So, I was in Krakow this weekend. I was pretty cool, although there were tourists EVERYWHERE! I'm running into more trouble updating my blog now, too, as the internet to my dorm room has been turned off indefinitely, as it is now summer, and so the Polish students are all home, apparently Joey and I are now 2 of the mere 4 residents of our entire dorm building. So, Friday I left Lodz around 4 and got into Krakow roughly 4.5 hours later, by this time of night, there wasnt really a whole lot to do, other than make my way to my hostel and take a shower (it was hot and humid all weekend, and trains aren't air-conditioned, making train rides in the ummer rather sticky). After that I met a bunch of crazy Irish guys from my hostel in the common room and we went out to a bar for a bit. I didn't stay out too late, wanting to get up relatively early Saturday to pack as much stuff into the day as I could. It's a good thing I did, too, since there's a lot to see in this city. Most of what I did Saturday was to go to the Royal Castle, Wawel, and wander around here. Krakow was the capital of Poland for about 500 years, through the middle ages, and so the city has a LOT of history. Also, unlike almost everywhere else that I've been, Krakow managed to emerge from WWII nearly unscathed, and so the old buildings really are old. I think that some sort of castle structure has existed on Wawel hill since the 13th century or so, in it's current state, there's a pretty impressive royal residence and an equally impressive church where there are literally of Polish royalty buried.



Here's the church, I climbed up to the bell tower where the largest bell in Poland is, apparently it weighs something like 8 tons, which is a lot of metal. It takes like 6 strong men to ring, the climb up was interesting too, because there were some points where i would've sworn I wasn't going to make it through the holes in the wooden internal frame - they were so small!



Ya, a big bell. I also went down to the crypt, where I found this creepy tomb.



I'm hoping that's not a real skull....creepy



Here's the royal palace portion, unfortunately there were no pictures allowed inside, but it was pretty cool, there was a chest that had a key that was literally 4 feet long, with a head that was at least 6 inches square, it was huge, and must've weighed a ton. Also, there's an interesting tunnel leading from the castle down to the shore of the Vistula where there's a statue of a dragon which is a symbol of Krakow, as a legendary dragon lived under the castle and was defeated by an early polish king.



Here's the crazy statue

After hanging out at the castle I headed towards the town square, the largest in Europe, apparently.



This is an impressive sight, to be sure, although the square isn't as full as those in Wroclaw or Poznan, it's still impressive, the large building running down the middle of the square is the cloth hall, a large marketplace past and present, here's a picture inside:



The other prominent building on the square is the town hall tower, which is all the remains of the town hall which was disassembled in the 19th century sometime...I think.

The square itself is pretty impressive though, between it's gargantuan size, and the sheer number of people and street performers there, there was one guy with an Elvis marionette who played along to music, it was pretty impressive really. There's also a church on the square that is amazing inside, again no pictures, but I did climb to the top of the tower.



Here's the church



There's Wawel from the top of the tower. They have this thing where, apparently forever, on the hour every hour, a bugler plays the city's signature song from all four sides of the tower, and I just happened to be there at the top of the hour, so here's a picture of the bugler.



After this, from the heat and walking around all day, I was ready to head back to my hostel and collapse, which I did. Later Saturday night, however, I went to the 3rd-place World Cup game with a couple of Finnish travellers who I met at the hostel, they were really cool, and it was fun watching Germany whallop Portugal, it's always nice when the home team wins.

Friday, I went on a tour of the Wielicka Salt Mine, about 20 minutes out of Krakow, this is an impressive place to be sure! This mine was the longest-running mining operation in the world, mining started here in the 13th century and went until sometime in the 1990's. Until 1910 or so, all mining was done by hand, with no explosives of drills, and all interior supports are made of wood, apparently totalling 1 million cubic meters of wood, supporting over 200 km of tunnels. Some of the caverns were amazing, like this one:



This is an underground church which was the hand-work (literally) of 3 men over the course of 70 years, a father, a son, and a third man, everything in the room, down to the chandeliers is made of salt or rock salt. The thing is just huge. Another cavern at the end of the tour route was the site of a Guinness World Record for the first ever underground bungee jumping, the room is over 100 feet tall, from top to bottom, and again was entirely hand-carved. There's even a place where there used to be underground boat rides until during WWII, some drunk Austrian soldiers capsized the boat, and then died, not of drowning, but of suffocation, floating under the over-turned boat, they were unable to swim under, being so buoyant in the super-salinated water of the underground lake.



There are a lot of other pictures in my scrapbook, unfortunately most didn't turn out too well, as my camera does not deal well with low lighting conditions, and flash in the dark makes for ugly pictures. After my tour, which by the way was gloriously cool, being underground the whole time, coming back to the surface was flooring to say the least, it was so hot that once I got back to Krakow, I immediately went back to the hostel to take a short siesta, wafter which I returned to the town square for some dinner and to wander around for a while. Later I met back up with my Finnish friends to go to see the finals of the World Cup, a close game where Italy barely prevailed in a shootout at the end, much to the satisfaction of many Poles, who apparently don't like French people (I don't think many Europeans do). Finally, today I went on a walking tour of the old Jewish quarter of Krakow in the suburb of Kazimierz where Schindler's List was filmed (and where the historical events took place). We saw Schindler's Factory:



Along with a somewhat unsettling monument to the 80,000 Jews who died in, or after leaving, the Krakow ghetto:



80 empty chairs, each symbolizing 1,000 victims. The tour was interesting, and our guide had lots to say. Afterwards I went and got some lunch, headed back to the hostel to collect my bags, and then caught my train home, and here I am! Tune in next weekend for the Torun adventure!

