10 September 2000

8 September - I am now home. I am back in my wonderful little town, nestled in the lakes of northeastern Poland. Gotta love it.

I arrived here on 7 September. I took a taxi to Lucja’s house (she was working) and visited with her children, Dawid and Arleta (and their dog Lupos). Dawid made me a cup of tea, and we had some cake and talked about the summer. I received my keys and walked to my flat. Walking up that hill (its loose dirt) with a backpack on is a challenge. I had left some boxes at Lucja’s house when I went traveling, and they were neatly placed in my bedroom for when I returned. After that, I went to the supermarket to pick up a few necessities, made a quick dinner, and went to bed.

I woke up this morning and just enjoyed being able to not have to move anywhere or be out by checkout time. I unpacked my backpack and started doing my laundry. I have a long way to go before I am totally unpacked, as I haven’t even started going through the above mentioned boxes.

Lucja stopped over for a few minutes today say "Hi" and also to give me some information. I will go to the school on Monday to help with grading placement tests that new students will take to put them in the proper level. Also, she told me that she is in negotiations with someone for our school moving to a different building, just down the road from where we are now. She will tell me more about that on Monday.

In honor of being home, I decided to do some big time cooking. I made Arroz con Pollo for lunch and homemade chicken soup for dinner. Both of which give me leftovers for one or two more meals. I also decided that I would begin writing down how I make these things and start a Cooking section of my website with recipes. It should be up soon. Don’t count on any gourmet recipes though.

Also, when I was in the USA, I picked up a couple of Amish cookbooks. I found them in an outlet shop in Pennsylvania (close to Amish country) for only $2.65. I know that some of you are laughing at the mention of Amish, but the main reason I bought them is because Amish people make everything from scratch, which is basically what I have to do also. To those who may be wondering, no, I am not Amish, nor do I have any Amish in my background.

Today I also went to the convenience shop behind my flat that is owned by the lady who speaks Spanish (if you don’t know about that, refer to the journal from 5 December, 1999). She gave me a dirty look and wondered why I hadn’t been there for a long time. I explained to her that I had been traveling for three months. She thought that I had decided to no longer patronize her shop! She wasn’t busy, so we talked about my trip for 10 minutes.

My flat looked great. There was a bit of new wallpaper in the bathroom and some of the walls had been painted. I will keep it better this year. Admittedly, I am a lousy housekeeper. However, I am determined to turn over a new leaf. I plan on keeping it clean enough so that if someone just pops over (something I HATE), I won’t be embarrassed by how it looks.

10 September – This relates back to my June 2000 journal…North and South Korea will march together in the formal ceremonies for the Olympics 2000 in Sydney that begin next Friday. They will march wearing the same uniforms and the flag will be a special flag of unity. They will compete as separate countries, though. I think that this is great. I haven’t been able to follow much of what went on between those two countries when I was traveling, but, after hearing this, I feel that they are still making progress in resolving issues between them. This should be a great example for many other countries that are having difficulties with issues between countries. However, this is a different situation, as both North and South Korea are, as the president of South Korea said, "The same people."

I did some unpacking today. Quite a lot actually. I was glad to see my big dark green winter coat and my gloves. I predict that I’ll be using them both around 1 October. I was also glad to see my other warm clothes. All I had with me when I was traveling were "summer traveler clothes," nothing all that warm. It’s been getting quite chilly at night in Poland for the last 3 weeks and I was cold. Not anymore.

I saw a movie on the tellie this evening called The Newcomers. It’s a story about a family who moves from Boston to Burlington (Vermont), and the issues that they go through with adjustment. It was excellent. It’s a drama and I highly recommend it.

This evening we has another brilliant sunset at about 19:20.

I guess that the Emmy awards are tonight. We won’t see them here, as they will start around 2:30am in this time zone, but they’ll probably be rerun on one of our national channels this week.

The temperatures have been around 8C – 10C at night and about 15C during the day. On Saturday and Sunday we had some rain.

Speaking of the tellie, CNN World has a ½ hour program called "American Edition", which focuses on dfferent issues in the USA. However, they choose to air it at 3h30 GMT! Who on earth would get up or be up at that time to watch? I guess that that way they can kill it off for lack of ratings. Dumb dumb dumb. I emailed them about this, but I doubt if they care.