Sadness

This afternoon my friend Dominique asked me if I could help her pick up a small refrigerator that she had lent to her tennis instructor Katina, and her car wasn't big enough to fit it inside. Tragically, Katina's 17 year-old son died suddenly a few weeks ago, of a heart attack. I had heard about this in the expat community, but I did not know her personally. I believe I had met her once at an event and knew she was divorced and lived with her son who was a talented tennis player. Apparently he had an enlarged heart, or it had thickened because of his extensive training, and he died in her arms in his bedroom after coming back from tennis practice. Just awful.

We got to Katina's apartment and I did not know what to say to her. Dominique introduced me but not really knowing her at all, was I supposed to offer my condolences? Was it rude not to? I just did not know what to do or say. Katina brought us into her son's bedroom to see if we needed any of his clothes since she was giving everything away as she was moving back to the US.  We took everything she offered us, but were looking at each other not knowing if we really should have. When I got home, I just sat and stared at the pile of clothes and thought about how unfair life was sometimes. About how that poor boy was never going to be able to wear his Nike sweatshirt or that Columbia rain jacket ever again. And about his poor mother who had to watch him die like that. Don't ever take life for granted. When my kids get home from school I am going to hug them even harder than usual.

New House

 In January we moved into a new house. The first house we lived in was okay, but on our first visit to Krakow Mike and I only had one day to look at houses so we sort of settled for the best one we found. It was big and had a nice yard, but to be honest we never really loved it and once I started spending so much time in the kitchen the dark wood in there really got to me after a while.  I wasn't too keen on the idea of packing up and moving all over again, but after about 2 years we decided to just look around and see what else was out there. We found a house that was just being built and had all new and modern appliances, including an American sized fridge with a water and ice dispenser in the door! This was huge bonus considering my ice addiction. It also had air conditioning (in some of the rooms) and a central vacuum system which included this neat little vent on the baseboard in the kitchen where you could sweep the crumbs into. I think I wanted to move into the house mostly because of this! The landlord even said he would put a garbage disposal in the sink when I asked about it after seeing some in the other houses we had looked at. The new house isn't too far away from our other house, and it's a little closer to the highway which means about an 8 minute shorter ride to school (it's also on a street that is much easier to pronounce!). The only downside is it doesn't have as big of a backyard, but there still is enough room to kick around a soccer ball (although I think our neighbors are getting tired of all the balls that get kicked into their yards). It also is extremely bright, which really is only a problem on the weekends when we are trying to sleep in. Our new neighborhood is really quiet, so no more annoying chirping birds waking us at 4 am, and no more annoying dogs who bark from 7 am until 11pm every.single.day. The new house is also right across from Las Wolski forest, which we ventured into nervously a few times, it is huge and trails are marked but we never knew where any of them led to so we usually just stuck to the paved road around the zoo and walked around that and back. Finally I was able to track down a trail map and since then we have discovered a bunch of good hikes, one to a man-made mound which has a great view of Krakow, another to a monastery where they don't allow women inside to visit except on certain days of the year, and another to a Castle/restaurant on a cliff overlooking southern Krakow where there is good Polish and Kurdish food and coffee and Mike tells me it's where the Nazi commandant lived while they were overtaking Krakow. Now we look forward to venturing inside the forest every weekend (okay, so the kids don't really look forward to it at all), and I have been going every Friday with some friends - one of whom is very excited to rent snow shoes and do it in the winter. That should be interesting! Here are some photos:

This is our old house before we moved into it (so not our terrible furniture or cluttered bathroom):

Back yard

Front of house

Living room

Ava's old room

Our old room

Our bathroom

Downstairs bathroom with a shower that was never used

Back of house

Very brown kitchen

 New house:

Living room looking into kitchen

Upstairs room that we are using as the play room (complete with ping pong table!)

 The kids each have their own bathrooms which is nice but I think it's a complete waste of space - they are directly across the hall from each other, so their doors can't be open at the same time. One has a shower and one has a bath tub, really they should have just combined that and used the extra space for another closet or something. But, Ava LOVES having her privacy.

Ava's bathroom

Jack's bathroom

Ava's room

Our bathroom

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 Our bathroom is nice, but the tub is in the floor which makes it very difficult to get into and out of (not to mention a little dangerous if we are ever sleepwalking or have had too much to drink!). I am not really a bath taker anyway, but sometimes Jack likes to use it but it's so hard to bend over to help clean him!

