Poland

There we were, 4 girls, 8 boys and 2 teachers, at the railway station of Den Bosch. Friday morning, fully packed. Ready for the long journey to Cracow. Fortunately all went well and when we arrive at Cracow on Saturday morning everybody feels relieved but rather exhausted. Sleeping on a train is not so comfortable as in your own bed!
The coming week we will stay at host families and we are going to meet them now. But on Sunday morning we will see each other again for our first excursion: the salt mines. We were pleasantly surprised to see what you can make of salt: sculpted gnomes, saints and a huge church hall. In the evening we met each other again when we went to a concert that had been organized by the Polish school.
Then came Monday, the first day of work. When we met in the market square in the afternoon we all talked about our work. Some were quite happy (I only had to work for 2 hours!!!) others sad (I had to do a lousy job all day long!!!) Afterwards we took the Polish pupils to a pub, otherwise nothing would have happened. Now we had a nice evening together.
The Tuesday and Wednesday were almost identical and afterwards we met at a nice little bar. By now we knew our way around town. Every one knew the best (and cheapest) place for kebabs and this became our usual evening meal.
On Thursday we had our 2nd excursion; we went to the Concentration Camp of Auschwitz. All of us found this very interesting and very touching of course.
In the evening we had a great party (they promised us) but what it boiled down to was that we could stay out a little later. But still we had lots of fun, helped by the (cheap) beer; the next morning most of us felt quite wasted. The walk through the Jewish Quarter of Cracow was criticized (yeah right, if the guide speaks French I can’t understand him!! I’m too tired for that) but was interesting enough, really. We visited a Jewish synagogue and went to locations where Schindler’s List was shot.
In the evening everybody took leave of us and we had a very long journey ahead of us. On Saturday afternoon we were all dead, but satisfied. We are looking forward to the week the Polish pupils will be here; that will be great.

Merel ten Hacken