(no subject)
So it's All Saint's Day in Poland. In a little bit, I am going back to meet my group and we will go to a cemetary. It brings out the spooky in me.
Most of Eastern Europe has a strange relationship with their dead. No one ever really dies here. I mean, they die, but they aren't forgotten the same way they are in the States. People rarely move very far away from home and on this day every year, people go to tend to the graves of their ancestors, often in the same plots.
Krakow and Lvov have been eerie at nights with the candles that I assume are somehow connected directly to these ceremonies, though I don't know how (I could ask...).
I feel so old on this trip. I feel like the people with me are either young, or have evaded adulthood for a long time. They're all good people. As always happens on a trip anywhere, something got hurt. My knee got smashed in a nighclub last night and people have been offering me their shoulders.
Someone just reminded me not to let any kindnesses, even small ones, slip by unnoticed.
After the cemetary, we take the night train to Kiev. According to many of the staunchly religious Lvovites consider the atheist Kievites not truly their countrymen. I'm told that I will see a lot of contrast beginning tomorrow. More on this, later.
Most of Eastern Europe has a strange relationship with their dead. No one ever really dies here. I mean, they die, but they aren't forgotten the same way they are in the States. People rarely move very far away from home and on this day every year, people go to tend to the graves of their ancestors, often in the same plots.
Krakow and Lvov have been eerie at nights with the candles that I assume are somehow connected directly to these ceremonies, though I don't know how (I could ask...).
I feel so old on this trip. I feel like the people with me are either young, or have evaded adulthood for a long time. They're all good people. As always happens on a trip anywhere, something got hurt. My knee got smashed in a nighclub last night and people have been offering me their shoulders.
Someone just reminded me not to let any kindnesses, even small ones, slip by unnoticed.
After the cemetary, we take the night train to Kiev. According to many of the staunchly religious Lvovites consider the atheist Kievites not truly their countrymen. I'm told that I will see a lot of contrast beginning tomorrow. More on this, later.