While all the "native speaking" teachers for my school are being housed in the city of Radom, the school has branches in several of the smaller towns nearby. There is a town with the largest coal power plant in Europe, and a town with a glue factory, and they give us lots of business. So we go to them.

If you're teaching in one of these smaller towns tonight, a local teacher who is also teaching there will come by in her car to pick you up, and then will bring you home after school.

I teach 3 nights in Kozienice which is 40-ish km away, 1 night in Pionki which is 25-ish km away, and Friday night in my city of Radom (5 blocks from my house).

Pionki is on the way to Kozienice, and to get to either you go through parts of a National Forest, which the residents just call "the forest". (Sounds like a name M. Night Shyamalan might want to copyright. Oh wait, did he already do that one??)

Driving through the forest feels like parts of Western NC and Eastern TN, where they do a lot of logging, only it's totally flat. While you're in the forest, all mobile communication drops. There are moose in the forest, only rarely spotted... and wild boar which is more prevalent. Also deer.

Sometimes on the way home we drop a teacher off at her house in the forest -- her father's The Forest Ranger. The first night we dropped her we turned off the paved road onto a dirt road and just kept driving and driving. It got darker and darker and the trees closer and closer. I thought we were going to see Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Grannie's.