Musings towards the 'end' of the 1st exchange

Generally I think of myself as quite an optimistic person. 

Even if a situation is looking impossible, depressing, and completely opposite to how I would like it to be, I usually can’t scrape away that little part of me that thinks it will all work out. This seems to go hand in hand with my slightly irrational life approach that if you expect something to pan out in a particular way, it won’t. This has served me particularly well when taking off the runway on various flights (expecting the tail to hit the ground has so far prevented it from happening) as well as walking dark streets at night by myself (less confident that this is a good approach). 

However now I’m questioning whether my complete refusal to think about never seeing many of my exchange friends again – and definitely not seeing them all together again – was the right choice. It’s not the first time that I’ve met people overseas and felt so close and alike to them that we could be family. It brings truth to the overused cliché that ‘my friends are my family’ – it’s a cliché for a reason, friends are the family that you choose for yourself and all that. Talking about it with one of them over here, we also discussed how at home, a lot of your friends (as much as I love them) are close to you because you’ve grown up with them and/or they know so much about you. Whereas on exchange, you are friends with people because when you meet them, something connects despite knowing nothing about them or their past.

You have one particularly interesting conversation that makes you want to know more.

Or they make you laugh, really really easily.  

They see things in a totally different way and make you want to see them in the same way.

You act completely naturally because they don’t know anything about you and have no expectations.

You have adventures together,

you see and try and taste and share new things and experiences with them, you make mistakes with them,

you live with them,

you don’t have time to waste fucking each other around or lying to each other,

you can ask for hugs whenever you want because one day in the near future they won’t be able to give them to you...

You spend 24 hours a day with them and then miss them an hour later when they’re not around. 

Best housemates ever!

I have several incredibly close friends that I have discovered this semester, people I hope that when I see them again nothing will have changed, and that will be my friends for life. When I think about it, it amazes me how we managed to find each other. If Grainne hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend and gone crazy, would we still find ourselves at a loss whenever one of us is away? Would I have eaten two blocks of chocolate today, or managed to watch a whole tv series in two days? If Alejandro, Giacomo and Tony hadn’t coincidentally booked the exact same dates in Budapest as Bahar and I, would I have become closer with another group and considered them my family instead? Would I have gone to Morocco? Going back even further, if I hadn’t accidentally followed a different group of people than my introduction group on the orientation day to a cafe, if I wasn’t intending to go to Turkey and hadn’t used that to struck up a conversation with the girl I had happened to sit next to, if we had waited until we had had more than one conversation to book trips together, would I have another life-long best friend in the crazy, insane, hilarious, exciting chaos that is Bahar?

Bang gang in Budapest

Isn't it amazing how things fall together like this? I couldn't think of a place I would rather be right now in my life. I couldn't think of people I would rather be spending my time with, discussions I'd rather be having, or addresses I'd rather be collecting for postcard purposes.

So if I ever find myself regretting something that I had or hadn't done in my life - doesn't happen very often anyway - I think about how all the things I have or haven't done, or said or didn't say, or perhaps even thought, led me up to this point.

And that stops me from thinking 'I wish I'd spent more time seeing the Dutch countryside instead of sitting inside for a whole day watching movies'...because who knows whether or not Giaco and I would be such good friends now if we hadn't "wasted" a whole day inside watching TV (something I would hate to find myself doing at home)...

Sylvia, I bid thee farewell.

So, Sylvia's dying.


My bike. 


Apparently one crash was more than she could take. She now has a bent front wheel that can barely scrape through the bent bars that attach to the (recently realigned) handlebars, and sounds like a gasping, dying weasel if I actually manage to get her going. I tried to ride her to the gym and in the last leg I was so slow I got outstripped by a pedestrian. I also no longer needed to go to the gym. 


Riding on the back of Laia's bike into town, we passed a parked car that I had apparently hit on Friday night. At the risk of divulging too many details about said car and possibly implicating myself in some sort of criminal damage case, I will only say this - I would have felt so bad if my bike had come off perfectly fine from the incident. No wonder Sylvia has been rendered useless. Fixing her will probably cost more than I bought her for in the first place. 


So there you are. Scraping the bottom of the barrel and finding the cheapest, most rusted bike I could in Utrecht (that hadn't been stolen) in order to save some moolah is going to end up costing me way more in the long run than the amount I saved in the short run.


I just hope the car owner didn't see me examining their car, nor Bonnie capitalising on the situation and taking a photo. Real life proof that perpetrators always return to the scene of the crime. 

(Mis)adventures on a bicycle

Yesterday I fell off my bike for the first time.


Whilst the experience was painful, slightly degrading, humiliating, drunken and unintentional, I think it was also one that was overdue for a student who has been living in the Netherlands for roughly six weeks now. I can add it to my list of things done on a bike. While this list is lacking the more exciting things like handstands or sex, it is nevertheless growing at a reasonably fast rate as I get more and more into the Dutch culture.


Which, when it comes to bikes, is AWESOME.

Nawww, they're holding hands!!