 We even have a sauna in our bathroom! I tried it once but after 5 minutes I was asking myself what I was doing in there because I hate being too hot...

Some pictures from our forest hikes:

With Colleen and Heidi, two American friends, at the monastery - apparently it's called the Hermit Monastery. We were afraid to get too close!

The view of Przegorzaly Castle and the "Bastion" from the road near the river

One of the mounds, and the view from the top

Jack taking in the view from the restaurant at the Castle

Home-Made

There are a few other things that are different in Krakow. For example, it's almost impossible to find vanilla extract. While in the US I usually bring several bottles back with me, but this year I forgot. I use it all the time so this is a problem. Fortunately I came across a recipe for it in one of my cookbooks (100 Days Of Real Food if anyone is interested.) It never even dawned on me to make my own! And it's super easy. All you have to do is add a vanilla bean to vodka and wait two weeks. Okay, so it can't be a last-minute rush job, but mine has been sitting for over a week so when my next bottle runs out I'll see how this works. It's definitely not the same consistency, but it smells yummy so it will be an interesting experiment.

I also can never find fresh coriander, and I tend to use it a lot - in recipes but also juicing in the mornings because it's a great detoxing green. There are only two places I have ever seen it - one of the organic stores, and one of the vegetable stands that has the worst parking so I pretty much stopped going there last year. This year I decided to buy a lot (it goes bad so quickly) and freeze it in an ice cube tray with a little bit of filtered water. I'm not really sure how well this will work for my juicer (guess I would have to defrost it first?), but it should be okay to throw into soups or cooked dishes. We shall see.

Come to think of it, buying any kind of fresh herb is hard here - I like the bags or packets that are at the grocery stores, but they don't sell them here - instead you have to buy the actual plant, and I do not have the slightest green thumb so I end up killing them all the time. And for something like basil, I end up using the entire plant for one portion of my pumpkin seed pesto, and it takes too long for the plant to grow back with enough leaves for another recipe.  I do see coriander plants at Tesco, but they are impossible to keep alive. Asia our cleaning lady laughs at me because it seems that every week she is here she is throwing yet another herb plant in the trash. She said her friend has huge coriander (kolendra in Polish) plants so she will ask her what her secret is.

My last basil plant

The other thing I am making a lot is almond and pistachio nut milk. I gave up dairy last year, and I had seen a recipe for pistachio milk and have never seen it in a store (even in the US) so I made my own and it was really yummy. The annoying thing is that it takes about an hour to shell 1 cup of pistachios, so it's super time-consuming. I can find tiny bags of shelled pistachios at the organic store, but they are kind of expensive and I have to buy so many to make milk it just doesn't seem worth it. They sell almond milk in cartons here, but since I have been making my own, the boxed ones taste too gooey and fake to me. It's also really easy, just 1 cup of nuts (almonds need to be soaked beforehand) to 4 cups of filtered water, whiz in a blender and then strain through a nut milk bag (I bought mine at Whole Foods, but cheesecloth or a regular mesh strainer will work too). Mike and the kids won't drink it straight, but I always use it in their smoothies or if I am cooking/baking and the recipe calls for milk, they never notice the difference ; )

Adjusting

The kids and I went went back to the US on the 4th of July - we didn't actually mean to go on this particular day, our flight was on the 3rd but for some reason we were delayed getting out of Krakow and we missed our connection to Boston. We landed in Frankfurt (one of the big things we miss not living in Dublin - no direct flights to Boston!) about 15 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave. None of the Lufthansa flight attendants made any kind of effort to make sure we made our connection - I thought that's one of the things they do, aren't they always holding flights for those last minute passengers?? They basically told me to just go inside and make arrangements to stay over, but I wanted to at least try to make our connection. I grabbed the kids and we sprinted through the airport - which is no small task, Frankfurt Airport is like a mini city -encountering some crabby Lufthansa workers along the way ("can't you see how BUSY I am?!" When I tried to ask which gate was the Boston flight). We came screeching around the corner only to be met with the pitying looks of the two people at our gate....I was hopeful because I could still see the plane sitting there on the runway attached to the bridge, but they told me they had already shut the plane door and for security reasons they were not allowed to open it. Oh man! I was so annoyed, I mean really, hadn't our flight called ahead and told them that a woman with two young children would be there in 10 minutes? I tried to beg but then I thought, it IS the 4th of July, there are terror alerts in the US so maybe it is fate that we missed our flight - maybe it's going to go down over the Atlantic and I shouldn't make too much of a stink to get on the plane!! Not that it would have made any difference, but I gave up and had them show me the way to the ticket counter to be re-routed on another flight....the following morning.