So, I'm not gonna write a whole lot, but Joey and I just got back from our weekend in Gdansk. This morning we woke up early, checked out of our hostel, went to the train station, left our bags there, and caught a train to Malbork - about 30 miles from Gdansk, 45 minutes by train - the only thing in this small town of any note is a castle. This, however, isn't any castle. The castle at Malbork, called Marienburg, was the administrative center of the Teutonic Knights, a group from the crusade, who continued their crusade after they were expelled from the Middle East by attacking and "Christianizing" the pagan people of Central Europe. At one point, they held their own independent state in what is now Poland, and the Polish kings didn't dare try to expell them, knowing that they would lose any battle that they started. These people were some sort of strange combination of monk and knight, and had some very strange traditions, but were one of the most powerful groups in medieval central Europe. At any rate, the castle that they built here is now one of, if not the, largest Gothic Castle in the world, and believe me the thing's huge. It was really cool, possibly my favorite single sight since I got to Europe. I think that's about all I have to say about it, to be honest, however, so here are some pictures:





One of these guys pulled out a cell phone at some point, kinda ruining the image.











Here's what the place looked like when the Russians finally captured it at the end of WWII



The still-devasted inside of the church





Impressive huh? I really liked it. Well, I guess that's all for this weekend, I need sleep, I'm freaking tired from this day that just doesn't seem to end. Tune in next weekend for Krakow, the jewel of Poland, I'm excited, and you should be too!

So, I just got back from a day worth of wandering around Gdansk, and this city is really cool, but I'm getting ahead of myself.... First, yesterday, Joey and I woke up way too early for my liking. We had to catch a train at 9 AM which means that we had to be outta the room by 7:30, and awake even earlier than that. The reason that we had to be up early is that Gdansk is a longer train ride than the other cities that we've been to since getting to Poland. The trip took a total of 6 hours, getting us in a little after 3 PM. We went to our hostel, checked in, dropped off our stuff, and started exploring. Like most of these Polish towns, Gdansk has a pretty pronounced tourist center. Our hostel is a little North of the center, and so we walked along the river to get to there.



This is the river.

The older portion of the town is centered around the Ul Dluga (Long Street) and Dlugy Targ (Long Market). These names are a bit misleading, however, as neither one is particularly long. These (not to mention dozens of other streets around the city) are lined on both sides with meticulously rebuilt and maintained Burgher houses.



Here's a picture of some. We wandered along the main street, which was just lined with beautiful architecture, not least of which was the Town Hall:



We continued down the street to one of the houses which is now owned by the National Museum, and is open as a period house. We toured the inside of this, and it was pretty cool. We stopped at a mexican restaurant with outdoor seating on the street and had dinner. Mexican is one of those things that you can't really get outside of the states, and even if you can, it's just not quite the same. We then decided that for the rest of the evening we wanted to go see the Baltic. We went back to our hostel, changed into something warmer, and headed to the train station to get to Sopot - a smaller city just North of Gdansk, the second of the so-called "tri-city" of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot. We got on one of the frequent commuter trains between the cities, and took the 20-minute ride North. Sopot is a smaller city, but it has miles of sand beach lining the Baltic sea. We worked our way through town, the main pedestrain street in the city is beautiful, lined with shops and restaurants, including this strange structure that looks like it's straight out of a Dr. Seuss book:



Crazy, huh? At any rate, when we got down to the beach, we walked along what is apparently the longest wooden pier in Europe, extending 500 meters out into the sea.



Don't ask me why, but there was a pirate ship moored to the end of the pier that was really a bar, it was kinda strange



Here are my feet dangling over the Baltic sea



More sea...

Once we had walked down to the end of the pier we worked our way back, and wandered onto the beach. We walked down the beach quite a ways, walking barefoot in the tide, and took some pictures of the amazing sunset.





There are a lot more in my scrapbook, but they all look pretty similar. We worked our way back towards where we had come from, and walked back downt eh pedestrian street through the middle of town. We stopped outside a restaurant, got a beer and watched some of the ongoing Italy vs. Ukraine World Cup game. Italy was up 3-0 when we left to head home. Upon arriving back at our hostel we were both tired and pretty much crashed.

Next morning, we slept in a bit, got breakfast at our hostel and headed out to see more of the city. First thing that we went to was St. Mary's Cathedral. This is apparently the largest old brick church in the world, and I believe it, this thing is HUGE! The decorations inside aren't that impressive, but probably partly because it's so hard to fill such a gigantic space. The fact that it's also very well-lit makes it easier to notice the plain walls as well, as opposed to other, dreary, dark churches. Here are some pictures:



View from the back forward



Closer view of the front



Check out this amazing organ!

Then we got to climb to the top of the church tower, now I must say, in spite of all the towers in all the cities that I've climbed, this one was BY FAR the creepiest. There are a total of over 400 stairs to the top, and the last 175-180 of them are in the tower itself, which is at least 30 feet wide, and is wide open the whole way down, here are some picture to illustrate my point:



This is taken looking up the tower



This one is looking down

It was also a lot darker than the pictures make it look. Just trust me, it was downright creepy. It was worth it, however, the view of the city, the river, the church, and the Baltic sea on the horizon was amazing.



Town Hall



The Church



The Ul Dluga



More cool houses with the river and the sea in the background

After the church we wandered over to the Gdansk Crane and Maritime Museum. If you don't know what the Gdansk crane is (which I bet you don't) it's actually pretty impressive. It's the oldest surviving piece of dock machinery in the world, dating to the early 15th century, it's capable of lifting up to about 4000 pounds worth of cargo. It has been standing where it is in Gdansk harbor, more or less preserved since then. It's undergone some reparation and restoration, particularly after WWII when it seems just about everything in the country was either damaged or destroyed. The crane is pretty simple, each lifting mechanism consits of two very large wheels, about 15 feet in diameter, much like what you see in a hamster cage, and operated the same way, there would be 2 men in each wheel, alking along the bottom in order to lift the load from the ground. There were two sets of wheels, one just above street level and the other much higher up for installing masts on ships. The most impressive part, probably, is that the wheels still work, and turn. We found this out while we were exploring the inside of the structure, and Joey decided to step into one of them, and walk, much to our surprise the wheel actually moved. It was crazy.



Here's the crane



Here are the wheels



and here's Joey IN one of the wheels.

After wandering around the crane, we crossed the river to the remainder of the museum, with lots of cool maritime artifacts, parts from old ships and information about how it was recovered.

The last thing to do at the museum was to tour the inside of an actual boat, the first post-war ship built in Poland is moored in the river and is now a museum in itself.



Some of the parts of this thing are huge, the pistons are about as big as I am, it was truly impressive.



Yup, that's about it. After the ship we worked our way back to the market, where we saw what may be the coolest street performers I've seen yet:



Their sign, if you can't read it, says "We Dream of a New Drum Set" and they were pretty good. The guy doing drums banged the cooler for a bass drum sound, hit the washboard for a snare, and the pie plate was a cymbal. They were certainly entertaining.

We then climbed yet another random tower...this time, we went to the top of the town hall. This was another impressive view, being able to see right down on the market below us.



The market



The church



Ant-like people below



The view down the Ul Dluga

On our way out of the tower, I took this picture which I thought was pretty cool, albeit much like one that I've seen elsewhere before



Finally, we worked our way to what used to be a prison and torture house for the city, but now houses an amazing exhibition on amber, a major product and export of Gdansk for hundreds of years.



This statue was probably the most impressive piece to me



I should get beer steins like these ones...

Finally, Joey and I went back to our hostel, changed into something warmer as it was getting a bit later and cooler, and went out to dinner, the dinner was unremarkable, but the restaurant that we found was really cool, with a garden out back, in the middle of a canal. After dinner, we wandered along the canal until we found our way to the harbor, we kinda wanted to wander through the shipyards and see what they were all about. On the way we passed by this guy:



Fishing out the window of his house - he's found a way to make what may well be the laziest sport ever even lazier. I thought that this picture was really cool though, as well. When we got to the shipyard we discovered that, unfortunately, we couldn't enter it. It's all blocked off to the public, probably for security reasons, we did wander around for a while, back to where the river was, and found that the fencing didn't make it all the way to the river, so we were able to wander a ways down the river, which was actually really cool.



Here's the port

Eventually, however, we came up against a wall that we had no way around, and so we turned back. The Gdansk shipyard has a lot of history and symbolism behind it. Not only was it, for some time, the largest port in Europe (I think), but it's here that some of the first organized resistance to Communism in the Eastern Bloc started. In 1970, the workers organized and protested, but the insurrection was crushed days later by Soviet tanks, 10 years later, a charismatic shipyard electrician spoke to another crowd of workers going on strike for pay and other problems - this man was Lech Walesa, and this group became the solidarity movement, the first anti-communist party in Eastern Europe. Lech Walesa went on to become the first post-Communism president of the country, and earn a Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-'80s. Unfortunately, now it's a bit more run-down



Here's a telling picture that I took of a warehouse.

After this we headed homme, back South along the side of the river, giving us a beautiful view of the city in the waning light.



This may be one of the most impressive pictures that I've taken here. Finally, we worked our way back home. Gotta get to bed at a reasonable hour tonite, we're waking up early tomorrow to head to Malbork Castle, one of the largest Gothic castles in the world, and I'm excited. I'll let you know how that goes then. Take care and good night!

So, we got into Katowice at about 3ish on Friday, checked into our hotel (it was so weird to be in an actual hotel! I'm so used to hostels!) and decided to wander for a bit. There's a large park called the Park of Culture and Recreation on the outskirts of the city, so we hopped a tram and headed there. It's a very large place, with some cool stuff including a planetarium,



a rose garden,



a crazy giraffe statue, and...



