The (Failed) Tunnel Video

Well, my video is going to take a long time to upload, so I'll write a little bit more here.

We had our placement exams this morning, and I don't think I did too poorly. The written exam was straightforward, and since I didn't want to do better on it than I deserved (one of those rare but welcome exams), I didn't try to guess on the questions as to whose answers I had no idea, and I didn't have to check through my answers at all.

After that I had an oral exam, which was basically a conversation with a couple of professors about living in Poland, learning Polish and what I like to do in my free time. One of the professors didn't speak at all, but the one I spoke with was very nice. I actually met her last night when we were in the park watching the dancers.

Lublin was in the throes of a folk dance festival this weekend--that's why the Burley crew was here--so we went last night to see the final show. They had dancers from Turkey, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Burley. Some of the groups were quite good, though the clogging from America was rather floppy, and I mean that literally.

It was interesting to see a lot of dances and costumes that the BYU folk dancers recreate exactly to style, like the Slovakian and Ukrainian dances. But all the groups had live music from little bands they brought with them, and that was fun to hear. Folk music has a certain style when it's played by natives, and I enjoyed it a lot.

We find out the results of our test this afternoon, then we have our first class tonight. We generally have class in the morning, but they want to get things going on the first day. I expect I'll be in an intermediate or advanced class, and I'm interested to see what that's like. I have no idea how one studies Polish in an advanced way. Probably a lot of writing...

Ah, we started meeting some of the other students this morning, and I'm excited for that. I walked to school with an Italian woman who speaks Polish better than English, so that's how we communicated. She had the most startling eyes I'd ever seen, really dark and deep (and that was the shallowest description I've ever given).

At breakfast we sat next to three nice French girls who smiled and nodded but weren't much on conversation. If only I spoke French. Then we met some of the other people from the States. There's a mother and daughter from Connecticut (or it might have been Kentucky), a girl from California, and a group of about 10 from a university in Wisconsin. One of the kids from Wisconsin told me I absolutely have to go to the discoteka, so we'll see what comes of that. When it comes to it, I'm a very meek person, after all.

Well, it looks like my video isn't going to upload before we need to leave to go back, so you'll have to watch it later.

I'll leave you with my life metaphor (we've been thinking of them as a group, and I got mine last night). Life is a one-act opera: one would think it should be longer, but most of us probably couldn't stand it anyway.