End of Summer Adventure #2

Our language camp ended on Friday night. Camp always ends with a program by the students. This one was no exception. The students presented T-shirts and a card to their English teachers and each group provided a short English presentation. These ranged from dancing the Hokey-Pokey to doing a poem in both English and Polish to singing songs. In between the dance classes presented their final routines.

Then the program ended with a theater production which combined all the skills of the camp -- music, dance, and English. But the theater teacher said the most important outcomes the campers would be demonstrating were cooperation and teamwork! This production centered around a pirate theme. One part of it that I enjoyed in both rehearsal and then at the final program was the Drunken Sailor song.

Following the program everyone goes to the bonfire area for kielbasa (which is actually the name for sausage with there being 50 or 100 kinds of sausage that have individual names -- think how we use apple in English -- yes, it's an apple, but then it's a McIntosh or Honey Crisp -- etc.) and the final goodbyes and signing of shirts.

The campers all leave with their families and suddenly it is very quiet at Reymontowka.

We left at about 8 AM on Saturday morning. We had good luck with traffic and encountered very few road construction delays. The LOT check in line was long when I got there, but I was going through security by 11 AM or so. The flight left Warsaw nearly one hour late and got to Chicago about 45 minutes late. The line at passport control was the longest I've seen in Chicago, so it was about 5:45 when I ready to head for my flight to Minnesota. I thought I'd surely had missed the  6 PM flight, but it turns out O'Hare had been on melt down for the whole day, and my flight was 2 hours late. I got over to the Terminal 1 and got into the McDonald's line. I heard a woman say she had been trying to get out since 2:30.

The flight I was on was slightly delayed twice and changed gates once. The flight was full of families with babies and pre-school children, the kids not enjoying all the delays any more than the adults.  Finally on the plane and I dropped off to sleep along with most of the passengers. I woke up during the flight I think because the sound of the engines had changed somehow. The lights in the plane were off, so I couldn't see my watch to determine if we were landing or where we were in the flight.

I looked out the window and saw we were flying on a cloudless night and rather low so I could see the lights from all the farms and small towns in Midwest America. Here's what I saw while we were landing over the Twin Cities:

Wish I was still helping with the language camps, but my other life has to take precedence now for awhile.