These past couple of days have been really busy, which believe me, is a good thing.
We went to a bar just to see what all the rage was about here, since all the tourist information sites said "You have to go." It was really fun! We each only had one cocktail, but in the process we met some really nice people who either live or work here. My favorite of the evening was a guy from Australia who was born in Poland and lived in Florida. Strange combination, adorable accent.
The four of us girls had a sleep over party in my little bedroom on Friday night. I think we get lonely, all being separated all the time - especially me and Courtney - so everyone grabbed their comforters and we camped out on the floor eating cheetos and watching Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. It was definitely a throwback to my Jessica Crawford days in middle school, and to this day... nothing makes me quite as happy as hearing the black knight say "It's nothing but a flesh wound!"
Damian also blessed us with the gift of physical labor. Courtney and I go to take apart (ahem) and clean a car engine. Damian's project centers around coating automotive parts with thick carbon layers to reduce friction, increase hardness, and prolong the lifetime of the valves and such in the belly of the engine. He has the chemical and vapor deposition techniques down, but no body is sure if they'll actually hold up in reality, so he went to a junkyard the other day to buy a super old car and disassemble it in our lab.
It was actually kind of fun... getting completely dirty and having these balls of dirt and oil I lovingly named "dirt boogers" everywhere. My appointed task was to clean the transmission with a flat screwdriver, so I was in dirt booger heaven. (Isn't it comforting, the confidence they have in me? Hahah Audrey, please rid this hunk of metal of all of its dirt boogers.)
No I really did have an awesome time... at one point I put on a doctor's mask and pretended I was in surgery, Damian decided it would be hilarious to rub oil and grease all over my face (... maybe I kind of begged him to, just for the hardcore effect it would lend to my outfit), and Court and I ended up doing Jazzercise in the office to some random Polish band named Vadar.
Courtney scrubbing the grease off.
I think I have a new favorite quote for the trip.
Stanishevksy, Courtney, and I cooked lunch (pasta and vegetables) about two days ago. As we were patiently waiting for the pasta to boil in our makeshift cooking pans (I swear, we really need to buy actual pots sometime soon!)... Stan started talking to us about mushrooms. I'm not sure how many people know this, but I have a strong aversion to mushrooms. I call them basidiomycota and I loathe them. My fond description of their texture is "squeeky" and it doesn't matter how finely they are chopped up into my food, I can still taste them. Me and mushroom - we just don't have a good relationship. When Stan found this out... he tried to sway my opinion on the whole matter. He was going on about how we don't really have 'real' mushrooms in the United States because they're all grown in 3 days (have you seen that How It's Made episode?); I wasn't really paying attention until suddenly I heard "I'm a really good mushroom-hunter." They phrase humored so I turned around to catch more of the dialogue, and discovered that mushroom-hunting is a real thing, he once found a knife while mushroom-hunting that he keeps with him at all times now, and that "the best mushrooms must be picked before 5 a.m. because if you wait longer than that, all the other mushroom-hunters will pick them." It was all very ridiculous, very amusing, and very adorable.
Yesterday was our thrift shop adventure. There hasn't been sun in almost a week so the general mood in our troops is somber and somewhat depressed. It's not that we hate our living situation or our work, we just really miss the sunshine. SOooo.. I decided that a shopping trip might be the best thing to cure our blues... and since we're poor and it's always a little bit more intriguing, second-hand stores became our objective.
It's fun to be lost in piles of old, musty clothes, and we found the Polish person who spoke the best english in one of our random stores. Not that I don't enjoy performing an entire purchase transaction in silence and then seeing the salesperson light up when I say "Thank you" in Polish, because that IS quite gratifying, but it's lovely to hear actual english coming out of a stranger for the first time in two weeks. And we came away happy. I bought this really fun brown coat with fur on it for the chilly weather that has been pervading our lives, and Courtney bought an amazing blanket that looks like someone took all of your grandpa's cardigans, cut them into substantial sized squares, and sewed everything randomly together. It's heavy and smells old... and is wonderful. She'll have that blanket hanging off the side of her couch for the rest of her life... and every time someone asks about it, she'll have the added perk of being able to relate the story of the summer we went to Poland... I'm really jealous, actually.
Stanishevsky leaves for good tomorrow, and the part of our journey where we are completely alone shall commence. Yikes! But no need to be depressed right now... after all I'm off to go mushroom-hunting.
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