What's Krakow-lackin'?

And I thought Berlin was old and Eastern European? Verily, Poland showed me the error of my ways.

After 4 days (3 days for most people. The earlier flight made a difference of a few hundred dollars) in Berlin, we boarded ourselves onto a fancy-pants charter bus for about 8 hours to Krakow. The drive was absolutely gorgeous, and the bus ride was a nice homage to the orchestra trips I've been jonesing for since 2006. Also! The music on the radio! It was SO cool to hear the transition from Germany to Poland: badtechnobadtechnobadtechnoDISCObadtechnoAMERICAN HITS OF THE 1990'sbadtechno... It was rad. Rad in that we heard three different Cher songs in the span of a few hours.

Our big group was split up into three hotels , and I got Hotel Europejsky, apparently the nicest one. It totally had free wireless, and I so took advantage of that fact, especially since it was the first chance I'd gotten to check emails and f-book and everything without having to pay at least two Euros an hour. Sa-weet. Oh! Oh! Also! I think our hotel was in the Red Light district, because every two feet or so, there was a sign that said like "SEXY DANCE" or something like that in bold letters.

There was a walking tour of the city, which was quite pretty, and actually old, versus Berlin's depressing faux-antiquity. We went Wawelly Castle, this gorgeously preserved 11th-century castle near the square in the middle of town. We also went to Jagellonian University (also called Collegium Maius), which is where Copernicus supposedly went to school.

Later that afternoon, we drove a couple hours outside of town to Auschwitz. And. Yeah. I couldn't try to describe it. I don't have any pictures.



They took us to dinner at a very traditional Polish restaurant, and we ate like Vikings. Hell of sausage, hell of potatoes, really weird pierogies with sour cherries in the middle with the pits still in 'em. AND free beer. Apparently some Gonzaga-in-Florence Alum somewhere had called the restaurant ahead of time and bought us all a round. Dziękuję, Alumni Joe. Wherever you are.

The next day, we went to the Salt Mine, which, while it sounds like sort of a lame excursion, was surprisingly cool, if not a bit touristed-out. There was a freaking restaurant and bar down there. Our tour guide had had her high school prom there. Wtf? Didn't stop me from making Moria references the whole way there and back, though. That, or assertions that Man-Bear-Pig was real. I'm super-serial.

There was some Krakow-related festival going on that night as well, but other than watching little kids ballroom dance, there wasn't really anything of much interest, and we instead ducked out in search of a hookah bar and more delectable kebabs.

Krakow'd!

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Writing in my journal on various park benches in East Berlin, it took me three days to finally get to the part where I'd actually gotten off the plane. If that's some indication of how much stuff was crammed into the week preceding September 5th. More likely, it was significantly more comfortable to stuff my head into a week spent at home, rather than the one that was going on in real-time. I'll spare you those three days' worth, though.

So, Departures: Spokane-Seattle, Seattle-London, London-Berlin

East Berlin was weirdly more Eastern than I'd expected. Not that I know what Eastern European means, specifically, but there you go. Also, I was unaware we'd booked rooms in one of the TALLEST BUILDINGS IN BERLIN. The Park Inn Hotel could've been seen for miles. If you got lost, you could look up and find your hotel. If that wasn't enough of an indication, you could just look for the disco-ball-on-a-stick tv-tower straining uselessly upward, some former symbol of Russian ingenuity.

Each of the 117 Gonzaga students made full use of their respective feelings of isolation, the assertion that summer vacation wasn't over yet, as well as the liberal open-container laws, all in one fell, 80-proof swoop. So that's Berlin.

No, not really. We toured the city, went to a few museums, saw The Wall & Checkpoint Charlie, but our tour guide mentioned more than once the fact that it's still standing only because so many tourists pay to take pictures in front of it. She also said never to trust an old building in Berlin, because odds are, it's been flattened and rebuilt within the last 50 years (Sidenote: So far removed from it in the States, it's easy to forget how huge of an effect WWII had. Here, and everywhere I've been in Europe so far, the effects of history, both positive and negative, are actually visible. I like that).

Berlin has some truly bizarre urban artwork, and, vastly different from your standard gang-tagging, the graffiti there is pretty excellent. Case in point: next to this enormous metallic robot-frog-man thing made of spare car parts, was the ridiculously enigmatic phrase "THE FUTURE WILL EAT ITSELF". Hell if I know what it means, but somebody thought it was deep enough to stencil onto the wall in spray-paint. So I'm keeping it.

Also, something I can't stress enough is the beauty that is street-vendor food. If someone by the side of the road ever offers you a one-euro schnitzel, TAKE IT, do you understand me? Also, I think the equivalent of the taco-truck is the kebab shop. Again, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that you consume that bad boy right quick. That's my most important revelation about Europe as a whole, I think. Schnitzel. Kebabs. Do it.

On to Krakow.

Fly

So, it's been a month now, since leaving Spokane. Feels like more than that.

Last summer is an entire Atlantic Ocean away, and I haven't told you a damn thing about this fall yet.

Can I fix that?