Zapraszamy do Polska!

So here it is.  My first title not in Italian.  The occasion?  The first time I've left Italy since arriving over three months ago.  This past weekend, I went to Poland!

What a weekend it was.  I went with my friend Jaclyn, and while we only had three full days to spend in Poland, we managed to pack in quite a lot.  The adventure began in, well, Bologna.  We met an adorable little Polish toddler named Miko in the Bologna airport.  He was learning to walk and was fascinated by us and wanted to hold our hands.  Adorable (it's worth repeating).  Once we arrived in Wrocław (pronounced something along the lines of "vrotsh-love"), however, things took a turn for the, not worse precisely, but certainly more confusing.  After having repeatedly assured Jaclyn that we would be fine changing our money from Euros into złoty at the Polish airport, I reached the ATM there only to find that Bank of America had apparently forgotten that I was abroad and had cut off all access to my accounts.  Just as I was beginning to panic slightly about having no access to money or a phone to call the bank in a country where the language is completely incomprehensible to me, Lukas appeared.  Lukas was returning to Kraków, where he was from, from Manchester, where he had been living the past few years, and for some reason decided to take us two lost American girls under his wing.  He helped Jaclyn buy a map and figure out the bus schedule and gave us his phone number in case we ran into trouble or were looking for recommendations later.  This enabled us to save quite a lot of złoty on cab fare and to reach our hostel without too much difficulty.


This is not to say that there was still no difficulty involved.  At one point Jaclyn and I ended up lost in a closing mall, where we were directed by a guy working in a coffee shop there to "go strange," which, as this was accompanied by pointing (in, of course, the direction from which we had been coming), we took to mean "straight."  


Eventually we did find out hostel, which apparently doubles as a marriage bureau, and I was able to use the computer there to send a text message to my mom asking her to get on g-chat so I could explain the situation and she could call the bank.  Ahh, the wonders of technology. 

Marriage and honeymoon all at the same time?

That night, Jaclyn and I did a bit of exploring right near the hostel and ate our first (of many) Pierogi of the trip.  Pierogi are basically dumplings that can be pan-fried or boiled and come with a variety of fillings.  My favorite were the Ruskie (Russian) pierogi with a potato filling, but we also tried spinach and cabbage and (in Jaclyn's case) meat.  

Church by night in a square near the hostel.

Boiled Ruskie pierogi with cabbage.

The next morning we left early to catch our train to Kraków, but we did manage to see a bit of Wrocław on the way to the station.

The view from our hostel in Wrocław.

The train station/castle.

Our interpretation of this sign: "Danger! Robots!"
Jaclyn's Polish friend Piotr's reading of the sign: "Caution! Work at heights"
Our conclusion: "Danger! Flying robots!"

The five-hour trip to Kraków constituted the first leg of our sixteen-hour train tour of the Polish countryside.  It was also by far the most miserable, largely because it had occurred to neither of us to pack food and the slice-of-bread breakfast at the hostel disappeared rather quickly.  Consequently, our first stop in Kraków was a restauracja (restaurant) where we ate delicious potato pancakes topped with mushrooms and sour cream.  The abundant and hearty Polish fare we enjoyed this weekend certainly provided a welcome break from the by-now-repetitive Italian cuisine in Bologna, and Jaclyn and I enjoyed every bite (and many, many bites there were)!

The Kraków train station.

The view from the station.

The teatr (theatre) we passed on the way from the station.
They were currently playing the Wizard of Oz!

After dropping our packs off at the hostel, Jaclyn and I again struck out to explore Stare Miasto (old town) of Kraków.  We were lucky enough to find an Easter fair in the Główny Rynek (main square), which was full of local crafts and even more delicious eats.

The Główny Rynek.

Animal-shaped bread.

Women grilling oscypek (a traditional smoked cheese).

Pisanki (Polish Easter Eggs).

The stand where we ate the best pierogi of the trip...twice.

There is a nearly-identical sculpture by the same Polish artist in
Citygarden in downtown Saint Louis.

"Free Beer"

A cotton-candy stand in the Rynek.

After thoroughly exploring the fair, Jaclyn and I headed a little further afield (although we stayed in the Stare Miasto the whole time).  Our random wandering led us to the Wisła (Vistula) River, Wawel Castle,  and a lovely park that circles the old town.

Doing my best to fall into the Wisła.

A bit of Wawel Castle.

Gorgeous park.

Eventually our wandering led us right back to the Rynek (ah, the wonders of a well-designed pedestrian city).  There we enjoyed some "hot wine" (grazne wino, or mulled wine) and people-watching before heading back to the hostel to grab some sweaters before coming back into the square for dinner (we just couldn't resist the thought of more "hot wine" and those delicious Ruskie pierogi from the stands.

Hippie drum-line in the Rynek.  Note the digirido.

Feeding the pigeons.

We met some Romans on vacation while eating dinner in the square.
This guy wanted a picture with us.

After dinner, the adventures really began.  Jaclyn and I decided to head to a pub for a bit before going back to the hostel, and we ended up choosing an Irish pub right off the square.  After chatting a bit with the heavily-accented and oh-so-very-Irish bouncer ("Can I see some identification, girls?...Oh I'm just kidding.  You all should be flattered!  They make me stand by the door so I'm just trying to do a good job of it), we went in....only to find that everyone in the pub was 1) male and 2) wearing a skin-tight, brightly-colored spandex "SupaSuit."

Oh dear.  Since we felt bad leaving immediately after having had a nice chat with the bouncer but we didn't particularly want to spend time with all of the SupaSuit-ed men, we decided to head upstairs to see if it was quieter up there.  As we were standing by the bar ordering our beers and deciding where to sit, a rather drunk British man came up to us and, after commenting on our selection, told us to come over and sit with him and his friends.  A night full of British accents and hilarity ensued.


It turns out that we had inadvertently crashed a "Stag party" (the British equivalent of an American Bachelor party).  As Rich (the one who found us at the bar) explained, the groom-to-be was "the one with the extreeemely white shoes."  Jaclyn and I began the night by slowly sipping our pints in the corner, but eventually we were drawn right into the middle of things and ended up singing karaoke to gems such as "It's My Life" and "Don't Stop Me Now" with Rich and his friends John and Frank.  The "lads" were all incredibly friendly, if somewhat repetitive.  They each asked us probably fifteen times where we were from, what we were doing there, what they were doing there, where we all were, etc.  We also learned that the group was from Yorkshire ("Yorkshire tea is the best!  I buy it by the boocketful!"/ "You wouldn't understand us if we were to speak Yorkshire") and that Prince William (surprise!) is about to get married (we were probably asked four or five times each, "Did you know that the prince is getting married?" It was cute how excited they all were, although we felt a bit bad for the actual groom-to-be in whose honor the party ostensibly was).  Furthermore, Rich kept insisting that he was "half-American" (to which his friend responded, "You're as half-American as Starbucks is!"  This was a slightly mysterious comeback, as we weren't sure whether the friend was implying that Rich was as British as Starbucks is American or whether Starbucks is secretly much more British than we had previously supposed).  


Eventually John realized that all of his friends but Frank had left, and a rather confusing situation ensued in which a still-quite-sober-after-only-one-or-two-pints Jaclyn and I attempted to take a very inebriated John and Frank home to their hostel (they didn't seem to have any idea where they were staying, but fortunately John had a card with the address in his pocket and Jaclyn had a map).  We made it downstairs with John only to find that Frank had somehow been left upstairs.  We sent John in to go get him and in the meantime made some Scottish friends on the street.  John returned, but Frank was still nowhere to be seen.


"John, where's Frank?"
"Oh, I don't know.  Upstairs?"


This time we sent in Jaclyn to fetch Frank, and he grudgingly came outside, but refused to leave his half-finished pint behind.  Used to Italy where open-container laws don't exist, Jaclyn and I decided to not worry about it.  Unfortunately for Frank, open container laws do exist in Poland and as we were walking down the street a police car pulled over, confiscated his pint, and wrote him a citation fining him 100 złoty (equivalent to roughly 22£).  His response? "What is that? I got arrested!"  No, Frank, you didn't.


