Krakow, Poland

I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been mostly without internet in the last few weeks. Even right now I’m at a campsite that makes you pay for wifi.
Anyway, Poland. It was amazing. Krakow is a really interestingly organized city. Everything you’d really want to see is contained within this small area in the center of the city and that area is surrounded by a park. This city center is full of adorable shops and cafes. There were tons of food stalls. Right outside this city center was the largest shopping mall I’ve ever seen in my life. It was huge. Took me an hour and a half to walk through it and I’m pretty sure I still missed some.
In the shopping mall I found an American bookstore. When I left the US with only one book the idea was that I would leave it and find a new one and then repeat that cycle. It didn’t occur to me how difficult it would be to find English books. So here was an American bookstore. Everything is in English. In it I find an anthology of Malcolm Gladwell’s best stories from the New Yorker. AWESOME. Freaking loved this book. Gladwell is pretty much one of my favorite people in the whole world. I get the feeling that if we could sit down and just talk we could go for hours, and I probably wouldn’t do more than ask questions.
Other than finding the bookstore, eating some wonderful food, and watching the finals of the world cup Krakow was fairly uneventful. The only other aspect worth comment was the street performers. It’s fairly standard fair to find street performers in the center of any big city in Europe. Krakow, on the other hand had the oddest performances I’ve ever seen. At one point there was an interpretative dance by some highschoolers. It more or less resembled a Westside story/ Romeo and Juliet set up as far as I could tell. Except they would break from that occasionally and just breakdance.
One of the things I’ve been doing as I go along is think about where I would want to bring people if I could only take them to one of the places I’ve been. For Jerry it was Munich, John would be Berlin. I’ve decided that Jill and I would have the most outrageously awesome time in Krakow. It’s easy to navigate, so the likelihood of getting too lost is small, and it has everything we could want in a short distance.
Plus they automatically serve coffee with a straw.