It wasn�t a lot of fun, but then this kind of journeying never is.

I was up at six to shower, finish off the packing, throw many, many things way and eat breakfast. Robert turned up after nine - �You know, when you said you had heavy luggage, I was expecting something heavier� � and dropped me at the station before leaving to go off to a meeting with his accountant.

Getting on the train was fine; there was plenty of room in the first compartment and a helpful young man to shove both my suitcase and my rucksack up top. And then he got off at Tczew, which led me to panic for a few minutes until he was replaced by an even taller young man who helped me get everything off at Gdansk. So I hauled my stuff around the bus station, opted for the exit with the escalators, and ended up in the bus station with not a taxi in sight. Panic! I found one lurking round the back exit though, and he spotted me and came over to help with my luggage. �You going far?� �Back to England.� �Aaah.�

Two minutes later. �I�m impressed you speak such good English.� �Well, I�m an English teacher, I learnt Polish from the kids.� �Aaah.�

A short tour of out of town Gdansk follows, and a reasonable tip ensures that he carries all my luggage into the terminal, as well. So far so good. Though there�s no-one around in the terminal except a few other confused looking tourists. I sat on the beautifully polish floor, took my shoes off, and cooled my annoyingly itchy heels � covered in bites � on the tiles. No officials around, so it hardly mattered.

I got in the wrong queue at check-in, though. �You have 39kg.� I nod. �You are only allowed 23kg.� I point out that there are a lot of businessmen not checking in luggage. �But you are connecting to Birmingham.� Drat. So I have to cart everything off to the ticket office, where tears, lying and downright pleading leads her to knock $40 off the price I have to pay. Fortunately the machine accepts Cirrus.

I go up to the departure lounge and sit upside-down on a bench with my legs up in the air to try and get some blood back to my head, and gain the attentions of a very large Alsatian sniffing at my face. A man is attached to him, but I don�t exactly feel safe. After that, I discover an awful lot of businessmen seem to be sitting near me. I thought they�d be put off by my upside-downness, but exposing my navel to the world perhaps has the opposite effect.

I get on to the plane and discover my seat is occupied by a one year old child. This is a case of LOT strikes again, according to his mother, who I spend ten minutes sitting next to while her son and I play pat-a-cake, while the cabin steward shuffles people around the plane, as I�m not allowed to sit next to the Emergency Exit, so someone else has to do that. Eventually I�m shunted off down the plane to sit next to a lady who has even more hand luggage than I do, so we squash in together and bond very quickly, as the pilot seemed to have been trained on a pogo stick, and we went bouncing up and down all the away to Frankfurt. On the landing we gave up clutching onto the armrests, and just hung onto each other.

At Frankfurt I decide I am feeling hungry, so after taking the monorail � my kind of rollercoaster � to the dreaded Terminal 2, I consider food. The only problem is, the Food Court is before passport control, and I�m in transit. The next thing I remember is that I have lots of loose change in Euros, which I shoved into my rucksack pockets and is now currently probably en route to Alabama. I storm off to the Caviar House and mope around for a bit, pick up some Mozartkugeln and then hunt for something else to spend my last Euro on. Then I spot a tube of Giotto and immediately forgive Frankfurt for everything else bad that has ever happened to me there, which is a long, long list. I�d forgotten Giotto existed, until recently, since they�ve been heavily advertised on German TV. They used to come with coffees at a certain coffee shop in Marburg and I used to float them in said coffee � or pretend to, anyway, once the coffee had been drunk enough. So I draped myself sideways on the departure lounge chairs this time and dropped little pieces of hazelnut absolutely everywhere. Which is kind of the point.

I didn�t quite have to resort to joining in with businessmen�s phonecalls; the flight was called quite early and once bussed out we then sat there for a while, so I wandered down to the back, availed myself of half of the medicine cabinet, and drank the better part of a carton of fruit juice before collecting copies of all the papers and wandering back to my seat to discover I�ve forgotten how to do a cryptic crossword. I discovered long ago that BA stewardesses seem to love waifs and strays � it ensures they come and check up on me extra regularly, which means I can order extra drinks without having to press the button and look like a nuisance.

