Lublin - the city of inspiration. My internship. Part 1

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"What do I know about Lublin?" was my first thought when I found out that I was going to go there for the following two months in July-August to teach Russian. "There was something about the Lublin Union" - told me my subconsciousness after checking some memories in history. Let's see, I started to google the city and I must say that it is so much underrated. I saw just a few random pictures of some nice places, but it seemed like there wasn't that much to do. That was so wrong. I packed my Francis (a big blue suitcase that broke ~~my heart~~ the handle at the beginning of my adventure) and set off. Though my region borders on 4 countries, one of which is Poland, it doesn't have customs, so my route headed from Uzhgorod to my beloved Lviv and then to Lublin by bus.

"Lublin - the city of inspiration" was waiting for me.

When I was waiting on the station, I was expecting a big bus with comfortable seats (~~and maybe even with wi-fi)~~ like one of those that were standing on their platforms and having other cities/countries as their destinantions. But when I finally saw my "iron horse" I started to laugh and at the same time wonder how this old piece of iron (which dated sth like 1980 for sure) could possibly move. The great amplua was reinforced by the old shaky ~~prince~~ driver , who perfectly supplemented his mr. I-am-supposed-to-be-a-bus.

Luckily, I passed the customs very quickly and in some three or four hours I was already making my first step on the Polish ground. Poland met me in a very cheerful way: the landscapes were beautiful, but on the one of the stops, I saw that place, which was called "SKLEP" and I couldn't keep from appreciating Polish black humour, since in Ukrainian it meant "a vault" rather than "a shop". Till the end of my internship I got used to the different variations of this cute word, which I could see at every step and in which I, of course, used to buy my daily products.

The bus station was small, so there was no chance to get lost there. The local market surrounded the station and I saw that there were a lot of Ukrainians around. I was met by two pleasant girls, one of whom was responsible for me 'buddy'. Lublin welcomed us with quite chilly and very rainy weather, which wasn't really what we expected to see in the middle of summer. However till the end of the week things started to get better.

The perk of my internship was living with 5 more amazing guys from Spain, Russia, Italy, USA and Tunisia. We lived in the dormitory of the UMCS (Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej) and held our workshops there as well.

Our first walk to the city centre was ...discovering, I would say. We saw beatiful streets with peculiar architecture. All in all , we liked the things we saw!

The symbol of Lublin is a goat.

This part of the old town reminded me of Warsaw a lot:

The heart of the city - Brama Krakowska, or as I called it "Krakow Something". Everytime we passed it we heard different street musicians or street bands performing some Polish or English songs and it gave a special hue to the atmosphere. Here we also concentrated many cafes, restaurants and kebabs.

Our sweet international AIESEC company:

An amazing view on the city from the Cathedral

This statue reminded me of the "Old Spice" commercial where a guy says: "Did you know I'm riding this horse backwards?" So, this is it, just Lublin version , I guess.

Exploring Polish cuisine.

One of the first things we did in Poland was trying as much national dishes as possible. The most delicious cafe of Polish cuisine was "Pyzata Hata" ( and again, it was interesting to find out that they have exactly the same cafe with exactly the same name as we in Ukraine). It offered such variety of delicious food, that we had difficulty with choosing something specific.

The favourite dish of my guys were pierogi with all kinds of filling: potatoes, cheese etc. They were tasty, indeed, and very much alike varenyky in my homecountry. Personally I preferred pyzy, that were kind of dumplings made of potatoes with meat inside.
From the dishes I liked as well was their soup called Zurek. It was quite simply, but nutricious.
I wondered that even the names of their crepes and potato pancakes were the same as in my language.
What we really liked there was so called "zapiekanka", kind of a long pizza-baguette.
Apart from traditional dishes, Poland is assosiated for me with kebabs. They are literally everywhere. When we walked in any city in Poland we always found them, the most widespread was the one of "Habiby".
The other thing that should be mentioned is Polish beer. They have all possible and impossible juices or syrups mixed with beer. They drink it really a lot (maybe they have a spare stomach for that) and I've never ever met so many different flavours of beer before.

We also had a very nice tradition to make a national dinner each week, so we had opportunity to taste ~~sweet~~ Ukrainian potato pancakes, genuine Italian pizza, Spanish Sangria, Tunisian Pastry and American breakfast at midnight.

Shopping time!

Since there were 3 girls among our friendly AIESEC family, we went exploring the other side of Lublin, which was called Shopping of course. And when it came to supermarkets in Lublin it was always either "Stokrotka" (daizy), either "Biedronka" (ladybird) either "Zabka" (frog). The company of these 3 bosom friends always gave us the products we needed.
And of course such big malls as Lublin Plaza and Olimp successfully tempted us to buy a few new items of clothes.
What always used to bring us to amazement were the prices. Everything in Poland was so cheap. One of the general suppositions about EU countries was always that they are quite expensive, but Poland was a pleasant exception.

Leisure

Party animals - this term could perfectly describe us at night. Hating clubbing at home, I decided to try all the clubs in Lublin. We had the nicest company ever , so there was no way we could possibly be bored.

The best one, which we liked the most was RIVIERA club, The peculiarity of this club was that it was situated on the roof of a building. When we entered it, it looked like a beach with sand and a few little swimming pools. It was open air, so it depended a lot on the weather. The music was danceable, I would say. It consisted of some new and not very new top hits. The only drawback, however, was that the playlist was the same every time we went there. We (girls) were quite pleased that there were free drinks till 11pm for all the girls.

Cream Club (or how our Polish friends called it "Smietana", which meant "a sour cream")
was one of the most popular and crowded ones. It had cool modern interior and two separate dance floors for those who liked club mixes of pop songs , and those who liked something like a dubstep or just beat music.

Dom Kultury. I'd say it was the funniest one. Our first experience of going to it was not at all what we had expected. Someone said it would be cool, but in fact they were showing some extremely weird videos and playing music we couldn't dance to. The best thing about this club was its terrace and quite inteersting interior. Also, all of us could very easely enter the club for free, because it was in the city centre and there were always some girls distributing free entrance coupons. However, we were risky enough to give this club the second chance and it didn't let us down. We went for a New Year party and had a great time there.

Except for the night clubs, we also visited local swimming pool. The funniest story about it was that there was a lake right in front of it, but people couldn't swim there since it was poluted. So all the citizens were gathering on a quite small territory of the swimming pool.