"Sis"

We just learned today that a beloved member of Myles' family passed away on February 26th. Marie White (pictured on the right), affectionately known as Sis, was 92 years old. Myles' godmother, Aunt Dot (pictured in the center) lost her mother in a fire when she was 14 months old. She and Sis, one year apart in age, were technically cousins but were raised together as sisters. They lived across the street from each other most of their adult lives. We were able to visit with Sis when we went to St. Louis shortly before we left for Poland. She was bedridden but always had a smile and kind words for us. We are sorry we were not able to be with Dottie for her funeral. She was a special lady! Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace.

Americana With a Heap of Pancakes

On Saturday I took Trey and Abbie to a playground.

We spied it back in early January but this was the first time that it was warm enough to get outside and play. They played hide and seek, and had a great time swinging and climbing.

We then met Myles, Ben and Natalie downtown. We did not really have any plans and just wandered. We walked by the office of Lech Walesa. Although we have not seen him (yet!), he does work right in downtown Gdansk.

It was cloudy but warm so we were happy. We walked by one of the many restaurants in Old Town and look what they had advertised on their board! (Second line under "Polecamy")

We went to a medieval crane museum. Gdansk used to be a major port city and this is where all of the goods came into the city from the ships. It's fascinating to see the innovative ways people used to bring goods ashore.

The best part of the day was that we found a place to eat dinner called Billy's American Restaurant! Wow!

They had license plates on the wall from many states. There was an almost current one from Kansas--Saline County! The expiration sticker was from 07. How did that arrive in a restaurant in Gdansk, Poland? Old Glory is outside and there are pictures of NYC, Mohammad Ali, Harley Davidsons and various other American symbols all throughout the dining area.

It kind of looks like a fast food place, but we went in, sat down and checked out the menu. We had to ask for menus in English but they had them. This was a pretty nice place--and prices were reasonable. So Trey ordered a hot dog, the girls ordered burgers, Ben and I had chicken sandwiches and Myles ordered a steak. While we were waiting for dinner we wondered about how "American" it would be. Red meat is not common here. I have found some fairly good hamburger meat at one of the huge grocery stores, but lots of times the smaller grocery stores don't have it at all. Turns out that this is an awesome American restaurant! It was sort of like an Applebee's. It was definitely a taste of home. The sandwiches, fries and cole slaw were similar to what we would find at any casual dining restaurant in Olathe. And Myles said his steak was pretty good, too.

We told the waiter that it was very American. He was surprised to learn that we were Americans living in Gdansk. He is a student at a different university studying finance, so he and Myles chatted for a bit.

We were full from our dinner so we did not order dessert. But one of the desserts on the dessert menu is "A Heap of American Pancakes with Maple Syrup." That leaves us to wonder how many American pancakes make up a heap? No worries, we will get to the bottom of it before we leave Gdansk for good. We will most certainly be making another visit to Billy's American Restaurant before we head home in June. The kids were already making plans to take Aunt P there while she is visiting us. She will be here on Friday. This Friday! But since she is coming from America, and will be returning to America seven days later, we will probably not be seeking out an American restaurant while she is here.

Spring Starts Tomorrow

But we got a sneak peek today! We've been craving a day over 40 degrees for a really, really long time, and today it shot clear up to 52! It was cloudy but that did not matter today. The kids went outside and tossed the ball around. There is still a tiny bit of snow on the ground in our yard, but most of it is gone (hopefully for the duration of our stay!).

I put the laundry out on the balconies to dry. We have had the laundry drying on racks in the house since about November. It was so nice to have it outside for a while!

It is back inside now because it looks like it could rain at any moment. But it was nice to have those things out of the way at least for a bit.

We did very little school work today, played hooky and went to the beach for a while. There was a tractor on the beach leveling the mounds of sand.

Ben and Natalie kicked the soccer ball around. Natalie spent a lot of time practicing her soccer juggling. It has been a long time since she has been able to have her foot on the ball and she has been missing it.

Abbie found a bottle in the water. She and Natalie tried to get it but it was too far out. It is way too cold to venture into the water, even if we suspect there might be a note in the bottle (as Abbie did). Someone else will have to get the message this time. Trey played in the sand and came home very dirty!

We were only there for an hour or so, but it is a favorite activity of all of us. If we want to go to the beach at home, major planning and traveling are involved to somehow get us to a coast. Here we can just go for an hour and enjoy the scenery. Everyone was thrilled to be able to ditch their coats this afternoon.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

'Tis St. Paddy's Day today! The chance of finding corned beef here is close to zero, so we'll just have to wear our green for the day. I just finished reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. What a storyteller! It is a heartbreaking, devastating, sweet and laugh out loud funny Irish memoir. It is now one of my all time favorite reads.