AN ALPINE SLIDE!!!!! If you've never been on one of these things, imagine the summer answer to the winter's luge. There's a downhill metal track, and you sit on a plastic sled with wheels and a handle to control the speed. I actually have scars on my arms from accidents involving one of these things in Northern MN, but that's another story. The point is that WE FOUND A FREAKING ALPINE SLIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF A PARK IN POLAND, and so we had to go down, the picture is Joey coming to an abrupt stop at the rubber skidpad at the bottom, after failing to slow down near the end, he almost went flying out the front of his sled. It was funny. So ya. The park was pretty cool, and interesting, and it was different from other stuff we've seen.

Saturday we woke up pretty early and headed out to Auschwitz, for details on the trip, read the post below.

Saturday evening, when we got home, we wandered around town for a while, found a vegetarian, very hippy restaurant and enjoyed some vegetarian lasagna.

Finally, it was time to head to the concert, and so we did. It was amazing! I haven't been to many concerts, so going to a metal show was a particularly big shock to me. I'm glad that we had seats and weren't on the floor, because had we been, I likely would've feared for my life, it was absolutely nuts.



Here's what the crowd looked like on the way out, you couldn't even see the floor! The concert was a lot of fun, though, a lot of the songs that they played I knew and didn't know i knew. It's probably partly due to how much 93X I've listened to over the years, most of what they played was older, which is good as their newest album isn't that spectacular.



This is the outside of the arena they played in - fittingly dubbed the flying saucer arena, it was actually rather nice (if ugly).

Finally, after the concert, Joey and I decided that it was too nice out and too early to turn in for the night yet, and so headed to a nice walking street near the train station for a beer. We had been there for about 20 minutes, when I heard someone say "Paul?" I turned, and who should be there but Dobrochna, who I stayed with in Poznan! I knew that she was going to the concert too, but didn't think there was a chance in hell that I'd actually see here there, but she was just walking back to the train station and saw us sitting there. She sat down for a while, and had a drink with us, her train didn't leave for a while.



Here she is, just chillin' out across the table. It was a good time had by all, but she eventually had to make a train, and we needed to go sleep, so we walked her to the train station and parted ways. It was so crazy RANDOMLY running into someone that I knew in a foreign country....

This morning we slept in, lazed around, and made our 12:40 train home with leisure, and here I am now! I guess that's about all for the weekend, tune in next week for Gdansk! (a city you've probably actually heard of!)

I'm posting this portion of the week's activities separately from the rest, as I deserve that it deserves special consideration and levity. Warning - probably not best-suited for the faint of heart

So, Joey and I went to visit Auschwitz today, the Polish name of the city where the infamous German concentration camps were built is Oswiecim, Auschwitz in German. The city seems nice, small, and quiet, and if it weren't for the hoards of buses there, you'd never know that there was anything notable. In fact, Joey and myself were dropped off 2 blocks from the site of the camp, and had trouble finding it, until we got close. The buses bring up a point that I'd like to address first, that is this, having been to places like the battlefield at Gettysburg, where large numbers of humans have lost their lives, and other places which seem to be deserving of great reverence, most other places seem to have an air, or a feeling about them. Auschwitz did not so much. It was certainly hard, given some of the museum displays, to completely forget and ignore the tragedy which took place there, but it still felt...not quite right.
First, some facts about the camp, the camp which is actually called Auschwitz is, in fact, only a fraction of the series of compounds which came to be know as Auschwitz. There were a total of three main camps and dozens of subcamps, but the majority of prisoners and victims lived and died in the much larger Auschwitz II: Birkenau camp. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Joey and I were unable to make it there, having to get back to Katowice for our concert. The first camp, Auschwitz itself, holds exhibits on the camp, and memorials to victims of different nations, whereas the Birkenau camp is much more open, only a fraction of the original buildings standing, but the complex itself is still not obtruded upon by the outside world, so one can wander the grounds to see the sheer vastness of the operation here. Again, this may be more a place for reflection and free from the crowds that seemed to lend the main camp a sense of non-reality.
The first thing that you see when entering the camp may well be the eeriest remnant of its past:



This sign, hanging over the front gate of the first camp, and later at other concentration camps throughout Europe, means, literally translated, "Work will make you free." The sheer gall of those running these camps can't help but horrify one.



Here is a picture of the barbed-wire fence of the complex, once again, an eerie reminder of its past. Once in the complex, as I said above, there are a handful of buildings detailing prison life, and the extermination methods of the Nazi guards. The most surreal and gut-wrenching of these is an entire building consisting only of the possessions taken from prisoners and dead. There were entire rooms full of luggage, hair-brushes, shaving brushes, shoes, discarded prostheses and crutches, and dishes brought to the camps. There was also the collection pictured below of discarded eyeglasses removed from the deceased.



