Mother's Day

When is Mother's Day in your country?

In Poland it is always on the 26th of May, which is not accidentally today.
Two weeks ago I've been to Istanbul, where one afternoon, my friend's aunt served a piece of cake after lunch and mentioned that it was left after Mother's Day. I asked immediately when do they celebrate it in Turkey and she told me that it's always the 2nd Sunday of May.

It reminded me, that in previous year, while I was in Portugal, it was even different - the 1st Sunday of May.
Because of my curiosity, I've made a small research (about the countries that are tagged on my blog) and it turned out that most of them celebrates Mother's Day on the same day as Turkey, for example Japan, Czech Republic, Ukraine or Belgium. Also, Spain celebrates it on the same day as Portugal but France is a bit odd and delays until the last Sunday of May.

The conclusion should be that, if someone travels too often and pays attention to local holidays, then that person's Mum, may start thinking that her child became crazy, if she was given wishes and presents over few times in May!

International Day of the Book

The 23rd of April was chosen by UNESCO for the

World Book and Copyright Day.

The holiday originated in Catalonia-Spain, where each customer who bought a book on St George's Day, received a rose as an additional gift.
The other sources inform, that it was a medieval kind of Valentine's day. On that day men were giving roses to their women, and since the beginnings of the XXth century women started giving them books instead.

A great coincidence is the fact, that the 23rd of April is also a date of such anniversaries as birthday of Shakespeare and Nabokov, or death of Cervantes and... Shakespeare as well.

Different countries celebrate it in many different ways. The most common one is probably making discounts like the one in Polish Empik (the most famous commercial chain selling books, press and media in Poland) - buy 3 books for the price of 2. Fnac, that originated in France and spreaded around the Western Europe, offers 10% discounts in its Spanish stores too. What is more, Portuguese Fnac announced its one month long, annual holiday "Festa do livro" that includes discounts up to 40% or books of the week.

My Easter Holidays in Japan

My Easter Holidays 2010 were the 3rd that I've spent outside Poland.
Each of those 3 times I was missing the part of my family that was not with me but on the other hand it was also great experience to try and discover new things.

This year, I've spent Easter Sunday with Daniel at hanami, which is a Japanese kind of spring picnic and it's main aim is to admire the Sakura - Cherry Blossom. At the time of Sakura, Japanese people gather in the parks, bring loads of food and drinks, blankets, music instruments, cameras and enjoy their hanamis.

Probably, the most spectacular and enjoyable parts of Easter Holidays in Poland are egg painting and Easter bunny's presents. And that's a part of things that appeared on that day.
Accidentally, just before going to the Meijo Kohen park in Nagoya, we got toys from gashapon machines - vending machines distributing toys in plastic balls, capsules. As soon as we got them we thought that it's a funny Easter coincidence that they resemble eggs.

We waited with opening them until getting to the park. It turned out that Daniel's capsule was hiding stickers with different kinds of beetles (not the Beatles!), while my toy was a kind of keyring, which after pushing the button sounds more less like "Ai shiteruyo baby" (jap. "I love you baby").
In the park, we did egg painting. Actually Daniel did most of the job but my cherry blossom egg pattern also wasn't bad. I should mention here, that originally the eggs that I bought were called Onsen Eggs and we didn't realize what does it mean. After making a small research I discovered that there is a special recipe for Onsen Tamago - Hot Spring Egg.

During our Easter Hanami we've tried some new food.
The most interesting looking one, was a roll with some green tea dough on the top of it. It was rather sweet and tasted great with chocolate bunny.

Another thing was Strawberry Pocky. To describe it I should use a comparison with something that exists in Poland and usually goes with a beer as a snack - słone paluszki (pol. salt fingers/sticks). Both of them, Polish salty and Japanese sweet version, are sticks made of crunchy dough. Japanese ones, are covered with different flavours such as: chocolate, banana, strawberry and many more. Yummmyyy!!!
By the way, did you notice unbelievable Japanese packaging??? The box contains 12 sticks and each 3 of them are wrapped separately!

