IC where I was this summer...

"Let me take you back, 'cause I'm going too..." would actually be a good start to this post, as I often drift back to my memories of this banana summer while gradually falling back to the day-to-day* of enjoying the last remnants of my soon-to-end student life...

...yet this time, I'm not "going" to the morally questionable, spicy "Strawberry Fields", but to the very beginning of our IC trip, which started, if I still remember right, at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The town in question was the city of Breslau; the bus station in question was full of young, motivated skinheads; and the bus in question had no air conditioning.

But let us not dwelve on this most unpleasant part of the trip (the Eurolines ride to Warsaw) which confronted me with the Highway situation in Poland (or lack thereof); for tho I very much enjoy the MC blog, which I shall now proceed to shamelessly plug, I do believe that our dear MC has forgotten that the average reader of the blogger age is ready to read 0.01% of the text in a typical MC post and is right away frustrated by the lack of respect it shows to the large segment of neo-illiterate** insomniacs on the web. This new breed of netizens will only accept more than four lines of text without a picture either from Houellebecq, Playboy magazine, or this blog, all of which happen to be pseudo-pornographic. But because even my blog cant survive text cemetaries without bringing up an occasional picture, I shall present the first slide...

Ah, Torun, Torun. Here you see the whole gang of study-tourees who braved the absolute burn-out of study-trip, pre-conference, and conference. Notice the way the photographer cut poor Copernicus at the legs, a metaphor for the cultural decadence of the modern student tourist group hellbent on visiting all Starbucks outlets in the town with the funny name they cannot pronounce.

ah, but let us not dwelve on the sense of dismay I feel every time my parents shame me by asking me exactly which cities I visited on the poland trip. Instead, let us celebrate cultural diversity. As we threatened to burn alive inside the bus bringing us to Marienburg, the driver released us into the open, allowing us one of those greatly appreciated, completely artificially induced moments of glee. As we were outside, he screamed at us that we should get back in or we could walk the rest of the way. "But sir, your bus is burning"... so we started walking... (on the picture: Robin poses in front of the burning vehicle)

I'm not sure you would appreciate all the pictures we took of the nearby gas station while the coordinators organised another bus; instead, a little interlude of a picture, taken as we actually got to Marienburg, 5 minutes before we started heading back:

This is me with Dina. She was a very sweet girl, I think I met her at coffee the day before... notice my hangover...

so maybe the view towards the other side is more rewarding... Finally, on the second day, we arrived in the city of Gdansk (Danzig), and at that point, blogger *&"&ç* refused to let me post more pictures, forcing me to ask you to continue reading at the next post....

*this term was proudly coined by me and will now be used for the next twenty years to the general dismay of english teachers reading this blog worldwide.

** people who teach themselves not to have to read