Flu & the City

I always thought I'd get sick this semester, with all of the traveling I've been doing and the bizarre food (fried blood sausage, anyone?) I've been eating. So far, I've been super lucky.

However, all that has changed over the last couple of days. I woke up Monday morning with, well, one of the nastier head colds in history--runny nose, stuffy nose, swollen nose, clogged sinuses, headache, general ache, the chills, a fever--plus terrible, terrible food poisoning-type symptoms. Fan-tastic.

Being sick in college for the first time was hard enough--where was my mother? Where was the carefully buttered toast and the TV remote?--but here, it's a whole different story.

Not only do I literally live on top of two other people, one of whom--Thanks, Christine!--gave me the cold (she, presumably, caught it from our third roommate), but on top of that, Monday was to be the day I got things done--grocery shopping, a little day trip out to an old hunting lodge castle, some writing on my Field Research Project. Instead, I found myself lying on my back, moaning till noon, craving applesauce, baby carrots, and toast--all of which are totally foreign here--and downloading episode after episode of "Sex & the City."

This shallow yet addictive show (movie to be released May 30th! Exciting!), really, has been the crux of my life for the past few days.

That, of course, got me thinking about sex, marriage, babies, and drinking too much at posh New York City clubs.

It also, however, got me thinking about how I want to lead my life once I get back home. I have no answers. I do know, however, that it will NOT consist of a pasta-and-rice diet, like mine has been here (being that, save meat, which I don't trust, and gouda cheese, that's all I can find here to cook) and it will, certainly, involve a fair amount of biking, swimming, reading, smiling, and general happiness (and hopefully my body weight in Chipotle chicken burrito bowls. My GOD.).

This semester has been something of an exercise in self-denial. Sure, as declared to me by my now beyond obnoxious residence director, Beata, Poland "is a civilization!", but still, I've missed a lot about back home. And perhaps, more than I've gained. I'm not sure yet--I haven't exactly been doing anything academic over here, and my math skills, save converting Polish zloty into the ever-plummeting dollar, have most likely suffered. What I'm attempting to ask myself is this: Has study abroad been worth it?

That I can't seem to answer, either. I have now just over three weeks left in Europe. Over the course of the last three and a half months, I've seen a lot: I've been on sixteen different flights and eight train rides, and have traveled to twelve countries, ten major European cities, and probably about two dozen villages. I've wandered through world-class museums, gotten lost in a field in Ireland, eaten thousands of calories of wonderful pastries, had dozens of glasses of beer (most with juice, which is how I like to drink it here in Poland--they put a shot of ginger or raspberry or cherry flavoring in it, and you drink it with a straw. It's truly fantastic), taken about 20 gigs' worth of pictures, and set foot in at least a half doezen UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
I've watched the sunset on a ferry with dolphins chasing us away from the Aran Islands, on waves crashing against the westernmost point of continental Europe, on a train track in Amsterdam, on a dusty park in Poland.

It's been unbelievable, truly. Why do I feel the need to complain? It seems that this semester has held for me a life of extremes. Never have I seen more and done more, but never have I cried more, and never have I been more lonely, more afraid and anxious and, frankly, more broke.

Throughout the semester, I've tried to tell myself to "live in the moment," and relish each and every experience as it comes. This has been more difficult than I would have imagined--one, because it sounds like a fuckin' Hallmark card, and I have trouble taking myself seriously, but two--because of a lack-of-resources--people. With only four people in my program, and barely any way to meet people I actually, truly, find interesting (and who find me likewise--I am one fuckin' boring individual to many people, I've found. No, seriously. I. Am. LAME. MAN, I need to incorporate binge drinking back into my list of favorites, me thinks.--what a hit on the self-esteem that discovery was.), it has been an awfully lonely and dejecting semester.

Never have I valued people more than now, when I've been oh-so-cut-off from them. I mean, of course, I miss my family and my friends...and my dog...terribly. But it's not even that--I miss people I don't even know very well. I miss my acquaintainces--those people that I should be friends with, but have never had the time to really get to know. I miss those ones just as much as my friends back home, perhaps even more, because I haven't--and how could I?--kept in touch with them. I miss being able to walk up to someone I've met twice in class and have an actual conversation with him/her. In English. And it being, oh, I don't know--interesting. engaging. intelligent. I haven't had a conversation like that in so long.