Last but not least, Takoyaki - the dish which was worth waiting in a queue for a while. As you may see, or not, it is baked and round shaped, served few pieces in a little wooden boat. Each of those round pieces contains butter, dough, vegetables, mayonnaise and a piece of octopus. The most funny part of it are the flakes called aonori, which cover the dish from the top. You may believe or not but, as long as the dish is warm, the flakes are moving. It gives an impression as if your dish was alive!

If you'd like to find out how do the Easter celebrations in Japan look like, check out Daniel San's last year post about his visit in Japanese and Korean churches.

Sakura in the rain

Cherry blossom, in Japanese called Sakura, is a symbol of spring somehow and a perfect reason for celebrating all around Japan.

This year in Nagoya, the first cherry trees` flowers, showed up 1 day before my arrival to Japan, on the 18th of March. For comparison, first flowers in Tokyo appeared 4 days later, on the 22nd.
Special sakura forecasts infom about each regions best time for admiring those flowers. It didn`t start in Nagoya yet... but it already looks beautiful. Even in the rain!

Fat Thursday

If I were to choose the sweetest Polish tradition, it would be today's holiday - the Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek). In Christian tradition, the Fat Thursday is the last chance to eat as much as possible before the 40day lent followed by Easter holidays. On the last Thursday of Carnival, each Pole has to eat at least one pączek, which is a kind of a donut with random fillings. The most classical one has rose jelly filling inside and is being covered with sweet glaze sprinkled with pieces of dried orange.
This time I had 2 pączki - regular one with jelly rose filling and the other one with advocat and powdered sugar on the top.

1 pączek (pon-check)

2 pączki (ponch-ki)

The best place to try pączki in Warsaw is "Cukiernia Pawłowicz " at 13 Chmielna street, where they serve them fresh and still hot!
Can you imagine something better than such a sweet donut covered in a paper bag warming up your hands and mouth when it's snowing all around you? I don't think so!

Mazury - family place

Mazury is the polish great lakes district, located in the northeast of the country.
Last summer I've stayed there quite a long time but somehow the blog post got lost in time and never got published. I've spent the recent New Year's Eve in the Mazury as well, so now I have a great opportunity to show how different its landscape is when it comes to compare summer and winter.

My new hobby - pouring water out of the boat.

Daniel hesitating if he should step on the frozen lake.

Four hand rowing!
Ula with Łukasz's support.

No chance to swim or to use the boat.
The ice layer was around 20-30 cm thick.

Christmas - how to not get bored

Christmas 2009 passed without getting bored thanks to the board games!

Just before the Christmas Eve dinner, together with Ela, Ula and Daniel, we've played the game called Shogun, which I was looking forward to since last January.
Generally speaking, Shogun is about scoring the biggest number of points by possessing as many prefectures of Japan as possible, fighting with enemies, making rice supplies so that people won't die of hunger in winter, building castles, temples and Noh theatres.

While playing we all had different strategies, but the ones of Ula and Daniel deserve to be described here. Ula's aim was buying loads of rice, while Daniel's main objective was making Nagoya a powerful city with a beautiful castle and attacking all his neighbours without caring about rice supplies. It's also worth mentioning that each player represented different famous shogun, for example I had a card of Ieyasu Tokugawa. Shogun is probably my no. 1 board game of all we've played.

Another 2 board games were this year's presents from Santa Claus - I've received Ticket to Ride - Europe and Ela got Small World.

Ticket to Ride - Europe is all about constructing railways around Europe's map from 1912. At first, the rules seem to be a bit complicated but it is a truly family game and each of my family members played it at least once during Christmas and enjoyed it.

Concerning Small World, it is a board game about possessing lands and scoring points for that by the use of supernatural powers - the players are representing different creatures - dwarfs, tritons, elves, giants and so on. Personally, I'm not a big fan of monsters and fairytale creatures, however, my second impression on Small World was much better than the first one.

