Day 14 London to Warsaw

Day 14

Oct 28/09

Trevor took our Wicked Van back into town without me while I had to get all of our luggage into the main building of our hotel. For most of the day I wrote emails and did some other computer work until Trevor arrived. We then quickly bought some lunch at a nearby grocery store and it was off to the airport. When we had purchased our Aer Lingus flight to Poland we had understood that you could have one 20kg bag each and then each bag weighing up 20kg was an extra fee. We had automatically paid for an extra bag because I knew there was almost no way for me to have only one bag. Unfortunately we found out that in actual fact the TOTAL weight of the bags you bring can be 20kg! And, for every kg over it would cost us 9 pounds! We were 18kg over which would cost us 162 GBP or $320 ish!!! That was ridiculous! Thankfully the person we were talking to said that he would only charge us 15 pounds for being one bag over our 3 bags we had already told him about. That was a relief. The flight wasn't very eventful. It was neat that many people on board spoke Polish and that they played the instructions for flight safety and other announcements in Polish. It was once we landed that my nerves started going again. I was so scared. I didn't know who was going to pick us up or really what they looked like. I was just hoping that they would recognize us (we had sent them a picture earlier). Customs was ridiculously easy. They just stamped our passports and off we went. And finally the moment of truth arrived. The few pictures I had seen of my mom's cousin and his family were almost 20years old, but they only looked slightly older. Everyone came; my mom's cousin Grzegorz (Gregory), his wife Grazyna (Grace) and their two kids, Mateusz (Matthew) whose 19 and Ola whose 13. The meeting wasn't even too bad. We said our hellos and we realized that everyone but Grzegorz speaks a bit of English and they said my Polish isn't too bad. They drove us over to what will now be our home for the next (at least) 3 months. A cute little apartment, it has a small kitchen, a bathroom (with only a tub, no shower), a very tiny washing machine, closet space and a living room that works as both that and a bedroom. It's perfect. We also went over to their house for a bit where we saw how a typical Polish family normally lives. They too have a tiny apartment. They have 2 bedrooms (each of the kids has their own) a living room, a bathroom and kitchen. Their bathroom doubles as a laundry room (as does ours). Their apartment apparently just got renovated so it has a very modern look to it now. Ours looks like a typical older apartment building in Edmonton. We had a late supper with their family with tomato soup and sandwich type items and then we headed back on the metro to our apartment. They only live one stop away from us. That was enough excitement for one day. We would see what we would do the next day.