We eventually arrived at their hostel, but they refused to go in, insisting instead on walking us home first.  However, after only a few minutes, both of them appeared to have forgotten this entirely ("Where are you taaaking us?"/ "Where aaare we?"/ "I've never walked this much in my entire life!").  Oh dear. Once we arrived, we had to spend a few minutes convincing a now-diagonal Frank leaning on our door and tiredly repeating, "Just let us in.  Come on.  Just let us in," that this was not, in fact, something that we could do.  Eventually the two of them agreed to leave if we would just give them the Italian-style peck on each cheek goodbye so they could "feel continental" (Frank: "I looove feeling continental!").


Once inside, Jaclyn and I had a fit of giggles and just shook our heads at the whole sequence of events.  The next morning, we spent a good bit of the eight-hour train ride to Poznań repeating some of the funnier statements of the night before to each other in our best British accents.  As Rich had reminded us, now we could say for the first time that we had spent a night "hanging out with a bunch of British lads."  


When we arrived in Poznań, Jaclyn's friend Piotr, a medical student at the university there, met us at the station, took us back to our hostel, and gave us a brief tour of the city center ("I think this was important somehow....I have a class in this building...That's the pathology department," you know, useful information like that) before bringing us back to the dorms to hang out for a bit.

Jaclyn and Piotr in the main square.

Colorful former Burgher houses.

A view across the (hidden) river.

After spending some time with Piotr and his friends at a birthday barbecue, Jaclyn and I headed back to the hostel for a bit.  There we met Tatsuya, a Japanese international relations student who was in the middle of a 5-month solo world tour.  He had just recently arrived in Europe after two and a half months in South America.  We were impressed.  He also told us about his ambitions to move to New York after graduating and become a professional hip-hop dancer for a few years before beginning a career doing something in IR.  Pretty awesome.  I also met another group of traveling Romans in the hostel.  One thing I was not expecting to do while in Poland was speak Italian, but there you go.  Twice.


That night we went out for a pint with Piotr in a very red communist-Russia-themed bar.  Jaclyn and I were fairly exhausted after the adventures of the night before and the long train ride, so we called it a night fairly early.


The next day we walked around Poznań a bit more before once again heading to the train station so we could go back to Wrocław to catch our plane to Bologna in the evening.  After enjoying our last meal of pierogi in Wrocław and sitting in the airport for a few hours (we vastly overestimated how long it would take to get to the airport/check-in/make it through security), fly back to Bologna we did.


The surprises, however, were not quite over for the weekend.  When I arrived back at my apartment a little before midnight, I not surprisingly decided to head straight to bed.  But when I turned off the lights and slid under the covers, I was very surprised to feel something cool and, well, leafy under there with me.  Alarmed, I leapt up and turned the lights back on to find a single, slightly squished, long-stem white rose in between my sheets.  I still have absolutely no idea how it got there, and I only have one day in Bologna to investigate before heading off to Berlin(!) tomorrow.  Che misterioso! (How mysterious!)

Ulteriori esplorazioni

I last wrote from Bologna, but I haven't been spending much time here recently.  Last Saturday I took the train south to meet Ellie in the Cinque Terre for a bit of hiking before returning to Florence with her for the remainder of the weekend.  

I had, of course, always heard that the Cinque Terre were incredibly beautiful.  However, my fear of tourist-infested must-see destinations (heightened following the tragedy I had recently witnessed in Venice) had ensured that they were never especially high on my personal must-see list.  So I have Ellie to thank for convincing me to go with her and reminding me that it would take a lot more than a few tourists to spoil such immense natural beauty.

I took the train from Bologna and met Ellie on the train from Florence to La Spezia.  We had been sitting in the same car facing opposite directions for several hours before I finally realized that the likelihood of there being two trains between Florence and La Spezia arriving at 12.20 was slim and that we were therefore probably on the same train.  Oh well.  At least we found each other.  From La Spezia we caught the train to Riomaggiore, the first town of the Cinque Terre...or at least we tried to.  We found the train without difficultly, but when it had still not left twenty minutes after its scheduled departure time, we figured something must be up.  The train had, in fact, broken down, and a mad dash ensued to find the replacement train.  We ended up sharing a car with an Italian liceo (high school) class on field trip.  Oh, memories.

From Riomaggiore, Ellie and I walked the seaside path to Manarola, the next town over.  The path was stunningly beautiful, but rather clogged with tourist groups (including all of those high schoolers from the train).

