Poland – Szczecin I spent my summer exchange in Szczecin in Poland. This city is localized in the norht- west part of the country. It is approximately one hour far from the Baltic sea and two hours far from the capital city of the Germany, Berlín. So you have a great opportunity to take trip to thess two points as a one day trip or whole weekend adventure. I visited Szczecin during the July. I can tell that wheater there was very warm for the first days of the stay, but then it went bad and it was rainy and cloudy majority of the days for the rest of the stay. My contact person was very nice and she took care of me for the first week of the stay. She picked me up, showed me a city – the best places, where to eat or take the most delicious homemade ice cream and she introduced me to departmet in hospital. She also helped me with monthly ticket for the public transport, what was really good choice to buy cause I needed to travel to my hospital every morning for about 25 minutes, but there was a direct bus and stop near the dorms so that was no problem to get to the hospital. I got the student price so it costs only about 15 euros. I took part in the department of neurology. I was assigned to one doctor, who communicated with me in english, but I had little advantage cause Slovak language is similar to Polish language so I could unsterstand the majority of what patient were saying so there was no need to translate me everything about patient during the morning rounds. My doctor was really nice, kind and smart and she thaught me how to examine neurological patient properly and she also explained me diagnostic process and treatment of every patient as well. I really enjoyed being in hospital with her and other doctors as well. Hospital was really nice, clean and in good state, I guess it was repaid not so long ago. In Szczecin, we were group of the 15 students. Every week we had some dinner together that was organised by local students for us. We lived together at the dorms. Each of us had own room and we shared only bathroom and little kitchen with each other. We had no cantine at the dorms so each day one of the local student brought us food to the kitchen at the dorms, there was shared bigger kitchen which was at the each floor. So you could eat there or took it to the room with you. In Poland there is a project called NICE project. With this project you can visit well known cities in Poland, Wroclaw and Gdansk. It is organised as weekend trip and you need to register for it before the start of the exchange. Points of the project are : to visit cites, get to know some history of Poland and to meet another exchange students from another cities that are in the same time in Poland. I took part of the trip in Gdansk. And I need to highly recomend to go there. First of all it is beautiful historic city, with port and secondly it is great opportunity to meet another students, get closer with students from your own group and have some fun at the parties all together. For me it was a wonderful weekend and we created beautiful memories. Except of the Gdansk, we also visited Sopot and Poznan together. And I spent weekend in the Berlin by myself also. In Poland you need to try their national food called pierogi, which you can have in a sweet and salty variant. There are two national drinks, one is called Soplica, it is avaliable with different tastes, the hazelnut one is used to drink with milk. It can sound strange and weird, but it tastes really good as a sweet. Second one is a Zubrowka and it is very similar to vodka. I really like the national drinking and eating party, where we prepared our national foods and drinks . We also brought some sweets and candies from our countries. It was evening with so many different tastes and all of us enjoyed this event. I am happy that I took opportunity to go to exchange in Poland. It was great time, I learned a lots of practical knowledge in hospital, I met interesting people and we also learned some facts about our countries trough sharing our knowledge and experencies with eat other. I also guess this exchange helped me a lot with the communication skills in English language. So I can only recommend it to other students who are thinking about going to Poland. Katarína Liptáková
