Eastern European Adventure, Day 7: Krakow

It was another rainy morning in Krakow, and we headed to Scandale Royal for breakfast across the square from the hotel. I got the buffet, which was really tasty, and Molly got an egg sandwich, which ended up being two full sandwiches, and we took one of them with us to eat later. Our destination for the day was the Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory, which was quite a ways away, and since it was raining we decided to take a cab there and then walk our way back over the course of the afternoon/evening.

Apropos of nothing, here's a kebab shop with a shawarma-head logo

The museum was very interesting and very affordable, but it was very claustrophobic, which was probably part of the point, but also made things less pleasant. There was a 35-minute film, and we spent another 90 or so in the museum in addition to that, but it was difficult to put together a real coherent narrative of how Schindler did what he did, or even exactly what he did.

Umbrellas!

We bought a joint ticket with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, which was next door. I thought the art museum was a better experience, and the exhibits about nationalism and globalism were particularly good. We fought through the drizzle to find Zayka, a really good Indian restaurant where we shared a couple of curries. We walked back to our hotel, where we rested for a couple of hours to recharge, and then headed out for dinner at Boscaiola, a very nice Italian restaurant where we split a bottle of wine, and Molly had some pasta with salmon and I had a duck salad. We strolled around and stopped for small after dinner drinks at a couple of places, one of which was decorated like a boozy Steak and Shake, and the other which was a Belgian beer bar.

Molly got a couple of small bottles of local flavored vodka as souvenirs, and we called it a night.

This is Day 7. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 6: Krakow

We got up and headed out in search of breakfast. Milk Bar Tomascza was our intended destination, but the sign on the door said they were closed for the next couple weeks for some reason, so we kept walking. We ended up sharing an omelet and a salad with chicken, along with a coffee and a fresh-squeezed orange juice. We strolled onward around the Old Town, which is really gorgeous, compact, and easy to navigate on foot.

We checked out the vendors in the Market Square and the Cloth Hall, and headed south along the main drag to Wawel Castle.

You can walk around the castle grounds for free, but you need a ticket to enter any of the buildings. We were curious about the Dragon’s Lair, which supposedly contains a dragon skeleton, but the line was really long for tickets and it had started to rain, so we skipped it and headed to Kazimierz, the former Jewish Quarter just outside the Old Town. We got a cake and coffee at a small coffee shop and strolled around for a while through the drizzle. It wasn’t as polished-up as the rest of the older part of the city, and I think that many of the businesses were more nightlife-focused and didn’t open until later in the day, but it was a very good area to walk around, as well. We strolled on the Planty, the former moat around the Old Town that the Austrians filled in and flattened after they took over Poland in the 1700s, and went in search of lunch at Pod Wawelem, which is an Austrian-style beer hall where you can get huge mugs of beer and delicious food, such as fried potato cakes with sour cream, salmon, and big ol’ salty caviar eggs the size of peas, and Hungarian goulash soup.

It was tremendous. We went in search of postcards at both the Market and a couple of museum bookstores, and stumbled upon a printmaking exhibition at a museum a couple of blocks from our hotel.

Next up was a very pleasant, very touristy drink at a café along the Square and some delightful people watching as the sun went down.

After that, we went and had a cafeteria-style meal at Chimera, which was very nice. You could have a serving of any four dishes, which was plenty of food for us. We were pretty worn out at that point, and headed back to the hotel.

This is Day 6. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

I got up, had some hotel breakfast and headed out on foot for the Old Town. First, I figured I’d stash my luggage in a locker at the train station so I wouldn’t have to bring it from the hotel later, in case I was pressed for time. I had got a little sunburned the day before, so I first had to acquire some sunscreen from the apoteka. I walked along the Nowa Swiet (New World) to Castle Square, and then followed it into the Old Town. I’ll just let the pictures tell the story for the most part here.

I visited the MariaSokolowsky Curie Museum, which was $2.75 admission, and was small, but informative about her life and career.

I hit a bit of a wall at this point, and walked down the hill from the Old Town to the Multimedia Fountain, and I sat down against a wall and rested and people-watched for a while. From there, I walked to the Warsaw Uprising Monument, which was massive.

Next was the POLIN History of Polish Jews Museum, which set me back a whole $7.50, but was well worth it. The museum kicked off in the 10^th or 11^th century, with the arrival of Jews in what’s now Poland after emigrating from the Middle East, and followed their history through the centuries to the present day. I didn’t know that 80% of the worlds Jews lived in Poland before World War II, for instance, and that Poland had traditionally been much more accommodating to them than other countries.

It was only a couple of hours until I needed to catch my train at this point, so I started working my way back to the central station. I stopped and bought some postcard stamps at the post office. Molly’s flight into Warsaw was departing late, putting her connection to Krakow in jeopardy, so I tried to work out some logistics with her in case she missed her flight, but I eventually got on my train to Krakow.

The train to Krakow was much less modern than the train from Brzeg, with no digital monitors in the cars and no air conditioning. It was stifling in there, and I’m glad I’d brought a big bottle of water along, although it was still pretty miserable. I had to make an unexpected train change on the outskirts of Krakow, but I figured it out without too much trouble.

The marked route from the train station to Old Town Krakow takes you through a huge shopping mall, which I’m not sure is necessary. Anyway, it was about a 20-25 minute walk from the station to Hotel Globtroter, which was located on a beautiful square above the frattiest dance club imaginable.

I got checked in, bought some bottled water and snacks at the nearby Zabka, and wrote postcards with some Polish sports talk show on in the background while I waited for Molly to arrive. Her flight was late from Warsaw as well, so no problem with the connection, but public transit didn’t operate that late from the airport, so she had to take a shuttle. She finally rolled in at about 1 a.m. and we crashed for the night.

This is Day 5. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Woke up early and dragged my luggage to the train station to catch the 7:18 train to Warsaw. The train station didn’t feature much English signage, but it was straightforward enough to figure out where to go.

However, I didn’t realize that I needed to watch for which car number to board, and I ended up on the completely wrong end of the train from my seat. I eventually got it figured out, but I felt pretty ignorant. There were only two or three stops between Brzeg and the central station in Warsaw, and the trip went by pretty quickly. I got there at about 10:30 a.m., and got the train tickets for the rest of the trip purchased while I was at a station with English-speaking employees. The ticket for me from Warsaw to Krakow, and tickets for Molly and I from Krakow to Prague were a total of $101.

"Stalin's Penis" is what this building is nicknamed, since he "gave" it to Poland after WWII

Then I walked about 25-30 minutes to my hotel, which was about 1 mile south of the Old Town. I could add a bike rental to my room reservation for an additional $10, so I went ahead and did that. It was a ‘90s mountain-style frame with a 7-speed internal hub; totally functional for the task at hand. I set out for the Warsaw Poster Museum, which was 6 or 7 miles south of the hotel. I wasn’t sure what to expect for bike infrastructure, but I was pleasantly surprised. There were a few spots that were a little hairy, but once I got a half-mile south of the hotel, there was a dedicated off-street bike path the rest of the way adjacent to the sidewalk. There were a lot of people biking, which was great to see. The Poster Museum ended up being on the grounds of the former Summer Castle of the Polish royal family (Wilanow), but fortunately Thursdays were free admission day to the grounds, so I got to walk around there a little bit, too. The poster exhibit was awesome, and I bought a bunch of postcards of Polish-adapted posters for American movies.

Next, I wanted to explore the large city park south of downtown, so I rode back along the banks of the Vistula River. I found a bike bridge under the freeway crossing the river, so I rode across to the suburb on the other side, where I found a statue to what to me was a random Polish general, and rode back.

I found the U-Jazdowski, which was an old castle housing a modern art museum. Thursdays were free admission day there, too, so I checked that out briefly and went in search of the Chopin statue. Along the way, I found the Orangery, which was an old theatre building where they’d discovered beautiful frescoes behind the walls, as well as a bunch of plaster busts of Roman statues, as well as Polish royalty.

The Chopin statue is huge, cool, and in a really nice setting. They have free live concerts of his music there on Sundays in the summer.

I went and found dinner at an Indian restaurant in the Downtown area, and tried a Tyskie, which wasn’t as good as Zwyiec or the local lager in Brzeg. It tasted more like an American adjunct – too sweet and not enough hop character to balance it out. Beers in Warsaw are just as cheap as in Brzeg - $2 to $2.50 for a pint. I found a statue of Ronald Reagan on the way back to the hotel, because why not.

This is Day 4. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 3: Brzeg, Poland

Another full day at the plant, followed by dinner at the same place. In the mid-afternoon, we were informed that there was a small canteen restaurant in a building adjacent to the plant entrance where we could get lunch. We walked over there and had some cabbage soup and pierogis.

Yummy-looking, huh? Between work and dinner, I walked to the train station to purchase my ticket for Warsaw. There was an automated station with English instructions, which was pretty easy to navigate. Here's a map of Brzeg.

It's pronounced "Zheg," because the B is basically silent, and the R-Z combo adds up to a zh sound. 

This is Day 10. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 2: Brzeg, Poland

Worked at the plant all day, and eating lunch doesn’t appear to be a thing in Poland, so I was really hungry by dinnertime. Ate at the same restaurant again, this time a steak salad with some local beers.

There was the option of either the local draft or a “bright” and “dark” Czech beer option. The local, Zamkowe, was a really nice lager from a town about 10 miles from Brzeg.

This is Day 2. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Eastern European Adventure, Day 1: MSP to Brzeg

Sunday, August 19

Flew out from MSP at 3 p.m. to Amsterdam, then to Warsaw.

Monday, August 20

Got to hang out in the KLM lounge in Amsterdam, which was better than not doing that. Napped a little on the flight to Warsaw, and then met up with guy from Crown Europe and he drove us to Brzeg. It was interstate for the first ¾ of the miles, but then the last hour and a half was on little country roads through small villages. The interstate had tall barriers alongside it in pretty much all the towns, which made it hard to see much of anything.

Once we got off the interstate, it was easier to get an idea of the area. The part of Poland between Warsaw and Brzeg is extremely flat, and mostly small farm fields. The rapeseed and wheat had already been harvested, and there were several fields of soybeans and corn, as well. I was totally beat by the time we got to our hotel, which was 7 p.m. or so. We had a couple of beers in the hotel bar and then walked around the town a little bit so that I could buy a toothbrush and kill some time before the rest of our work group arrived.

We had dinner at the Arte Hotel Café across the highway from our hotel. Brzeg is a town of about 30,000, and it’s quite nice. Pope John Paul II was from this part of Poland, and Frederick Chopin was from Poland as well, and their names are everywhere on streets and buildings.

This is Day 1. Here's the full list of posts from this trip:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Book Report: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Sharp Objects is a very tense, uncomfortable book. I felt like I read most of it by looking between my fingers. That's not at all to say that it's a bad book, just that it is unrelenting in its yuckiness.

I'd heard of Gone Girl but never watched or read it, and I hadn't heard of Sharp Objects before the show came out on HBO. I don't read many "thrillers," so I don't have much in the genre to compare this to, but I thought that Flynn did an excellent job of keeping the plot moving. You may be able to guess who did it before the big reveal at the end, but I thought that there were enough possible suspects to make it interesting.

There are some ridiculous aspects, but it's not a bad book. It creeped me out enough that I'll probably avoid the show for a while, though.

Book Report: Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

I watched Molly's Game, the major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, on a flight a few months ago, and I liked it so much that I requested the book that it's based on from the library. After reading some heavy science-based and more academic books recently, it was kind of nice to enjoy a breezy, somewhat vapid book for a change of pace. The pages flew by, man.

