around the world in 180 days

Three weeks from today, with a little bit of luck, we’ll be at home. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Probably, like everything else, it’ll be a little of both.

When I was 3 or 4, my parents took me to the winter carnival in St. Paul. I’m not sure if they still do it, but they used to build enormous ice castles out on Harriet Island or somewhere and at night they’d light it up with colored spotlights. On the grand finale night, they’d light off a bunch of fireworks and put on a nice show. We were down to watch the fireworks and I remember being terrified that they were so low, they were going to land on us. It was probably the first time I’d seen fireworks, and they scared the crap out of me.

I’ve since become quite fond of fireworks. We’ll still be out of the country for the 4th of July, so we’ll miss all of them in the US for the summer. In Krakow, though, they have a huge celebration for the solstice (only they hold it like 2 days later–I’m not sure what the deal is with that), with live music, wagons of sausages (polish, naturally), and fireworks. We walked down to the river and waited around for about 1 hr, watching the crowd, before they started.

It was a hell of a show, one of the best I’ve ever seen. There were continuous explosions, lights bursting everywhere, and when they lit off the finale, bits of fireworks did rain down on the crowd. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The lights faded from the sky almost completely, falling and disappearing, until some of them crashed into the crowd in showers of sparks. No one seemed to be hurt, but I thought of that time when I was a little kid and I was worried about that happening. I’d never seen it once until now.

Anyway, enough of the fireworks. We’re in Krakow, Poland. It’s a great old town, one of the few in this part of Europe that wasn’t completely or mostly destroyed in WWII. There’s tons of old churches and synagogues and culture and I guess they look different from the ones in Budapest and Vienna, but I’m starting to have trouble noticing.

We went to Weilicjia (that can’t be right) salt mines today. I think it would have been a great experience, if we hadn’t been in a group of about 50. It turned into a sort of hurry up and wait game: we’d rush out of an awesome underground cavern with incredible carvings, sculptures and bas-reliefs and into a hallway, where we’d wait around for 10 mins. It was stupid and kind of a waste of money, which is a shame, because the mines were pretty incredible. We just didn’t get to see them.

Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll go to Auschwitz, which I expect will be horrifying. I suppose that’s kind of the point, though. We won’t be going with a tour, which should make the whole experience a bit better.
Anyway, I guess that’s about every single thing that’s happened to us since I last posted. Talk to you again soon!

Tags: Krakow, Poland, Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.