PTR

Indonesian people is well known as its welcome and polite people. We used to greet each other on the streets. It’s still happening now, but mostly in a village or small town. We smile to each other when we passed by. Well you can find something like that in Jakarta too sometimes, I have try it, and mostly the ones who smiled back are not young people. This habits, the greet-people-on-the-streets is something that I didn’t hope to find in Europe. As they say “western people are so individual” “western people don’t even care about their neighbors” western people this, western people that. My adventure in Poland started in Warsaw (Polish: Warszawa), the capital city of Poland. My impressions was not strong enough because we often just met students, which some of them not came from Poland itself. Then I came to Skaryszew, a small small town that even you have to go to another town to take a train. The first time we (Me, Anna, Asser and Kacper) walked to M-GOK (it’s a short name of the school), we often met someone was walking towards us. Suprisingly, Kacper knows almost ALL those person. He greeted a lot of people since the first step we took from his home. Those people even smiled at us. Me and Anna were wandering because we really didn’t expected this kind of traits in Europe, so we asked Kacper. He said “Well this is a small town, it’s totally normal if you know everyone”, and I thought “Wow, it’s just like you live in a village in Indonesia, only the technology already great, and the traffic plan is great, and there’s a big supermarket in here” This town really changed my mind about everything I assumed about people in Europe.

People in Skaryszew was thrilled to have us there. The teacher, Anna and ……(I'm sorry I forget your name :(..I will ask Anna later ) (they are so look alike, I barely can recognize the difference) , are so kind and want to share anything with us. They tell us about the amazing Zakopane mountains, showed us photos of them, and influenced us to go there. They succeed, me and Asser always talked about sparing time to Zakopane and ended up only talking about it (next bucket list?). But the thing they liked to do the most is telling Asser about their vacation to Egypt :D once a year they go there with Amelka, she met a friend named Amir, and they said Amir is similar to Asser. It was so funny because everytime we met them, they talked about their Egypt holidays and how they will meet Asser on the next holiday. I really really like them. Just before we went to another town, they invited us to dinner in their home and it was lovely as in home magazines. They have this big backyard, complete with swings made of wood! O.m.g. After dinner Amelka asked Asser to play football with her (she loves football and she’s good at it) and we watched.

Remember that I said on the first day we went for a walk? Kacper introduced us to junior high school students (Marta, Ola, Ula, Julia and Marysia) And we went everywhere by foot. We went to Mary and Martynka‘s house and met their parents. Anna was asked to play the piano because mary herself was learning to play piano and want to hear a piano played by a master (don’t deny it, Anna :D). After that we spent days mostly with them. They are nice kids. Some of them already know what they want to pursue. Marta, she likes learning languanges, that’s why she wants to take language program in lyceum (high school). It’s just like in Indonesia, in Poland it had lyceum (high school) and technikum (practical school like SMK), so junior high school students will have those two options. Julia wants to be a hairdresser. They were waaay more mature than I was in that  age. They accompanied us all the time happily, they didn’t shy to ask questions and all. Thank you for making our days delightful girls.

Every morning we made breakfast together, Kacper usually took us to Biedronka (it’s everywhere in Poland) the day before to chose what we would have for breakfast. Bread with butter cheese spread, beef ham was our everyday breakfast. Sometimes Kacper made salad that we can eat with bread. He was working in Kielce (1 hours away from Skaryszew), the town where he studied and met Weronika. But with us in his house, he took a week off! How kind. His father couldn’t speak English, so we interacted with him with body language or with google translate (All hail the internet!). There was this time where his Dad told us to cook our traditional meals, and Anna got the first turn. The menu was friend rice and tomato seasoned beef (I ate it so often in Indonesia, I forgot it was chinese food) then we cooked together. Kacper was like “I will cut the paprika”  “I like paprika” and he ate lots of paprika while he was cutting it. Hahahaha ok we got it now, you LOVE Paprika! Asser was like “I never cooked in my house” and Kacper taught him how to cut paprika. After a while, Kacper’s Dad came in and said

“Wow, it looks great! You guys are great chef”

“Well, I cut the paprika” –Asser

Hahahaha okay we really proud of you Asser, we really did.

On the last day, Kacper took us to visit Weronika’s home in Radom. It’s a much bigger city than Skaryszew, it has public transportation, big church and flats. We met in the old town, and Weronika took us for a walk around the city. In case you haven’t notice, I already tell you about Weronika quite a bit. She is such a simple girl that any of us (Anna, Asser and me) could easily felt close to her. She always make great ambience around people. She knew what to talk, when to talk, and whom to talk with. Weronika’s family have a bakery and we visited them once. By bakery, I mean a “bread factory” that produce bread and distribute it to shops that sell bread. That’s how it works in Poland. 

Every paragraph in this post is dedicated to different person or families in Skaryszew. Each of them had one similarity, which is how welcome they were to us in everyway. People here, is the main reason that I choose Skaryszew as the second best town I’ve teached. I’m glad I met them, I’m glad we had them as our host family. I hope we will still contact each other in the future. And I hope Kacper and Weronika will get married! :p