Central Europalooza, Part 2

Okay, when we last met I was telling you how much I loved Krakow. Now I will tell you what I did there. The first morning we all made a pilgrimage out to a sort of suburb to see another highly anticipated alternative art space. This one was also pretty cool. The suburb was called Nowa Huta, and it was a Soviet Communist settlement with all block-style apartment complexes built to be the model of a perfect community (where everyone worked in factories) to counteract Krakow’s intellectual mass. Now, it’s generally pretty run-down, and has high levels of unemployment and social problems. The art space was in a re-made factory/warehouse, and was used mostly as theaters/performance spaces. The people who run the theater (who we talked to for a long time, and went out with the next night) do a lot of work to get the entire community involved by doing surveys to see what the people around there would like to see and basically pulling people off the street to act in their plays. Then the people living in Nowa Huta come to see the plays because they star their friends or feature true stories about their community. Neato. In the afternoon, another girl and I managed to find our way to a salt mine just outside the city. This included several encounters with very eccentric characters, but I will save those stories for another time. It was neat for me to be in a mine in general, since I’ve never seen the inside of one, though the 380 steps down to the first (closest to the top) level were a bit intimidating. Our tour guide was hilarious and really really into salt. He kept dropping stories about times he visited mines in other countries or went into a closed part of the mine with an owner. It was hilarious. He also kept making jokes about the fact that he got a hard-hat and we didn’t, which I didn’t find as funny. Anyway, the mine has been operating for hundreds of years, and it’s HUGE. They still have to mine salt today in order to keep it safe for tours. The neatest part was that throughout the mine there are these statues carved in the salt. They are very intricate, and range from statues of saints to important people who visited the mine to little dwarf-miners. The statues were all carved by actual miners who were temporarily hired to do that instead of mining. Occasionally there would be a gigantic area where they found a bit salt deposit, and these “rooms” were made into chapels. The one we saw was amazing and so so beautiful. It had chandeliers made out of salt and “The Last Supper” carved into the wall and a huge statue of Pope John Paul II. I’ll put up pictures eventually. The other highlight of the mine was coming across a few brine lakes, which were creeeeeepy and cool. The “water” is so saturated with salt that you can practically walk on it, and people have died after falling in because they can’t get either up or down in the water. That night we hung out at an amazing café for a bit, then went to dinner and eventually bed.

The rest of my time in Poland, which was really only a day and a half I guess, consisted of some museums, another alternative art space (this one a museum built over an old bunker), and wandering around the river, the Jewish Quarter, and the main square. Of these, the last was by far the most interesting for me. Although it was really touristy, in my opinion Krakow’s main square was amazing. It was surrounded by old buildings and churches and in the center is a big long building called the main market full of little stands with cutesy souvenirs. By far my favorite part was outside, though, where you could sit on a bench or a statue and watch all of the other people or one of the many many performers. My favorites of these included accordian players, a bunch of teenagers breakdancing, a guy playing the water glasses, people using ropes to make huge bubbles, a guy doing spraypaint art, etc. The weather was gorgeous, which helped a lot, too.

The other best part of Krakow was when we joined the people from the Nowa Huta theater to see live music one night. One of the bands featured a harmonica player, if that gives you any indication of how cool it was. I ended up talking a lot to this one Polish guy who plays soccer for the Polish soccer team. It was pretty cool. He was shocked when I told him that I played. The other funny phenomenon was that throughout the night everyone kept making allusions to the fact that I was Polish (which I’m not). For example, if I said that I liked the music, they would say, „That’s because of your Polish blood.“ When I said that I didn’t have any Polish blood, they were, again, shocked (there was a lot of that going around), and insisted that I look very very Polish. This question of what I „look like“ came up frequently on the trip. I had many people tell me I look very Polish, many others assume that I’m British, a few who insisted that I was Irish, and one who suspected that I was Czech but decided I couldn’t be because I look „exactly like the lead singer from the band Portishead“ who is British. I think it’s pretty funny because I just look like me.

In Bratislava, people generally thought I looked Czech. Bratislava was our first stop on the whole trip, and we got there by train. It’s a very small city, but the capitol of Slovakia, so it was fairly nice, as well. It also had a lot of good museums (I, as you can maybe tell, am quickly becoming unenthused about museums) and very nice European buildings. It took maybe an hour tops to walk around the whole city, so we did that multiple times, of course stopping copiously to také in the sights. I had two favorite parts of Bratislava. The first was the hot chocolate. I’m not sure why Bratislava’s hot chocolate was so attractive for us, because you can get the same thing in Prague, but for some reason we just went hot chocolate crazy. Maybe it’s because on the first day someone pointed out a cafe that had 60 unique flavors, I guess you can’t blame us for being intrigued. Like in the CR, the hot chocolate in Bratislava is an appetizer, a meal, and dessert all in one. By that I mean that it is huge and thick. There were a few times when I could barely finish, which should tell you something. It’s practically just melted solid chocolate, but thicker. The other best part was a weird statue obsession. Every half block or so there was another random statue. Again, I will put up pictures, but for example, there was a metal man sticking his head out of a window holding a clock or a guy waving his hat. The best was a man peeking out of a manhole (Tim, I thought of you). Other highlights…hmm. Well, the Danube flows through Bratislava, so that was neat. I know I’m forgetting things, I have notes somewhere, but Elena is calling me for dinner, and I would like to try to eat.

Coming soon: Things I forgot to say about Slovakia and Poland, More on FOOD, A special segment on the language, and Ode to my Bed