July 30, 2009

Thought for the day: Well done is better than well said.

Poor Richard’s Almanac

We started the day with the great teacher swap of 2009 in order to give every student the opportunity to learn from a North American English speaker. What the swap proved was that every single one of the teachers is a liar. How else to explain the angelic behavior of Pawel and Kacper, Janek and Mikolaj, Amadeusz and Jakub? What we got, perhaps, was the kids’ day-one desire to impress the new teacher. For me, the swap was a way to get to know eight of the children a little better—sadly, just in time to leave them.

By third period, we were all anxious to continue prepping our own classes for tomorrow night’s final show. Strains of Old MacDonald floated up from Ania’s table to the second-floor workroom where Chris’s and Cyndi’s classes put the finishing touches on their not- so-top-secret grand finale. This included once again interrupting Bruce’s and Jim’s classes for picture re-takes. Both classes got in the spirit of the thing.

The final session was given over to the sports round robin that proved so popular on Tuesday—with Jim supervising volleyball, Nathalie and Cyndi doing their best to keep the Blasto players INSIDE the box, and Chris’s team trying to even the score with Bruce’s in a sun-baked game of soccer. Bruce’s team once again crushed Chris’s, but, as Chris pointed out, his defense held Bruce’s team to a mere 3 goals, an improvement over Tuesday’s 8-4 rout. There were a few intelligent souls who opted out of all such activity, opting for the shade of the nearest tree.

Lori had made two dozen muffins with her class during third period, but somehow none of the muffins made it to the lunch table, a breach smoothed over by her provision of some traditional Polish gingerbread at the midday meal. There was also sorrel soup and baked chicken and of course potatoes—a Polish version of Tater Tots.

In the afternoon, we visited some of the sights few tourists to Poland ever see, beginning with the wooden manor house at Sucha. We toured the 1743 home currently under restoration and watched the most famous artist from Belarus at work in the living room. The highlights of the tour were the wooden windmill and the thatched-roof peasant houses.

Then it was off to the castle at Liw, a bastion that once stood at the border between Lithuania and Poland formed by the Liwiec River. The very fine armory contained weapons from the 15th century up to the Second World War. Chris gave us a lesson in the subtle distinctions between the halberd and the spontoon, while the guide explained how the castle’s bricks were saved from becoming cornerstones at Treblinka by the quick-thinking Otto Warpechowski, who persuaded the Germans that the castle used to be a fortress of Teutonic Order Knights. And in what might possibly be the most serious overreaction to conjugal infidelity ever, we were shown the very stone where the castle foreman had his wife, Ludwika, beheaded. The Yellow Lady stalks the castle grounds at midnight with her head under her arm, undoubtedly awaiting a suitor of less savage tendencies.

Our penultimate dinner at Ewa’s brought back our favorite mushroom pierogies, as well as ham and bean soup, and chocolate-filled “rugelah” for dessert.

By Cyndi