Amy Roberts - Teacher
"I arrived in Walbrzych yesterday after a seven hour train ride (in which we somehow managed to find the train station and the train, switch trains and get off at the right stop...in Polish. I’m still proud of myself!).
The past week I spent in Warsaw, where I met all the Australian and New Zealand volunteers. We all did a teaching course, where we were shown how to teach Polish students, and got to practice teaching with a Polish class. My class was awesome, Claudia (a Polish girl) took us shopping after school. We also learnt a bit of Polish (like how to order food/drinks, buy a ticket and directions). Last week was a lot of fun, although tiring, and everyone was great. It took a while to get used to their water (which is mainly sparkling water), the food (everything has cabbage and meat and is...not normal, eg kebabs come in a bowl with pickled cabbage) and the traffic (which drives at dangerous speeds on the right hand side of the road and does not stop for pedestrians!).
I’m staying in an apartment-style room with my roomie Georgia (who is from Queensland, lovely and scarily similar to me), which is about 50 metres from the school.
The school is a private girls’ school and is one of those big old buildings that are hundreds of years old, but so well maintained. It’s three stories and houses a gym, library, dining hall, classrooms, computer rooms, chapel and the convent for the sisters.
The sister in charge of us, Siostr Ludwika, is also lovely and speaks English well. She picked us up from the train station on the first day. We were then taken to supper, which was massive and so yummy! The other sisters are all very nice and smiley-especially when you try to speak Polish to them! Sister Emelia is my favourite. The first day I was wearing a warm dress with no sleeves, and she kept telling me in Polish that I needed more clothing or I’d freeze.
Georgia and I went for a walk around Walbrzych yesterday. It’s not the most picturesque place-all the buildings are cement rendered and decaying and because it used to be a coal mining town it’s still a bit polluted, but the countryside is beautiful.
I began my lessons today. I’m teaching small classes of girls, ranging from about 14 - 18, with usually between 1 - 5 girls in a class. Basically my classes are ‘conversation’ classes, so my objective is to get them to talk and practice their English. Easy peasy. I have about five 30min lessons each day and the earliest I begin is 9.00am.
Breakfast is at 10.30am; the second breakfast that is, because there are two in Poland. The first is at 7.30am but I go to the second one, and generally consist of bread with toppings (butter, cottage cheese, creamed cheese, horseradish spread, ham, sausage and salami....for breakfast!), apples, juice/tea/water and we had a strudel type pastry this morning.
Lunch (dinner) is MASSIVE. No joke. Yesterday was five courses-salad (lettuce with dressing), yummy chicken soup, main (chicken in orange sauce and potatoes), cakes and pastries and then ice-cream. Needless to say I couldn’t eat it all. But supper isn’t as bad, usually just bread and some sort of meat. They love their meat.
This weekend me, Georgia and a couple of volunteers from Poznan are hoping to go to Wroclaw (pronounced Vrow-shwav), which is a 2 hour train ride away and is the fourth largest city in Poland. It’s meant to be pretty cool, lots of art, food and churches."