In order to cause the least confusion and to finally post some entries about my trip to Africa a couple months ago (insert copious amounts of apologizing here), I have started another blog wholly dedicated to this trip. You can find the link in my profile on the right. It's just new and has work to be done, but it shall be all spiffed up real soon.
Enjoy, and again, I apologize for the immence delay.
Thank you, and have a nice day. :)
1/27/2008
1/16/2008
Revelation and Finger Eleven
Happy Belated New Year to one and all... I am afraid I have been quite lacking in time and inspiration to update my blog. I’m back in Norway and back in classes – I am amazed at the fact that it is already 2008 and I will be here only another 5 months, approximately, and then, who knows what?
This semester I have classes in Revelation with Kenneth Jorgenson, which are usually very interesting , and if not, then his hilarious pronunciation of the English language makes up for it. I have been designated as part of the crew (along with the other North Americans) to help correct his English mistakes since his main grammar teacher, Elyssa, is back home in Maine... sadface.
So currently we are going through the book of Revelation word by word and verse by verse and I personally am sceptical as to whether or not we shall ever make our way through... as of current, we are on verse 6 of Chapter One.
Other classes include Anatomy and Physiology, Church History, Last Day Events, Massage (that is to come in about a month) and, since Monday, Hydro Therapy. I have to say, I’m not a huge fan of this segment (referring to the latter) due to the fact that I am not used to having good blood circulation, and since hydro therapy is designed specifically to help with that issue, I have been getting severe headaches and some bouts of dizziness from the excess blood flowing into my brain. On the other hand, it’s good for you, and is highly relaxing, and I don’t mind giving treatments, either. But I’m more excited for massage therapy, as I feel I will be more likely to use it in my future life.
On Wednesday, I indulged in the grand luxury of a bath, as I realized that it has been several years since I have enjoyed the bubbly goodness. So I took my rubber ducky and my bubbles and soaked for a good hour. I know it’s not an overly thrilling thing to share, but it made me happy, so I though I would tell about it anyway.
Other than that, it’s been snowing and melting and snowing and melting and freezing and currently it’s about 3 degrees above 0 and everything is a sheet of ice with a layer of water over top, making the normally 2 second trek from my dorm to the school a treacherous and hazardous journey. Sarah has even farther to walk from her dorm, and there have been several accidents of people slipping and falling thus far, and I am aware that it is only a matter of days before I succumb to a moment of utter clumsiness and find myself sprawled out at the bottom of the steps. But until that moment arrives, I consider myself lucky and make sure I step with care.
Really not that much else to tell. I have been reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, listening to Tegan and Sara and Timberland (odd combination, I know), and waiting for the day when Marcus buys a coffee maker so I can enjoy my Honduran coffee with Sarah McCann, who brought me a bag all the way from Honduras, of all places! Not only did she bring me coffee, but a Rastafarian hat, as well. Also, I recently discovered that I have a much higher tolerance for hot sauce than I previously have had, and we have been eating habanero pepper ULTRA HOT hot sauce as though it were going out of style.
I do promise that one of these days - hopefully very soon – I will post a series of blogs telling about my trip to Africa, but I will just say that I enjoyed the experience greatly and would like to return at any moment to once again have the heat, (some of) the food, the landscape, the trees (especially those), and the people around me once again.
That is pretty much it. I’m going to return to my day-long obsession of watching the Finger Eleven music video of “Paralyzed” with Rob Monk on YouTube and try to avoid loud sounds and bright lights, due to the throbbing pain in my head which I would really appreciate the disappearance of sometime in the very new future.
Good day.
<3Jen
This semester I have classes in Revelation with Kenneth Jorgenson, which are usually very interesting , and if not, then his hilarious pronunciation of the English language makes up for it. I have been designated as part of the crew (along with the other North Americans) to help correct his English mistakes since his main grammar teacher, Elyssa, is back home in Maine... sadface.
So currently we are going through the book of Revelation word by word and verse by verse and I personally am sceptical as to whether or not we shall ever make our way through... as of current, we are on verse 6 of Chapter One.
Other classes include Anatomy and Physiology, Church History, Last Day Events, Massage (that is to come in about a month) and, since Monday, Hydro Therapy. I have to say, I’m not a huge fan of this segment (referring to the latter) due to the fact that I am not used to having good blood circulation, and since hydro therapy is designed specifically to help with that issue, I have been getting severe headaches and some bouts of dizziness from the excess blood flowing into my brain. On the other hand, it’s good for you, and is highly relaxing, and I don’t mind giving treatments, either. But I’m more excited for massage therapy, as I feel I will be more likely to use it in my future life.
On Wednesday, I indulged in the grand luxury of a bath, as I realized that it has been several years since I have enjoyed the bubbly goodness. So I took my rubber ducky and my bubbles and soaked for a good hour. I know it’s not an overly thrilling thing to share, but it made me happy, so I though I would tell about it anyway.
