouse if the minister of education's newest idea is going to go through and if it does what will come out of it. he proposed that we hold a referendum in which the polish nation will answer three questions. 1. should uniforms be made obligatory in schools 2. should we have "zero tolerance" in schools meaning that the difficult youth will be put away into special schools. 3. should a curfew be imposed for all minors.:) the results might be interesting  i couldn't have spent new years better then i did this year. it wasn't the place that made it so great, nor the weather that actually managed to suprise me cause it snowed, but it was the group of people that came for it. there is actually no one that i would rather see more then those 3 people that i shared the floor with in prague. the only problem is the side effects that the trip left over. first of all that awfull feeling that was left over when everyone went back home and i realised that they live so far away i probably won't be seeing them in a while (not to say that there is a mighty good chance that we won't see each other again unless we really want to and plan it) second, i'm still trying to catch up on the sleep and energy i lost during the trip back. hey i'm getting there, today i felt as if i ran the marraton but that's much better then the feeling of being hit by the train that i felt yesterday. the trip was worth it and i would repeat it again. the waking up at 4 30 am on the 1st of january, the breakfast in a mcdonald at 9 am in krakow and the lonely trip back home( had to get on 5 different trains, run in the pouring rain up and down a flight of stairs to catch the last train home at 8pm.)
 as for new years itself we got to spend it quietly in a town in the south of poland called zakopane. the people there are specific. they have they're own clothes, customs, way of being and talking. a very big part of poland goes down to zakopane or the nearby towns and villages during the winter breaks to skii.