We are still waiting for some sign of spring in Poland! To be fair, it has been reaching above freezing on most days. We are definitely out of the deep freeze, but we are still spending more time than I would like around freezing (and below freezing at night). There are still mounds of snow in parking lots and some still left in our yard. Everyone tells us that they cannot remember a winter in Gdansk like this. Ok, we get it. We are ready to move on! According to the forecast we should have temperatures in the mid 40s in the next few days. Then next week it's back down into the 30s--just in time for my California sister to visit and find herself shocked into my world. We are so excited for her visit, and hopefully she'll be so taken with our warmth that she won't notice the cold weather outside.

We've been staying close to home, getting school work done and finding things to do around the house. Abbie and Trey were bursting with excitement when I brought home play doh from the store over the weekend. 

They spent hours rolling, molding, creating. There were many masterpieces throughout the day but the uncontested favorite was the American flag. They improvised yellow stars instead of white, but the idea was surely there.

I have been meaning to mention an interesting thing about Polish money for some time. Polish currency is the złoty. It takes about three of these to equal one dollar. Then the złoty is made up of 100 groszy (like cents). People here in stores like exact change. If you hand them a 50 or 100 bill, most of the time they will ask for the groszy. It took me a while of observing others (and learning a little Polish) to figure out what they were wanting. Now I try to have a handful of change to give them exact change. Sometimes we have it, sometimes not. Lines wait patiently as everyone counts out their groszy. Some people (especially older people) pull out a handful of change, open their hand and the cashier counts it out of their hand for them while they just stand there. I've even seen people (again, mostly older people but not always) just hand over their change purses for the cashier to count out the coins for them. Another subtle difference in money handling is that when exchanging money there is a little change plate at most counters. You set your money on the change plate, they pick it up from there. Then they put your change there and you pick it up. Now that we have been here for six months I am not having to think about these things so much anymore.

Speaking of money, we bought our plane tickets home yesterday! They were not cheap! It is much more expensive for us to go home than it was for us to get here. It's hard to believe we are already making plans to come home!

Common Sense, Anyone?

A decision has been made by the education officials regarding whether or not Natalie has to take the exam (in Polish) to determine what level she should be in at school. Myles and I wrote a letter explaining that Natalie just arrived in Poland at the end of September. She cannot read, write, speak or understand Polish. We told them that we are leaving the country permanently in June. We advised them that Natalie has been enrolled in our school back in the US, and gave them that contact information in case they wanted to verify the information.

There was a big pow wow Monday morning with the education folks and our school director. The officials have decided that in the future international students will not have to take the Polish test. But this year Polish wisdom dictates that Natalie will have to show up and write her name on the test. That's it. So she will have to go to school on a day that we don't usually go, write her name on this test and head home. Couldn't someone else write her name for her (it's not a signature) so we don't have to trek to the school, I ask. No, she has to write her name herself. Hmm, seems like an illogical waste of time to me!

Last Monday, Natalie hurt her finger in PE at school. We taped it to a popsicle stick and I was prepared to get on with life. By the weekend, after a few showers, the tape needed to be changed. We first ran into a problem because Trey used the rest of the medical adhesive to make a bridge for his trains in his room. So we had to get some more and went about changing it out. Well, her finger was still swollen and very bruised on the underside. Poor Natalie just about fainted from the pain when we were retaping the finger. We are now reasonably certain that it is actually broken, and not just sprained or jammed like we originally thought. I ended up using the popsicle stick and taping her ring finger and middle finger together. I had brought an ace bandage with us from home. (You never know! And it now has come in handy.) So we wrapped her hand to secure the "splint," and will leave it to heal for a while now.

Ben had a couple of friends over Saturday night. They hung out, ate pizza and played computer games all night long. They are a nice group of boys. We hope that they will make the big trip across the Atlantic and come stay with us in the US in the near future.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

We continue to march toward spring (ha! ha! Get it?). We had a couple of days in the low 40s, and quite a few in the 30s. It is going to dip back below freezing tomorrow and through the weekend. But the change in the amount of daylight is significant. It is now light well before 7:00 a.m. and stays light until about 5:40 p.m. By the end of the month it will be light until 7:30 p.m. because of the lengthening days and Daylight Savings Time.

