So I've been told to post more often because it helps Julie procrastinate and really that's one of my most important duties as a friend: helping other friends not do important things like studying, passing exams, and etc.
Last night we went out with Matt and Maggie, the two Americans we've met also studying here, and Viktoria and Gerard. It was Gerard's last night in Krakow before heading back to Vienna at 7 am today, so there was a lot of dancing and picture-taking in celebration. We went to a pretty classy place for the first part of the evening (we had to pay a cover charge!) that was full of people in business suits. When we first walked in the waitress told us to be sure to dance since there was small and empty dance floor in front of the stage where the live musicians were playing. We didn't dance at first but went up about a half hour after we got there and started dancing on the still-empty floor. It was a little awkward since it was just Gerard and the four girls (Brad and Matt stayed at the table with the coats) but we were having fun and the band loved having us up there. After a little while a bunch of the business suits joined in and there was a whole crowd out on the floor! But we got bored eventually and decided to go someplace else, and by the time we'd gotten our coats and were headed to the door all the business suits had sat down again. So we totally brought the party....and then took it away again. I don't get though why all those men and women were out at 10-12 pm in business suits! It was weird.
I'm getting totally excited for classes to start on Monday! The Polish attitude towards scheduling is really laidback. We met all of our professors almost two weeks ago at a coffee-tea shindig and asked when our classes we're going to be meeting. The professors all said that it was very flexible and we should tell them when we wanted to have class. So then we asked when their other classes for the semester are scheduled, so we could try to pick times that would work for them. Their response: "we don't know when our other classes we'll be, they're not scheduled yet." That was almost two weeks before the start of classes. Brad, Rachel, and I sat down on Wednesday to plan when we wanted to have our classes - half a week before classes are supposed to start. We sent each professor a time suggestion of when we would like to have class, and they all emailed back: "we'll get back to you, that time is ok for now but our other classes are still not scheduled!" So we have most of our classes set up for the first week starting on Monday, but they're all conditional and will probably change over the next couple of weeks as people START scheduling things! It's so so so so so different from the US. One of the professors teaching us our Polish History and Culture course this month said that this mindset about scheduling is a symptom of the general Polish mindset that developed as a result of communism. He says that under communism there was no reason to ever think of the future, that the past was glorified and the present was thought of as polluted so there was no long-term planning or thinking about tomorrow. It was pretty cool to have a lecture on this during our first week here and then to see it for real now. It makes sense to see this in our professors because all them are my parent's age and grew up under communist rule.
Now I'm going to enjoy drinking my cup of mint tea and watch an episode of The Office with Brad and Rachel. We're having a lazy Friday evening because we have to get up at 7 tomorrow morning to catch a bus to Zakopane, the ski resort in the Tatra mountains!
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