The most disturbing collection, however, by far was the room where, behind a glass window, there was a massive pile of human hair, shaved from women as they were on their way to the gas chambers. The array in the display was apparently about 2 tons of human hair, and when the Russians liberated the camp they found roughly 70 tons of women's hair bundled and ready to be shipped out for use in making fabric. There was also a bolt of fabric from war-time Germany, which was likely made from hair from Auschwitz or another concentration camp. We also saw the building where political prisoners were held. Notably, one cell of importance is the one where St. Maximillian Kolb spent his last days. The saint is something of a national hero in Poland, a priest in war-time Poland, he aided many Jews in escaping and hiding from the Nazis, eventually imprisoned in Auschwitz himself, he traded his own life for that of another prisoner, and was put to death by lethal injection after he didn't succumb to his sentenced death by starvation after 20 days without food. There were also cells where prisoners were forced to stand, constrained by the size of the cell, unable to lay down, they were kept here at night and then made to do back-breaking labor by day. Few survived long, and some apparently succumbed to suffocation in their cramped, air-tight cells.
We didn't have time to see all of the national memorials, and so we saw just the one to Poland, and the memorial dedicated solely to Jews. Many of the pictures shown in these buildings, whole walls plastered by them, captured much better than words ever could the true brutality of the mass extermination carried out by the Nazis. They sought, not only to destroy the Jewish people, but the national identities of the countries it captured. Reading some of the quotes from senior nazis regarding their plans to stomp out any sense of Polish identity in the people of the country was sickening.
The last place that we visited was the gas chambers and crematoria, where so many thousands lived their last moments. This is one of those things that you hear about so much, that it's almost like you've already been there. There really wasn't much to it, a bare, concrete room with shower heads where the people were gassed, and a series of 4 ovens next door for cremation, each holding roughly 2-3 bodies at a time. There was a sparse memorial to the victims who died here, which is good because anything more couldn't really do any more justice to the grave events which unfolded in this room.
Finally, we watched a documentary shot by the Russians who liberated the camp, in order to try to document what the camp had been like. There was a shot of a mass grave for those who died after the Germans left, but were unable to be rescued by the Russians, this we saw later. The images of emaciated survivors, men, women, and children, was disturbing to say the least.
That's about the end of that tour, I don't really know how to end this post, it just doesn't seem like I can do it justice, so I guess I'll just say that I don't think any words or experiences or pictures or videos can ever due true justice to what happened on this site 65 years ago, but I just hope that the lessons that we learned then, about genocide and human's capacity for cruelty to others is not lost on our current and future generations of leaders. While the events of the past are grievous, and even upsetting, we cannot forget them, because history forgotten is history repeated, and there are genocides occurring this day that are ignored by the world and western civilization.

So, to start off, the US team is now officially out of the World Cup, and I didn't even get to see the match! It wasn't televised here, but at least we got to watch the Czechs lose, which was still fun, and with Poland out too, Joey and I are going to have to come up with a new excuse to go out and have a beer...maybe I'll become a Brazil fan or something, or maybe England, do you think I could pass for British? Naw, not fashionable enough. At any rate, that was a little depressing, but Joey and I have been having a lot of fun going and watching the matches, learning about soc...uh, football as we go. The Poland-Germany game in particular, now if only Poland wouldn't have lost...but at least they did better in the tourney than the US did, although neither team actually scored a goal in their first two games, the Poles did manage to actually win a game, more than we can say.
Another week of research down, and I must admit, I'm a little bit disappointed with what we've gotten so far. I was expecting to work with the Professor more directly, but he's out of town for a conference right now, and I find it hard to shake the feeling that we've been left out to dry, maybe things will pick up whenever he comes back. On another note, more travelling for the weekend, Joey and I are heading to Katowice, a rather large industrial town to our South, apaparently rather devoid of activities, but that's ok, we're going to a Tool concert on Saturday night, and planning to visit Auschwitz during the day on Saturday, keeping us pretty well-busy, if maybe a little depressed. I'll post about the weekend when I get home, should be fun.

