A Series of Unfortunate Events

My classes started on Monday. As the courses in English are for the exchange students only, and there are only 4 exchange students, I am the only student in 20th century history and one of the two students in other few classes. Fun fun fun! The truth is having such private lessons is an advantage – you pay a lot more attention, whether you want it or not as you are more involved in the discussion and the interaction with the teacher is intense.

I take very interesting classes: 20th century History, International Relations, Anthropology of Modernity, Contemporary Polish Culture (and we go to museums during this class too!), Basic Polish, Photography (which I’m not happy about studying since the course is in Polish and the exchange students are supposed to catch up with the theoretical thingies by reading 2 books) and Newspaper Journalism. I hope I didn’t forget anything.

Well, I went shopping on Monday. I wanted some sweaters as I didn’t bring a lot of clothes from Romania and it’s cold here. I fast-shopped and bought very quickly 2 sweaters and a blouse (mango and terranova) and then I moved on to an Indian store where they had very nice skirts. I got there but it was closed. What to do, what to do? I invited one of the Portuguese students for a beer at Browarmia, since I hadn’t seen any of them since we met in Carrefour. I went there expecting to use my laptop as well, but as it turned out, my network controller (whatever that is) must be reinstalled. I was very unhappy to notice that. Luckily, while I was silently swearing the Dell employees and their families, four Scotsmen entered the pub. Three of them were wearing kilts – that kinda gave them away! 🙂

“McRetea”?

I went right up to them and asked if they knew anything about computers. Well, this is the proof that English and computer science go together hand in hand! One of them was a computer genius, he used to work for AOL and stuff! So he looked at the laptop, told me what to do when I would be connected to the Internet through cable and invited me to join them at the bar. Meanwhile, the Portuguese guy took a rain check, so I hung out with the four Scotsmen. They were going at football game in Kiev and they changed trains in Warsaw. I had a lot of fun talking with them, they were really funny, but the unfortunate event was that they had to leave for Kiev in the evening. One of them gave me a little badge with a Scottish symbol, we also took pictures they promised to email and they saw me to the tram station. Miss them already. They were such a nice company. We talked about football, music, grammar, taxes, cultural differences, drugs, communism and the novel nineteeneightyfour… And we had Urkel beer, I think. I’ll never see them again. After the game, they’re going home, through Warsaw – but we won’t have time to see each other, although I would’ve loved to.

As soon as I got home I realized that not only my wireless connection to the Internet was dead, but so was the cable one. I tried everything, it wouldn’t work. My colleague’s laptop is connected, mine isn’t.. All the computer geniuses I know are in Romania. And the Polish ones don’t seem to speak any English, which is hilarious considering they call a lot of things related to the computer industry in English, just like we do too. They just have to add a few verbs here and there and that’s it!

I’m still offline. It’s Wednesday. I’ve almost given up hope. This will be a typing machine only… Yesterday I took my laptop with me and went out the door, determined to solve the problem. I entered V3 – a computer store. The shop assistant spoke English and tried to help me. (He also read the text on my desktop wallpaper “serenada pt ochii tai” with a very good Romanian accent!) The cable connection worked there, the wireless didn’t. At home, none of them works.

As if this wasn’t enough, I woke up this morning (my neighbors are very noisy in the morning, but that’s a different story…) with a terrible wrist ache at my right hand. Sitting at a computer at the College, I realized I got the ache form using the computer keyboard. Can you imagine that? I can hardly shake hands with somebody (and all my teachers shake my hand, which is incredibly painful), have a cup of coffee of lift anything I pick up.

Have I told you I had to buy another SIM card for my phone too? The Orange one didn’t get text messages and the services are very bad – nobody speaks English in that company! So I am now an Era customer.

Oh, and I lost my Romanian SIM card too. I had to block it and ask for another one in Romania. No roaming for me…

The landlord still didn’t fix the doors and the windows, the drawer of the towel holder… he said he would come on Friday.

The series of unfortunate events ends here…

lader edit: I fixed it! My laptop is working just fine. My significant other helped me find the driver I needed and stuff 🙂 I am no longer pissed off! 😛

later-er edit: my Scottish friends sent me the pictures we took. Here’s one: