krakow

saturday was one of my favorite days ever. krakow is one of my favorite places ever. i wish i had more time there. it was so pleasant.

the bus ride to krakow ended up taking about 4 hours longer than it was supposed to because we kept stopping at gas stations and everyone kept getting off the bus. i had bad insomnia the previous night and only got about 2 hours of sleep and then some asshole on the bus decided to put in reservoir dogs at 9am on full volume. the result was that i got about zero minutes of sleep for the entire 12 hours on the bus. but the other result was that i slept like a baby once we got to krakow.

kristen d. and i shared a room, of course, because it was in the stars for us. (by this i mean that had i lived in the dorms, i was supposed to be her roommate.) we're like minded. we both like to sleep and go out about the same amount. we both wanted to sleep. first we watched LOTR that was actually still in English, and wasn't dubbed, but had a voiceover in polish. you know, like when they're translating on the news. it was a little distracting, but i was so tired that i felt intoxicated, and so i didn't care a bit what it sounded like. i was just enjoying the pretty pictures.

the next morning we woke up early for free breakfast and one of zdenek's spectacular walking tours. the old town in krakow was a walled city, so to get to the center of town you have to walk through a gate. when we walked through the gates, there was a long, wide cobblestone road lined with shops and restaurants, street performers, and pretzel stands. it was so suddenly full of life and happiness that i pretty much instantly decided it was one of my favorite streets that i had ever been on.

the town square was just a few minutes down the road. the first building you come to in the square is a catholic church consecrated to the virgin mary. every hour a bugle call sounds from the tower of the church, but is cut off abruptly. the reason for this is that once, when the town was being invaded, a bugler was sounding a warning call from the tower, but was shot in the throat before he could finish it, so now the melody is never concluded. across from the church is a market, where i purchased some amber. and outside of the market is a rotunda (which is a romanesque church) and tons of street vendors and street performers (even in the middle of cold cold winter).

less than 10 minutes walking from the square is a castle. outside the castle is my favorite garden i've ever seen. because it was very cold in krakow, there was snow covering the entire garden. i've decided, though, that krakow is home to my favorite trees i've ever seen, and they look beautiful even when their leafless, and especially when they're covered in snow. the trees in krakow look black against the thick white snow and the bright white snowy sky. they have narrow trunks that burst into a hundred twisted, splaying, black branches about ten to fifteen feet off the ground. there are other trees there too, of course, but there are my favorite ones.

kristen and i returned the garden after zdenek dropped us off in the town square because i spotted a door nestled in some hedges, and became convinced that it was a portal to another world. kristen and i slowly circled closer to the little wooden door and actually heard some distant music that seemed to be emanating from it. so we both became even more convinced that there was a magic world on the other side of it. but i wish we'd stopped there because we made it all the way to the door to find out it was an antique music shop. i suppose that's a pretty nice thing to be in the magic door, but i would've preferred dragons and princesses. oh, they love dragons in poland, by the way. pictures and statues and models of dragons are everywhere! and there is also this strange tradition of putting little statues of pale, creepy looking monks on the streets outside of restaurants.

when we were let off, kristen and i also went first to the catholic church that zdenek told us was a 'must see'. it cost about 30 cents to get inside, so we grudgingly coughed up the money and went in.

!

it was huge!!!!!!!!!! it is famous for the bugle call, but also for it's alter piece, which is gigantic and sort of tacky. the whole place was a little bit tacky, but in a breathtaking way. there was not a single inch of that entire interior that wasn't decorated. there were greens and mauves and sort of subtle blues everywhere. and golds. there were skulls nestled in the remotest corners. there was a portrait of a women with a dagger in her chest and another one of a martyr being shot through with arrows, who was tied to a twisted tree trunk. there were little engravings of weapons (daggers, axes, etc.) all around, and pictures of different babies and old men with halos on their heads. there was a large crucifix and uncomfortable wooden pews, which were mostly empty in the visitor section of the cathedral, and totally full for the worship section. kristen and i sat on the pews for almost a half hour, just looking around in horrified awe. there were skulls hiding behind babies under bleeding jesuses. skulls everwhere! a picture of a crow holding an eyeball in it's beak. it was so full that kristen and i almost missed the GIGANTIC crucifix stretching between the two center walls, way above our heads. it must have been about fifteen feet tall, and about 15-20 feet above our heads, just floating there in between the walls, touching the high gothic ceilings.

while we were sitting there, admiring the grotesque beauty of the cathedral, a group of worshippers started chanting in unison from the back of the cathedral. it felt like a scene from a horror film. it was perfect. now i'm not a big doer of drugs. in fact, i'd say i'm one of the littlest doers of drugs. but i really wanted to be stoned in that church. is this sacrilege?

after the church, kristen and i were too cold to continue on outside. it was fucking cold there. yikes. so we went to an overpriced, posh coffee house full of hot polish guys. polish guys are hot, it turns out. we spent an hour there bonding because krakow is a great place to bond, it turns out. then we walked around some more and started making our way back to the hotel. we saw an open door on the side of the road and, naturally, went in. the noise of the streets instantly fell away, and was replaced with silence and a strange red light. we took some cool pictures and left.

something about the cold weather made us realy want to go swimming, so we put on our bathing suits and went to a water park. actually, i'm not joking. they have an indoor water park in krakow that's open until late at night. and the park has slides adn dragons spitting water out of their mouths and a climbing wall where you drop off and fall into the water and a sauna and steam room and a cool black slide that has flashing colored lights inside so that you feel like you're in that scene at the end of 2001: a space odyssey.

okay. people are waiting for the computer. this is an explanation of my saturday in krakow. sunday was spent at auschwitz, which was less fun, but still an extraordinary experience. i will blog about that sometime later, i think. it was so intense that i couldn't speak or move for hours.

okay okay. i'll go i'll go now.