On Tuesday the kids went ice skating with their school friends. At the international school the students usually have swimming on Tuesdays. Since it has been so cold the swimming facility has been unavailable. So they are doing other activities and invite us part timers to join in. Here is a picture of most of the students. I love this picture, but Abbie and a couple of other students are not in it. So I will have to keep my camera handy and get a picture of everyone before we leave Poland. The countries represented in this photo are: Italy, Colombia, Japan, Denmark, Latvia, Holland, Norway, Romania, Poland and US. That's pretty cool!

Trey and I skated but we spent most of our time holding onto the wall.

He skated around more than I did. It was a fun afternoon activity. The picture below is Ben and his friend Mads, from Denmark.

We took the tram to the ice skating rink and this ad for Alice in Wonderland was at the tram stop. I love seeing the translations of American movies over here. This version of Alice in Wonderland looks a bit disturbing to me, though.

Yesterday afternoon we went to the beach. It was still cold and pretty windy, but a lot of the snow that had been there has melted. You could at least see that there is sand on the beach. The remaining snow did not keep Trey from playing in the sand.

There has been quite a bit of beach erosion since we were there in January. There is a "cliff" that is about two feet higher than the water.

Natalie took the picture of Trey with the swans. She wants to be a photographer and practices a lot. She likes to take pictures when people are not looking at the camera. This picture is one of my favorites. She has a good eye!

We took this picture at this same spot the last time we came to the beach and it was very snowy. There is still snow on the ground but it is not nearly as deep as it was before, and the sun is much higher in the sky.

Abbie is posing in front of a beautiful background along our walk to the beach.

But Natalie Doesn't Speak Polish

Our kids go to the International School on Mondays only. Our purpose in sending them is three fold. First, the British School has been a wonderful way for us to meet other English speaking families in the area. Second, on Mondays they have PE and art at school. Since it has been so cold for so long, it is very nice for them to have a place to run and play games and be with other kids. Lastly, it is nice for the kids to have a break from being with mom all of the time. We do not send them to the international school for academics, though they have certainly benefited that way. The girls have done a really neat project on Berlin and they are now learning about the countries of Africa. Ben has had exposure to physics and some advanced algebra that he would not have had otherwise. Trey gets more practice with reading and writing. And I'm pretty sure he's more cooperative with school work with Miss Marta than with me! We spend the rest of the week doing school work so that they will all be ready to go back to their regular schools in Kansas in the fall.

Natalie is at an "in between" age where she could have gone with the older group or gone with the younger group. Since she has not had much algebra, we decided to have her stay in the younger group, so she would not be stressed out and could enjoy her time there. Well, here comes the dilemma. The Polish Government Education Authorities came to meet with our school director. They have decided that Natalie, along with another boy in her class, Jacob, will have to take a test to determine what level they should be enrolled in. Ok, a few issues: The test is April 8th and we had talked about being out of town that week. I'm not sure if our travel plans will work out for that time frame, but we could get in trouble if she does not show up. I don't know what "trouble" means, but I am not looking to  get in any trouble at all! Next, we are leaving Poland in 15 weeks. We are not coming back anytime soon. Our kids will not be educated here and have been enrolled in our schools back home for the fall. So what is the point in taking this test? And finally, here's the big one: the test is in Polish. All in Polish. We know a few words and can get by in day to day life here. I was actually very pleased with myself the other day when I went to the little store across the street and asked for bread in Polish. While that was a proud moment, that's the extent of our skills!

So we are going to write a letter and the secretary at the school is going to translate it. We are going to request that Natalie be exempt from the test. The secretary does not think this will be accepted by the complicated Polish bureaucracy, but we are going to give it a try. If they do not excuse her, we will have her show up for the test, she will write her name on the paper and leave the test completely blank. Jacob has the same problem with the language and he will do the same thing. He is from Denmark, but his situation is more complicated than ours because he will be returning to the school in the fall. He is taking Polish lessons but does not have a firm grasp of the language to be able to take an exam.

On another Natalie note, today in PE the kids were playing basketball. She's not sure exactly how it happened, but her ring finger on her right hand was injured in the game. It is swollen and she can barely move it. She can move it a little though, so we don't think it's broken. On the way home from school we stopped at an apteka. This is a little pharmacy where you get prescriptions and all over the counter medications. I was hoping they would have a splint for her finger. They did not. Where's a Walgreen's when you need one? They did have some medical adhesive tape so I bought some of that. When we got home, I ran across the street and bought a popsicle. Myles was very helpful and ate the popsicle for us. We then used the popsicle stick and the tape to splint her finger. It is working just fine and she is on the road to a compete recovery.