Europe - Part III - Is so belated.
Okay, okay, so I'm still alive. You got me. Life has been crazy these past two months - crazy enough that I'm shocked it's been that long, staring at the calendar in disbelief like a girl whose period is three weeks late. But before I can allow myself to discourse at any length on such craziness, I feel it is my duty to complete my Europe posts - not for your benefit, as I very much doubt that any of you still care, but because someday I may want some more expressive record than simple images can allow. Truth be told, I have much of Krakow already written up, so whatever I have there is what's going down. For the rest of Poland, I will do what I am able to restrict myself by the dreaded manacles of brevity, in hopes that I can soon provide you a real post, residing more closely within real time.
KRAKOW
The short version of the beginning of this story goes thus: our train ride from Budapest, rather than taking ten hours, took twenty.
We had a sleeper car, so we spent much of this time stacked three people high with some two feet of clearance above. When we were not playing at being Japanese or sardines, we were clambering into and out of these bunks, which admittedly provided me with at minimum an undue amount of amusement. We had plenty of opportunity to do this, too, because shit kept going down.
Some examples of shit which went down:
Ultimately, we did survive the numerous trials of the railway and arrived in Krakow. It was essentially as I remembered it: a city. It was also fairly awesome. One reason for this is that one can eat a solid dinner for $2.00 with little trouble, provided that one enjoys pierogi, and why the fuck would one not? I mean, considering that they're delicious. One can also eat poppy seed cake for breakfast, and you'd better believe we did. My only regret is that I do not have these things before me as I write - but such is the nature of poppy seeds, as transient as time itself.
We stayed in an excellent guesthouse which made an admirable attempt at being called the Globetrotter, but this fell apart somewhere around the fifth letter and initiated a downward spiral from there. The result was "Globtroter," but which globs specifically it purported to trote we never did discover. As in Prague and Budapest, we were in the very midst of the Old Town, which was more old than it was a town in its own right. We found ourselves living a mere block from Old Town Square, and this boasted no less than a clock tower, a 14th century market hall, and a brick cathedral. Rather a famous one, really, so we were forced once more to venture beneath the baleful gaze of the Catholic god. We emerged thankfully unsmitten. The market hall is now filled unto overflowing with tourist items, so that we obtained amber for those who required it and a "Polska" shirt to indicate Maddy's new honorary nationality.
Krakow also has an excellent castle, you may have heard, and this too we were able to confirm. The interior we could not photograph, for the Poles jealously guard its secrets, gripping the palace on Wawel Hill as one might a treasured bauble. We were able to get the exteriors and sneak a shot of this rather large sword.
In the evenings, we ate more cake, listened to more jazz, and gave up on hoping to use any of our ballroom skills (i.e., foxtrot) at a jazz club, since people apparently do not enjoy dancing at those. Instead we changed to a new tack of attempting to find a Latin club, because those sometimes do involve dancing. We actually briefly considered adapting the fairly versatile rumba to whatever the kids are listening to these days, but this quickly failed because it turns out they are listening to crap. In any event, on our last night we finally succeeded at the Latin business, stumbling into a dark cellar flooded with rhythms, much as Watson must have stumbled upon Livingston, or Perceval upon the Grail.
The natives, however, had a particular dance favoured within their tribe - the salsa - and proved intolerant to any encroachment of our foreign ways. Our conquest having gone no further than a humble corner of the dance floor, they began to forcefully resist our apparent imperialistic aims. When we were bumped into five times during the course of one song, we began to understand that we were dancing in hostile territory - that our every step may as well have been the report of a cannon, every gyration of our hips a fresh declaration of war. Despite the growing threat of bodily harm, we persevered, the bartender happily steeling our resolve with some of the most delicious drinks we are likely to ever encounter - we suspect that he, too, had no great love for the salsaists. But even given this formidable armor, in time our foes' strength proved too great for mortal flesh. We had in the end to beat a tactical retreat, slipping off under cover of night to reground and await more favorable conditions. As one might have foreseen, these did not present themselves at any point prior to our departure the following morning, so this conflict must remain undecided until next we visit Krakow.
We then stayed for some days with family friends in Jelenia Gora, near the Karkonosze Mountains, and there was some hiking. The other entities there are Basia and Ela, both of whom are involved in dark secrets which I am unable to discuss here - while Basia is herself dark. The dog is dark too, actually, but I am not privy to any secrets that Rufus holds. At one point my hair exploded, and at another there was a church.
