Final Hurrah in Poland

Sooo blog updates have been few and far between. But Internet access and desire to sit at computers have been too. So, I'll give a brief overview of what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks.

I think I left off with England...my time in the land of Marmite and English breakfasts was spent mostly a short train ride out of London. I honestly spent a bit more time vacationing than studying (ahem), but I did visit a town called Totnes. Picture the British version of Ithaca, ie smaller, with a cathedral and a craft market run by little old ladies dressed in Elizabethan clothing. And no Ithaca Bakery. But it did have lots of pseudo-hippy intellectuals wandering around with cloth bags full of organic produce. It was a nice town, since I love homebaked bread and raw milk cheese probably more than the average person, but it also has a rather secret side.

Totnes is the home to a movement called Transition Towns, which aims to deal with climate change and peak oil at a local, town level. The movement in Totnes has created a currency used only within the town, does a lot with education about energy efficiency, and may create a community garden or two in the future. However, after finding their office closed, I had a long chat with a wonderful women in the Tourist Info shop. She informed me that the average citizen of Totnes really has nothing to do with the movement, and that it suffers from low participation. Sounds like sustainable movements everywhere...Furthermore, because Totnes is such a desirable place to live, at least for relatively well-off, educated people interested in these sorts of things, housing prices sky-rocketed. Some people now need to have three jobs to live in Totnes, but apparently like living their so much that they do so.

After adventures in England, I moved on to Poland. On the last leg of my journey, I have been on a Heifer International study tour with 5 other Americans, a Heifer group leader, and 3 Heifer Poland staff members. It's a very, very different way of traveling than I've been doing: hotel rooms to myself, planned transportation, arranged meals, siteseeing tours. It's mostly a welcome change, especially as the whole point of the trip is to visit farms that have received animals from Heifer. We've visited lots of families who have gotten cows, horses, or sheep, and have, I think, improved their lives. I love Heifer because they try really hard to be culturally sensitive. We're not rich American tourists oggling at poor Poles...we're interested (fairly rich) people who are interested in agriculture and want to know what these people have done using resources provided by Heifer.

Maybe I'll write a bit more about Poland once I get back- I'm still here, so I'm still processing everything. In any case, my flight back to the US is SUNDAY. But I'll still be backpacking...I'm pretty much flying to Portland, going to a conference, and then attending AmeriCorps camp for two days. Like, sleeping in cabins and having bonfires. And THEN I'll be coming home for a break next Saturday, packing, visiting, not sleeping. Maybe updating.