A view of the Ligurian Sea and the Via dell'Amore. 

We walked right down to the water.  So blue!

From Manarola, we decided to hike the overland path to Corniglia, the third town.  This proved to be an excellent decision, as we not only lost the tourist groups and managed to do a bit of real hiking, but the higher altitude meant that we didn't lose the incredible views of the sea.  We were also able to take a lot of little side trails through the nearby vineyards and olive groves.

View overlooking Manarola.

We climbed up the hills of Manarola and began our hike in earnest.

Then we got lost in a vineyard.
(Guess whose fault that was.)

We didn't mind too much because the view was incredible.

Then Ellie started minding because we had to bushwhack and she was
wearing shorts.

An enticing side trail.

The gorgeous vineyard to which it led.
(Note Ellie's victory dance in the background.)

Taking in the view.

The view I was taking in.

Who knew when we met on WP as freshmen that in fewer than three years
we would be hiking the Cinque Terre together?

More trail.

The stairs leading back down to Corniglia.

We missed our train back and spent another hour or so at the station.

Our view for those few hours.

Ellie and I met up with Parker and Corey in Corniglia and we all took the trains back to La Spezia and Florence together.  Back in Florence, Parker headed off to stay with some other friends and Ellie, Corey and I headed up to Fiesole, a small town in the hills where Ellie's dad lives.  Sunday and Monday were spend exploring Fiesole and the outskirts of Florence (and navigating around town during a surprise bus strike).

Looking over Florence from the hills.

The ubiquitous Duomo.

Fiesole is in the hills on the right above the city.

Postcard-worthy.

The door to the apartment in which we were staying.
The whole place smelled of lilacs.

There were donkeys!
One was named Pavarotti.

View from the window in the apartment.
Again, note the Duomo.

So we were truly lucky to be able to stay in such an idyllic pastoral setting.  It was lovely to experience Florence from the perspective of someone who lives there rather than as a weekend visitor.

I made it back to Bologna on Tuesday morning, only to leave again early Wednesday, this time for Milan.  I took a day trip with my friend Vittorio because he had an audition there and wanted to make the several-hour-each-way-by-regional-train trip worthwhile.  We spent the morning on the train and then walking around the city near the hotel where his audition was taking place.  Then I got to spend an hour observing Italian aspiring actors and assuring the man in charge that I did not, in fact, want to try out for anything.

After the audition Vittorio and I headed over to the Duomo area, where we shared a picnic and people-watched in the shadow of the great church.  When we had eaten as many of the tomatoes as we could manage, we spent some time checking out every H&M in the vicinity (there were several) searching for suspenders, because Vittorio's had broken and apparently a belt was out of the question.  

When we eventually headed back to the station after some more lying out in the Piazza del Duomo, we missed our train.  Which meant several more hours of aimless wandering and gnawing on the cheapest bread we could find.  Fortunately we did make the next train, which was divided into compartments.  As we had a compartment to ourselves, we were able to spread out, sleep (in my case), and practice headstands (in Vittorio's case).  

Back in Bologna, I discovered that the past week or so of travel and adventure had completely worn me out.  How did I discover this?  By going to sleep for what I intended to be a quick nap between classes only to wake up twenty hours later.  Oops!

Un giretto imprevisto a Venezia

La vita continua (life goes on), and things continue to occur at an astonishingly rapid pace (even my three-hour lectures don't seem quite so interminable these days).

A few days ago (as in, Saturday night at two in the morning), my friend Ellie from Wash U wrote to me letting that she was going to be in Bologna on Sunday night and inviting me to continue on the Venice with her on Monday to meet up with Parker (another close friend of mine from Wash U) and Cory (a friend of close friends from Wash U...as in he and Ellie and Parker met while studying at Oxford this semester).  This sounded like an admirable plan, especially once Ellie told me that the three of them had rented an apartment for a few days while they were there (apparently some Venetians with second homes elsewhere rent out their Venetian apartments to travelers by the night) and that I could stay with them there at no cost. Perfect, right?

