Good-bye Zakopane

On Friday, July 12 we were back to teaching in the morning after the wonderful party the night before. The weather was cool, but thankfully not rainy. I gathered my class for a few minutes in order to present an award to the young man in my class for the drawing he had done of a jack-o-lantern that was superb!

Then I gave them each a scavenger list of seven items, written in English, that they were to find in the grocery store. This list ranged from Greek yogurt to light bulb to kitchen scale to a Coca-Cola with your name on it. (Indeed as a marketing idea, Coke is putting first names on bottles, and also "generic" words such as brother, friend, and father.) We clarified understanding of each person's list and then were off to the grocery store.

They did a good job with their lists. At the end I told them indeed they could help an English speaking person who arrives in Poland to find items such as peach jam in a grocery store.

We all went to Zakopane in the afternoon. I went to one of my favorite shops with another volunteer. She bought some of the beautiful Polish pottery. I'm going to wait with my purchase of any until my trip later this month to Lodz. There is a shop there that has thousands of pieces. There is a new pattern out this year with poppies as part of the design. Since I have such fond memories of seeing the poppies last year during my train ride to Lublin, I want a piece of pottery with that pattern.

The evening was quiet. It was time to pack and then try to grab a few hours of sleep before breakfast at 6 AM on Saturday morning.

The halls started to become noisy around 5:30 on Saturday morning because the campers were told to load their luggage on the bus before breakfast. I carried down my small bag as well as my handbag with the computer, leaving my large bag outside the door of my room. After breakfast I found one of my former students, now a young man approaching six feet tall and asked for help with my large bag. Got to my room and it was gone! Magic fairies had arrived to move all the volunteers' luggage to the van.

We waved good-bye to the campers in the bus and then departed for Krakow. It was a very cool and rainy morning, so we knew we weren't missing anything that day in Zakopane!