Things done on a bike (not an exhaustive list):

• texting
• changing music on m'ipod.
• drinking coffee
• spilling coffee
• talking on the phone
• carrying shopping bags (so. heavy.)
• riding handless (a lot harder with a bike that is falling apart and lacks any sort of wheel alignment WHATSOEVER)
• passing stuff to a companion on another bike
• almost got hit by a moving car
• almost got hit by a motorbike
• almost got hit by a pedestrian
• hit a parked car
• hit another person on a bicycle

I wonder what will be next...

Previously on Alice in Wonder

By the by, I started off on another site, Travelblog.org, but it didn't really give me the option to waste time on backgrounds and fonts and stuff.


Sooooo here I am!


You can see the other posts, about Amsterdam and Tilburg, at http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/AliceInWonderlands/


:)

Where am I from??

What does it mean to be identified with a country? 


I mean, according to official documentation (ie passports) I am Italian and Australian. But I don't speak Italian, nor have I ever lived there for longer than a month, and I have (to my knowledge) no Indigenous Australian heritage whatsoever. 


Yet my father was in the first of his family's generations (both sides) to be born in Australia and to grow up there from birth. My mother's family has six generations of farming in Australia stretching back to their migration from Poland sometime in the 1800s (retained in her Polish maiden name if nothing else). So some part of me has 'Polish blood', however minimal, but at what point did this minuscule part stop becoming Polish and start becoming 'Australian'? When did my father's Italian-English-Armenian-Scottish-Indian-mumbojumbo mix of ethnicities amalgamate into an Australian identity? 


At first I thought it was where you grew up and the culture that you identified with strongly. And for the most part, I think this is the defining aspect. I identify myself as Australian because it is the place I grew up and the lifestyle I was raised with. English is the only language I speak fluently (a very Australian characteristic) and I speak it with an Australian accent. However if an English person moved to India, married a Scottish person and they had children together there, who spent their whole childhood there, would you say that the children (having no Indian physical characteristics whatsoever) were Indian? (This is what happened with my father's mother's family - hence the 'Indian heritage.' They identified themselves as being part-Indian.) 


So there is something in the physical characteristics realm, as well, obviously (e.g. a person of African heritage living in a non-African country would still be identified as African upon sight) . But if that's the only link you have to that culture it seems pretty arbitrary too, if you have never lived in the country or anything. 


And what does it really mean to be 'Australian' then anyway, if the above definition isn't enough? There are some people who only refer to Indigenous Australians as being 'Australian', which is fair enough in part, but I also think that that ignores the people that have grown up in Australia and have nowhere else they would call their country. I.e. me. I guess you could have something like 'Australians' and 'Invasion Australians.' I don't know. This also reminds me of my aversion to celebrating Australia Day. They should change the name of that.


Anyway this is quite a superficial, introductory discussion of the topic/general ramble, but it was more to kind of figure out my own thoughts about it. I think it's interesting to talk to people about their cultural identity and heritage, and see where they identify themselves with and why. Especially while on exchange! :)

An International Foray: Krakow

2nd - 5th March

I've been meaning to write about my short trip to Poland for a while, and now being hungover has presented me with the perfect excuse to sit back and spend time on the way-too-wide web. 

I think I was a bit too eager to get to the airport on Friday - five hours (including an hour of delay) in one of those depressingly boring departure lounges (no free samples anywhere!), with a headache and lemonade that I had mistaken for water, left me with an almost desperate desire to get on the plane. In my defence the airport was in another city, so I spent two hours getting there from Utrecht. 

Anyway, arriving at 8pm I was totally starving, and after finding my incredibly hard-to-find hostel (quickly realising that way less people speak English in Poland than they do in the Netherlands) I set out to try a recommended Polish restaurant. The place was cute, too cute for someone sitting on their own at the most awkwardly-located table possible (in front of the cashier?!) could feel totally comfortable in, and I ordered 'pierogi' (little dumpling kind of things, the only items with English descriptions on the menu). I pointed to 'meat.' However once it came out I realised that they are probably more of a sharing dish ... one is nice, but 12 on a plate with nothing else but a slab of melting butter was a bit much. Add that to the fact that I couldn't tell what kind of meat I was eating, it was unlike anything I had eaten before (including cow's tongue). I also got nauseous once I looked at the menu again and noticed that the only other English meat option was pigeon. Funny how the thought of eating a pigeon - a bird who is not friendly, exciting or even funny (ok they're a bit funny) - nauseated me more than the thought of eating chicken ... and I LOVE chickens. 

The giant, cherry-flavoured hot chocolate that I was pushed into buying (at the price of two nights in my hostel) by a deceptively friendly waitress also contributed to my general feeling of nausea, and the reluctance to stay out on the streets much later than 10pm. 

It was beautiful at night though.

In the morning I walked around the Jewish Quarter/Old Town (the whole city centre felt like an Old Town) and thought about what it means to be identified with a country. At the risk of getting completely off-track I will save those musings for another soon-to-be created entry. 