Molly Bloom (the sister of Jeremy Bloom, who was a world-class skier and also a wide receiver for the University of Colorado football team) moves to Los Angeles after her skiing career came to an end with no particular plan. As part of her job working for perhaps the worst person in the world, she ends up organizing high-stakes poker games for the Hollywood elite. When her boss tries to fire her and cut her out from the lucrative poker-organizing action, she turns the tables (see what I did there?) on him and takes control of the game herself. She is extremely successful as a game-runner, but eventually it all comes crashing down.

There's a shit-ton of money flying around in this book, even more than I was aware of during the movie. Since directly taking a cut of the action on the table is illegal, Bloom makes money through tips from the game participants, with the implication that if you tip poorly you won't get invited back. It's apparently nothing for most of these people to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a night. I can see where it would be tough to lose perspective in a situation like that, and Bloom does.

An interesting side note in the book (that doesn't figure into the movie) is that Bloom dates a son of Frank and Jamie McCourt, who owned the Los Angeles Dodgers at the time. The McCourts were shown to be vindictive bastards with an outrageously opulent lifestyle, but they come off as some of the more grounded and decent people in the book, which tells you something about the rest of the company Bloom keeps. Another thing is that Michael Cera's character in the movie is clearly based on Tobey Maguire, who if he's actually anything like how he's portrayed in the book, is a tremendously manipulative, petty sonofabitch.

Reading the book revealed some huge liberties that Aaron Sorkin took with the story for his screenplay, and I'm sorry to say that a lot of the parts of the movie that I liked were movie magic and had no basis in the actual story. For instance: Idris Elba's enjoyable lawyer character doesn't exist at all, and the skiing accident that is pretty much the framing device of the entire plot, didn't happen in anything approaching the way it's shown in the movie. Sorry if I ruined it for you, but I'm just passing along the favor done by the book.

Book Report: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire is full of fun facts! Especially the apple part of the book. There are also potato, marijuana, and tulip parts, but I enjoyed the apple part the most. Did you know that growing apple trees from seed is a complete crapshoot, and you don't know what kind of apple you'll get because they don't grow "true" from seed? Did you know that there wasn't any honey in the U.S. before European settlers brought honeybees along with them? Did you know that before refrigeration was developed, there was no such thing as non-alcoholic cider? All cider was hard cider. These are fun facts!

Pollan's central premise is that plants trick or manipulate humans into propagating them by providing sweet (exemplified by the apple), nourishing (potato), intoxicating (weed), or beautiful (tulip) vegetation or fruits. I think I buy that, although the cases for each and my level of interest in each varied widely. It's a pretty good book overall, and I feel like I learned a lot.

This was the September selection for the Boneshaker Science Book Club, and we had a good discussion.

Book Report: Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

One of the troubles with procrastinating on writing these reports until a month or more after I finished the book is that for the more forgettable books, I don't have very strong recollections. Ada's Algorithm is not especially memorable, and not for Essinger's lack of effort in trying to make Ada Lovelace a memorable figure.

Since Lovelace died at a fairly young age and didn't publish her own work (the primary source for Essinger's book is her letters and a commentary that she provided for Charles Babbage's essay for his difference engine), a lot of his work is speculative. Both speculating on her state of mind, as well as on the significance, more than a century later, of what Lovelace foresaw about the future of computing. Essinger sweats all over the page trying to make the case that Lovelace was the real brains of the operation and had more of a vision for what the difference engine - and, more importantly, its never-built successor, the analytical engine - could become.

However, in order to make this case, Essinger chooses to make some pretty disparaging statements about Babbage, who, you know, actually made the thing, and who was attempting, with little success, to advance his creation further. While Lovelace was a genius in her own right, that doesn't require the diminishment of Babbage, and it's important to note that any advances she made were purely on paper. I think that if the gender roles were reversed and Babbage were being denigrated for the benefit of Lovelace, then that would be pure male chauvinism. I don't think that pursuing the same strategy to raise Lovelace's stature does her or Babbage any good.

Also, it's annoying how much of the early part of the book is spent on Lord Byron, Ada's absentee father and a real piece of shit human. Ada Lovelace is cool and amazing and good, but any effort that  this book makes to further that case is not beneficial to her.