Long time no see

The sporadic internet access in my apartment makes updating this lovely blog a bit difficult, and whenever I do get internet access on my labtop I am franticly checking various email accounts and using messenger programs so sadly, this update will be hurried.

I also need to note that since I've gotten here and have been (trying) to learn Polish, my ability to type or speak articulate English has gone substantially downhill, and not only am I making more typos, but I often have difficulty figuring out if what I've typed is spelled correctly or not...So there's my disclaimer.

I figure it's about time I post a picture of my school, in all of it's impressive Soviet glory. Behold, the Palace of Culture and Science:


Or, in Polish Palac Kultury i Nauki. It is arguably the ugliest building in Warsaw, which is really saying something, but I think it's kind of cool, and certainly pretty at night. It's also very good for me that there is such a huge landmark because I still get lost in this city at an alarmingly frequent rate. I also know very few street names. These things might be related. Because I'm sort of stealing internet access from a cafe that I'm at right now, I won't type out my own history of the Palace, but instead direct you to good old Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_culture_and_science
(incidently, Polish is the fourth most frequently used language for Wikipedia. Kind of cool?)

Because my classes here are pretty shitty, I've decided to make the most of my free time and go to a lot of museums and gallaries while I'm here. So far I've been to the Old Jewish Cemetary, the Pawiak Prision Museum, the National Art Gallery, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum. I've been doing a lot of reading about Solidarity, which involves a lot of reading about Marshall law, for my Thesis next year, and combined with my experiences at most of the museums, I've been having nightmares about totalitarianism on a fairly frequent basis. Warsaw is certainly a crazy place to live in while studying history.

Here part of the memorial outside of the Pawiak Prison. The prison was originally used by the Russian during partition, but it's more well known for being the largest German political prison in occupied Poland. 100,000 prisoners were kept here, which was over 10% the population of Warsaw, and 37,000 prisoners were killed

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It's certainly a creepy place. The museum was good, tons of information. I had a bit of an interesting experience though, because it's a pretty small museum so curators get really excited when they have visitors. To enter the museum, you walk down 5 steps and then walk about 2 meters to the prison door. I had barely finished with the steps when the door sprung open and 2 older Polish men with questionable dental hygiene opened the door and immediately asked "Polish??" I replied, in Polish, that I was American, and they were overjoyed to have such a visitor in their humble museum. They talked to me for a good 10 minutes about why I was in Poland, telling me that Poland is where my heart is, that they were happy I was here, etc. There was a bit of physical contacting, as they kept patting me on the shoulder. It was kind of uncomfortable, but my friend Nadine who visited the museum a few weeks before had a similar experience.


The old Jewish Cemetary is really close to my apartment and it enormous. I spent about an hour there and you could spend much more time walking around because it goes on and on, and once you enter the gates you are essentially in a forest.




As you can see, Warsaw is really an upbeat place! Prisons, cemetaries, uprisings oh my! I am really having a good time though, and it's a very interesting place. The other people here are great; I'm enjoying being the token American in a European exchange program and getting to bust up some American myths.