A Day in Krakow

Our first full day in Krakow was August 12th. The plumbing in the faded grandeur was, as expected, not brilliant for water pressure. However, the water was hot, the bathroom was clean, and the bed was comfortable. And, best of all, a breakfast buffet was included. Not an American style bad toast, bad juice, and some eggs from a bottle, a nice (except the oil soaked sausage) buffet. Everything except the juice was a bit bland. The juice, although from a bottle, tasted fresher than what we get back home.

As always we loved the old buildings of many colors.

One of our major goals (possibly mostly Rod's) was to photograph as many proto-bagel vendors as possible.

And another nifty building!

We happened across a Google office right on one of the main squares!

And more buildings!

Part of any complete breakfast: cakes and huck finn.

We passed Wawel castle, heading for the Jewish area Kazimierz. This seemed a promising area to photograph further proto-bagel vendors. And it had lots of synagogues.

We wore hats. Paper hats.

Rod's hat constantly fell off.

Stained glass is awesome and sorely lacking in the new world.

A synagogue or two and some street raspberries later it was time for coffee.

In a fantastic turn of events fresh squeezed juice was also available for cheap.

In some synagogues you get fancier hats.

It may be that the quality of hat is inversely proportional to the awesomeness of the synagogue.

The Jewish cemetary had some interesting headstones.

For about $13 we got tickets to a musical performance in a casual little venue for later in the evening.

In the meantime we decided to visit Wawel castle.

Wawel really felt more like a monstrous mansion than a castle.

Cafes everywhere. The horror.

Apparently the people here smoke more, eat cake constantly, drink beer by the gallon, and still manage to have less of an obesity problem than the Americas. Fast food ftw?!

We needed a train ticket to Budapest so we wandered in the direction of the station. We passed a casual, intimate, little theater along the way.

A "milkbar" is a holdover from communist times. Basically it's a restaurant serving plain fare in plentiful portions for cheap. We wanted to try one. So we did.

Borscht was good. Juice was good. Kashi stuff was good. Perogies ... cheap, plentiful, and bland. After dinner we saw hilarious labels and break dancers in the plaza. At first it seemed out of place but then it occurred to us that music and tumblers was probably quite traditional; this is just the new form.

After a light snack we headed back towards our concert. Espresso in Europe is better than in the new world. Specifically it has much less of the bitter aftertaste.

The concert was quite good. The performers were generally solid, and the guitar soloist was outstanding. As a group their best effort was Nachtmusik. The best performance was Asturias.

We have video that hopefully turned out OK of some of the performance but it's painful to work with on the eeePc.

Old buildings are nice when lit up at night.