Other than that, it’s been snowing and melting and snowing and melting and freezing and currently it’s about 3 degrees above 0 and everything is a sheet of ice with a layer of water over top, making the normally 2 second trek from my dorm to the school a treacherous and hazardous journey. Sarah has even farther to walk from her dorm, and there have been several accidents of people slipping and falling thus far, and I am aware that it is only a matter of days before I succumb to a moment of utter clumsiness and find myself sprawled out at the bottom of the steps. But until that moment arrives, I consider myself lucky and make sure I step with care.
Really not that much else to tell. I have been reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, listening to Tegan and Sara and Timberland (odd combination, I know), and waiting for the day when Marcus buys a coffee maker so I can enjoy my Honduran coffee with Sarah McCann, who brought me a bag all the way from Honduras, of all places! Not only did she bring me coffee, but a Rastafarian hat, as well. Also, I recently discovered that I have a much higher tolerance for hot sauce than I previously have had, and we have been eating habanero pepper ULTRA HOT hot sauce as though it were going out of style.
I do promise that one of these days - hopefully very soon – I will post a series of blogs telling about my trip to Africa, but I will just say that I enjoyed the experience greatly and would like to return at any moment to once again have the heat, (some of) the food, the landscape, the trees (especially those), and the people around me once again.
That is pretty much it. I’m going to return to my day-long obsession of watching the Finger Eleven music video of “Paralyzed” with Rob Monk on YouTube and try to avoid loud sounds and bright lights, due to the throbbing pain in my head which I would really appreciate the disappearance of sometime in the very new future.
Good day.
<3Jen
1/10/2008
Krakow - Day Four
Sunday, December 30, 2007 – 9:30AM
Woke up early, and Agnieszka and I snuck out of the house in order to go see the inside of Wawel Castle. The reason we snuck out was because Rob didn’t want to go, and Rob’s two friends who had come to visit were still sleeping, so we headed out on our own. Turns out everything at the castle is free on Sundays, hurray! So we went on in and checked out the beautiful living quarters (wearing our sweet blue plastic hospital booties, I might add). The main things I enjoyed seeing there were the ceilings. In each room the ceiling is different, and also each element of the ceiling. For example, a few of the rooms had large, ornate gold flowers, framed in wood, on the ceiling, but each flower was unique and different. It was amazing to me how much work was put into that. Other rooms had beautiful paintings from the Baroque period overhead, and in the Throne Room, my personal favourite, the ceiling had sculptures of heads hanging down looking at you. I took a picture of it which unfortunately turned out blurry, as I took it in sort of a hurry, because pictures weren’t really allowed, or at least that was the message I had gathered from all the signs about with cameras x-ed out that were basically everywhere.
We then went through the armoury, which was cool. Anyone who has ever gone shopping with me and seen me ogle the swords at the House of Knives knows how much I like that kind of thing. We spent about 3 times longer looking at the spears, daggers, swords, guns, armour and canons than we had going through the whole other section of the castle.
We returned to the apartment and packed up, handed the keys over to the landlord, and moved out. Cramming all the luggage of 5 people, plus those 5 people, into our tiny car was quite the feat in itself, but we were successful and drove off to find accommodations for Rob’s friends at Elephants on the Moon hostel, and then drove to the Town Square. Walked around for a while, played with the huge numbers of pigeons – even had one land on my arm; I was so proud. Went to lunch at the Sphinx, enjoyed some amazing curried pasta (it sounds kinda gross, but trust me, it was quite the opposite), and then sadly it was time to take the car back to the rental place.
Carless and backpacked, we jumped the tram and headed for the train station, which conveniently has a huge mall right next to it. Wasted a couple hours there and then at last got on the train and headed back to Wroclaw. Unfortunately, I could not sleep this time, so I spent the duration looking out the window at the drab and bleak winter landscape fly past. Arrived back “home” and went immediately to bed, tired but happy.
Good times, good memories. =]
Woke up early, and Agnieszka and I snuck out of the house in order to go see the inside of Wawel Castle. The reason we snuck out was because Rob didn’t want to go, and Rob’s two friends who had come to visit were still sleeping, so we headed out on our own. Turns out everything at the castle is free on Sundays, hurray! So we went on in and checked out the beautiful living quarters (wearing our sweet blue plastic hospital booties, I might add). The main things I enjoyed seeing there were the ceilings. In each room the ceiling is different, and also each element of the ceiling. For example, a few of the rooms had large, ornate gold flowers, framed in wood, on the ceiling, but each flower was unique and different. It was amazing to me how much work was put into that. Other rooms had beautiful paintings from the Baroque period overhead, and in the Throne Room, my personal favourite, the ceiling had sculptures of heads hanging down looking at you. I took a picture of it which unfortunately turned out blurry, as I took it in sort of a hurry, because pictures weren’t really allowed, or at least that was the message I had gathered from all the signs about with cameras x-ed out that were basically everywhere.
