A month? Already!

Thirty days I've been in Wroclaw but where has the time gone. No one was lying when they said time here would fly by.

I finally got out of Wroclaw for a weekend with a group of erasmus people and it did me a world of good. I've found that when I'm in a new place I feel very small

and my surroundings seem infinite. The train ride out of town into Krakow helped shrink my world and provided a sense of geographical placement in this foreign land.

The 5 hour ride was all sunny and warm and relaxing as we each had 1.5 seats to ourselves. (much different to the ride home :-( ) The trip and sights were wonderful

with Wawel Castle and it's Dragon. The lesson learned was to get out of town more often. Of course the trip let all of us get to know each other a lot better which is 

also important, to know who you're sharing this experience with.

The people in Krakow were just as nice in Wroclaw even though we were obviously tourists there. If someone in line hears that you speak english but you're

attempting so hard to say your order in Polish they will ask, "what is it you're trying to say?" and then relay the order or tell you how to pronounce it. It certainly cuts 

the embarrassment of the situation down in half. It must always be pretty obvious that I'm an out-of-towner because I take this deep breath of "here we go" before I

order things. :-P Unfortunately I hear that though natives are not unhelpful to most foreigners, they do look down on some. And this is based on skin color. :-( A fight

erupted outside our dorm between 5 polish guys and 2 spanish guys. One of the Spanish guys came out with a huge black eye. Actually a lot of fights happen right

outside of Olowek, another happened last night when I heard screams below. I ran out to the balcony to see 8 guys running around each other. Pretty scary.

There was an instance in which a group of us were harassed. A club had held a Carnival themed erasmus party and a group of us were heading home from it. We

were 4 girls and 1 guy and snowballs started landing around us. We turned around to see two Polish guys yelling and lobbing them in our direction. We yelled back but

the ambush did not stop. I decided to turn around and asked them in polish to stop,please. They accepted laughing still but they stopped. After rejoining the group the

guy with us lent a bit a truth to the situation. The guys were probably trying to flirt with us as we're all dressed in cute outfits and we just couldn't understand what they

were saying. And that they were laughing probably because I was trying to act intimidating while dressed and painted as a leopard. Oh that wonderful language

barrier.