Drown the witch!

Happy first day of Spring (yesterday)! The past week in Lublin has been beautiful with the sun actually out for more than an hour at a time. Our first three weeks here the sun shone for an average of probably five hours per week. It was a little discouraging. But with Spring in the air I'm hoping for more sunlight. I guess when you live in a place with so little winter sunlight you really appreciate Spring. And the Poles certainly do...although not in the way I would ever imagine.

An array of fresh flowers are sold across the street from my apartment
 every day--even in the Winter!

Majdanek and the Nazis on my street

It's not often that you get to walk where tens of thousands of men, women, and children died under the order of Nazi leaders. But it's even less common to walk on your very own street and know that that is where many of those Nazis marched by command of Hitler.

Although I am determined to to learn some Polish history outside of the grim details of World War II and the Holocaust, the overwhelming presence of the Nazis in Lublin during WWII deserves a post of its own. 

My first encounter with some of this history came unexpectedly on a walk to the bus station. I passed by a large rock monument, to the side of a building and stopped to read the plaque. It commemorated the sad ending of Polish poet Jozef Czechowicz who left Warsaw at the start of the war because he thought his hometown of Lublin a safer option. He died just over a week after the start of the war, when the building where he was getting his hair cut was bombed. 

Monument to a famous resident of Lublin who was killed at the start of WWII

An introduction to Lublin

Despite our rough start with finding an apartment, we found one that we love. Not only does it have plenty of lighting that I need as an artist, but it is in a great location right in the heart of the city. Multiple bus stops are located within steps from our apartment, so we can easily get anywhere in the city for less than a dollar. (Oh yeah, that's the other amazing thing about living here. The exchange rate from the Polish zloty to US dollar is about 4:1. One of the things I love about being American!)

View from our window (gotta love the pigeons)

My favorite thing about where we live, is our close proximity to Old Town. Within ten minutes, I can walk through the 14th century Krakovian Gate and into a darling cobble-stoned Medieval town. According to my tourist guides, Lublin boasts the best preserved Medieval town in all of Poland.

Taking the leap...Poland here we come!

The past few months have been probably the craziest of my life. Within 24 hours of each other, my husband changed career plans from dentistry to medicine and we found out I was pregnant. A few weeks later we left for a family visit in Brazil. Returning to Utah, our next few weeks were a blur. First there was the disappointment of a miscarriage. Then studying and taking the MCAT, solving a tax auditing issue, panicking at 10:45 pm when we find out that the passport photo won't work and the only photo center that is still open will close at 11, and then driving Alex to the airport at 4:30 the next morning so he can fly to LA to get a Polish visa AND a new Brazilian passport within 4 hours. 

(Wait, there's more.) 

Selling our apartment contract, selling all of our furniture, packing everything else, re-packing everything to store at my parent's house...the list goes on. And yes, we were both still working at our jobs during all of this. 

I get panicky just writing about it...

Predictably, when we finally boarded the plane my brain was doing the equivalent of that thing that happens after a day at Lagoon--right when you are about to fall asleep and you jerk awake with the feeling of somersaulting through the air. 

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We flew to New York (I tried without success to convince Alex that visiting an airport doesn't count toward our list of "visited" places...but he still wanted to take a picture,) then we flew to Istanbul. If we were to take any pictures, that should've been the place. I have never been around so many Muslims in my life. And orthodox ones too; women covered from head to toe, even wearing gloves, with only a small hole for their eyes. This time, we thoroughly enjoyed playing our long-layover-game where we watch people walk past and comment on the first thing that stands out about them.

After just one overnight flight we already look exhausted