Poland for Christmas

This year I finally got to spend Christmas with my family in Poland. Overall it was really relaxed and relatively uneventful and filled with lots of cake. I talked with my grandma a lot, filled up on good tea and food, watched TV, missed WiFi, got groceries, etc.

Getting to Poland was quite the journey. I took a tram to Grenoble, train to Paris, bus to airport, flight to Modlin, bus to Warsaw, and then a train to Bydgoszcz. Overall I think it was something like 19 hours. And then coming home I had to do it all over again. At some point on the first train I put instant coffee in my yogurt because I was so tired and had no hot water. That was a low point. And yes, that does mean I brought my own instant coffee. It's an addiction, leave me alone.

I spent the first couple of days with my cousin and his wife in Warsaw, where we ordered the biggest pizza known to man, visited Stalin's gift to Poland (the Palace of Culture), and hung around drawing family trees and talking a lot. It was really great, not only because these are literally the two nicest people I know, but because I was able to speak my native language with them: mostly-Polish-with-random-English-thrown-in (they both lived in England for 10 years), not many people speak it. Although for the first few days my brain kept trying to say things in French, I kept popping out random pardons, d'accords and ouais. It took a few days before I didn't have to consciously think of what I was going to say before I said it.

On my way to Bydgoszcz I learned that my great-uncle had died at the age of 94, and I ended up going to his funeral and seeing loads of extended family I never thought I'd see again, and a lot more I didn't know existed.

I met my baby nephew for the first time.

I caught some sort of a virus and spent nearly a week too tired to do anything besides sit and watch TV. Talking was a struggle, which was annoying since most of what I did there was talk to people. I had absolutely no appetite and anything I ate made me feel sick (but it was the holidays and I was surrounded by Polish food so naturally I still ended up gaining 6 pounds, no joke). My grandma finally made me go to the doctor. I reluctantly went. I don't like doctors.

I welcomed 2015 by drinking what tasted like sugared rubbing-alcohol with my grandma, and exchanging życzenia (basically what you wish the other person in the new year) which I don't think is a thing in the U.S. (it should be). It wasn't the most exciting of new years celebrations, but at that moment I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

Then the next day I made the long trek back home where nothing interesting happened except for the conversation I had with a Congolese man on the tram. Although I was so dead by that point it might have been a hallucination. It started at 4:00 am and I was able to flop onto my bed a bit before midnight.

We even got a little snow

Christmas in Bydgoszcz

Went to go see my cousin's band (B.O.K.) in concert. Maybe standing in front of speakers in a crowded room isn't the best way to deal with a virus, but I'm really glad I went

Yum, drugs

What?? It's hard enough to read this shiz in English

Happy New Year :) I promised I wouldn't share this post-shower photo, but I love it too much

Wigilia part 1

I swear all this kid does it eat

Wigilia Part 2

Warsaw Uprising Museum, some of the armbands of the underground movement members

Soviet "liberators," Warsaw Uprising Museum

Palace of Culture. Thanks Stalin

Our Christmas Tree. I've never decorated one of the kitchen table before, very efficient

This made up 80% of my diet

And the journey back home begins...

Christmas in Echirolles (is a confusing time)

Anyone who has ever taken any interest in French current events is well aware of it's changing demographic, but it's one thing to read about it and another to see it firsthand. The country is historically catholic, but because of the huge waves of North African immigration and the decline of catholic influence, you're more likely to see people going to the mosque than going to mass. This is especially apparent in Echirolles, where a large majority of people aren't what the French call francais de souche (literally souche means stump, and it refers to a person who is "pure" French, or whose French roots go back generations).

Case-in-point: teaching a Christmas lesson. This is the last week before the winter break so I decided to have a low-key Christmas-themed coloring activity day with my 2nd/3rd grade students (I'm just as ready for break as these kids are, and I had no desire to try to talk over a class of 20 screaming kids for 40 minutes). I started off the lesson by asking the class who celebrates Christmas, expecting maybe half the class to raise there hands. Three kids raised their hands.

"Okay, who doesn't celebrate Christmas?" Almost every hand shot up. Instead, most of them celebrate l'Aïd (explanation here). From what Wikipedia tells me, it's a celebration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his own son before God intervened.

(Side note: I asked the students what traditions they have, and I got a lot of the same responses I got when I asked about Christmas traditions in some of my other classes (family, food, snowmen, etc.). Then one girl bluntly said they kill a sheep. I was a little shocked., Thinking maybe I understood her wrong, I moved on to the next kid, but then I turned to her again, too curious to resist: "like...a live sheep?" A few of the kids made the knife -across-the-throat gesture and the teacher looked at me and gave a slight shake of the head. I'm not quite sure if he meant "don't get into this" or "she's bs-ing you.")

At the same time it's interesting to see the interaction between this and laicité, the French version of separation between church and state which has become something of a national obsession. For example ever since 2004 students are forbidden from wearing any sort of religious symbols, be it a cross on a necklace, a headscarf, a yamaka, etc. So often here you'll see students or, in my case teachers, take off their headscarf before entering the school, and then putting it right back on as they leave for lunch.

I'm not making any judgments, just making observations,  just want to make that clear, these subjects are always a little touchy.