It took ten minutes to get off the plane at Birmingham, apparently the ground crew couldn�t remember how to get the corridor to the plane door, but that meant I did get to see my luggage coming off the plane, and it was on the luggage belt by the time I made it into the terminal building. Ten minutes after getting off the plane, I was through customs and out the door � all to no avail, as mother�s plane was delayed and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for a bus to the terminal, resulting in pacing-muttering-stressed father, stroppy-stressed mother, and manic-not-quite-sober-stressed me.

We went home and ate fish and chips.

* posted by nat 6:29 PM

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

It feels like such an anti-climax, for everyone to drift off in ones and twos, and to wander round town doing odd jobs, and to sit out in the square in the evenings having a quiet drink, being eaten by komary.

I cleared my desk today, started to pack, did a little shopping. Tomorrow will be one large food marathon as I try to eat up everything in the fridge � ha, ha.

I also had a great conversation at the hairdressers�.

- Hi, is there a free appointment for me tomorrow?
- For a haircut? Hmm. Today?
- Today? It�s possible?
- No, not today. But tomorrow it is.
- Ok, tomorrow then.

I really wanted to bang my head against the wall and wail...

* posted by nat 10:32 PM

Saturday, June 22, 2002

I got red roses, orangey-yellow roses (my favourites), blue roses (I3 Piotr and Michal from Ciechocinek, need you ask?) and Paul R. let me have his carnations, so I've got a nice big flower arrangement going on again.

Last night I was at Justyna's and we drank a bottle of champagne. Well, cheap shampagne, more just very fizzy wine, but that at least meant it was palatable. Proper champagne is one of those drinks I can't stand - it tastes like overly fizzy gone-sour grape juice.

* posted by nat 1:21 PM

Thursday, June 20, 2002

Justyna and I went to town after a stressful day. After a quick drink and discussion of future lives, I dragged her over to the flower stall and bought her a rose, as on Wednesday she passed her Viva and got her Master's Degree. So I had to buy her a rose, and damn if it wasn't the biggest rose in the shop - a huge red flower with getting on for a metre of stem. She loved it! She went from stressed-Justysza to hyper-Justysza in half a second flat. It was well worth it!

Then we got a taxi home and I nearly took the door off when trying to bail out on the road side. Luckily I didn't push the door open straight away and so just missed the taxi cruising past.

And tomorrow I shall have to get up for Brazil-England. If I can find a channel that's carrying it live...

* posted by nat 10:56 PM

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

* posted by nat 11:11 PM

Monday, June 17, 2002

It's official!

Next school year I will be working in Istanbul. On the Asian side. Here.

* posted by nat 4:37 PM

Saturday, June 15, 2002

I went to see Jaromir Nohavica play tonight.

For me, it was a big, big thing. He is one of my favourite singers, and to have the opportunity to see him live in a small concert just had to be taken. This time, at least, he was in Torun on a Saturday. So I went down, bought my ticket, nosed around the fine staircase - wood panelled, huge mirrors, painted ceilings - it was in Arthur's Court, it had to be grand - and then settled down with a couple of hundred other Poles.

Which was very strange for me, because of course Jaromir Nohavica is Czech. The Polish bumf described him as 'The legendary Czech bard' and I can't currently think of a better way to put it. Just him, his guitar and his accordion and it was a wonderful evening, with the evening sun spilling in through the stained glass windows, and right from the word go, when he walked on and started with Dokud se zpívá - I joined in with the last line of the very first verse by force of habit and was one of just a smattering who did so, though by verse 4 a few more were doing it - however he picked up instantly on those first few of us who started singing along and gave a lot of focus to us for the rest of the hour and a half.

