brief report from Krakow

1) Learn from my error, chilluns. If you're going to a foreign country, turn off 2-step verification on your Google accounts for the duration, unless you can actually get text messages on your phone while overseas. Otherwise, if your laptop refuses to talk to the hotel wireless, you'll have to go to great lengths to get internet access long enough to turn verification off so you can check your Gmail on other computers as needed.

2) Things Krakow does very well: street musicians, fall color, street performers of the non-musical kind, hot chocolate, music not on the streets, sausage (so saith the kniedzw), and RIDICULOUSLY monumental altars/shrines in its churches. Also, veneration of Pope John Paul II (shocker, I know).

3) Things I do not do well: sleep on planes, these days. I don't know where my ability to do so went, but it is gone.

4) I wish I could have come here two years ago, when I could pretend to the IRS that this was research for A Natural History of Dragons. Thanks to folklore (which I will report on in more detail later), there are dragons ALL OVER the place. Including one whose picture I will try to post later, because he's awesome.

5) Off to Auschwitz tomorrow. Not exactly happy fun vacation time, but it's one of those things you kind of have to do.

P.S. My folkloric and musical heart is kind of in love with the Heynał mariacki.