In Warsaw, Poland

I've been in Warsaw for a couple days now and it's a nice city. It feels like America more than any other city I've been to on this trip. It's also been a different experience because I'm with my Polish friend Patricia all day.

Yesterday we walked into the former Jewish ghetto and she said, "We've been walking in the former ghetto for a little while now." I was taken aback at how matter-of-fact I perceived her statement. I didn't have time to prepare emotionally. But she didn't mean it to be matter-of-factly. She told me that it's just reality, it's there, so they are forced to deal with it, forced to come to terms with it. Her psychology classes are in one of the few buildings left in Warsaw from before the World War II and 1 of only 2 in the former ghetto that survived. It used to be where the Nazis tortured people. Patricia is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

I met her family last night. They were so unbelievably nice. Her mom would say an English word and her and her two daughters would giggle. Patricia's sister Joanna is 19 and speaks English fluently and is clearly quite intelligent. One minute the mother and her two daughters are screaming at the top of their lungs at each other and the next they're laughing with each other. It's a site to see when you don't speak the language and you don't know what the fuck is going on.

Later I met Patricia's cousin George, who is a model. He is also 19, only about a foot taller than me, and was very eager to practice his English with me. He got his ideas across with ease, but struggled to master sentence structure. I really admire the ability to speak more than one language. I feel confined by English although people really do speak it in most places around the world. The entire family speaks more than one language.