January and February

During January it was blistering cold and snowy all month long. It was too cold to go do anything, so i spent most of the time in January in the house working on homework. It was very depressing.

February was much much better though. We spent most of the time in Scotland and Ireland, where it was warmer, and we could actually see the ground with no snow.

The first place we went was Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh was probably my favorite city so far. It was the most American place in that I've been to. There were many interesting sites there, including the Elephant Bar, where J.K Rowling first started writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. She actually currently resides in Edinburgh. I didn't get to see her though. :( Also in Edinburgh, there was Dr. Pepper, which they do not have in Poland. They didn't have any root beer there, so I'm gonna have to wait until i get home for that. Some other sites in Edinburgh that i saw were the Scottish Writer's museum, which included authors such as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

After 4 days in Edinburgh we went on a plane ride across the Irish Sea to Dublin, Ireland. I found Dublin to be not as good as Edinburgh but it was still good. Unlike Edinburgh, which was all packed together and easy to get to, Dublin was more spread out, and you had to take more buses. Some interesting sites in Dublin included St. Patrick's cathedral, where in the courtyard of the church, St. Patrick himself baptized the pagans of Ireland. Another site was the viking museum, which was interesting. Ireland was overrun by Vikings in the 1500s, so that was what the museum was about. On our last full day we went to the Dublin zoo, which reminded me of the KC zoo. It was under renovation so we didn't get to see some of the animals like the penguins, but it was still good.

My next blog will be about March, where we didn't go anywhere, but my aunt Pam came to Poland.

Tragedy in Poland

For those of who have not heard yet, The Polish president Lech Kaczynski was killed in a plane crash in Western Russia on Saturday morning. His wife, the head of the bank, and many top military and the chief of the military were also killed in that crash. In all around 96 people were killed. The nation of Poland is in shock and mourning for their fallen leaders.

The plane was headed to a ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre where over 20,000 defenseless Polish soldiers were killed by the Soviet Union. The place will now be remembered for two tragedies.

The Polish people are very patriotic and everybody has their flags hanging from their apartments or houses. The flags have a black ribbon on top of them to remember "Black Saturday."

This has been called the worst tragedy in Poland since World War II, and the Nation of Poland will mourn for their fallen leaders for a very long time.

Budapest

On Christmas Day we left Gdansk for Warsaw for one night, then we took a train down to Bratislava Slovakia.

After a 2 night stop in Bratislava, Slovakia, we took a three hour train south to Budapest Hungary. Budapest was one of my favorite cities in Europe. It had a lot interesting sites and attractions to see. Hungarian is a very hard language to try and learn (even harder than Polish). Luckily though many people spoke English as a second language so it wasn' that hard to communicate.

One of the interesting sites that was in Budapest was the Hungarian Parliament. Hungary has the second largest Parliament builiding, only Englands is bigger. I went on a tour of it with My Dad and his collegue. It was interesting inside, since it is a different government than America. It looks really beautiful from the outside. From accross the river. I' ve posted a picture of it below.

Another interesting site in Hungary was the Fisherman's Bation. Its an overview where you can see most of Budapest from the height. The first day we went there it was so foggy we couldn't see anything so we tried again the next day. It was clear and the view was absolutely spectacular. It's even better at night. I've posted 2 pictures below one of what the Fisherman's Bastion looks like, and a picture of the view from it.

During Communist times in Hungary, The communists would put up statues showing themselves as heroes or leaders. After the Hungarians became free, instead of just destroying the statues, they moved all the statues and moved them to a park where people could see them. It was appropriately called Statue Park. It also called Momento Park also. It has over fifty statues from the communists. Ive posted a couple of my favorite statues from the park.

We spent New Years Eve in Budapest and it was an exciting experience. People were blowing off little fireworks on the sidewalks, and it was crazy so we decided to go back to the rented apartment for our safety, where we watched the countdown and the fireworks on TV.

My next blog will be written by the end of this week and it will tell you about my families trip to Scotland and Ireland.

sorry for lack of blogs

I would like to apologize for lack of blogs because I have gotten lazy. I will now bring you up to date on how my adventure in Poland has been going and I promise to update more often.

I left off in November after my Berlin trip. About 2 weeks after that we went to Warsaw, the capital of Poland.It was early December and they were getting ready for Christmas in Warsaw. Warsaw was actually really nice and a lot of the people there spoke English.We got to see some friends from America who are on the same program as my dad here. In Polish Warsaw is spelled Warszawa and pronounced Var-shaw-va. In Warsaw we saw the Warsaw uprising museum and saw the Palace of Culture built by Stalin after World War II. We went out to eat a lot and my favorite place was this German place where we ate lunch with some of my dad's c0llegues. Warsaw is about 5 hours by train from Gdansk. It was 80% destroyed in World War II by the Germans. The Red Army was coming close to taking the Germans out of Warsaw, so before the Russians could get to Warsaw, the Germans destroyed the city. We saw where the Jewish Ghetto uprising was, which is different than the Warsaw uprising. They were two different uprisings in two different locations. In the Warsaw uprising, the Polish fighters would get through town through the sewage system because otherwise they would be killed by the Nazi army. The Warsaw uprising could have been a success and the Polish were winning, they just expected the Russians to help them when the Nazis called in for back-up. But the Russians stayed on the other side of the Vistula River and watched as the Nazis quashed the Polish rebellion.

After Warsaw we went to Budapest, Hungary in late December/ Early January. I will tell you about that in my next blog which I promise will be soon.