First Day of Orientation

Very tired but some quick info for today:
1. Tried the showers and they are not the best. :-P I am continuing on the idea that this hostel is more "blessing in disguise," but we still have another week. Eek. Breakfast was more or less the same. A guy asked me a question and if I speak Polish and I replied a little (in Polish) and then he left me alone (which makes me a bit happy, haha).

2. Today we walked to school and met with Gosia and Bogdan. We learned somewhat how to go to school and some neat places around the area. Polish train tickets can be bought online and there is even a website in English. CIEE students will have group meetings weekly and have special office hours available with Bogdan. We saw some of the buildings and rooms and went through some preliminary info. I was glad to hear about courses and trips. Some places include Olsztyn, Gdansk/Gdynia/Sopot, Lublin, Krakow/Auschwitz/Salt mines, and there will be monthly cultural events (concerts, operas, etc.) the whole group will attend. We have ticket reimbursement available (travel, ticket/admission fees, etc.) for about 300 zloty. The trips - day, weekend, a few days - will have everything included in the program (meals, ticket fees, travel and stay accommodations).

3. Classes do not seem as though they will be too bad; we received booklets describing the CIEE, but not SGH - Warsaw School of Economics, courses. I even have a new student ID. :-P

Hooray for student discounts, haha. I have a 90-day ticket on it to use public transportation. I think I am going to take CIEE classes only and I am not sure about the language course situation since almost everyone is at 0 except me and two others who know more, so I fall in the middle. We shall see when the testing is tomorrow, but most of the students will have really no test at all barely knowing "thank you" and "yes." The language classes will include language classes to practice talking in Polish. We stopped for a coffee/drink break before going on a tour.

4. After the info session/orientation and short campus tour, we went around the neighborhood, bought the transportation tickets (I also stopped at an ATM), and went to lunch at a pizza/Italian place (http://www.pizzadominium.pl/). I had a salad with lettuce, smoked salmon, and sun-dried tomatoes - not too bad - with my first Polish Coke Zero. Some Polish buddies (there is a buddy system where we each are paired with another SGH Polish student) met us and brought us to buy phones and/or cards for minutes/texts. We also went to the Golden Terraces mall - it was GREAT - and I stopped at a grocery store (Carrefour) and a bookstore (Empik) since we stayed for about an hour. I bought some snack bars, Granny Smith apples, rice cakes with spelt, Orbit sugarless apple gum, water (called Laguna Bialy - haha), 1 cold Coke Zero for then, green tea bags, a little notebook, some garbage bags, and a small tote-type bag (the only Empik purchase for carrying my goods). I drank the soda because I was becoming hot and sweaty inside and then I would have to go out where it was a bit overcast and cold. :-/ It was awkward to feel almost too warm inside and then have a cold face outside. The gum and soda are pretty good (Coke Zero pretty much is the same) and I tried one of the snack bars:

Quite tasty

Then we stopped at the hostel before going to a Czech restaurant for dinner with some of the buddies. They liked the special for today = 15,00 zl. schnitzel-it was huge and served on a block/cabbage/coleslaw/fries and 1,0 L beer for 7,00 zl or 0,4 L for 3,50 zl. This is roughly $5 for a meal and about $2.50 for the bigger beer. I had Coke Zero from a glass bottle and a salad with chicken on it that was pretty good. It was a big group and it was interesting to meet other students and talk to everyone. It was just weird since I am SO not used to indoor smoking anymore! I am treated so well in NY and CT that I am rarely even near smokers except sometimes outside of a library or school building since some kids do smoke at school. But here a lot of people smoke and cigarettes are less money versus what they are in NY. The meal ended with a shot - I think some cherry vodka - it reminded me of the medicine I hated taking when sick as a kid. Thank goodness I can swallow pills now. :-P

The restaurant: http://www.uszwejka.pl/

My new phone for Poland:

After dinner the group split up a bit. I headed back to the hostel with a few others and stopped at an alcohol store with them. I helped order beer for a couple of them, haha. I still have not had much alcohol here - I think my first was the shot. I don't have any go-to drinks since I haven't cared for much of what I have tried. I do know that some of the Polish buddies are interested in doing drinking games with our group, haha. They say they will do American ones since they do them and would even learn ones they do not know. Now I am relaxing before bedtime. I may go back over my previous posts and see if there is anything I have left out over the first couple of days. There also is a chance that a guy in the program already left. He has disappeared; maybe we will hear tomorrow about that situation. Another interesting observation is on having big groups and trying to figure out how to pay since twice today we compiled instead of doing separate checks - which would make it easier than using big bills or a lot of coins.

Dobranoc! :-D