THE LAND OF POLES!!!: Back In Gliwice

The bus from Paris pulled in at a bus stop we had never seen before, but luckily I had gone through the area to do some lessons at the Citroen dealership. It wasn't very difficult from there.

The Poseidon fountain on the Rynek.

We stopped by the school to get the keys to Amelia's flat, since she was kind enough to put us up for a couple weeks while she was in England. There wasn't enough room for us to stay with Sofia without making things awkward, and we ran into that again once Amelia came back. We thankfully had some time to recover from our travels before we had to scramble for another place to stay.

Thank the universe for Peter, yet again.

The Old City Hall

As it turns out, his former English teacher from elementary school has an apartment that she converted to single flats directly across the street from Speed. We paid the same amount for the single room with shared bathroom and kitchen, plus utilities as we were for the one bedroom flat and utilities that we were renting from Sofia -- however at this point we were just grateful to have somewhere to stash our suitcases and sleep at night. It was decidedly a last-minute arrangement, as we spent our last night at Amelia's asleep on her kitchen floor since she was kind enough to not leave us on our keesters her first night at home.

I agree with Peter completely. If we come back to Gliwice we definitely need to be more on top of making sure things are more organized. There was waaaaaay too much flying by the seat of our pants. And far more moving of 50 lb bags up and down staircases than any of us would have liked.

We learn from experience, yes?

I wish more buildings in Western Canada were this detailed and beautiful.

Unfortunately once we'd paid our month of rent it meant we didn't have much money to do things like enjoy our last month at home being tourists, or buy groceries. Things got a little tight and we seldom left the flat as we spent even that last amount of time searching for jobs that just weren't there. That's the problem with not having an EU passport -- nobody wants to pay for work permits and allow you to take the time necessary to get the work visas. You can establish yourself as a business and contract yourself out to language schools, but that paperwork is more expensive and the whole process takes a lot longer to complete. We did, however, leave copies of our CV's and credentials with our landlady so she could speak with a few of her contacts in Berlin on our behalf.

A secluded spot behind the current City Hall

Peter's friend Ola also tried to help us get work at one of the language schools she was at, but the commute to Piekary from Gliwice was fairly brutal and they didn't have enough hours to make living and paying student loans nearly impossible. But that's a soap box to stand on in another post. I learned a good many things in my travels, and most of them reflect rather poorly on the country I call home. It's sad, but true.

Because we wound up paying more in rent than we were really hoping for and also had to buy plane tickets home, it meant we also couldn't take one final trip in Poland the way we were initially planning to -- a big thank you goes to Sarah's mother, Pam, for sending us the money to do so. We used it to spend a few days in Krakow, which will be the next post, followed by what we did in our last days in Poland.