Another game we've tried playing 2 times was Mystery of the Abbey, which I already knew before. In my opinion Mystery is a very interesting game and what makes it even more cool is being based on the book "The Name of Rose" by Umberto Eco. At the beginning each player receives a bunch of cards with names of different monks, while one of the cards remains hidden.
During the game the players are trying to find out which of the monks is the murderer, for example by asking questions to other players. The necessary thing during the game is taking notes about the facts that are already known.
In our case, Daniel didn't take any notes and then kept on refusing to answer questions (yes, it is allowed) or he gave Ela and me some fake answers, which finally lead to getting lost in our investigations. When we've played Mystery of the Abbey for the 2nd time, Daniel was trying to cheat, but luckily, thanks to the special card, Ula got a possibility to exchange cards with him.
Obviously it was annoying to have such a rebel player among us but in the 2nd game somehow it made it more funny and interesting.

Except the board games we've also played 2 games that might be considered as card games. The first game MahJong, is a kind of an Asian equivalent to European cards, was brought to us by Japanese Santa Claus. As I've attended a workshop dedicated to this game few days before Christmas, I already knew what is it all about and after watching 2 videos on youtube we were ready to play. Well, I still need to learn more about MahJong so I'll explain the rules of the game some other time.

Last but definitely not least game was the one widely known as Bohnanza, in Poland named Fasolki (pol. beans). The aim of the game is exchanging cards in all possible ways with other players to be able to plant as many beans as possible and receive the coins for that. There are few kinds of beans, in polish version of the game they are named in polish so I recommend the foreigners eager to learn polish to play Fasolki at least once to learn few useful words. In our case, the winner of the game was Daniel - the only non-Polish speaker.

Corpus Christi in Vila Real

Second weekend of June was a, so called, "long weekend" for everybody thanks to the Corpus Christi holiday that took place on Thursday.
Typical thing about this holiday are processions. In Poland, the processions take place in the morning and everybody treat it very seriously and try to look and behave very elegant. In Portugal it looked more like an evening street parade where firefighters and friends were making a lot of noise with their drums and trumpets.

Meanwhile the community of Vila Real gathered in front of the church as if it was a picnic. In Poland everything is closed during such holidays, in Portugal every supermarket is open just like it was during Easter.

To seize the day, Sena and Filipe called me in the afternoon and we took a ride to Alvão.

It gave us a lesson that my beloved waterfall is hidden in the shadow in the afternoon.

Instead of swimming we went on admiring the views.

In the faraway background - Vila Real.

Queima de Vila Real

Queima das Fitas is a traditional festivity of Portuguese students. The most famous ones take place in Coimbra and Porto. In Vila Real it started last Thursday.

That evening Iva, with a support of Paulina and me, prepared Czech dish called knedliki. She served them with chicken and as a salad prepared cucumbers with yogurth (in polish: mizeria, in turkish: cacık). As you see below we had a big variety of people with different eating habits: a vegetarian, non-pork eaters and also a person who eats mostly junk food. Despite of that, everybody enjoyed the dinner and we have to repeat it!

After having a coffee we've moved to the Camara Municipal - the main square, where crowd of students gathered for the Monumental Serenata. During the Serenata fado and historical songs were performed. However, I was personally positively distracted by the general atmosphere and students dressed in traditional outfits. The picture below shows me and my classmates (from the right: Nelson, Simon, me, Armando and Filipe). As you see, two of them are wearing praxe and two of them not.

Praxe is a traditional outfit of portuguese student and its history reaches 14th century. It consists of a long jacket, trousers, black tie and vest and of the long coat which has many patches on it.

The patches on each student's coat are different. Those that you may see at Armando's coat symbolize his university, his faculty and his favourite football team.

Nelson has a patch of his faculty and many patches of cities that his friends come from. Interesting rule is that the number of patches must be odd (1,3,5,7...101).

Felipe, who studies biochemistry, has not only patches with his country, city or faculty but also favourite bakery, his parents, valentine's day. He told me that it is also common to wear a round black hat with the whole praxe.

Inseparable and main part of Queima are music concerts and even if you are not paying attention to what the band is playing it is still fun. The biggest stars so far this year were Rita Red Shoes and Blasted Mechanism. The week is not over yet!

