I ate too much chocolate today

The chocolate is just too good in Poland. I'm sure I've mentioned this before... It's also very inexpensive. A fantastic combination.

We went to dinner tonight with Matt and Maggie, the other two American students we've been hanging out with a fair amount. We tried a vegetarian restaurant called Greenway, just a short way off of Rynek Główny. I ordered a vegetable curry and found it to be quite good, though it could have been MUCH more spicy. Another dinner-goer tonight was a guy named John from Miami, a nuclear physics grad student studying at one of the technical universities in Kraków. Nice guy who fits that "physics-type" in a good way. Sounds like we'll be seeing him again this weekend for some Friday night festivities.

Rachel and I just finished watching the BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice" (with COLIN FIRTH!!!) and now we're not quite sure what to do with ourselves. The real world just seems like such a let-down after being immersed in Jane Austen. Fewer empire-style dresses (is that the right term?), fewer beautiful gardens and parks, no carriages, no balls, no rich men come a-courtin'. It's very sad.

So maybe I'll talk a little bit about my usual week, now that our class schedule has gotten (kind of) settled... I have 4 environmental classes that each meet once a week for 2.5-3 hours, depending on whether or not we get a break in the middle of the class.

Monday at 12:30 - Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe
Tuesday at 10:30 - Ecological Engineering and Sustainable Development
Wednesday at 2:30 - Environmental Engineering Lab
Thursday at 10:00 - Environmental Economics

Monday and Thursday evenings I have swim practice with the Politechnika team for 45 minutes (I wish it was longer...). I also have a violin student! It's looking like I'm going to be meeting with him for about an hour, once a week. His name is Tom, a British dude maybe late-20s teaching English here. He plays guitar already so he knows music but wants help with violin technique and fiddle music. Totally fun, although now I'm definitely wishing I'd brought my violin with me... I'm weighing the possibility of renting a violin while I'm here, trying to decide how much I would play it versus the cost of renting. Having a student definitely inspires me to work harder on my own though, and the whole atmosphere of Kraków makes me want to delve more deeply into klezmer music.

What else... I spend quite a lot of time reading in cafes. I have to write a paper by the end of April for the main professor of the survey culture course we took in February. I've got my topic narrowed down to Czesław Miłosz, a famous Polish poet and Nobel laureate who wrote prolifically throughout the 20th century. His work is really REALLY beautiful. We had to read a few chapters in his semi-autobiographical book, The Captive Mind, for class and now I'm debating between writing about his book or his poetry. The book is really cool because he explores the mindset of many Polish authors in the first half of the century and the emotions and thought-processes that made many authors choose to collaborate with the Communist regimes and many others to choose exile and the life of an emigre abroad. It's fascinating. On the other hand, his poetry is amazing art. So I have a lot of reading ahead of me as I work out what I'm going to do...and then do it. And of course I'm also doing reading for next year's thesis, as I've mentioned many times already. I've got some new general ideas that are kind of exciting and it's reassuring to find that there are several directions, many interesting to me and perhaps actually worthwhile, in which I could go. I'll probably post long boring posts about these ideas sometime when I sit down and actually start to explore them in detail.