So I spent the next day catching up on various things that needed to be done and waiting for Ellie.  Once she arrived around 10pm, I obviously wanted to show her around the city and have a fun night out.  Unfortunately, Bologna is absolutely dead on Sundays (especially at night).  More fortunately, my friends Vittorio and Milos had been telling me all day that they were interested in doing somehing, so since Milos speaks English fairly well (Ellie speaks no Italian, and Vittorio speaks pretty much no English whatsoever. His vocabulary consists mostly of "Yeah!," which he uses often and with great enthusiasm), we headed over to their apartment (after finally finding them in Piazza Verdi after two hours of searching/waiting for them).  Although there were several language barriers in the way, the four of us managed to have a good time and communicate reasonably well (except for the part where I tried to explain the concept of Newspeak and Saussure's linguistic theories about the relationship between the signifier and the signified in Italian...that didn't go very well at all).

The next day Ellie and I walked around Bologna for a bit and did some grocery shopping at the vegetable market before catching the train to Venice to meet the boys.  Although the train ride itself was incredibly pleasant and Ellie and I each very much enjoyed both the view and the conversation, disaster was soon to strike.  Well, maybe not disaster, but certainly a great deal of inconvenience.

The plan had been for Ellie and I to meet Parker and Cory at the apartment they were renting around 6.  What actually happened was that Ellie and I got off the train and straight onto the vaporetto (water bus) going absolutely the wrong direction.  So instead of going only four stops, we ended up going fifteen stops and taking a fifteen minute break at the end of the line while waiting for the vaporetto going in the correct direction.  Meanwhile, Cory's phone has run out of batteries and Parker's phone, which won't accept calls outside of England, decided not to accept text messages either.  To further complicate matters, the apartment reservation is in Ellie's name and neither her nor Parker nor Cory speak any Italian (well, to be fair Parker took a few semesters a few years ago but freely admits that he remembers almost none of it), and the woman at the apartment speaks absolutely no English.

Eventually, after a stunning (if unintentional) tour of most of Venice by water, Ellie and I made our way to the apartment, still without any sign of the boys.  At this point, we discover that this is not, in fact, and empty apartment as the listing implied, but an apartment inhabited by a reality-TV-watching grandmotherly Italian woman named Linda.  However, she seemed happy enough to see us and, after showing us our room, directed us to the kitchen so we could cook up those vegetables from the market in Bologna for dinner.  I was able to provide translations between her and Ellie, so the conversation went relatively smoothly.  As she was showing us around, the boys finally arrived and joined us in the kitchen.  Linda resumed her reality-TV watching while we chopped vegetables.

Then she came back into the kitchen.

"How many of you are sleeping here?" she asked.
"All of us," I replied.

This was apparently a problem.

After a long (confusingly translated) conversation and several international phone calls to the British woman in charge of the on-line listings and reservations, it became clear that while Ellie had made a reservation for three with the understanding (she thought) that there might be a fourth for the empty Rialto apartment, there had been a mix-up of some sort and the four of us had ended up in Linda's spare room.  To further complicate matters, Linda had been informed that the reservation was only for two.  Yikes!

After a bit of begging and offering to sleep on the floor (keep in mind, it was already past 9pm by this point), we agreed to finish making dinner (which had been simmering away on the stove this whole time) and leave.

This dinner was one of the more hilariously (in hindsight) uncomfortable experiences of my life.  Since we had been unpleasantly distracted throughout most of the cooking process, the pasta was overcooked, the carrots were undercooked, and there was not enough sauce.  Still, we ate as quickly as possible while trying to keep the nervous giggling to a minimum since Linda was standing over us banging pots around in the sink as she did our dishes.  After refusing to let us do out dishes, Linda then stood at the door as we gathered our things and ushered us down the stairs to a chorus of mumbled "ci dispiace"s ("we're sorry"s).

So we stood there on the street, absorbed the fact that we had just entered an elderly woman's home, cooked dinner in her kitchen, and left, and considered the fact that we were now on the streets of Venice at 10pm with nowhere to stay.  Parker and Cory had called all of the hostel numbers in their guidebook, but all were either full or no longer answering phones.  So, we wandered.  And wandered.  And wandered.