It was a realllly nice day weather-wise, the sun was out! It actually took my eyes about an hour to adjust to so much light. Getting used to the concept of 'sunlight' in Europe has been a bit of a struggle - sun here does not equate to short-shorts and the beach, like it does at home...It equates to people skipping responsibilities and taking a bottle of wine down to the park to soak up as many rays as you possibly can. 

It was a bit weird seeing Jewish cemeteries surrounded by cafes, carparks and shops. But I guess it would be even worse if they got rid of them to make way for said cafes etc. I can't remember how long the cemeteries had been there. The area was filled mostly with synagogues, markets and picturesque buildings (everything was picturesque!). I knew I was seeing the 'right things' when I was joined by little packs of tourists or groups of Israeli schoolchildren seeing them with me. 

After consuming a delicious gingerbread latte I sat in the sun in the main square and chilled out. Because it was Saturday (or maybe just because it was Krakow) there were market stalls out in the square, with buskers either playing music or standing still. There were a lot of pigeons also, that I avoided eye contact with. It's quite strange, I know that most of the people in that square were probably tourists, but it didn't have a touristy vibe at all (especially compared to Brussels, Belgium ... but I'll get to that later.) 

Once Anna arrived with her friends Kapil, Jenica (Janiqua), Mark and Chris we went and enjoyed some giant, cheap beers and food. I realised that the reason I had been unable to identify what meat was in those pierogi was that it wasn't meat at all, because Jenica's potato and something-else ones were identical taste-wise. Or we were both eating pigeon. Later in the afternoon, after walking around and seeing  we sought out the 'House of Beer' and sampled some delicious chocolate-flavoured beer! Quite delicious.

That night we enjoyed an all-you-can-eat-and-drink-for-ten-euro at their hostel, filled with Aussies and a really creepy photographer, before heading out to a little club. Very drunken times ensued. However we made a tactical decision to leave at 2am so that we could get up in time to catch our bus to Auschwitz. 

Auschwitz was depressing, as expected, however it was difficult to imagine the things that happened there actually happening there. Especially seeing as the sky was clear blue and it was sunny and deserted but for tourists. 

Google tells me that the reason the 'B' in 'Arbeit' (which, btw, means something like 'Work Makes You Free') is upside down is unknown, however there's a theory that it was put as a warning to the people arriving there that things were going wrong inside. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei#cite_ref-Liwacz_3-0) I thought it was interesting that the first commander of Auschwitz, after he was sentenced to death, was hanged at the same place that they had tortured a lot of the prisoners who were suspected of being part of the Resistance movement. 

Auschwitz-Birkenau

The bigger camp of Auschwitz, Birkenau, is really where you get the sense of how big and terrible the concentration camp operations really were. They could house up to 100, 000 people there! The little houses were awful inside, its hard to imagine seeing five or six men sharing a little platform about the same size as my double bed at home. I also didn't realise that the Nazis blew up the crematorium and gas chambers at Birkenau once the end of the war was imminent. So now what lies there is huge slabs of wall and ceiling. 

That night we spent a good 45 minutes to an hour searching for the most elusive and hidden Polish restaurant (Babci Maliny) in the whole of Krakow - totally worth it! I had "pork chops Krakowice style", which looks identical to a small sweet potato. This resulted on me going up to the counter several times and asking for meat on my plate, before she pointed to the deceptive potato and I discovered there was meat inside.

There was a huge train crash between two trains coming from opposite directions that had been mistakenly placed on the same line, the Krakow-Warsaw line. Anna and her friends had been on that very train route not eight hours earlier...I think about 16 people died and there were over 100 injured, some in induced comas. Scary stuff.

That night Anna and I sampled a few little bars - one very small one with an upstairs and hot beer (interesting...) and the other an underground, pirate/nautical themed bar. It was so good to see a face from back home. I very rarely get homesick but the value of a pre-existing, close friend is never better realised than when you haven't seen any of them for a while. I literally felt like smiling every minute I was around her. 

Mmmm pretzel

The next morning the others were due to head off to Warsaw, on the train line of death. We sampled some delicious bread pretzel things (I'm sure they have a proper Polish name) that were being sold on every street corner. The cafe was sold out of gingerbread lattes, which was very sad. We managed to squeeze in a quick tour of Wawel Castle, but we only went inside the Cathedral and not inside the actual castle. No point in paying when we would have had to rush through it. Beautiful castle though! I went back there after the others left and found the dragon statue that 'breathed' actual fire. 

Krakow feels like a very accessible place - as in, it doesn't feel like we did that many 'organised' activities, but we did manage to see many of the recommended sites around the centre. Lots of the castles are within walking distance. Unfortunately Schindler's Factory is closed the first Monday of every month, so I couldn't go that afternoon. Very sad. 

Cathedral in Wawel Castle

Therefore, Krakow is likely to break the long trend of not returning to places I have already visited. As well as Schindler's Factory I would like to see the Salt Mines too... apparently if you take some tequila down there you can break the salt off the wall to have with your shot. Deliciously convenient, if not unhygienic. I also wonder if Krakow is one of those places where the areas you see as a tourist bear almost no resemblance to the Krakow people actually live in. I think another visit, this time perhaps featuring couchsurfing, will be the best way to find out.