Maybe that's it: Maybe that's what I want to do this summer--just...talk to people. Hopefully, a pair of four hundred dollar shoes can be incorporated into this plan, but, Ms. Bradshaw, I'm not holding my breath for that one.

Park Wodny, Poland's #1 Waterpark!

Me: So, the water park today was, in a word, amazing. It had SO MUCH TO DO!

Me: And I'm happy to say Christine and I did it all. So, it had a CLIMBING WALL in the water! and EIGHT saline jacuzzis and at least SEVEN water slides--all of which were, surprisingly, super, super intense (and amazing)

Me: and, at one point, I got kinda...stuck...in one of the slides.

Mersa: hahaahahahahahahaha

Me: ...

Mersa: please tell me someone had to come get you out?

Me: thankfully, no.

Me: it wasn't that I was too large...it was that I didn't have enough momentum to, ergh, finish the whole slide.

Mersa: ahahahahaha oh my god!

Me: basically, it was slides that you spin around and around in a dark tube, getting centripetal force built up...and then, you get dumped into this big bowl thing

Mersa: ooooh

Me: and what the momentum is supposed to do is carry you around the diameter of the bowl (kinda like one of those things at the zoo, where you put a penny at the top and watch it spin-spin-spin-spin around until it falls down in the center) and dump you down a slide in the middle.

Me: anyway, so, all of that was good and fine...and that WOULD HAVE happened, except...well...the slide spun me around and around, and then I got dumped into the bowl and....stopped.

Mersa: that's awesome! were you just...sitting there, then?

Me: and, since I'd closed my eyes (contacts in, and all) about mid-way through the slide, I opened them to find myself in a large orange bowl, with no visible exit.

Mersa: ahahahaahahaha

Me: (because I couldn't see the one in the middle--it was around on the other side of the big platform in the center)

Me: so, I sat there for a second, a little stunned that I hadn't, well, completed the journey, and even more stunned that I could see no way out of this bowl.

Me: so what did I do? You ask

Mersa: what! what!

Me: (nice audience participation. you're getting a bit too sassy over there in that United Kingdom, me thinks)

Me: I stood up.

Me: In the middle of the slide.

Mersa: ahahahaahahahahaha

Me: and started, um, well, wandering around, looking to see if I could get out.

Mersa: oh my GOD

Me: eventually, after feeling thoroughly like a hamster in a Habitrail cage, I found the little slide and--whoopf!--down I went, the most anti-climatic of anti-climatic endings to a waterslide ever.

Mersa: jesus christ! That's fucking AWESOME, megs

Me: I had no idea how it was SUPPOSED to work until I saw these big Polish guys fly on down after me...and then had to suffer through them verbally poking fun of me (like I understood any of it. Pfft. JOKE'S ON THEM!).

Me: So that was my adventure in Poland for the day. And tomorrow, I’m going to a Medieval castle.

More Transylvania...

As promised:

Transylvania, ctd

A few pictures (of many to come) from Transylvania

So it's been an atrocious amount of time, but, basically, I haven't had internet access since my last post, because it has crashed, twice now, in my dorm, and I've been elsewhere. Where? you ask.

Well, since last posting, I've taken a tour of Auschwitz, biked around Amsterdam, spent about 8 hours in the Vienna airport, taken a terrifying taxi ride (wrong way on a one-way, anyone?) through Budapest, and spent six amazing, exhausting and exhilarating days on a bus winding through the mountains and valleys of Transylvania.

That's where you come in...

Since I still NO internet access again, I'm posting this from [yet another] cafe in Krakow, and have already been here for a time. So...these are only a few snapshots from my travels through Transylvania, but I promise, promise, PROMISE I'll post many more as soon as I can. Prepare yourself.

What follows are, essentially, from the first day of the trip, March 27th, after we (and by "we," I mean me and about twenty other Lexia students, who are studying in Krakow, Berlin and Budapest, along with several Hungarian guides) had crossed the Hungary-Romanian border (another stamp in my passport--yesss!), and after I'd gotten felt uber-motion sick. Bring. It. On.

(Oh, and a couple random ones from my half-day in Budapest made it in, too (I spent a couple hours there after the trip, too, so you might get a better glimpse of it post-Trans trip).)

Here goes:

My first day of Transylvania