Kraków

Kraków is cool. I really like this town, despite its cranky old people and the fact that I was hit by a ketchup covered roll as soon as I stepped off the train. Damn kids. (Like most European languages, their w sounds like v to us, so the town name is actually said “crack-of.”)
The train trip up from Brno had two changes and was blissfully easy once Alissa taught me how to read the boards announcing arrivals and departures. We had a Northern Irish med student named Shane on our 2nd and 3rd legs, delightful fellow who's been doing some volunteer work on his summer break. Got to discuss the British taking the troops out with him. I love trains, they're great for people and for relaxing while watching the landscape. The vegetation and terrain looked like what you see out the window of the Boston – NYC trains lots of locust trees and shrubby green plants, but the buildings and people stuff were more like south Jersey or back road Pennsylvania, all weatherbeaten concrete and broken glass with graffiti.

We avoided the main train station and got off towards the outskirts of town. Things this far out feel kind of sprawling and disconnected. Big blocks of apartments shoot up out of the ground at somewhat regular intervals. They don't look particularly bad or old, I think most are newer, and they've even got pastel color schemes in a regulated, housing development kind of way. There are a few decaying low-rise structures and lots of fairly empty flat ground here. There are lots of medium sized trees and sometimes gardens or old houses taking up a whole block. There are old ramshackle traces of things that were, like funky fences and bad paving and plain aging concrete walls, right alongside signs of progress, parking lots and alleys with neatly placed factory made concrete paving stones, the nicely kept trolley ways with fences, trimmed trees, and flat even gravel that lead right into new construction.

The blue and white buses are roaring fumey affairs with doors that clatter open and closed like you'd lose a hand if it were in the way, bought second hand from Italy I'm told. Streets don't have a grid and can curve or juke sideways as they please, so you wind up with forking intersections and loops radiating from the town center. The old city walls have been removed, but there's a green park ring there now with the old town immediately inside. It's beautiful, having been recently renovated and revitalized. Most streets are closed to cars and paved with those factory stones so the streets are smooth. The buildings are old and authentic, some with plain fronts and others spouting little architectural flourishes like cherubs or scrollwork on supporting beams. There are throngs of people everywhere, luxuriating in the balmy cosmopolitan atmosphere. The stores vary from tourist trinkets to furniture boutiques to designer clothing stores with a healthy smattering of pubs and kebab stands and other restaurants. Then you get to the Rennik, the main market square. It's huge, easily four football fields put together, lined all around with café tables sheltering beneath umbrellas. The crowds thicken here, but they aren't claustrophobic. In the center, looking like an imposing castle with buttresses and sinuous arches holding up turrets and ramparts, is the Cloth Buying Hall, which is only about four stories but stretches most of the length of the square. A long passage takes up most of the fist floor where they sell tourist trinkets from stalls now. Alissa tells me that four years ago only one side of the square had café tables, things closed at three on the weekend, and you could barely find someone who spoke English. Today the beggars will speak to you in five languages and the Cloth Hall is hosting a wine tasting with live chamber music in the midst of the sellers hawking their wares at ten o'clock on Thursday.

There are innumerable themes and variations tucked away in odd corners. Cathedrals off the Little Renick, Roosters is the Polish version of Hooters, Tribecca Coffee is a highbrow Starbucks clone (with posters in English) that's hooked into the cool jazz café with cartoony and eclectic paintings on the walls. There are underground pubs where you can see an old man in a beige suit waiting at the top of the steps with a young woman and exchange a ticket for the money when her date arrives. Overpriced Irish pubs host the English speaking expats, while all the young foreigners flock to booming brightly colored dance clubs. Bars and dance halls fill converted apartments in what were originally burghers houses. There's a summery feel to the city and it's wonderful to bask in the glow of all this polyglot hum and self-satisfied capitalism, the locals and the tourists each happy with their end of the bargain.

Alissa showed me the English language bookstore near the university, Massolit. Tres cool. Would be a modest but high quality place at home, but here it's like a treasure trove. Comparably priced, too. Lots of the prices are the same in absolute terms as the bookstores back home. Alissa mentioned that books are subject to the Value Added Tax in the EU, which I don't really understand, but in many instances works out to something like 20% of sticker price. But it's a cool place. They have American style brownies and a few tables and copies of the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, some other English screeds, and a gigantic stack of old copies of the Onion.

The oldest university in Europe is Charles University in Prague. The second is Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Alissa tells me that Charles was founded as or quickly became a forward thinking/heretic-friendly institution while Jagiellonian is the reactionary version and has traditionally been something of a wellspring or shelter for conservative thought. Much like Poland itself, I guess.

Saw the Simpsons movie while I was here. In English, with Polish subtitles, a very odd experience. The average age of the audience was something like 20, and they got most of the language jokes, but a lot of the visual puns missed them. Homer bouncing back and forth between a large rock and a bar called “The Hard Place” was a non-starter. And when they went through Seattle by train in the movie, I thought it was Toronto. Good fun though, well worth watching.