Easter Holidays in Poland

The polish tradition that my cousins and I enjoy and cultivate is painting eggs for Easter. If somebody has any doubts: we were born in '85, '86 and '87 which means that this is not only practiced by children. It is a significant part of our folklore. These are some of this year's pieces of girls Easter art:

If you want your Easter egg to become brown or orange- boil it in hot water together with dry parts of onion. If you prefer other colors try grass for green or betroots for purple.



Easter basket, which is taken on Saturday to the church to bless the food, usually consists of eggs, bread, sasuage and salt and pepper. This food may be eaten during Sunday breakfast.

If you look carefully at the eggs in the basket below, you may see an egg which looks like a flag of Portugal!

My cousins who turned simple eggs into such colorful "things" are Ela and Ula (for curious people- those short forms of their names come from Elżbieta - like Elisabeth and Urszula - like Ursula). Thanks to them for sending the pictures of eggs! :-*
If you're interested in your wedding's professional photo session, french and vegeterian cuisine or you have any problems from the computer science field they may help you!

Easter Holidays in Portugal

This year's Easter Holidays were different from all the previous ones....
For the first time in my life I didn't spend them with any member of my family. I missed them a lot and it was hard not to imagine what are the doing, what is the weather like where they are and most of all how my cousins painted the eggs and how does the cheese-cake taste this year!
During this year's Easter, one of my AEGEE friends - Sylwia - invited me to join her and her friends. I've arrived to Porto on Saturday noon and met Sylwia at the Bolhão Market. She kept on looking for chives, necessary vegetable for easter dishes, and I took some pictures of the place. The whole market was full of energetic and very convincing ladies trying to sell all kinds of food - fruit, vegetables, meat (including birds in cages) - the air smelled like a mix of fish and... strawberries!

After doing the shopping we still had a lot of time for further exploration of Porto and other side of the Douro river called Vila Nova de Gaia. It is there, where the cellars of famous Port wine are located. The wine is stored there after shipping it on special boats from the vineyards of the Douro Valley. Most of the tourists stop by the first cellars (caves) near the river bank and pay around 4 euros to try Sandeman's wine, while at Croft's they may get a guided tour around the cellar for free.

As soon as Sylwia and I went up the hill to Croft it turned out that we can visit its caves with spanish speaking guide or wait 40 minutes for english one. We've picked the first option, drank some white Port and the tour started. The guide was a lady from Panama and she lead us through the corridors of gigant barrels filled with wine and told about the procedures of making good Port. At the end the guide said that she has never seen such a quiet Spanish group. Well, none of us, neither Scandinavian guys, German girls, Itallian couple, told her the truth. We were just enjoying the second glass of Port...

The activity of wine tasting was very tiring so we went back to Sylwia's flat were her Indian flatmate - Qadir - was preparing Pav Bhaji, a typical dish from his country. It turned out that there is a shop with real Indian spices in Porto, so thanks to that he doesn't miss his mum's cuisine too bad. I've also found out that curry is a european invention. Qadir told me that he discovered what curry is when he left India. Curry is simply a mix of all possible Indian spicies but nobody uses them all together there. We ate Pav Bhaji with bread by the use of our hands. This dish convinced me that vegetarian food can be really tasty. Meanwhile, Qadir was looking forward to his first Easter Holidays!


As soon as the Sunday morning came we started preparing jajka faszerowane (eggs with top-secret filling) for the Easter lunch. Sylwia and I didn't boil eggs for a long time so it was hard to predict when should we take them out of the water. Other parts went without any problems and after approximately one hour the eggs were ready. Sylwia, Qadir and I took a bus and went to join the rest of our compagnions. Each person prepared a different dish, so the Easter table cosisted of: EGGS, chicken soup, 2 kinds of salad, chocolate cake... and a rabbit! At first we thought that rabbit is a typical Easter dish of Portugal but at the end it turned out that it's French. Still, everybody found it exquisite!

After the lunch we took a walk to the nearby ocean side. It was pretty windy but sunny. The Easter food and sun rays made us a bit lazy so we've headed up for a coffee...

Thanks to (from the right) Sylwia, Dorota, Qadir, Aga, Ada, Sara and Piotr, it was unforgetable Easter!