Fat Thursday, Farmers Strikes and Heading South to Szczyrk
Friday was the last day before the regional winter break*. Our lessons took place with a discordant but not unpleasant musical background of tractor horns. This turned out to be the first day of a month long protest by Polish farmers across the country to protest competition from cheep Ukraine exports (which don't have the same EU restrictions) and heavy EU regulations. Apparently the government are likely listen and to move to impose new import bans on Ukrainian agricultural products.
*The 2 week Winter Break happens at different times across Polish provinces on a rotating basis from the 2nd week of January into February.
The Thursday before ash Wednesday when you eat as many doughnuts as possible. Our boss Jaygosh brought in piles for the staff!
Now that's what I call a great day to celebrate!!
Friday was the last day before the holidays. My 1: 1 didn't turn up and my conversation class was cancelled so unfortunately for our long suffering Polish teacher I made it to the Polish lesson. Gwill is one of our senior staff, a proud Welsh man who speaks good polish and taken on the task of Polish teacher when the Polish national gave up after 2 weeks with us!! In our class are Russian and Check speakers, teachers with Masters in linguistic and then the almost hopeless like myself - pity the man!!
Our lessons are as we teach them - immersive - meaning the teacher only speaks the taught language and nothing else with a fair bit of pantomime going on!
He was asking us how to conjugate regular and irregular verbs. Regular!! very little is regular in the Polish language and it seems to be a lottery when a word that starts with a d whether it is pronounced with a d or a ch sound!! Next time it's the past tense!! a colleague and I have requested a lesson on pronunciation.
Polish over it was time for me to get ready for my epic journey south to go skiing.
I left the flat at 23.45 heading for the train station. my train was at 1 am but i'd allowed extra time for the farmer street blockades, but they had all gone home so I had plenty of time and the station was full of happy holiday makers.
Polish trains are really easy to follow as your ticket has the locomotive number, the platform and section of the platform to wait at to get into your allotted carriage where your booked seat is. Tickets are only released 30 days before travel so Poles frequently stay up until 12.30 30 days ahead to ensure they get the best prices - sometimes more that 50% lower. I did this for my Crakow ticket as my flatmate had warned me it would be very busy in this holiday week. My first train was a 7 hours journey and then after a change in Katowice, it was another 1.5 hrs to Bielsko-Biala. Here I followed a bunch of cool young people with snowboards over bridge to the bus station for another 50 mins into the mountains to Szczyrk.
Amazingly a got off the bus and a Polish granny I had been sitting next to introduced me to a Yorkshire man who happened to be passing the bus top!!
So tomorrow, kitted out in a marvellous array of adapted, borrowed and cobbled together ski kit kindly lent tome by colleagues, ski pass in pocket, skis ready to be picked up from David's Skis , I'm off in the gondola up the mountain to find the snow.
a friend to welcome me!!
Looks wonderful! Xx
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