Recap (If I can) Wreak Havoc (I must)

TIME FOR SOME SPRING CLEANING ON THIS BLOG: Right below this latest update, which chronicles the second half of Krakow but not Amsterdam, I have uploaded a series of pictures from the first month and a half of my stay in Europe, organized by the fact that they were all taken in France, and they have been posted in roughly reverse chronological order... Bear with me please. Ok, so what's next: notes from the Netherlands sandwiched by Poland photos and then A-dam ones... And as the great appliance salesman from Carlson's says, thanks for listening...


Round 2 Krakow—
Sunday February 27th: Returned to Kazimierz with a group of 8 German girls and their unfortunately lone male companion Sebastian, all of whom I befriended at the Stranger Hostel, and together we saw the oldest synagogue there which is now a heritage-y kind of museum. The historicization of the Jews in Europe seems nearly complete… we are almost a fairy tale people there. Weird seeing my own customs and not so distant cultural past on a platter, and sharing the dish with some college kids just like me, except whose grandfathers warred against mine, and whose elder elder fifth cousins baked mine in the ovens…
Later that evening, we all went to Stalowe Magnolie (Steel Magnolia?) a très classe jazz club in the French style, and saw the prototypical Polish duet, a lead singer with soulful pipes to match her stunning beauty, backed up by a balding but young, buzz-cutted brute, an ex-KGB henchman on acoustic guitar, whose skilful fingers now plucking guitar strings once held the garrotte wire for back-alley stranglings.

Monday February 28th: Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow, where everything is made of NaCl, including chandeliers, statues, chapels, recreations of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, etc. Miles and miles of underground passages, a UNESCO declared hyper-priceless place (pronounced eepehr, the French put it in front of everything, kinda like super, it’s not formally called that by UNESCO, just a bit of French info). Salt was so valuable back in the day, it would be like if there was a oil museum under the sea where everything was made from crude…
In the evening, rendez-vous’ed with Mathieu again, who took me to a KLO (Krakow locals only, what up Malibu) bar, where we ate like Polish kings, on Bagis, which costs about a buck-fifty for 250 grams of your finest sauerkraut and sausage, complemented by stale bread and .5 liters of Zwyiec Beer, can’t they just call it a pint? Ironically the crusty older set who were the establishment’s true patrons didn’t get give me any dirty looks for speaking English loudly like we Americans do, but one did hassle Mathieu a bit, even though he lives in Krakow! Poor kid (he’s 24) already has enough frazzled nerves after being mugged with two friends the week before. Also, the bar (the name of which I never learned) came complete with its own Goldstein (my former deadbeat landlord from Berkeley). The clone even walked into the bar with his own bizarro version of Dino, a dog retarded simply by the constant contact with his master.

Tuesday March 1st: AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
I still don’t know what it was supposed to make me feel, and I will never be able to process it fully. Everyone should go there. There are no words I can say to explain to you, and I don’t want to, or can’t be, a guide to Holocaust genocide. I will put up some photographs of the cold -14° Celsius day when I was there during the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

Wednesday March 2nd: En route to Amsterdam,
from now on to be referred to as A-dam, Blog post forthcoming…