I love this random city.

Yesterday proved that.
My financial aid FINALLY came in full, huzzah! So we celebrated (we being Martina and I) by going to going to Nowa Huta and the steel works!!!
Nowa Huta literally means "New Mill," and some interesting background information of the town is that it is pretty unique, at least in Poland. It was built specifically for being a Communist city, seperate from Krakow, with no churches or anything like that. It was built for the workers of the steel plant. It didn't work out entirely that way, because Poland is very Catholic, and they made their own church outside of town (which is now in town) and it eventually connected to Krakow because of expansion, but it's still a cool place. At first thought, you think, "Built by Communists--hm. A town of block flats and squares? Nice." But in reality, this city is really quite nice. There are parks everywhere, with things growing all over the place and children playing. The main street, Aleja Roz, is the street of roses, and there are roses growing everywhere. It's spacious and airy, and even the blocks (cos they are there) look rather homey. Nowa Huta has quite a bad reputation in Krakow as being unsafe, but one of our guides lives there, and she said it was grossly exaggerated. It was a nice place. Clean.
The steel works were REALLY cool. First of all, they gave us these cool blue jackets, yellow hard hats, and glasses to wear and then told us no cameras were allowed inside at all. They also took our passport numbers to make sure we weren't spies! Anyway. It was really cool. It's like a whole steel city behind their gates. There are about 200 kilometres of roads back there, and there are pipes running every which way around. It's really something to see. We also got to see how they pour the molten steel into molds to make these huge bars. They were still glowing orange when they would come out, and they would be rolled and stacked and then carried onto a train car by a massive hand clamp. The next building we actually got to see molten steel flowing into a little river at the furnace. It was crazy. It was flaming orange and you could feel the heat from metres away. There was this little window we were looking through, and he turned on a bit of the fan or something to show us what happened. Honestly, it was rather strange to see something so absolutely beautiful in an industrial place like that, where we could smell burning metal and inhaled bits of dust the whole time, but this really was. The orange steel flowed over from the left and down into a pool below it that was pulsing and moving around. Everything around it was brown and stained with black, but these little bits of burning metal were zooming around inside looking like little shooting stars. When the worker turned the fan on, they went crazy, the the whole thing was glowing orange and shining and sparkling. The worker seemed just as enthralled as we were. He was speaking passionately as he explained to us what was happening. I couldn't hear a word he said, because it was so loud, but his voice spoke volumes. He was truly proud and excited about his work. So many people look on factory workers as lower, blue-collar people who are poor and probably hate their jobs. That wasn't true with this guy. He was so excited about it. He loved showing us what it was doing. Anyway.
The workers there actually earn pretty well for Poland, which is still nothing for most of the West, so don't keel over. The average Pole makes about 750 Polish zlotys a month. These guys make about 1200, so that's quite good. Still not as good as it should be, but what can you do? At least it is slowly improving.
So, it was cool.
Following that, we visited a church that was incredibly interesting. The architecture was rather post-modernist, which is rather strange for a Catholic church in Poland. As you can see from the above picture, it's not particularly orthodox. :) Very cool though.
After that, we went to Ikea, where I bought a duvet cover and a towel and a few other minor things. It was pretty exciting. Amazing the difference money makes.