the twisting road to Poznań

What can one expect to see in the first post in a freshly created blog like mine? I struggled with the same dilemma, and finaly took the advice of our teacher, which was to write about how we got to Poznań in the first place. So here's the story:
Looking back at how I ended up in KJO in Poznań, I cannot escape the impression that I was - maybe I've been - lucky, at least to some degree. This luck largely boils down to the fact that I could have as well ended up like most of my classmates working in ... a woodchuck in my one-horse town of Barlinek but for one significant event. This groundbreaking event was me buying myself a games console...
That may not seem as a very auspicious start to my "career", but the consequent events truly lead on to it. Just imagine that at that time all the games launched for PSX were in English - and many others, except for Polish of course. I used to get ballistic at that very fact, blaming my lagging country. In the end though, it turned out quite alright, if not much better. What it actually led on to was my fascination with one particular game, Vagrant Story, an RPG set in the Middle Ages. The whole scenario seemed to me so enthralling that, on the spur of the moment, I set about the task of translating all the dialogues. No computer, no decent dictionary (just one that remembered Hitler probably:), no reliable knowlegde of English to start with, but I set off. It took much effort, arduous work and excrutiating pain (I'm hyping it up), but I finished it - 48 A4 pages, and sent it to a video-game magazine PSX Extreme. And I got a notice in the RPG corner!: "I warn against such acts of madness - I'd sooner pop up the clogs than finished typing it. So I'll be happy to use the work as tinder," the editor wrote. But still I toughed it out and got my satisfaction. This was in the 2nd grade of high school, and soon after I signed up for a course of English...
What happened later can be easily predicted. Suffice it to say that soon after joining the course, I made a resolution to win the following year's in-school competition of English, and I won it (my first monolingual dictionary as the prize). With my confidence boosted all the way, I persevered, passed my written matura of English with flying colors and off to entry exams to KJO in Gorzów Wlkp. First year passed, and then I changed schools for personal reasons and eventually landed in Poznań. You can piece together the rest of the story yourselves...
I wrote at the beginning that I consider myself lucky, not in the sense that I slacked and a lenient teacher let me through the exams - not at all. I was lucky because I wasn't far from overlooking my uhmm...talent maybe... and getting stuck in that jerkwater town for good, with no perspectives whatsoever. I've seen my mates do it, and I can't imagine now my life being like theirs. Yet, I did it, and I'm here now. Lucky me:)