Post 19, in which I show a little Krakow

Pronounced Crack-oof, with the emphasis on the first syllable. (or the second-to-last, if you want to apply the rule generally)

What overindulgent, sickeningly western joy, to take a weekend off from grading papers for a visit to the big city! T-shirt; and Indian food; and even English novels! All can be had, for a price, in the debauched western city of Krakow!

Here's a brief summary of what we did:

Ate bagels with lox and cream cheese.

Ate a burrito.

Ate chips with salsa.

Ate a kebab (horrible).

Ate palak paneer.

Ate Chinese food (also, unfortunately, horrible).

Drank drip coffee (miraculously wonderful!!!! And I arrived back at the office to find that equally miraculous colleague Bartek has given me my very own espresso maker. Bliss!)

These are all things that cannot be bought in Chelm.

We spoke to other Native English Speakers!!!! I'd almost forgotten how annoying drunk American tourists can be. Luckily, there were enough of them in the hostel to remind me.

We walked around Poland's most prestigious mall (hence the t-shirts).

We sat in the sun and drank beer in the market square, overlooking other tourists and the historical "cloth house".

We went to the Wieliczka salt mines--300 km of rock salt tunnels that have been hollowed out since the middle ages, including such wonders as an entire cathedral, dozens of smaller churches (this being Poland, after all), a restaurant, many many sculptures, underground lakes, and so on. Extremely cool, though our guide sounded unimpressed.

We toured the castle, though maybe Palm Sunday wasn't the best day to pick to look at the cathedral. I got about a foot from the door, and was stopped by a mass of people holding hideous bunches of dried flowers, and the obligatory palms.

Do all old Poles look like this?

Palm Sunday

We played some pool.

We went to a museum dedicated to a mysterious cult of hunters who worship a silver chicken. We saw the chicken. The museum mostly consisted of the chicken, and a lot of paintings and photographs of famous people holding the chicken. Apparently, our president is an honorary member of the cult.

The Chicken

We went to a bookstore in which all of the books were in English.

Sunset, behind the bizarre manmade hillock