So, catching the train on Friday didn't work out quite as planned, unfortunately :(. We went to go to try to catch the tram in order to get to our 2:20 train, and we got there about 1:15, to the tram stop that is - and then no trams came! In either direction, on any one of the 3 lines that went past that stop! We were starting to get worried, and decided it best to wander back to the dorm and try to get a cab to the train station, hopefully still making the train. We got back, and tried to get the desk worker to call us a cab, but she doesn't speak English, and we don't speak Polish, bad situation, we finally figured out that she couldn't call them for us, but she gave us a number we could call. We got back to our room and tried the number, but couldn't figure out how to call out (if you're making a call to somewhere else on-campus it's a four-digit number to dial, and we couldn't figure out normal numbers) so we just gave up, looked up the next train, and decided to catch that, hoping the tram was working by then. So we hung out for a while, ate something, and headed back out to the tram stop, this time at about 4:15 for our train that the website said was leaving at 6:05. We still ended up waiting a while for the tram that we were looking for, having just missed one, and having the next one show up very late, so we got to the train station about 5:10. We bought our tickets, we checked the schedules, and saw that the train that we were looking for didnt leave until 6:20 or so, and figured out that we had almost an hour, so sat down and ate something. As we were getting done eating, about 5:50, we looked at the schedules a bit more closely and discovered that the one we had been looking at was arrivals, not departures, and that the train TO Wroclaw left at 5:25 - as we had been sitting there! We looked at the flip board, which has current arrivals and departures, and confirmed our suspicions, there was a train on there, leaving for Wroclaw at 5:25 - but wait, it said that it was running 35 minutes late! We ran up to the platform to discover to our relief, that it was still there, got on, and waited another 5 minutes for it to leave, I've never been so glad that a train has been late - nor have I felt like as big of an idiot! But we did catcha train eventually, and it got us to Wroclaw, at about 10:00 PM. We found our hostel after a bit of searching, and got in just before it started pouring rain outside, good timing us! Our hostel was very nice, rather small, but very friendly and with a large community room, and lots of other random youths and such-not. It's so strange being in a place where just about everybody speaks English, but still none of them are American! We're a novelty here.
After waking up pretty early Saturday morning Joey and I set out to go see the city, in light rain, we both had umbrellas, so this wasn't too bad, but it was a little dreary nonetheless. The first thing that we went to is called the Raclawice Panorama. This is a huge painting, about 15 m by 120 m - that's almost 50 feet tall and 400 feet wide, which is hung around the inside of a circular building so that it's just that, a panorama. It's really cool, and very unique, I've never seen or heard of anything like it! The fore-ground, in front of the painting itself, is a continuation of the ground in the painting, it's a really cool effect, there is at least one place where there's a log that starts in the painting and ends out of it. Unfortunately, you couldn't take pictures inside, but here's a picture of the outside of the building to give you a sense of scale:



The whole interior wall is one big painting.

After that, we went to an Art Museum nearby that had some interesting medieval wood sculpture, and some cool modern art with topics relating to communism.



This is that building.

Then we started wandering around to one of the many islands in this city. There's a river which works its way through the city, branching out, creating many islands and necessitating dozens of bridges. The first thing that we saw on the main island was the Cathedral, a huge Gothic Church with a pair of tall slender towers.



Here's the church



Inside



We got to go to the top of one of the towers, and here's a picture from up there. This was a pretty cool church, but very dark inside, I'm learning what Poland's style of church-building is, and I think that I like Hungarian churches better, although most of the churches here are much older than all hhungarian churches I saw but Matthias Church.

We went a little further to another church, and here's a shot of the inside of this one:



I really liked this church, it was so bright inside, the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the stained glass behind the altar is beautiful.

We kept going, making it to another church with a tower you could climb up into, this time, the place where you got to stand was actually a walkway between two towers of the church (by the way, I think I've done a lot towards conquering my fear of heights since coming to Europe, climbing up so many tall things). The stairs also kept going up a ways further, and then there was a ladder leading out onto the roof, like the roof, the roof. I don't think, in retrospect, we were supposed to go up there, but Joey and I did.



here's a picture of my butt as I look out a trapdoor.



Here's a view of the Cathedral from up there, it was a little creepy, to have nothing above, or even at eye leve with you...



Here's the town square from the walkway.

We then continued on to the town square itself. It's huge! The building structure in the middle has three small streets running through it, and the whole thing probably takes up about 4 blocks worth of space, I was impressed. It's supposed to be the second-largest town square in Poland, behind the one in Krakow, and now I really want to see the one in Krakow. Here' are some more pictures:





Some Burgher houses



A cool fountain

Finally, we made it to our last church tower of the day, the one of this church:



More pictures from the top:



A wedding had just gotten out in the church below us, see the Ferrari in the upper-right of the picture? The guy who was driving it killed the engine about 5 times trying to pull away, it was hilarious.



Here's town square from a new angle, I like this one better.

After all the churches we had dinner, and went and found somewhere to watch the US vs. Italy World Cup game - a fun game, but we only came out with a tie, better than a loss i guess...

Next day we slept in, and meandered back through the old town, didn't see much else, we had been to most of the sights the day before, but we liked the city, and so wanted to see it again begore going home. We made it to the train station



Cool looking train station, isn't it?

When we got on our train (which was on its way to Warsaw, going through Lodz) it was already full, and there was a whole platform full of people waiting to get on, I've never been on a more crowded train in my life! It was ridiculous. People were packed so tight in the hallways that the conductors could barely get through. We made it home alright though, if a little tired of standing, and that was that. Tune in next week for Katowice, Auschwitz, and a Tool concert.

