Say what?!?

After a long and tiring day I wasn't feeling too in the mood for company... And in fact I was feeling a little bit like just curling up in bed.  But something compelled me to start up a conversation with two polish women in the room with me. It was Kate and Kate, one of them my age and the other a little older.  The younger woman spoke polish, and a little English.  The other, i found out, spoke polish and a little German.  So with a little translation help we all decided to get dinner together.  We went to an itty bitty place out of the eyes of the tourists that was completely in polish.  (you'd be surprised how hard that was to find!) I couldn't understand the menu so I asked the Kates to order for me... And ended up with 4 huge dishes all for me. Oy! The amazing thing was that this feast was only 15 zlotty, or about 5 Euro! I had a spicy goulash soup, and a pork roast with peaches and cheese (sounds weird but it was delicious!), a salad that was somewhere in between a lettuce, potato, and pasta salad, and pierogi again, but this time they were filled with a strawberry dessert!! The adventure though was trying to communicate with each other.  We would try to ask each other questions just like in a normal meal... But we had to wait for someone else to translate, and hope that person actually knew the words in one language or another! Amazingly, this worked out really well.  I discovered that young Kate is the same age as I am and also an only child. She is currently studying cosmetology in her home town (that took some pantomiming to understand...) Older Kate was living in krakow to study polish language and literature.  This whole experience was really uplifting to me. It made me feel like humanity does have a fighting chance to communicate :)

Later that night, the older kate left us and young kate and I were stuck trying to translate... Which was much more difficult.  We ended up using google translate on the iPad to get most of what we were saying across. Eventually, I understood that she wanted to go to a fireworks show on the river! As we were about to leave, a few canadians i had met earlier walked in... And low and behold, the guy spoke fluent Polski! Phew! So they came with us down to the river... And I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. Not only was this a fireworks display, it was a celebration of their nation's symbol, the dragon.  They did a huge boat display with gigantic fighting balloon dragons... There were giant jelly fish, and all sorts of nasty looking creatures of the deep.  They had the most epic music playing in the background, like we were watching a fight to the death. And occasionally they would shoot off a big bunch of fireworks.   Kate was absolutely enthralled, and she explained that this type of very dramatic show is very stylistically polish, and was a night she will always remember.  I certainly can't argue with her there... But it was really a lot of fun, and kind of cool to see this very polish celebration without the influence of tourists.  

A successful end to a very long day.