Saturday, June 11- Interns Conquer Old Town

Aw, the weekend! I’m so glad I chose this weekend as an opportunity to just catch up on sleep. Being able to see in to around 11 was just so wonderful! I generally am not able to go to bed really “early” so sleeping in is my way of catching up on some shut-eye. :) 

Today I went out with the other interns I met with IAESTE to explore Old Town. Our first stop was getting some lunch at an Italian place (you have no idea how much flack we got from the Poles that evening for stopping here since it was the first place we ran into…). If you were wondering what a good way to walk a lot was, here is my advice -->  either have no idea know where you are going and get lost so you end up walking in circles, or just have no agenda and walk aimlessly and chose walking over public transit. Luckily we were in the later group and were simply enjoying the nice weather to walk around outside. So we walked a lot around Old Town and saw the Royal Castle, explore a nice university building displaying Muzeum Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, and then walked to beautiful church across the Vistula River, the National Stadium of Warsaw for UEFA and more! We tried to get into the stadium but for some reason we could only walk in the track through the gates, but outside the stadium. Tons of people were biking, rollerblading, skateboarding, etc. in this paved walk way and it was a nice walk. Apparently the main reception is usually open to tourists and anyone who wants to go inside and see the locker room, some famous seats, and other things that are inside, so maybe we will go back another day. On our way back to our dorm before going to IAESTE's birthday party, we tried to find this donut shop that we were told a few days ago was AMAZING! Problem was, none of us knew the name or the street it was on, we only knew we walked by it once. Ha luckily my spidy sense got us there ;) 

Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel and Florian the Martyr - Minor Basilica 

Museum building

Royal Palace

Old Town Road

Interns find the donut shop

Chocolate donut beats all! 

Today was also IAESTE's birthday party—> IAESTE Poland turned 57 today and this also means that the IAESTE Warsaw committee also turned 57 today (Warsaw is the oldest committee in Poland). So this birthday, along with the fact that interns have just arrived, and the Politechnika Warszawska students have exams that start on Monday, means tonight was one to remember (or for some people, maybe not remember) as we celebrated all of the above! A few things I learned from this experience include—Poles know how to drink their vodka; seriously though, they drink that stuff like water, I don’t even understand. Beyond that, I was smart enough to make sure to have dinner first and unlike one of the interns I did NOT make the fatal mistake of mixing vodka with beer in the same night. I also found it funny because one of the Warsaw committee girls was trying to convince me that by the end of the summer they would make sure I could 1- drink like a Pole (aka drink lots of Vodka); and 2- outdrink many of my male counterparts in the US. Somehow I’m skeptical, but apparently I didn’t do the RIGHT type of research on Poland before coming to realize that an internship in Poland + living with college students = learning how to drink like a Pole. lol