Spent the day in Krakow determined NOT to see any sights, but just to relax and enjoy myself! The biggest highlight of my day was finding a bilingual volume of Szymborska's poetry in a kind of twilight-zone moment. More on that later... So for the most part I succeeded in resisting all the tempting sights, content in wandering through Old Town and around (not in) Wawel Castle. I, did, however, go into St. Mary's Basilica Church (something forced me) and admired the beautiful blue stained glass. And I visited Kamiriez, the Jewish part of town, where I enjoyed a nice surprise concert.

Evidently July 3rd is the end of the 2-week-long Festival of Jewish Culture and they had a HUGE outdoor "Shalom" concert in the heart of Kamiriez, which I got to enjoy. There were so many people that making your way through the crowd was a little like doing the congo (minus the kicking, of course). The next morning I tried to visit the Galicia Jewish Museum, but the queue was soo long that I didn't try to get in.

Krakow is a really relaxed city, much smaller than Warsawa. When I bought my train ticket for Praha I was amazed that the lady at the counter spoke English...a first for Poland!

So...the highlight...after buying my ticket, I was wandering through Old Town's narrow streets thinking cynical thoughts about the obvious rampant consumerism everywhere, admiring the old fortification walls, feeling intermittently sorry for the beggars, contemplating whether or not it would rain, and suddenly I started hearing music, like gypsy music, and it got louder the further down the hill I went...until I rounded a corner and walked into the square, which opened up into a big open plaza in front of me...full of the usual cafe umbrellas plus dozens and dozens of people stands with buckets of flowers (sweet pea in all colors, roses, sunflowers, delphinium, freesia, everything!).

Just at that moment a huge flock of pigeons took to the sky and circled the old church, the collonades of the town hall, and the umbrellas and flowers, and just at that moment, the music seemed to hit a high note and hold, hanging in the air for just a split second before falling just as the birds settled back down to the ground. It was eerie and really, really neat.

The music turned out to be a “gypsy” (in costume, I think) band which were being towed along in a “pirate ship” led by a horse throughout the plaza. After wandering around and checking out the cafes, I ducked into a bookstore (ksiegaznie) on impulse. I walked in the door, looked to my left, and there was the poetry section (in Polish, of course). I looked at the shelf and literally the first book I saw was Wislawa Szymborska, a slim white volume of “Chwila” (Moment) that was bilingual Polish-English. (Szymborska is the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996...I had been looking for her poetry in Gdansk without luck.)

I bought it, went to a cafe, and started reading and had this strange destiny kind of moment, like something momentous was happening to me, although I'm not sure how to define it and don't want to reproduce my entire journal entry from the cafe here.

Here's just a few lines from Szymborka's “A Few Notes on the Soul”...it in this context being the soul / spirit...

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

...there is more but I am trying to keep this short... suffice to say it is a REALLY cool, thought-provoking poem...and her whole volume is full of them.

Then later in the day I went to the English-language bookstore I'd been originally headed for (Massolit) and discovered Jacqueline Osherow, a Jewish lady (American) who writes the most amazing, wry, sarcastic but honestly questioning and unflinching poetry in challenge to the spiritual and historical legacy of Judiasm I have ever read. She is amazing! I didn't buy the book, because I can get it at home and my pack is getting heavier with every book I buy. But I laughed out loud and cried a bit (she has one poem on Auschwitz, which is something else I didn't visit) and felt inspired to not hold back with all the hard questions that I have bouncing around in my brain. The idea that such hard questions could even be poetry is totally radical for me.

So, after this I wandered down to the Vistala river where there was an amazing late afternoon sun on the water feeling. Then I went to the concert, wrote a bit, and called it a day.