Wroclaw

Ros was our host in Wroclaw. He stayed with the boys from Krakow the week before so they called him up for us to see if we could stay with him. He's fairly new to CS but was an awesome host. Him and a friend of his from Ukraine picked us up from the station and drove us to his place. We are not in cars often so it is always a luxury to not take public transportation. After getting settled we headed to the river and rented a motor boat to see the city. Wroclaw is old and beautiful so that was a lot of fun. Ros had to go home so it was just us three girls (all blonds) trying to maneuver the boat around the river. Good times. When Ros met back up with us we went to get some food and drinks from the store and headed to the city college park where it is "legal" to drink outside and had a cute little picnic until it got to cold to stay outside any longer. We headed back to Ros's for a calm night in.

The next morning we headed to the main square to meet up with a couple of CSers that offered to show us around the city while Ros had class. Marta was a seasoned CSer and told us a lot about the history of the town. She was super sweet and I really enjoyed hanging out with her for the afternoon. Karol was brand new to CS - he just joined the day before. He was able to hang out with us longer and ended up spending the entire day together and then meeting back up to go out for drinks with us. It was a nice day, yay!, so the four of us just walked around the city and saw all the major sites.

One of the attractions of Wroclaw that we got a kick out of was that they have little dwarf statues all over the city. Legend has it that the dwarfs come out at night while the rest of the city sleeps. The little statues are really cute and each one is different based on where they are located. For example one outside of the bank is on an ATM machine and one outside of the university is sitting on books and papers. So creative.

After seeing most of the major sites Ros met up with us and we headed back to his place for a quick dinner and then out for drinks with him and Karol. It was a Monday night so there wasn't much going on. We ended up at a pretty empty bar just sitting around and talking the night away. When that bar closed we had intentions of going home but ended up stopping in another bar and dancing the rest of the night.

We were planning on leaving Wednesday afternoon to head to Prague. Ros took us to the train statiion (thank god!) we asked around trying to figure out which train was ours. Got on one. Then realized about 5 minutes before it was leaving that it was headed to Dresden, which is in Germany. We were going to have to transfer trains from Dresden to get to Prague. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. The train pass that we had didn't work for Germany. Once we realized where the train was headed we jumped off and spent the next 3 hours trying to figure out how to get out of Poland. If we didn't have Ros there with us to do the translating we would have probably ended up in Germany and paying some ridiculous fine for having the wrong tickets. He was our hero that day. After talking to a number of people Ros finally figured out the trains we needed to get from Wroclaw to Prague without going through Germany. Problem was it was the next day - at 6am, yikes.

Back to Ros's place we went. While we were hoping to get to Prague that day, in the end it wasn't that big of a deal. The whole trip our motto has been that the only place we HAVE to be is in Paris on June 21st for my flight out. Other than that schedules are flexible and going with the flow is part of the deal.

The upside to the situation was that Wroclaw's Juwenalia celebration was that night. Juwenalia round 2 here we go. Ros has 4 flatmates, none of which we had really spoken to the whole time we were there. Ros said they were all to shy to use their english. For some reason people are really self conscious about that when they speak to native speakers. I always tell them that their english is better than my (insert foreign language here) so they shouldn't be worried about it. Anyways, they all were going to Juwenalia with Ros so it was us and the 5 boys.

We got to the bus station and when our bus pulled up it was packed. I mean PACKED. I'd never seen any one vehicle full of so many people. I almost didn't get on the bus. But one of the boys literally wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me on through the closing bus doors. The bus ride was hilarious cause every time we'd pull up to a stop there would be a huge group of students trying to get on but it was so full the doors wouldn't even open. And every time people wanted to get off they would have to push their way through any narrow opening they could find between all of the people. We were so squished together no one had to hold on to anything to prevent from falling cause there wasn't any room to even move. The one good thing from all of that was it was instant bonding with the flatmates. Ros had gotten on a different door so he was at the back of the bus and all the flatmates and us were in the middle. By the end of the ride we were laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and some of the boys were speaking a little in english to us.

Wroclaw's Juwenalia was not as intense as Krakow's but there was an added bonus of a light show on the side of one of their huge dorm buildings. The light show was interesting. A lot of it was humor that neither of us understood so people around us would be laughing hysterically and Hilary and I woudl look at each other in confusion. It was also a bit more violent than what would have ever been allowed in the states. One of the first scenes was of a man with a machine gun shooting at people. There were more scenes of guns, people choking each other, men dying from the guns, blood... It wasn't like that the whole time just random scenes here and there, but a little shocking every time it popped up.

Once the light show was over everyone started to leave. We started pushing ourselves through the masses and Ros's flatmates were so cute. There were two in particular that kept watching out for us. One kept an eye on Hilary more and one kept an eye on me more. I'm not sure if they knew we noticed, but one would always make sure he was behind us and when we started to separate he grabbed my waist and I grabbed Hilary and he pulled us out of the crowd with him and one of the other flatmates. So the four of us got separated from the other three. This was a fun time cause only one of them spoke a bit of English to us. There was a lot of hand movements and laughing going on in an attempt to communicate to each other while we were looking for Ros and the other two. The boys were super sweet though and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them for the night. Turns out speaking the same language is highly overrated.

The boys were hungry on the walk back so they wanted to stop for food. All of the sudden we were at a KFC. Yuck. I've made it a personal mission to never eat at any of the American fast food places when I'm out of the states. So far in all my travels I have been successful at this. I'd never even stepped foot in one. So when I found out I was going to have to go inside I was a little upset. If it weren't so cold and late I probably would have stayed outside. But in I went, pouting silently to myself and wanting to get out asap. I didn't get any food and just went and sat down until all the boys were ready to go. It was a slightly traumatic food event, I won't lie.

We got back around 1am and went down for a 4 hour nap before we had to get up at 5am to catch our 6am train. So early. We were able to get up easier than expected though and Ros came with us again - such a good guy! This time we knew what we were doing and didn't have any problems. The train was pretty empty so we got a cabin to ourselves and were able to spread out and sleep the whole way.