He managed to ramble along cheerfully enough in Polish - simple enough for me to understand, but complex enough for him to be able to crack some wonderful jokes that had us all in stitches. He was obviously pleased enough with the reaction to launch into some anecdotes about his reception in other countries, make lots of jokes about the differences between the Czechs and the Poles, and then halfway through the concert launched into Metro pro Krtky and followed it up with Tri Cunici which got everyone joining in. I loved those especially - Metro pro Krtky (Metro for Moles) is the first song I managed to transcribe and learn in Czech all on my own, and is good for practicing my 'r's, still.

He did plenty of his more haunting, introspective songs as well - Sarajevo and Kometa (crowd favourites also), and did two encores (including Pijte vodu - a hilarious song about all kinds of alcohol sung to the tune of Shortnin' Bread) before telling us all to go home, much as we wanted him to stay all night he wasn't going to!

And I decided I had to acquire Tri Cunici on CD - my tape is at home and I needed it now! Oh, it was a wonderful evening...

* posted by nat 9:54 PM

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

An entry for Rae:

My I3s came up with, when asked to make a sentence with "I'm going to wear this dress, mum, and you can't stop me!" and the word 'insist', came up with:

*He* insisted on wearing the dress.

Have just come back from the pub with PFCE4. I should have done this earlier... they talk so much more after a beer... lots of fun! (And beer...)

* posted by nat 11:18 PM

Monday, June 10, 2002

Gloom and doom as Poland are knocked out of the World Cup. The poor teenage boys were all listless, so I threw them in the Computer Room with a list of links to World Cup sites. Evilteacher? Me?

And then I came home and totally overdid it with the garlic in the garlic mushrooms. It was very tasty, but the flat stinks!

* posted by nat 10:06 PM

Sunday, June 09, 2002

From time to time I remember why I keep my lives neatly seperated, segregated; it works better. It's been difficult having people invade my Polish life - it's strange, it jars. It's a weird thing suddenly having people turn up in a different setting. It throws me off my stride, it gets me confused, it plants points of reference of last year, last life, into this life, and I find that difficult to come to terms with. I change from my Polish persona slightly, and have to remember the London way of thinking, or whatever way of thinking exists in the place that they've invaded from. I get protective of myself.

Don't ask me which is the real me; that's not the point. It's all me, really me, different facets and different bits on the surface, that's all. It's just a bit tricky to have everything pointing outwards at once, there isn't that much room, I'm trapped mid-metamorphosis. This is my version of culture shock, I suppose. It's the sort of thing that I never have been able to prepare for, wonderful as it is to have visitors, it is still so very disorientating.

* posted by nat 7:46 PM

Saturday, June 08, 2002

So despite the fact it rained all day... there was hot chocolate, there was cakes, there was the Copernicus House - stars and rocks, what more could I want? - there was Pod Aniolem, and there was lounging around in the living room expressively singing along to the soundtrack of West Side Story. What better a day could there be?

* posted by nat 11:03 PM

Friday, June 07, 2002

Last weekend the family was here, and it rained. Today Tim and Ray turned up... and it's raining again. No-one else is allowed to visit!

They came and had fun in my classes - EL2 really enjoyed chatting to them, I3 were a little more shellshocked, having had no warning, but managed to quiz them quite well. Then I had a nightmare lesson with EL1 who were simply being stupid - oh well, 15 and 16 year olds at 8pm on a Friday night with the summer holidays in sight, what more do you expect?

And then we went to see Attack of the Clones. Yes, the acting was pretty wooden, the lines dreadful (a lot of them somehow seem to have been lifted straight from other Star Wars scripts. Hmm.), the number of clichés so huge that any drinking game based on this film could well end in hospitalisisation for partaking parties, but I still enjoyed it immensely, so there. And I still want a lightsabre. And I have suddenly realised something: when a droid's head gets stuck on C3PO's body when they're all going out to battle in the Colisseum-Gladiator-inspired-type-thingy, the droid blurts out:
My arms aren't moving. I must need maintenance.

I'm a droid. It's the only explanation.

* posted by nat 11:31 PM