We then went through the armoury, which was cool. Anyone who has ever gone shopping with me and seen me ogle the swords at the House of Knives knows how much I like that kind of thing. We spent about 3 times longer looking at the spears, daggers, swords, guns, armour and canons than we had going through the whole other section of the castle.
We returned to the apartment and packed up, handed the keys over to the landlord, and moved out. Cramming all the luggage of 5 people, plus those 5 people, into our tiny car was quite the feat in itself, but we were successful and drove off to find accommodations for Rob’s friends at Elephants on the Moon hostel, and then drove to the Town Square. Walked around for a while, played with the huge numbers of pigeons – even had one land on my arm; I was so proud. Went to lunch at the Sphinx, enjoyed some amazing curried pasta (it sounds kinda gross, but trust me, it was quite the opposite), and then sadly it was time to take the car back to the rental place.
Carless and backpacked, we jumped the tram and headed for the train station, which conveniently has a huge mall right next to it. Wasted a couple hours there and then at last got on the train and headed back to Wroclaw. Unfortunately, I could not sleep this time, so I spent the duration looking out the window at the drab and bleak winter landscape fly past. Arrived back “home” and went immediately to bed, tired but happy.
Good times, good memories. =]
Krakow - Day Three
Saturday, December 29, 2007 – 10AM
Began driving to Zakopane - a mountainous ski town – about 2 hours later than we had wanted to. This caused the trip, which would have normally taken an hour, to stretch to three, due to loads of traffic. But at last we go there, walked around, saw the view... and then the sun went behind the mountains and doused us in darkness... so we walked around some more, and then went to eat. We found a quaint little restaurant that at last had an available table, and settled in for a nice meal. After which we went to a bakery and bought the most amazing cake I have ever eaten, and feasted on that in the car while Agnieszka talked to her aunt, who lives in the Adventist church in Zakopane. It was a fairly pointless, but nonetheless nice trip, and I got to sleep the 3 hours back in the car, which helped make up for a less-than-sufficient amount of sleep the night before.
Began driving to Zakopane - a mountainous ski town – about 2 hours later than we had wanted to. This caused the trip, which would have normally taken an hour, to stretch to three, due to loads of traffic. But at last we go there, walked around, saw the view... and then the sun went behind the mountains and doused us in darkness... so we walked around some more, and then went to eat. We found a quaint little restaurant that at last had an available table, and settled in for a nice meal. After which we went to a bakery and bought the most amazing cake I have ever eaten, and feasted on that in the car while Agnieszka talked to her aunt, who lives in the Adventist church in Zakopane. It was a fairly pointless, but nonetheless nice trip, and I got to sleep the 3 hours back in the car, which helped make up for a less-than-sufficient amount of sleep the night before.
Krakow - Day Two
Fridayday, December 28, 2007 – 7:30AM
Awakened suddenly, hurriedly dressed and out the door. Informed on the way we were going to Wieliczka Salt Mine, one of the most “eagerly visited tourist sites in Poland”. I tried not to fall asleep on the way, coffee deprived as I was, and when we got there I was happy enough that they hadn’t left me in bed, as it was quite interesting a very beautiful. Obviously this salt mine is no longer used to mining salt; it is strictly a tourist attraction. And rightly so. 101 metres below the ground is the world chapel of St. Kinga, which has beautiful carvings and sculptures and even chandeliers made entirely of salt. There was a large statue of Pope John Paul II (Jana Paula II), which we all took our picture with, but then very unfortunately and much to my frustration and disappointment, I somehow foolishly managed to clear my memory card of all pictures. Needless to say it was not my finest moment. But all that aside. There was also displays of how salt mining worked, and how back in the day, when a man wanted to marry a woman, it was good if he had big hands, because in order to marry her he had to pay a dowry for her to her parents, and so he would go to the salt mines and he was allowed to take a two-handed handful of salt in order to prove his worthiness. The bigger his hands, the more salt he could take, and since in that area at that time salt was more precious than gold, the more salt he brought, the more likely he was to get the girl.
The deepest part of the salt mine was 125m, and from there you could use email and mobile phones, and there was also a restaurant, so you could say you had eaten 125m below ground. However, the food looked utterly devoid of edibility, so we continued on our way.
Luckily in order to get back out of the salt mine you were not required to climb the approximately 80 billion stairs it took to get down. Instead, we got to use the lift, which was much more claustrophobia-inducing, but faster. I got crammed into a tiny corner and pretty much just held my breath for 5 minutes until I could get out – and then I panicked. I was proud for holding it in that long, but I really don’t like small spaces when they are made small because of people. I also don’t like elevators, so it was a very bad combination. But still kind of fun, I guess.