Afterward, we spent the rest of the trip with my grandparents, et. al. My grandfather has recently finished building this house with his bare hands, which took him some eleven years. The form crouched ominously before the house is my grandmother's, who here can be seen demonstrating an expression of "WTFski?" There was also my miniature cousin, a miniature bouquet, and the remainder of a family. As you may have noticed, the house is surrounded by gardens, in which the grandparents are continually working, for lack of anything better to do (save to cook us more, even better Polish food). We therefore became extremely busy relaxing, and practiced this until we were veritable experts in the field.
Which leads me to my next topic of fields and forests. These are what surrounds the small settlement in which my family lives, so when we were not lazing around as noted above, we were exploring the many miles yet untouched by man. We tried to touch as many as possible, just to stick it to them. We discovered many things; a watchtower presumably erected by bears, a mysterious pond surrounded by wild blackberries, a road that led from a small town straight into thick undergrowth, a fly constituted entirely from butter, some more fields and tall grasses, a hoard of wild blueberries which we gathered and ate with cream. Maddy also ate this snail, because it had the gall to sit atop her white currant. Those of you acquainted with my penchant for constructing towers will be pleased to find that it continues unabated - even when the individual components of my spires weigh significantly more than I do, and must be leveraged from the ground through a complex interaction of vector analysis and brute strength.
Sometimes we replaced feet with wheels, and this often occurred at high velocity, while we stared at cameras ominously. We actually got mired at one point in a muddy wasteland whose navigation required extreme motocross-style hijinks, particularly when negotiating a 45-degree hill of mud littered with shattered tree trunks. Once past the obstacle, we found ourselves lost and probably unable to go back up it, whereon we had to forge a way home through the uncharted, cougar-ridden wilderness. (We survived.)
And that was approximately that! We flew home through Amsterdam, which has the single greatest airport in the world. It consists of little but black pools of rippling water, bars, and gadget shops. Such a superabundance of fountains, liquor, and electronics proved nearly sufficient to overwhelm my senses, and I plan to arrange layovers there as frequently as possible - perhaps even for flights within the continental U.S.
KRAKOW
The short version of the beginning of this story goes thus: our train ride from Budapest, rather than taking ten hours, took twenty.
We had a sleeper car, so we spent much of this time stacked three people high with some two feet of clearance above. When we were not playing at being Japanese or sardines, we were clambering into and out of these bunks, which admittedly provided me with at minimum an undue amount of amusement. We had plenty of opportunity to do this, too, because shit kept going down.
Some examples of shit which went down:
- Two passengers getting off the train for a cigarette during a 13-minute stop, only to find that the stop was not actually for 13 minutes, but rather for no time at all. They realized this around the time that the train pulled out of the station without them, but with all their worldly belongings and passports, at which point they were utterly alone in the middle of a Hungarian wasteland, and they wept. Through some complex arrangement between their friends on the train, the conductor, a Polish-Hungarian-English-speaking fellow in our cabin, and some Hungarians he happened to know in the countryside, they were given a ride and jumped back onto the train from an overpass, in a daring but necessary stunt.
- The train for which we were supposed to have waited for 13 minutes to link up with being five hours late, which we ended up waiting in a different middle of nowhere.
- Mysterious delays of several more hours.
- Our being told that there was no food on the train, the opposite assumption having provided the basis for our bringing none whatsoever. Maddy was actually in the process of stealing food from a railroad official's private cupboard before I discovered a way for us to purchase the very same snacks she had been pilfering. It took me a number of frantic hand motions to remove her from that cornucopia of salvation as the conductor approached, the harsh life of a gypsy having rendered her stubborn and desperate.
Ultimately, we did survive the numerous trials of the railway and arrived in Krakow. It was essentially as I remembered it: a city. It was also fairly awesome. One reason for this is that one can eat a solid dinner for $2.00 with little trouble, provided that one enjoys pierogi, and why the fuck would one not? I mean, considering that they're delicious. One can also eat poppy seed cake for breakfast, and you'd better believe we did. My only regret is that I do not have these things before me as I write - but such is the nature of poppy seeds, as transient as time itself.
We stayed in an excellent guesthouse which made an admirable attempt at being called the Globetrotter, but this fell apart somewhere around the fifth letter and initiated a downward spiral from there. The result was "Globtroter," but which globs specifically it purported to trote we never did discover. As in Prague and Budapest, we were in the very midst of the Old Town, which was more old than it was a town in its own right. We found ourselves living a mere block from Old Town Square, and this boasted no less than a clock tower, a 14th century market hall, and a brick cathedral. Rather a famous one, really, so we were forced once more to venture beneath the baleful gaze of the Catholic god. We emerged thankfully unsmitten. The market hall is now filled unto overflowing with tourist items, so that we obtained amber for those who required it and a "Polska" shirt to indicate Maddy's new honorary nationality.
