So my on-arrival training is over. It's been an exhausting but enjoyable past week. I'm happy to be back in my own cousy little home town though. And november is here. The weather is getting colder everyday and the days are getting darker. Reminds me of home.
After dinner we had a tour through the old city of Warsaw. Our guide was an ex EVS -volunteer living there. The tour was very interesting even though I was still so tired from the travel.
Monday night in the old town wasn't too busy. The atmosphere was very touristic though chilled. I'm very interested in the history of the old town, and even though it's so beautiful, it still feels so fake. The fact that all of it was destroyed at some point and even the royal castle you can see is this picture; this building as you can see it now is actually just 40 years old. But the story of the rebuilding of the city after the second world war is fascinating; they used as much of the original bricks etc. as they could and tried to rebuild it as realistic as they could. And this was all done by the people of the city. It might be fake, but for that it has been placed on the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites as "an outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century.
This half-naked stone mermaid lady is called Syrenka Warszawska. She's the protector of the town of Warsaw and the legend tells that she was just swimming around the rivers in Warsaw and freeing her fellow fish friends from the nets of the local fishermen. They surprisingly were quite pissed off about this and catched her, but for her appearance and beautiful siren-like singing voice they fell in love with her; excpet for one, who captured her to show her around the country as a part of an kind of travelling freak show. But the men of Warsaw heard her cries echoing through the wind in the nights and decided to free her. For this she promised the people of Warsaw to always protect them and their city. Well, this is still just one of the stories travelling around. I guess no one knows which one is actually true, but she's very famous in the city anyway.
Long term EVS -volunteers have three trainings; pre-departure in their home countries (which I didn't) and on-arrival and mid-term during their project. The purpose of the on-arrival training is mainly to get together with other volunteers, share experiences, get advice from others and the trainers. Also to get a new perspectives about volunteering, about your own work and generally EVS.
One of our first tasks was to create something from different materials in groups about the subject of My Project in Poland, and then present it to the group. The one above is my group's poster.
What I think about Warsaw;
- I've got the image of people living in Warsaw being really proud of living in the big city; still no one seems too happy. The atmosphere is very reserved and still. Probably if you here someone having fun, smiling or speaking out loud it's a foreigner (still, just my observation from one week)
- it's very recognizable as a polish city; though a lot more grandiloquent from what I've seen before
- there's some very beautiful architecture but still an ugly contrast between areas in town making the ugly even uglier and the beautiful feeling more fake (the city reminds me of the game SimCity, where you can build your own city and just place any kinds of buildings next to each other block after block)
- people jog. A lot.
The rest of this post is actually just about photography and happiness and what I think about Austrian girls;
- they're damn beautiful
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