Day 4 of our Journey: August 28, 2008

So we left Berlin at 9:15am to start our trek to Poland. I was definitely very excited to visit Poland especially, because of family's background. My grandmother was born there and although I never got to meet her, I thought it would be very interesting to see the country where a large part of my family was from. Even more, the country where such horrible events occurred that affected my family directly.

We made a short stop at the Berlin Soviet Monument on the way out. It was huge, massive, like all the things that the Soviets do I learned. We continued our journey on our light purple bus, complete with butterflies covering the outside, which seemed to become our traveling home. Of course, I fell asleep the majority of the time, since I can seriously sleep ANYwhere. However, the ride was scattered with multiple games of Mafia, which turned out to be so much fun. Not surprisingly, I was HORRIBLE at it because I am probably the worst liar ever and sat there grining the whole time followed by everyone saying "It's Jo!!!!" And I failed to persuade them the other way.
Once we reached the German-Polish border, we stopped for another one of Professor Raczka's lectures called "Shifting Borders, Changing Identities." I probably heard about half of it considering how grogy I was sleeping on a bus on and off for hours. It was exciting though to walk across the bridge connecting Germany and Poland, so exciting. We returned to the bus and finally arrived in Wroclaw, Poland at 7:30PM and checked into our hotel.
As a group we walked to the main square of the city. The city was gorgeous! Absolutely beautiful! Small streets filled with cobblestones and colorful buildings surrounded the main square. We decided to be really Polish, and ate our first meal of pierogies which were soooo good! Too many, but delicious! Our first night in Poland would be one to remember definitely. It was followed by a visit to a bar and then club "Daytona", filled with creepy Polish people, American music and finally a walk home at 4am. Oh man, but it was a fun fun night.
The next morning however, we had to wake up at 8:30, but somehow, my roommate and my alarms did not go off and ended up missing the bus departure to visit our first Wroclaw site at Centennial Hall. We woke up at 10:00, freaking out, quickly deciding to find the location, and take a cab. We made it there after about 45 minutes after the group arrived, and called Professor Bach (the director of the program), once we got there, and thankfully he didn't look TOO angry. Oh boy, what a start to Poland.
So we had missed the Introductory film, and made it for the panel discussion, which I was a little confused about. Oh well. We then went off for lunch downtown on our own, which we weren't too hungry for. It was followed by another lecture "Russian/Polish Relations" in front of the Monument to the Victims of the Katyn Massacre.
We then visited the "Panorama" which was in this huge cylindrical building and held a huge panoramic painting that circled the entire wall. It depicted the battle between the Polish and the Russians. You walked around the painting as the audio described what was happening. It was awesome.
That night, we were totally low key, with an Italian late lunch/early dinner, followed by me passing out at 8PM until the next morning. So necessary.