Anyway, let´s back to the issue: Lublin and Ula or, better said, Lublin, Ula and Ewa, Ula´s flatmate who also happened to be a very nice girl. Both of them took me for a walk into town and, more than the city itself, what I really enjoyed was the conversation. I happened to had just read a book about the II World War which described how germans and russians had taken their turn to invade and fuck the polish. After the Word, Poland ended up controlled by the URSS with all this fact implies: totally lack of thinking freedom, hard communism system, limited food allowance, a controlled government and all these kind of non-nice consequences. In Ula´s words, the polish would only be allowed, for example, to one packet of jam per month since most of the food produced in Poland would go to Moscow. No wonder they don’t like Ivan too much. It wasn’t till the end of the eighties when a movement conducted by work associations and students managed to get rid of the communism and started the current capitalism system, in line with the rest of Europe.

I spoke about all this with my hosts while I was having, as usual, a delicious polish lunch – dinner – whatever. Here you have some recommendations to fill your stomach in Poland: first some “bigos”, vegetable dish I don’t really remember much what it was, followed by “pierogis”, bread balls filled with different stuff and ending with a dish made of potatoes and meat called “placek po zbojnicku”. All very tasty, I probably gained around 5 kilos in this trip. It was 7 pm and I was totally full, good we had a good walk through the city afterwards. Lublin is the typical small student town, nice to walk around and a bit empty at this time of the year. Continuing the communism history overview, they took me to the soviet bar in Lublin. Well, maybe the ruskies were a bit bastards but the atmosphere of this kind of places is definitely cool, with all these soviet signs, propaganda, pictures of secret police and stuff like that. Not to mention the menu containing a lot of different varieties of vodka…

So, with my stomach feeling more comfortable thanks to the soviet alcohol, we continued the Lublin tour: people playing music in the middle of the street, pints of beer with a vodka shot at the bottom and a few funny pictures

The night ended up with a funny cultural exchange at Lula´s place: polish vodka vs the leftovers of my Pampero Special Edition bottle of rum, Spanish music vs polish hits. And, pay attention to the great musical finding of the trip, I am sure this will become a classic in Orense v2 parties! The guy with the beard is amazing, I could not stop laughing!! That´s the good thing about travelling, you come back home with new musical influences…

With such a good ingredients, the “party” kept going till very late so next day there was only time to visit the university and take the road again, well, I mean the train… Sitting in that wagon I did my balance of the Lublin stop and I got the conclusion it had been perfect even though it hadn’t been my typical way of travelling. Without any specially nice places to visit nor hard party, the polish experience had left a very good memory. I had the feeling of had been involved in that country more in a day than a normal tourist would do in a week. I had gained a friend I am sure I am going to meet again and the bad start of the trip had been definitely forgotten. I started to think that, as long as the rest of people I was going to meet were as good as Ula, the experience was going to be great. I realize there is starting to be a lot of “thank you”s here but they are more than deserved. Thanks a lot Ula Lula!!

Amazing the ICEX IT people meeting in my spanish favourite city. I wont tell you how it was, you can check this out (if you read Spanish ) at Marta´s blog (day 1, day 2, day 2 night, day 3) and Guatemala´s blog. What I want to say here is that actually having fun is a pretty simple thing. It is not about get drunk and party very hard, someting we already did of course, in fact you enjoy more and remember better all these moments of jokes and conversations. From the beginning, when Pekin was trying to park his car, until the end, those last conversations before leaving the apartments. In the middle, all kind of stuff, Marta and Shangai spicy talk, those tapas lunches, talks over a Cachimba. Finally, what I really matter is the people you get together. The place is not so important althouth in this case it could not have been better. The truth is that I was pretty pissed off when I knew I had to spend month and a half attending a boring trainning in Madrid but now I am very happy I did it. Because of so many people I got to know, most of them with my same interests and way of seeing life, because of all the stuff we did and all the stuff we will do, because know I can have a look at a map of the world knowing that I have a friend in most of the places. Anyway, I dont wanna get boring with this, I already talked a lot about this issue. I will just leave you with Dubai´s video and soon I will uplodad some pictures. A big hug for all the ICEX 2006 IT promotion which soon will be spread all over the world!

I think I already talked more than one time about how funny my time in Madrid was, with that bunch of great people forming the 2006/2007 ICEX IT promotion. As some of you may know, I am going to Stockholm in October thanks to this entity internship program. Like me, there are another 70 people going to different cities all over the world. You also have to add a handful of sustitutes that participated in the Madrid trainning with us. That was already more than a month ago but the spirit is still alive. We already organized a meeting in Granada in September and it is very promising to think about travelling next year with so many nice people distributed all over the world. See this video, courtesy of the great Dubai, to understand what I am talking about…