One month into my traineeship

OMG! I was supposed to keep this blog up! Hence the reason why I haven't told anyone this blog site yet cos I wanted to make sure I will keep up with blogging before I tell people that I actually do keep one.

Well, I finally managed to set up this nomadlife.org blog business so now I have a real @y blog well suited to my time here in Poland.

Went to my first Polish class this morning! Virginia, Hamie, Aline and Chris and I got up bright and early for our lesson with Kasia. We were all such eager students with our notebooks open, pens, highlighters all waiting to be used, ears peeled ready to absorb as much Polish as possible. Probably intimidated our teacher a bit :P not used to seeing such an enthusiastic bunch. It was great! We learnt our alphabet - practising our 'cer, chee, cher' rz, cz, dz etc (those lovely consonant strings) and proudly spelt our own names. It was also great being a student and getting a feel of how my students feel in class and what kind of things are appreciated by students. For example, more practise with new vocab/phrases we've learnt, personalise things we've learn so that we can really own the new language and also drilling is important to get the pronunciation right cos people do want to get it right. I always fear that my students would find drilling boring but especially beginners level, it is so valuable.

I'm really determined to learn as much Polish as I can while I'm here... I want to be able to understand conversations or at least get the gist of it sometime soon!

Tonight met up with Johnny who is crashing here at my place tonight, yay a fellow kiwi! So happy to get a visitor! It just felt so strange that a month and a bit ago, we were just at New Market, talking about what's going to happen when we get to Poland and now, I'm here and 'supposed' to be the expert/guide here already. Don't really feel like an expert but at least I can do the day to day stuff and get by. I'm feeling quite settled here already I guess... it didn't take me that long actually. I remember my first night in Wroclaw and sleeping in my new flat and thinking how comfortable it was and settled I felt already. He asked if I was home sick yet... and to be honest, it hasn't hit me hard yet. I don't know if it's because I'm still in my 'honeymoon' stage of traineeship or what. Of course I miss my family, hanging out with friends, just chilling at home and all that but maybe it's just cos I've been kept quite busy here so far?

Gosh now I'm just blabbering on and on here in my blog. Ok I will try to keep this blogging up!