As we were leaving I bought a block of salt for 1 zloty, which is about 25 cents :D and then we continued on our way to one of the main reasons we came to Krakow (I just learned it was spelled “Cracow” in English, but never mind): Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was a very sobering experience. It was a place I had always wanted to go, but once I was there I realized I had not prepared myself for all the things I was going to see. We walked around, from bunker to bunker, looking at the displays. The living quarters, the descriptions of work, and life in the camp, the grotesque pictures on the walls of men, women, and children, naked and starved nearly to death. Three things impacted me the most while I was there: the first was the displays of all the shoes that were taken away from the people who came to this camp. There were thousands and thousands of shoes, piled up to the ceiling and placed behind glass. They were all torn apart, searched for money, etc. But the thing that hit me was that each pair of shoes represented a human being who lost everything they owned, and for most of them, even their lives, for the sadistic pleasure of one man.
I was also struck by the descriptions of the torture many of these people were put through, and the experiments done on them. Babies being starved... it all just roiled me with anger and saddened me at the same time.
Lastly, I was abhorred by one quote of Adolf Hitler: “I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience, morality... we will train young people before whom the whole world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence, imperious, relentless, cruel.”
The last portion that we went through at Auschwitz was the gas chambers, where thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and even some Germans, if they didn’t live up to Hitler’s standards, lost their lives.
Words are not sufficient. Let me just say that I would highly recommend for each person to visit this place if they have the chance at some point in their lifetime.
Awakened suddenly, hurriedly dressed and out the door. Informed on the way we were going to Wieliczka Salt Mine, one of the most “eagerly visited tourist sites in Poland”. I tried not to fall asleep on the way, coffee deprived as I was, and when we got there I was happy enough that they hadn’t left me in bed, as it was quite interesting a very beautiful. Obviously this salt mine is no longer used to mining salt; it is strictly a tourist attraction. And rightly so. 101 metres below the ground is the world chapel of St. Kinga, which has beautiful carvings and sculptures and even chandeliers made entirely of salt. There was a large statue of Pope John Paul II (Jana Paula II), which we all took our picture with, but then very unfortunately and much to my frustration and disappointment, I somehow foolishly managed to clear my memory card of all pictures. Needless to say it was not my finest moment. But all that aside. There was also displays of how salt mining worked, and how back in the day, when a man wanted to marry a woman, it was good if he had big hands, because in order to marry her he had to pay a dowry for her to her parents, and so he would go to the salt mines and he was allowed to take a two-handed handful of salt in order to prove his worthiness. The bigger his hands, the more salt he could take, and since in that area at that time salt was more precious than gold, the more salt he brought, the more likely he was to get the girl.
The deepest part of the salt mine was 125m, and from there you could use email and mobile phones, and there was also a restaurant, so you could say you had eaten 125m below ground. However, the food looked utterly devoid of edibility, so we continued on our way.
Luckily in order to get back out of the salt mine you were not required to climb the approximately 80 billion stairs it took to get down. Instead, we got to use the lift, which was much more claustrophobia-inducing, but faster. I got crammed into a tiny corner and pretty much just held my breath for 5 minutes until I could get out – and then I panicked. I was proud for holding it in that long, but I really don’t like small spaces when they are made small because of people. I also don’t like elevators, so it was a very bad combination. But still kind of fun, I guess.
As we were leaving I bought a block of salt for 1 zloty, which is about 25 cents :D and then we continued on our way to one of the main reasons we came to Krakow (I just learned it was spelled “Cracow” in English, but never mind): Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was a very sobering experience. It was a place I had always wanted to go, but once I was there I realized I had not prepared myself for all the things I was going to see. We walked around, from bunker to bunker, looking at the displays. The living quarters, the descriptions of work, and life in the camp, the grotesque pictures on the walls of men, women, and children, naked and starved nearly to death. Three things impacted me the most while I was there: the first was the displays of all the shoes that were taken away from the people who came to this camp. There were thousands and thousands of shoes, piled up to the ceiling and placed behind glass. They were all torn apart, searched for money, etc. But the thing that hit me was that each pair of shoes represented a human being who lost everything they owned, and for most of them, even their lives, for the sadistic pleasure of one man.
I was also struck by the descriptions of the torture many of these people were put through, and the experiments done on them. Babies being starved... it all just roiled me with anger and saddened me at the same time.
Lastly, I was abhorred by one quote of Adolf Hitler: “I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience, morality... we will train young people before whom the whole world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence, imperious, relentless, cruel.”
The last portion that we went through at Auschwitz was the gas chambers, where thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and even some Germans, if they didn’t live up to Hitler’s standards, lost their lives.
Words are not sufficient. Let me just say that I would highly recommend for each person to visit this place if they have the chance at some point in their lifetime.
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