Krakow also has an excellent castle, you may have heard, and this too we were able to confirm. The interior we could not photograph, for the Poles jealously guard its secrets, gripping the palace on Wawel Hill as one might a treasured bauble. We were able to get the exteriors and sneak a shot of this rather large sword.
In the evenings, we ate more cake, listened to more jazz, and gave up on hoping to use any of our ballroom skills (i.e., foxtrot) at a jazz club, since people apparently do not enjoy dancing at those. Instead we changed to a new tack of attempting to find a Latin club, because those sometimes do involve dancing. We actually briefly considered adapting the fairly versatile rumba to whatever the kids are listening to these days, but this quickly failed because it turns out they are listening to crap. In any event, on our last night we finally succeeded at the Latin business, stumbling into a dark cellar flooded with rhythms, much as Watson must have stumbled upon Livingston, or Perceval upon the Grail.
The natives, however, had a particular dance favoured within their tribe - the salsa - and proved intolerant to any encroachment of our foreign ways. Our conquest having gone no further than a humble corner of the dance floor, they began to forcefully resist our apparent imperialistic aims. When we were bumped into five times during the course of one song, we began to understand that we were dancing in hostile territory - that our every step may as well have been the report of a cannon, every gyration of our hips a fresh declaration of war. Despite the growing threat of bodily harm, we persevered, the bartender happily steeling our resolve with some of the most delicious drinks we are likely to ever encounter - we suspect that he, too, had no great love for the salsaists. But even given this formidable armor, in time our foes' strength proved too great for mortal flesh. We had in the end to beat a tactical retreat, slipping off under cover of night to reground and await more favorable conditions. As one might have foreseen, these did not present themselves at any point prior to our departure the following morning, so this conflict must remain undecided until next we visit Krakow.
We then stayed for some days with family friends in Jelenia Gora, near the Karkonosze Mountains, and there was some hiking. The other entities there are Basia and Ela, both of whom are involved in dark secrets which I am unable to discuss here - while Basia is herself dark. The dog is dark too, actually, but I am not privy to any secrets that Rufus holds. At one point my hair exploded, and at another there was a church.
Afterward, we spent the rest of the trip with my grandparents, et. al. My grandfather has recently finished building this house with his bare hands, which took him some eleven years. The form crouched ominously before the house is my grandmother's, who here can be seen demonstrating an expression of "WTFski?" There was also my miniature cousin, a miniature bouquet, and the remainder of a family. As you may have noticed, the house is surrounded by gardens, in which the grandparents are continually working, for lack of anything better to do (save to cook us more, even better Polish food). We therefore became extremely busy relaxing, and practiced this until we were veritable experts in the field.
Which leads me to my next topic of fields and forests. These are what surrounds the small settlement in which my family lives, so when we were not lazing around as noted above, we were exploring the many miles yet untouched by man. We tried to touch as many as possible, just to stick it to them. We discovered many things; a watchtower presumably erected by bears, a mysterious pond surrounded by wild blackberries, a road that led from a small town straight into thick undergrowth, a fly constituted entirely from butter, some more fields and tall grasses, a hoard of wild blueberries which we gathered and ate with cream. Maddy also ate this snail, because it had the gall to sit atop her white currant. Those of you acquainted with my penchant for constructing towers will be pleased to find that it continues unabated - even when the individual components of my spires weigh significantly more than I do, and must be leveraged from the ground through a complex interaction of vector analysis and brute strength.
Sometimes we replaced feet with wheels, and this often occurred at high velocity, while we stared at cameras ominously. We actually got mired at one point in a muddy wasteland whose navigation required extreme motocross-style hijinks, particularly when negotiating a 45-degree hill of mud littered with shattered tree trunks. Once past the obstacle, we found ourselves lost and probably unable to go back up it, whereon we had to forge a way home through the uncharted, cougar-ridden wilderness. (We survived.)
And that was approximately that! We flew home through Amsterdam, which has the single greatest airport in the world. It consists of little but black pools of rippling water, bars, and gadget shops. Such a superabundance of fountains, liquor, and electronics proved nearly sufficient to overwhelm my senses, and I plan to arrange layovers there as frequently as possible - perhaps even for flights within the continental U.S.