When we got to the customer service area there was a HUGE line. I saw an attendant at the front so I went over him to ask him if I really had to stand there in the line. He was very patiently trying to explain to a middle-aged Indian woman that she had missed her flight and the next one out to DC was not until the following morning, so Lufthansa was putting her up in a hotel so she had to follow the exit signs to leave the airport to get to the hotel, stopping first to get a new flight. I have to give the guy credit for not losing his patience with her, I think she was obviously nervous that if she left the airport she would not be able to get back in to make her flight the next morning. As I said it is a huge airport, so I think she was also nervous that she wasn't going to find her way to the hotel. I just stood there waiting my turn, and when the Indian woman finally left I laughed at the guy and said I guess you are going to tell me the same exact thing and I need to follow her? He said yes, we could choose to stand there in that huge line, or just go out to the front of the airport to the arrivals hall to get re-booked there instead.  I asked him if we could maybe get on a different airline's flight that night but he said all flights to the US had already left (Really?? It was only 6pm). There was no way I was waiting in that long line so the kids and I started to make our way to the arrivals area. It was a bit confusing, but after a while we got to a point where there was police tape up and they weren't letting anyone through. Oh great I thought, terrorist activity, just what I need!! But fortunately we only had to wait 5 minutes and then they let us through (not sure what the hold-up was though). While we were standing there we came upon the Indian woman, so I stood next to her and said Hey, you found your way here! I told her we were headed the same way because we had missed our flight too and I honestly have never seen a look of more relief before! She happily walked with us and we found our way to the re-ticketing line where they put us on different flights and gave us vouchers for the local hotel - I was disappointed to learn that the hotel was on the other side of the airport and not in the city of Frankfurt, since we were stuck there for the night I thought it would be fun to hang out in the city since I had never been there before. The Indian woman was in the line next to us and when she got to the counter I heard the attendant tell her, Miss I'm sorry but they are going to Boston, and you are going to DC so you can't be on the same flight! But it turns out our new friend just wanted to make sure she was sent to the same hotel as us, which she was. So we made our way outside to wait for the hotel shuttle which took forever, then got checked into our hotel. She asked if she could have dinner with us and I said no problem. Apparently Jack had not heard this, because when we went to our room to drop off our things and got back to the lobby, he saw her sitting there and when I started to walk over to her he said "What is she doing here and do we have to eat with her??". Ugh, I need to work on this kid's manners. It turns out her name was Suzy, she lives in DC but had been in Prague with her husband for a work thing and they had to take different flights home for some reason. She missed her connection but he did not - so he was on his way back to DC and didn't even know that she was stuck in Frankfurt. She was nice enough but the kids were not very interested in making new friends - during dinner Jack needed to use the toilet while Ava was up at the buffet, so I got up to bring him - while inside the bathroom I was thinking that Ava wouldn't know where we were, so she'd just have to sit and make conversation with Suzy. When we left the bathroom of course there was Ava standing there waiting for us. I guess she really was not into making conversation with poor Suzy. We had a quick dinner and then went back to our rooms ('Mommy we don't have to share a room with Suzy do we??  asked Jack).  We did make arrangements to have breakfast with her the next morning and then to take the shuttle back to the airport together- I think our flight was a lot earlier than hers, but she didn't care and just wanted to come with us.  We said our goodbyes in the airport and she thanked us for keeping her company. We exchanged email addresses, as we were walking away Ava said "you're not ever going to email her, are you?". But I was happy that I helped poor nervous Suzy!

