June 2009

krakow has been amazing. we leave tomorrow.

kazimierz: cool, artsy, well worth any time spent there. awesome bars and cafes. bagelmama with delicious bagels (including the obama mama...offensive and perfect).

obama mama bagel

some great shops. old cemetery once covered by sand and synagogues:

an old jewish cemetery in krakow

the old stuff's not as cool as prague's josefov, but the district overall is way better. feels like a real place where people go.

auschwitz: hits far harder than dachau. huge. 3 hour tour well worth it. very difficult to get back from -- we spent 1.5 hours standing in a minibus that the driver seemed to think it was ok to continue to pack people into the whole way there. then again, thinking about where we were coming from, it didn't seem right to complain.

wawel castle, the main square, awesome awesome. plus we do not miss the euro at all. life is so cheap here. we have been badasses, camping in thunderstorms. warsaw tomorrow, and berlin soon after. we both agreed yesterday that we miss germany -- a lot. wir freuen uns auf berlin...

4.5 days. rainy. cold. beautiful but overrun prague castle. a lazy day in the old, old city, on the old, old fort, where we found karel capek's grave and played deep dark secret, in a way.

august: osage county with its fishing poles sticking out of the rotating set that the actors kept breaking. a cute if too-pda gay couple on the fountain outside the theater. a very strange man walking down the street playing with his shirt. fried cheese sandwiches.

not making it to cesky raj...oh well.

knedliky. free museum night + bad performance art. fried green beans. lots of czech beer though we never did have budvar. i bet they'll have it in poland. poland. poland is next.

archie hostel, which i recommend.

lauren getting trashed thanks to her crazy czech relatives. lauren and parag leaving this morning. christina and i heading off to krakow, which is where you'll hear from me next.

it is all i can do not to find this language ridiculous. this is because the only words i recognize are english words that have just had a slight spelling change and a "y" added to the end.

steaky
ryby (ribs)
alkoholy

...i mean, come on. that's funny.

when we arrived, i took 2000 kc out of the atm (a little over $100). the atm gave it to me in one 2000 kc bill. the woman at the internet cafe looked at us like we were crazy when we tried to pay for 30 minutes of internet (30 kc) with a 2000 kc bill. all we needed was to look up our hostel information (that's right, ladies and gents, we forgot to write down what hostel we had booked and how to get there before leaving for prague).

today we bought tickets to see the czech premiere of august: osage county on sunday.

me: do you have tickets available for this show?
ticket lady: we don't perform this show in english.
me: oh that's ok.
ticket lady: that's ok?
me: yes, that's ok.
ticket lady: ...ok.

dear world: we like to see theatre even when we don't understand the language of performance. get used to it.

today, we (that's me, lauren, parag, and christina) wandered around the jewish quarter of prague. it is stunning. the old cemetery: mounds and mounds of graves, over 12,000 stones and there are far more people than that buried there, the stones sticking out at crazy packed-in angles like the snaggleteeth of a hick horde. giant hicks. the golem rabbi is buried there. and the old-new synagogue, the oldest extant synagogue in europe. and another, the pinska (i think that's right) synagogue, painted with the names of czech jews killed in the holocaust.

there is a display upstairs in pinska of pictures drawn by children in theresienstadt, the propoganda camp. one of the most intense holocaust-related things i have ever seen. children were still children.

our plays opened on thursday (http://yinzerspielen.wordpress.com). then, since the second performance isn't until tomorrow, we headed to garmisch for a long-anticipated camping and tramping trip: me, simon, parag, lauren, basti, christina, vinz, iris, and nora.

we weren't the only ones who'd had this excellent idea, so we hit a bit of traffic heading into the town. once there though it's beautiful, never mind how touristy: dirndl outlets and brezen fade into the background when you look up and see the german alps considering you from above.

we climbed and climbed, and then paid 3 euro each to climb some more. past a great glacier, of course, rained on by melting ice, glad of my accidentally-brought poncho, though it makes me look like frodo. at the hut at the end of the trail we lunched. nora, vinz, simon and i lagged behind on the hike down. basti taught the others a dirty rhyme game. in the car, i taught parag, nora, and simon the "one day as i walked through the woods" song. basti and simon stole wood.

at the campsite, parag terrified a biergarten full of people with his antics in the car. an asthmatic lady asked us not to build a fire. we said we needed to cook our dinner and that was that. later, some kids stole half our beer from the river where it was cooling. we found more wood after a long search, me dragging back two giant pieces of a dismembered fence (the "bastard logs"). no s'mores due to the woeful lack of marshmallows in this country, but steaks and sausages and delicious feta-vegetable foil packets. in spite of the stolen beer we managed well with four bottles of wine (one XXL-sized).

the stars were beyond incredible. simon kept saying he'd found "the horse," "the elephant," "the frog." turned out he was making them up. we tried to sleep four in a tent. we didn't sleep well. but we slept happy. the asthma lady whined. we slept on.

today before our drive back we stopped at a lake. freezing water that we nonetheless swam in, me holding my ground until simon and i spotted a water snake that i thought at first was a stick. sunned, dodged giant bugs. a shirtless sleepy simon drove parag, nora, and i back to augsburg, with sleepy hilarity along the way. we were all in fine fettle. and it had really been a glorious trip.