Well, it has been a while since I've updated, and Easter was a month ago, but I have pictures! We spent Easter with Paul's family in Rydultowy Poland. The picture at the top of this post is of Paul and his grandfather. And no, that is not a mountain - it is a giant slag heap from a coal mine!! All of that stuff came from under the ground! It is so big they are thinking of putting ski slope on there!
It was great to see all the relatives and to eat Babcia's (grandma) food! It is so funny when Paul's grandma puts out the spread of food for each meal - it's enough for 10 people and it's just me and Paul! We left on a Friday and returned on Tuesday evening, so we had about 3.5 days there. Paul's grandparents life with his great-grandmother, who is 95 years old and always smiling!
Easter is the most important holiday in Poland, and it is celebrated over several days and nights. In fact, it's called Wielkanoc (vyel-ka-notes), which means something like "many nights", because Easter is celebrated over several nights. Pretty much everyone in Poland is Catholic, and it seems like the church bells don't ever stop ringing during this time, as there are masses throughout the holiday weekend. We went to 2 masses, one with Paul's grandfather and one with his uncle. They like to sit up in the balcony with the rest of the men (not to mention some bats!), and with the service being entirely in Polish, it sure was a cultural experience!
We also visited Paul's grandmother's brother's family who live nearby. They put out two huge platters of delicious desserts for us, and served us coffee with milk from their cow! Unfortunately, I ate so much of the desserts that when they brought out some ham and cheese to eat, I couldn't eat a morsel more! I still haven't quite figured out why they have dessert before meals, but the same thing happened when we visited them on our honeymoon, so it's just something I'll have to remember for future visits.
Paul did the talking when he could, and I tried to learn some Polish, but with only a pocket dictionary I bought at the airport, I didn't help too much in the conversation!
Here is Paul's grandparents' house right after a small snowstorm.
Near Rydultowy is a town called Rybnik. We went there one afternoon and walked around the town square, which was all decked out for Easter. Here's a picture of Rybnik's town square:
Easter Monday also has a funny tradition. They call it Smingus Dyngus, which is a nonsense word, but what they do on this day is spray people with water. More specifically, boys go around and spray girls with water, and the girls are supposed to give them a treat. Paul's cousin Jakob tried to explain this to me, and when I told him that if a guy squirted me with water, I'd be more likely to punch him in the nose than give him candy, he seemed very confused. I guess if you grow up with it, it makes more sense!
The other neat thing I saw was easter baskets. On the Saturday before Easter, people brought baskets with bread and flowers into church for a blessing. This food was then served at Easter dinner. I haven't fully looked into this tradition, but it was really neat to see all these people walking to church with pretty baskets.
We flew on Wizz air, a Hungarian discount airline. It wasn't that cheap since there is huge demand for flying to Poland for Easter due to the large number of Polish people living in the UK. But, it's the only airline that flies direct to Katowice. Anyway, it started to snow when we got to the airport to go home! Fortunately, it wasn't enough to delay our flight too much, so we managed to get back on schedule.
Here's our plane waiting out the snowstorm before we could board!
