June 29, Warsaw.

Can I just say: Polish TV is very strange. We get 11 channels in the hotel, and since I'm pretty much on my own for the evening, I've been laying around channel surfing. There was one game-show-like program where this dude had to identify famous people from photographs and give some sort of description about them (I suppose it was a description anyway, I couldn't really tell). Another program was like a variety show of sorts. These two guys - one playing an instrument like a recorder and another playing a violin - made very strange noises and jumped around a lot. There's also a Russian movie that is both subtitled in Polish and dubbed, but the same guy does all the dubbing with no inflection whatsoever, even for the female voices.

The game show is actually a lot different than my initial impression. It seems like Made (on MTV) except the contestants don't have as long and they get tested at the end. And if they pass whatever the game show test is of their abilities, they get some sort of reward - the first guy got a car. The funny thing is that, during the rite of passage part, the contestant's family is on the stage watching the test. So, there are all these dramatic cuts from the task to the expectant faces of the family members. It's called "Chiwila Prawdy." If I had internet in this room, I'd look that up on a translator and see what it really means.

Polish seems like it'd be really difficult to pick up just by living here. There isn't a lot of break between the words, so everything just kind of flows together, and there are a lot of sounds that I'm not used to hearing, and though they use the English (what's it's proper name?) alphabet, they pronounce letters differently.

I'm sleepy. Maybe I'll go to bed soon, even though it's still light out - I guess I didn't realize how far north we are.