After some time, we found an (exorbitantly expensive) internet cafe, where we quickly searched for more hostels in the area.  None of the phone numbers we tried worked, but at least this time we had addresses.  Armed with this list and our free map, we struck off in search of the B&B Rota.  Due to the narrow windiness of the Venetian alleys, the dark, and the absurdly tiny size of the hostel's sign (it was, no exaggeration, about half the size of a postcard), it took us some time to find said B&B.  When we finally did find it, we rang the bell...and received no answer.  So we rang again.  This time a suspicious face appeared in the window.  Apparently the four of us with our backpacks didn't look too disreputable, so he opened the door.  "He" turned out to be a German backpacker staying at the hostel.  He also didn't speak much English, but managed to convey that the receptionist was mysteriously missing.  Fortunately, he let us in anyway and the four of us sat in the hallway of the hostel for approximately 45 minutes eating apples and sandwiches and wondering how long we should wait and what we could possibly do other than wait.  After about 45 minutes a man walks in, looks at us all sitting there with our packs, and, without batting an eye, asks how long we've been waiting.

Not only were we able to get a nice room for four right off of the kitchen, but we also got a tour of the entire hostel (for rather obscure reasons) and cookies!  So, all in all, not a bad night.  Walking around a deserted Venice at night was incredible, and we got some great pictures.

The Grand Canal by night.

The next day we spent the morning wandering around the city some more.  Venice is a completely different place by day than it is by night.  I LOVED walking around the empty nighttime Venice.  It was beautiful and, other than being slightly deserted, felt like a real place.  However, the daytime was horrendous.  The city was obviously still incredibly beautiful and even more incredible to think about (especially considering its past), but it was impossible to escape from the tragic theme-parkification.  La Basilica di San Marco had ropes strung up ushering lines of visitors through (it felt like being in line at Disneyland), and the Bridge of Signs is apparently now sponsored by Toyota.  I wish I had been able to see Venice at least a hundred years ago, and while I was there I just couldn't keep from being distracted by a feeling of something precious having been irrevocably lost.  Really, the only word that can sum up the situation is tragic.

This makes me lose a little of my faith in humanity.

Fortunately, the rampant tourism has not yet completely destroyed Venice's underlying charm.  Here are a few (more uplifting) pictures as a reminder of why people go to Venice in the first place.

Small bridge near our hostel.

Ok Parker, I admit it.
Venetian canals DO beat the one in Bologna.

The Grand Canal by day. 

A rather over-exposed Parker and I.

Gondolas in which we did not ride.

Italian flag made of laundry!

Someone rather helpfully wrote the direction to
San Marco on almost every wall in the area.

Even the graffiti in Venice is directed at the turisti!

The whole crew.
Ellie, Corey, Parker, and I.

View from the bridge leading to the train station.

One of my favorite things in Venice, other than some of the views, was the fish market, because it seemed like a part of the city that was still living.  I also very much enjoyed taking pictures of all the slimy sea creatures.

After we had had enough of Veniceland we hopped back on the train to Bologna, making a quick stop off in Padova to visit Genna.  Back in Bologna we made dinner and walked around the city a bit.  The next day involved some more serious exploration, as we headed outside of the walls to check out Blu's murals at XM.  We even found a few more that I hadn't previously known about on our walk back towards centro!

Parker admiring some large-scale street art.

After all that hiking around la periferia (the periphery), we grabbed some falafel from my favorite kebab place and sat on what I like to think of as "the beach" a.k.a. Piazza Verdi, the major student hang-out in the city.

The Opera House.
"Un popolo senza teatro è un popolo morto."
("A people without theatre is a dead people.")
-Federico García Lorca

Just the usual.

Parker and I chatting with my friend Vittorio.

That night we headed back up to XM for a "concert," which turned out to be a screening of a 1911 silent film version of Dante's Inferno accompanied by an experimental jazz quintet.  It was completely unexpected ("imprevisto" is becoming a bit of a buzzword in my life these days...), but incredible nonetheless.  I would highly recommend the film if you ever happen to come across it.

The next day Parker, Ellie, and Cory left Bologna for Florence.  After leaving them at the train station I headed over the Questura (an immigration office) to (finally) pick up my official permesso di soggiorno (permission to live in Italy...which is apparently not granted by a visa alone).  So I'm finally officially living in Italy legally and have the card to prove it!

Whew.  That was quite the post.  Props if you made it this far!  Here's a reward: an awesome music video to a song that you cannot move without hearing most places in Bologna.