We spent 6 weeks in the US, we were hoping to spend most of it in Falmouth but we were having work done to our house and unfortunately it was not quite ready. Mike flew back 2 weeks after us, and then after that we were so busy with the house that the summer just flew by. For some reason coming back to Krakow was much harder for me this time - I think because we were in our Falmouth house, where I had my own bed and dresser and brand new kitchen that I loved, and I felt like we hardly had any time to really relax so I wasn't quite ready to go back to Poland. We left on the August 16th and arrived on the 17th (and Stella our cat turned 3 on the 18th!). The kids started school on the  25th so this gave them (us) a good week to get adjusted back to the time difference which is always difficult to deal with coming this way. The kids were pretty excited to get back to school, I was worried about Ava because 3 of her good friends left Krakow over the summer so I wasn't sure how she would adjust. But, she did just fine and met a new American girl in class and had her and an old friend from last year (who she declared is now her best friend) over for a sleepover that first weekend. Jack wanted to wear his suit and tie for the first day, so he could look just like Daddy going to work - he had it all laid out the night before, but of course he changed his mind that morning and had a complete melt-down. I thought this was going to be the year of no morning battles but I guess I was wrong. Eventually I got him into his suit. He loves his new teacher but asked me if they made the school day a lot longer this year - which they didn't, I think he just does a lot more work this year!

Once the kids got back to school and I was getting back into my routine, I realized some of the things that I had a hard time dealing with not having here. The first, being the pay at the pump feature ot the gas stations. Why, oh why have they not figured this out in Poland?? It's 2015! Do you know how annoying it is to have to go inside and wait in line to pay for your gas?

It was also really hot once we got back to Krakow, and I was dragging with jet-lag those first 10 days or so. As I was out running my errands, all I really wanted in the afternoons was a nice iced coffee. But no, they have not figured this one out in Poland yet either!! Not only do they not sell iced coffee, there aren't even any coffee shops you can just pop into while you are out, like Mary Lou's or Dunkin Donuts etc. There is a Starbucks here, but it's in the gigantic mall so it would take me over 15 minutes to park and then walk into the mall to get to. And, even though they have iced coffee on the menu, it's actually a blended drink (like a coffee smoothie) so you specifically have to ask them to just make it with coffee and ice cubes (and this takes 5 minutes of broken Polish trying to explain). And then they don't have pre-made cold coffee, so once they add ice to the 'iced' coffee it instantly becomes a gross lukewarm cup of blah.

Lastly, the other thing I really miss is the option to get cash back and every single store you go into. There are few things I absolutely hate doing in life - one is stopping to get gas, another is stopping at an ATM to get cash (and looking for a toilet while I am out...and unloading the dishwasher...). I always forget to stop, or there isn't one near me, so being able to get cash while out shopping is a huge bonus. Unfortunately they have not caught onto this concept here either. Thankfully there is an ATM sort of near our house, so it's just a matter of me remembering to stop.

Despite all of this, we are all happy to be back and are getting settled back into Polish life : )

Here We Go Again!

I know I have tried this before, but I really really want to get this blog started again! For the first few years in Ireland I was pretty good at keeping up, and when we moved to Krakow I got the blog printed and bound into two big books and I'm so glad I have it, and that the kids will have it to look back on since they were probably too young to remember it all (we left Ireland Ava was almost 7 but Jack was only 4).  So, now that it has been THREE YEARS since we have been living in Krakow (yikes!), I figure it's time to get started again! I have good intentions and I have lots of things I mean to write about, but sitting down and finding the time has become really difficult. I am surprised, because I have so much more free time than I did in Ireland, so I don't know where the time goes. The kids leave for school in the taxi shuttle van at 8 am, and don't get home until after 4. I usually spend my days out shopping (which takes forever here), at Polish lessons, at the kids' school, at IWAK (the international club) events, at the gym, or oh yeah doing fun household chores like cooking, doing laundry, the dishes, etc etc. So I am going to promise myself to try harder to write this year because I really want to be able to have something to look back on - maybe that means spending a little less time on Facebook, which I guess became a faster and easier way for me to share our family happenings, instead of sitting down to write about everything, then it taking forever to upload pictures to this blog. I saw that there was a Blogger app for my iPhone, so hopefully that will help to make things easier. But I get sucked into all the different crap articles that pop up on my Facebook feed and can't help reading them all!! So, bear with me as I try this again - even if it's only my parents and maybe Aunt Karen who will be reading, I will keep plugging along! : )