Right now I am sweaty, and exhausted

but tonight was heavily worthwhile.

Dear Matthias,

Thomas got me a birthday present.

Regardless of whether they are eaten in Hungary or Poland, they are terrible. I was surprised by how much Nathan and Thomas liked them.

I will tell you the story of what I did last night. I have no pictures because I did not bring my camera.

The night started off in a way that was not particularly interesting. We had some pizza for dinner, then headed out to meet Hania, Marta, Łukasz and company around 9. We found Łukasz and Marta where we had arranged to meet, then walked down Piotrkowska street to find Hania and some of her friends.

Hania, Marta and Łukasz, along with two others who were not there tonight, are a group of students at the Uni who we were introduced to several weeks ago. They are good to be around, and much more wholesome than Rafa and Magda, who we have not heard from in a very long time.

Our first stop was a beer garden. They line Piotrkowska street: fenced in areas with picnic tables, a bar, and usually a big TV to watch futbol matches. There was a little switcheroo as some people left and some arrived.

I ended up talking for a while to a guy (whose Polish name I cannot recall) who had just spent 3 years living in California. polish people learn English in their schools. Some of them have particularly strong language skills, however, because it is typical to find summer work in America or the UK because the pay is so much better.

We had a few beers and I must retract my statement from a few posts ago. Beer hits me hard I guess. I had only two, and it was the first time I have ever felt alcohol in my life. I would certainly not say I was drunk, but I could tell I had some in me. This contrasted pretty strongly with my past experience, Matthias, as you may remember.

I felt a little iffy about not being sober. Of course, I also feel a little iffy about beer (read: I don't like it). So I suppose those two facts should usually compliment each other. However, I decided that if there is ever a night for iffy, it's the night of my 21^st birthday.

We left the beer garden and stopped at a liquor store. We, our friends had decided, needed to experience Polish vodka. It is the best in the world, they said. The poles claim to have invented vodka. They drink it with apple juice or straight. Even those who admit to not liking it still drink it out of tradition.

In Poland you are not allowed to be drinking in public places. I don't quite understand how this works with beer gardens. They might be allowed to serve booze because they are fenced in. In any case, we proceeded to scout out a place that was less public then Piotrkowska. Eventually we ended up in a dark courtyard a block or two off of the main street. It was one of the shadier looking places I've ever been: the courtyard of a crumbling old building, across the empty street from a sputtering neon sign.

Plastic cups were dispensed and we got to compare the cheap Polish vodka and the name brand. Interestingly, the name brand of Polish vodka means "Buffalo." In each bottle is a blade of grass from where the buffalo graze in eastern Poland.

Now I cannot claim to be a connoisseur of vodkas. My experience with them is pretty limited. But I could agree that even the cheap Polish one makes anything I've had in America taste like acetone in comparison. I would not go so far as to say that either of them was pleasant, but I was able to drink them straight without a problem.

Don't worry, there wasn't that much. We had two bottles and ten people. By the time we were done in the courtyard it was around midnight.

We went to a club. It was clean, which I liked, and the music on the dance floor was not outrageously loud. We found it a little bit entertaining that our Polish friends assumed that we loved all music that comes out of America. They were surprised when we didn't fully appreciate 50 Cent, for example. Jacob (I think) was insistent that we show off some American moves.

Now, I do dance. But this club was not the place for a tango. So I mostly pretended I knew what I was doing.

Really in dancing I was just very curious to try to gauge how drunk I was. I made a habit of moving in ways that would invite me to lose my balance. I managed to not knock anyone over or fall myself. Two hours later I was not really bussed anymore, but intensely sweaty. We left the club to go somewhere else.

Some people stopped for another drink at another liquor store. One of the girls got a fruit juice beer, which I had never seen before (she said it was lemon, but the can was orange). I was super thirsty, so I got a liter of apple juice.

The process of getting the juice from the bottle to my stomach was really not managed well on my part. I drank a lot really fast, then later suffered some waves of nausea as my body taught me to not do that again.

We stopped at a kebab stand and got some food. By now the lingering action feeling from the club was wearing off and we were just getting very tired. It became unclear whether or not people were going to find another club or just sit around and eat for a while. Hania told me that they might turn in early on a Thursday night, but on a weekend 4am was not unusual for them.

We made it to the night bus stop in time to catch the 2:30 bus back to our dorm. Philip, unsure that we would recognize a stop near our dorm, was trying with some success to follow the route on his map. The vibration of the bus motor was really not helping the pool of juice in my stomach settle down, so I was just concentrating on not puking.

We tried to get off when the bus got pretty close to our dorm, concerned that it might keep heading too far south. However, just about everyone else on the bus yelled at us that we were one more stop.

The group on the bus was of eight or so. They were all international students who had recently arrived to Łódź and are living in the same dorm as we are. I'm not sure where all of them are from, but we encountered a pair of girls from Spain and Ireland. Their Polish is as miserable as ours, but they have very strong English. We plan on tracking them down again, since they are the only people we know in the dorm.

We made it up to our room and slept. Soon after I woke up I started writing this. It is now 2:30 in the afternoon.

Most of today will be spent doing laundry by hand, since last night I went out during my 1-hour laundry slot for the week. Tonight we are investigating seeing Kung Fu Panda.