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!
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