Of Poland, Czech, and Narnia

"It's over there, just beyond the lamppost"
-Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

When I arrived at the hotel where I am currently staying in Poland, one of the first things pointed out to me was a lamppost. Three of the young women on my team rushed up to the lamppost exclaiming "It's like the lamppost in Narnia!" In reality, the lamppost looked nothing like the light fixture that Lucy found in Narnia, but we spent the next few minutes discussing Narnia and how we wished we could move there. Little did we know how close we actually were to the real Narnia.

Several days later we crossed paths with the lamppost again on our way to a forest that boasted beautiful waterfalls. A feeling of familiarity struck me as we walked through the trees. Somehow the topic of movies came up and one of our Polish friends interjected that we were walking through the forest where The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian was filmed. We were in Narnia!

A Narnian waterfall

Look! Narnia!

After the stumble across Narnia, the travel bug hit us and we decided to go visit another country. The camp we are at is located close to the Czech Republic border, so we decided to hike up a mountain and step foot in Czech. The hike actually turned out to be a ride in a ski lift longer than any I've ever been on. It took us over a half hour to get to the top of the mountain. By the time we reached the top, we were so exhausted that we walked in, took a picture, and got back on the ski lift to go back down.

On the ski lift. I'm the one in the background sticking my tongue out...

Finally, I suppose I should mention that the English camps that I am filming are going super well. I'm getting great footage and it is so neat to see how God is working through us to impact the people of Poland. Thank you all for praying for me! As you can tell, I am enjoying myself - which is a huge praise as I was not excited whatsoever to go on this trip. Little did I know that I was about to go to Narnia.

Pożegnanie!
-Matthias

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The Incredible Shrinking Pants

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-Anais Nin

In honor of the fact that my family will return from Romania in exactly two weeks, I have decided to uncover a peculiar phenomenon that, as far as I know, has never been brought into light. It's called The Incredible Shrinking Pants.

Throughout my travels in Europe, I have bought clothes. Of course, the clothes that I bought fit wonderfully on my body in the European dressing rooms. As would be expected, I brought the clothes back to the United States with me in my suitcase. This is when the phenomenon occurs. You see, instead of  the clothes getting bigger (as one would expect, everything is bigger in the US) the clothes actually get smaller. It's not an immediate thing, it sort of happens over a period of time. One doesn't notice it happening, until one day, that fateful day, it all becomes clear: clothes from Europe are designed to shrink when taken outside of European borders.

Today was that day for me.

I must say, I'm rather perplexed as to how it happens. I'm thinking about it quite hard as I sit here and eat my nightly snack of Oreos and ice cream. How does one design clothes to shrink?! I mean, if that method could be successfully figured out by American designers, it would cause a revolution in the fashion industry! It'd be motivation for people to lose weight! 'Buy this shirt and lose 10 pounds in 5 weeks! If you don't, the shirt simply won't fit leaving you without anything to wear!'

Hmmm.
-Matthias

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Finals Week

"I have never let schooling interfere with my education."
- Mark Twain

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a list of goals. I tend to write lists of goals whenever I know something needs to be done but don't feel like doing it. List writing is a great way to get the warm feeling of productivity without actually being productive. One can proudly flaunt off the list to friends and watch them think "he made a list, that means he's productive...I wish I could write lists like that." Sadly, what no one knows about my lists is that they typically don't get done. For example, my list last night had four simple things on it:

Goals:
Bed @ 10:00
Movie @ 8:00
Study Until 8:00
Eat Well @ Supper

One can begin to see where I went wrong just by looking at the chronological order of my list. Observe my priorities - Bed, Entertainment, Studying, Food. Here's the lowdown on how my list helped me through my day.

Bed.
Promptly after writing my list, I sat down on the immensely comfortable futon and absentmindedly popped open a caffeinated beverage. When I crawled into bed at 10:30 last night, I felt rather proud of myself. I had basically accomplished my goal (my goals contain lots of room for interpretation - 10:00 actually means somewhere after 10:00 but before 11:00). Sadly, the caffeine in the beverage I had enjoyed hours earlier decided to act up right then. I didn't sleep until 11:30.

Movie.
Ha. It's finals week. Movie didn't happen.

Study.
Thankfully, I did actually study yesterday, but it was a sort of a distracted studying. I was too busy contemplating the taste of my caffeinated beverage to really pay attention to how Western Civilization has progressed throughout the past five centuries. (Did you know that in blindfolded tests people are completely unable to differentiate between different carbonated beverages? Sprite, Coke, Pepsi - no one can tell the difference when blindfolded. Interesting...)

Eating Well.
I didn't eat supper. I had popcorn.

Welcome to Finals week. I'm not entirely sure why I'm blogging right now. I think I'll go write a list.
-Matthias

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