Krakow: Day 2-3
NOTE: This is part 2 of 2. You should read them in order! The first one is the post before this.
We woke up at 10. And went back to bed. We woke up at 11. I checked my mail to see how the Trojan Men had fared at Absolut, and took some Tylenol for my RAGING headache (damn you, vodka...). I went back to bed. At noon, we finally did get up and started to execute our plan for the day: check out the city, then a tour of the legendary salt mine.
We began where every day should begin, with a bagel at Bagelmama, a restaurant that allegedly sits on the site of the birth place of the bagel (literally 10 feet from a massive synagogue). Awesome bagels, and for cheap! From there, it was a short walk (as everything is in Krakow, seriously the place is tiny) to the magnificent Wawa Castle. The place is such a cool mixture of different types of architectures, and it's all open to the public, just like Prague Castle. We toured the armory...cuz you know, we're guys and all.
The city itself, as we found on our walk back, is magnificent, but you can check out more of that on flickr. And the salt mines are salty and really neat as well, but that'll be on the flickr as well. Suffice it to say we had a big day.
Which of course, could only be matched by a bigger night (after all, it was my birthday). And oh, what a night it was...first, dinner at an outstanding restaurant (Martin's recommendation again. That guy rocks), which included two 5L towers of beer (awesome beer). It was then time to hit the club, along with the other CIEE people who had visited Krakow this weekend (we didn't really see anyone we knew for the majority of the time we were there. Which, for the most part, was actually really nice). I'll spare you the details of the evening and give the highlights:
-Towards the end of the evening, I found Dave in a corner of the club near the exit, asleep and almost completely unresponsive. As I was sitting there, Evan walked up and joined him, in a similar state. I walked away for a moment, trying to see if anyone else was left to hang out with, and when I returned they had mysteriously disappeared....I found out later: Dave had vomited...everywhere...and had been kicked out, and Evan went with him. On the way home, in a drunken stupor, they passed some Brits, to whom Dave said something (he can't remember what it was, but it was probably something about the US bailing them out of WWII. He's a history major.) The Brit passed Dave, turned around and ran at him at full speed. With a huge leap into the air, the guy performed a Bruce Lee-style roundhouse kick and jacked my 6'4" friend in the face. Dave, slightly shocked (mostly at the fact that the guy just kicked him IN THE FACE, as opposed to something, anything lower), paused a moment, but Evan charged at the guy. Dave held him back, realizing there were eight of them and fighting would be a very lost cause. They returned home.
-!!HIGHLIGHT OF THE TRIP ALERT!! So, not finding anyone to go home with, I decided to walk back to the hostel on my own (in the freezing cold). I found Evan and Dave in the lobby of the hostel on the internet, where I heard the aforementioned roundhouse-kick-to-the-face story. I checked my email again, and retired to the room, where Evan and Dave had already passed out. On the bed next to me, I discovered Danny G under his blanket. Oh wait. There are 4 legs there...I walked out to brush my teeth, came back in for a towel, and saw the same lump, but with Danny's ass sticking out of one end. I left. Came back. Danny is sitting up at the head of his bed, but still there's this lump in the middle under the covers and now it's pulsing. I stare at him a moment in disbelief, wondering if he can see me. He gives a small wave.
The next morning we had a very unwelcome wake up call at 9am. At 10, we had to catch a bus to tour Auschwitz. Not many words to describe this one...everyone should get a chance to see it. The weather was exactly what you'd expect to tour a place like that: freezing and foggy. It looked like there were ghosts hanging in the air everywhere. After our tour, we were given some time to walk around on our own, and me, Dave, and Jon set out to find the pond in the north side of the camp that, to this day, is gray with ashes. Quite dramatic. Unfortunately, Auschwitz is a very big place, and we were 20 minutes late getting back to the bus, which had almost left without us. So I almost got stuck in Auschwitz...
We lounged the rest of the day (it was a 6 hour tour, and we had to recover), then had a fantastic dinner of authentic Polish food - tons upon tons of pierogi (AMAZING) and of course, some beer to help us sleep on the train.
Which would have helped, had the train not been so small that we got stuck in a smoking car with two Polish guys who were hilarious. After asking if Evan W was in al-Qaeda, one of them tried to bargain with Dave (in Polish, remember...we think he was bargaining) to get rid of some zlutys (Polish currency) and exchange it for Korunas. At least we think that's what he was trying to say...
So I didn't sleep much, and woke up with a sore throat and stuffy nose that has since matured into a full-on sinus infection. Oh well. At this point, I'm done writing, so you'll have to hear about the first day of rehearsal some other time!
