UPDATE: I made it to (and from) Poland!

What's up, home slices?
Just kidding. That's lame.

ANYWAYS. I made it to Poland. (Actually, I've made it to Dublin, but this update is about Warsaw.)

So the beginning of the trip was basically me being so excited I was kind of nauseous. I made all of my flights, everything went fine (as evidenced by my post from Hamburg). And as soon as I got to the hostel I passed out. This is how I met my roommate for the week, Brook (this is actually how I meet most of my roommates, come to think of it. Damn, I know how to make a good first impression).

I'm not going to go into all of the little details of every day because that would take forever and I don't remember all of them. (Side note: Was that really only 9 days?) The first night we kind of all met each other, signed up/registered for the week, and did the basic boring stuff. We also spent like 40 minutes trying to figure out the hostel's obscure WiFi system, which involved getting 2 separate passwords, logging in every time we used it, and sacrificing a goat (no goats were harmed in the making of this blog post). (And the important part of this is that I immediately -- ACCIDENTALLY -- deleted one of the passwords we needed and never saw the light of internet again.)

Other than that, we spent the week kind of in a constant cycle of being shepherded from place to place, sitting and listening, eating, sitting and listening, eating, and being herded somewhere else. Oh, and going out every night and staying up entirely too late. That part was my favorite part.

Warsaw was beautiful. I wish I'd taken more pictures, but we really spent most of the daylight hours indoors, taking notes and listening to lectures. And getting wifi during those lectures. So pictures of the town itself were really not an option until yesterday (when I had the whole day to wander around) and THEN there was this MASSIVE protest in downtown Warsaw and all of the public transportation got shut down for the whole afternoon. So I walked around a little and got some pictures but it was mostly of the protesters.

Basically, I had a blast. I met some awesome people from all over the world, made a bunch of new friends, drank a lot of Polish beer, learned a little about humanitarian action, and learned a lot of interesting phrases in Dutch and German that will DEFINITELY come in handy in the future.

Cool story, right?

Dublin update to come. Don't worry. I've got plenty of mishaps for you -- and it's only Day 1.