So, I've been here for 2 weeks now, and I haven't really talked too much about Poland in general. First, there's the language. Not quite as crazy as Hungarian, but still plenty difficult. For example, today I'm leaving for the weekend, Joey and I are travelling to a city called Wroclaw, (the l has a stroke through it, but I don't care enough to figure out how to type that), and I'll give 50 groszy to anyone who can actually pronounce that correctly. It's actually pronounced vrots-wahf (long "o"). It's pretty crazy, I know about half a dozen words, that's actually probably an understatement, let me see...yes, no, good, beer, small, big, orange, please/here you go/can I help you, thank you, I think that may be it, so that's 9, better than I thought. They only have a wussy 32 or so letters, not holding a candle to Hungarian's daunting 42. I'd like to know more the language, but don't know how I'd learn, and am unsure if the time investment would be worth it. Having travelled so much in the past 5 months, I've really come to appreciate the beauty of knowing foreign languages, I am still not that motivated to actually learn them, as learning foreign languages is such a painful process, but I think it'd be really cool to just know dozens of languages. I really don't know what I'll do when I get home and actually speak the same language as everyone else, it'll be crazy.
Oh, also, I offered 50 groszy earlier to anyone who could actually pronounce Wroclaw correctly, but don't get too excited, because 50 Groszy is worth about 16 cents. That's another thing different about here, the currency. The main unit is the Zloty, and there are about 3 Zloty to one dollar, and then the Zloty is broken up into units called Groszy which are one-hundredth of a Zloty, and so the one-Groszy coin here is worth even less than a one forint coin in Hungary. Furthermore, I didn't really think it possible, but I'm pretty sure that things are actually cheaper here than in Hungary, not by much, but noticeably so.
So far as research for the summer goes, we haven't really done a whole lot yet, Wylczynski's mother dying meant we didn't get started too promptly, and this week we've been working on a couple of problems, but without too much success, which has been somewhat disheartening. I hope that things pick up a little. Well, gotta go, train leaves in a couple of hours, I'll post on Sunday or Monday detailing my travels.

So, I took a trip to Poznan this weekend. I think that Poznan is the 4th biggest city in Poland, behind Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. Bartek goes to school in Poznan, and grew up there, and I have two other friends from Valleyfair who go to school there. There's Simon, who's a childhood friend of Bartek apparently, and Dobrochna, who I stayed with (Bartek lives with his parents, whereas Dobrochna has her own flat.) So, Friday night I got in at about 7:00, and Dobrochna met me at the train station. We went out to dinner in the Old Town Square, which is beautiful, and then went to the first Polish World Cup game in a pub. It was packed, crazy really, and there were random Polish guys wandering the streets screaming "Polska!" (Polish for Poland). The game itself was really depressing, Poland losing 2-0, with shots hitting the crossbar, the upright, and a goal negated for offsides, nonetheless, it was a lot of fun. We then went home and went to sleep (I was pretty tired after a 3.5 hour train ride and some beer.) The next morning we went to a local market to get fresh fruit for breakfast, which was really good. We then went to the cathedral which is on an island in the middle of the river running through town. Here are some pictures:



Dobrochna in front of the Cathedral



Me with John Paul - gotta love that guy....



Inside

After wandering around the cathedral for a little bit, we went to check out the crypt, no pictures from down there, but it was a little creepy, because the lights were motion-sensing and either the sensors weren't sensitive enough or the timers weren't set for long enough, or both, but the lights kept turning off on us...more than a little freaky, especially given all the dead kings buried down there.

After the Cathedral we went to the old town square and wandered around there for a while.



This is the town hall, an impressive building I think. We then met up with Bartek and Daria, and Dobrochna left to go home and work on studying (she has exams coming up, hope I didn't distract too much). We then went to Bartek's home, picked up Simon, and went to eat, then we went to the Lech brewery, Lech is a pretty big national brand in Poland, and the brewery was huge. I don't think that I ever actually took any pictures from outside, which is a shame because there are dozens of massive silos where they have beer that's fermenting. We went on a full tour of the brewery, and it was actually really cool and interesting. my favorite part was the bottling and canning rooms, unfortunately we couldn't take pictures in there :( but here's a picture of us in one of the rooms:



From left to right that's Simon, myself, and Bartek and Daria. After the brewery we went to a free concert on the shore of a large lake in Poznan. That was about it for the day. Yesterday, Dobrochna and I went to a park outside of the city on the site of what once was a large fortress, called the citadel. The citadel was destroyed almost entirely when the German army used it as a defensive site in their retreat from the Russian onslaught. There's a pretty interesting museum there featuring old weapons and tanks and airplanes, and that was kind of interesting as well. Finally, we made our way to the train station and hung out for a little bit until my train home arrived. I must admit, I really like train travel. Not only does it have an impressive aesthetic appeal to it, but it's very relaxing, unlike on a plane where you're stuck in one place the whole time you can get up and wander around. For a good hour of the ride home, on a beautiful early summer day, I just stood at an open window of the train watching the landscape pass by. It was very relaxing.

Now, 3 reflections on Poznan: 1) A much prettier city than either Warsaw or Lodz. There are a few things that seem reminiscent of communism, but not nearly as many. 2) So many of these cities, I see all of these old-looking beautiful buildings, and I have to remind myself that there are very few of them that are less than 60 years old, being as many of these cities were all but destroyed in WWII. 3) Finally, I really am glad that I made the effort to see my friends in-country. It's nice to have someone to show you around, but it's a little surreal hanging out with these people who I thought that I'd likely never see again.

So......sorry I haven't been posting at all in a really long time. I've had copious amounts of works to do for classes, and then lots of fun computer troubles, but now I'm back! I will soon be filling in the intermediary time between my last post and this one, but I thought that I'd just put something up to put my parents' minds at ease about the new country into which I am settling. So, Saturday I parted ways with my friends Kris, Ania, Bartek, and Daria who graciously played host(ess) to me in the couple days that I was in Warsaw. I barely made my train at 10:20 leaving for Lodz, continuing a recent streak of close calls on transit, but I made it on, my 3 gigantic bags all still intact (although I got some strange looks when placing the aforementioned three huge bags on a luggage rack). My train trip to Lodz (pronounced woodge) where I will be spending my summer was uneventful, I napped a bit, and read some, and sure enough, 2 hours later, here I was! I was met at the train station by one Kasia Flak who is one of the professors from the matth department at the University of Lodz where my summer studies will be pursued. She is a very nice lady, albeit rather quirky and with limited English. We made it to my residence for the summer by way of cab, and I got checked in and everything. The best way I can describe my room is a relatively up-scale dorm. It is definitely a dorm room, but a very nice one, with a bathroom ensuite, new furnishings, and a kitchen-style sink. Although it is a step down from a full-blown flat in Budapest, I won't complain too much, as I will be paying under $100/month to live here, even though I have to share the room with Joey (he really is gonna kill me by the end of the summer....I must be driving him nuts, he being a very neat individual, I'll have to do my best to keep my messiness in check for the summer...) At any rate, we then went and toured the campus, saw the math building, which, while rather homely outside is a very nice building inside, and nothing compared to other buildings on the campus, to either extreme. There is a business building nearby which can't be more than a year old, and looks amazing, and also a physics building which looks like a bunker. We went downtown to a mall after lunch where I was able to go to a Tesco and pick up some necessities that I didn't yet have, and felt I should (i.e. food, a towel, etc.)
Sunday I woke up, got my stuff together, and went to meet Kasia at 2 PM at her office in the math building, she then took me to another shopping center downtown, and showed me around some more...I feel like our hosts feel compelled to be watching out for us at all times, which, while flattering, is not always desirable. Sometimes I would just like to go explore for myself, which Joey and I plan to do tomorrow, although I do kind of wonder what my feelings on the subject would be had I not just finished 4.5 months in a different foreign city.
Monday was supremely uneventful, I just got some moving in done, ate food, read, and generally passed time until....
Today! Today more stuff happened, we had our first actual intellectual interaction with the department going to a talk by one of the graduate students on her doctoral thesis, unfortunately it was in Polish, and we missed the first half of the talk last week, but I was still able to follow some of the broader strokes of what was going on, math is kinda it's own language anyways, Polish or English is really just used to fill in conjunctions. I say we because Joey arrived this morning via train from Berlin after what sounds like it was a productive interlude. In the middle of the seminar, the head professor of the Polish program, Professor Wylchinski, (I think I spelled that right), who I get the impression we will be working under, was called out hurriedly, and we didn't find out until later what the situation was, apparently his mother died today, which was an expected event, but earth-shattering nonetheless, and so our start of meetings with the Professor (as everyone else calls him) will be delayed, understandably, a few days. We then went and chilled out with some of the math grad students who invited us to join them for a beer on thursday, about which I am rather pumped. Now:
3 random observations on Lodz: 1) It seems as though everybody from the math department is very very how shall I say...excited and thrilled to help us. Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's that we're American, maybe it's that we're working with the Professor, maybe it's just that we're that cool. Whatever the reason, I think that I had 3 cups of tea in 3 different rooms this morning, because each new room that I entered I was offered one, and felt bad saying no. Everybody just seemed altogether very eager to please. 2) The city itself is very interesting. Most of the city that I've seen thusfar is much more what I think of when I think of post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Many more Soviet-style buildings, much more dilapidation, very gray, lots of very overgrown lawns, and, well, really overgrown everything.



Here is the aforementioned Physics building, to give you an idea. I don't know, have you ever seen Euro-Trip? Think the scene where they randomly end up in Bratislava, and what that looks like. That's kinda how most of Lodz looks, albeit slightly less dramatic. 3) BUT, not everywhere looks like this...there are these small pockets that seem completely modern and Western. There are two modern shopping malls in Lodz, one is nice, and the other is amazing! It's brand new, and it's like a slice of America transported to Poland. There are other things like this, like the Mansion that's right by the nicer shopping mall, looks like it would be right at home in the middle of Paris, and the private school where I went for lunch the other day is a completely beautiful modern building, behind a facade that's anything but. I think that this is probably representative of the way that the recovery after the fall of Communism has affected some spots greatly, and some not at all. I think that in Poland, it's the same with people, while some have become prosperous, others have barely subsided.....I dunno, just my two cents. I'm very excited to travel all over the country this summer, however, there are lots of cool cities in Poland, and I hope to visit them all, and keep y'all updated (no joke) via this blog.

P.S. - I think that I may have just inadvertently demolished every picture that I had online except for a few from Slovakia, but I'm not working that out tonite, so you'll just have to live, I'll fix it when I get the time, which will hopefully be soon. That and there are posts coming to fill in the last 2 months, much excitement including trips to Munich, Amsterdam, Paris, Prague, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Warsaw! Stay tuned....