Catholicism, Communism, and [hot] Chocolate[...ism?]

My train trip from Prague to the motherland was a near-fiasco, but all's well that ends well. Just note that if you take the train from Prague and have to change trains in Katowice, most likely no one will speak English, and you ought consult the departure schedules yourself (and know the Polish word for departures) instead of waiting for the quaint flap-board to display your train. It's easy to get a ticket from Katowice to Krakow if you make a mistake, however, so I'd recommend the trip if you have a spare day.

The old town of Krakow has a wonderfully medieval feel. I thought I had reached hot chocolate nirvana in Prague, but that was before I went to Wedel and got a cup of their traditional drinking chocolate—heavenly. Big shout-out to Nowa Prowincja for their amazing drinks and beautiful interior. I went there thrice, I couldn't help myself.

Wawel Castle was as beautiful inside as its smok statue was brutals, but I was a bit disappointed that the “dragon's lair” is closed in the winter months. Entry to Wawel Castle Cathedral entitles you to a trip up and down the bell tower, where each of the huge bells has a name and a history. The Cathedral also has some beautiful tapestries inside, as do the castle staterooms. A word to the wise: admission prices and ticket-buying is a bit confusing, but all of it is cool, so you really can't go wrong. I bought tickets first and then tried to figure out what parts of the castle they were for, rather than trying to find tickets for parts I wanted to see. This worked nicely, but you need to be easy-going about it.
These guys were pretty easy-going, just kind of hanging out and crooning to the accordion on the entry ramp to Wawel Castle.

Krakow had more museums than I knew what to do with (which sounds funny after coming from Prague...). I would highly, highly recommend the Cloth Hall museum in the main square: it's only four rooms, but it has hands-down some of the most intricate and masterful paintings (some on 30-ft canvases) that I have ever seen. Also if you don't think you'll miss the 7 zloty (about 3 dollars), the Archeology Museum feels like a well-done 7th grade social studies project, as it makes ample use of dioramas. The big draw is the only Slavic cult god statue ever found.
I also rekindled a little Catholic feeling by going to Mass at St. Mary's Cathedral (pictured in the background above) and visiting the former apartments of Pope John Paul II (before he was a pope, when he was a professor and cardinal, from 1951-1968 or thereabouts).

Of course, everyone knows that a trip to Eastern Europe is just incomplete without some kind of communist history thrown in. Well, my hunt for remnants of communism in Poland took me nearby the Krakow School of Economics to see Skeletor, a Soviet building that was started but never completed and now stands as a skeleton due to the complexity of zoning laws that prohibit its destruction. But I repeat: it shadows the Krakow School of Economics. Best juxtaposition ever?
And speaking of amazing juxtapositions...
Being unsatisfied with this mere taste of the communist legacy, I continued along the tram line to Nowa Huta, or New Steelworks. This is a completely Stalin-planned community on the outskirts of Krakow (now a part of Krakow), apparently built to countermand how beautiful, medieval, and artistic Krakow was through its industrial, worker-championing layout and amenities. It was not nearly as depressing as I expected, but it sure was a lot of nearly identical dilapidated concrete buildings. I would have tried to adhere more to the route on the map, but I was a bit too cold to stay there too long.

On the way back to Prague I took a bus because the timing was more convenient. Please be aware: when you take a bus across the Czech/Polish border, border patrol will board the bus, take your passport, and then GET OFF THE BUS WITH YOUR PASSPORT. This is absolutely terrifying to someone who does not speak Polish and who consequently thought her passport was gone forever as the bus pulled away, but eventually at the dinner stop (20 agonizing minutes later) the border guards pulled up and returned all of the documents. In any case, one of the movies shown on the bus was called Holy Business (I think). It was about two men who supposedly inherit a car owned by Pope John Paul II. It was adorable, it mercifully had English subtitles, and it was a very fitting end to my time in Krakow.

Czech it out!

Prague is an utterly amazing city architecturally and artistically, but one thing struck me above all else: the sheer willingness of the Czech people to speak English. Even in situations that would in no way require a Czech person to go out of their way to speak English to me (such as reaching above me to get a bag, or just passing me in the grocery store), if they overheard English on my lips they would immediately exchange some pleasantry in English with me. I am sure that this is a result of the insane numbers of tourists that flock to Prague regularly. I never thought I would see the plus-side of relentless tourism, but it turns out that the incredibly welcoming Czech people have extended their hospitality to include language (there is also a goodly amount of French, German, and even Russian, to name just a FEW of the languages that clutter up signage in Prague).
"Are you flirting in English? Oh, do go on..."

Of course, I hit the tourist highlights: Charles Bridge, the Astronomical Clock, Prague Castle, Wenceslas Square, the Municipal Building, eating goulash and honey cake, and sampling some delicious beers. It took a lot to distract me from the ubiquitous hot winter drinks, especially hot wine and rich hot chocolate, but Czech beer is famous, after all. I saw a hilarious amount of malformed babies, either Jesus on his mother's knee or cherubs floating in the periphery of the Christian masterworks that litter Prague's museums. I unexpectedly came across some decaying saints in glass coffins in one of the churches I went to, because Christians are rather macabre.
But sometimes you also unexpectedly find peacocks in public gardens, which is cool.

Like many tourists in Prague, I simply could not spend enough time looking at Alfons Mucha collections. There are two museums dedicated to him (that I knew of), and the one that is simply called “The Mucha Museum” is well laid-out and informative, albeit a bit expensive for its small size. I would recommend if, like me, you are a devotee of his art. Another small, expensive, but worthwhile museum is the Museum of Communism, which somewhat passive-aggressively suggests that tourists are intellectual beings that deserve to know more about the Czech people than what can be seen through the bottom of a beer glass (I paraphrase, but the sentiment was the same). Despite this somewhat off-putting introduction, the museum is like reading a short book about how and why communism affected the Czech nation as it did, and it makes the vibrancy of Prague shine all the more, even from behind tacky tourist shops.
I also visited the Museum of the City of Prague (part of the interior photographed above), which is just adorable. Its “claim to fame” is a 3D model of the city made in the mid-nineteenth century, and every half-hour you can see a 3D film where you “fly” through the Prague of yore...a digitization of the model. There is also a beautiful painting of the city in the stairwell dome and far too much minutiae of how districts were divided for tax and municipal purposes throughout history. The temporary exhibit was about Prague denizens traveling to suburban “garden restaurants” for happy summer picnics and the like, which ended in a FUNCTIONING REPLICA of one such restaurants. They recreated a menu and had the foodstuffs on hand, in the museum, served by people in period waitstaff costume. Brilliant.

What is that in the lower-left corner? A dog? A lion? A lion-dog? A cool building near the Astronomical Clock nonetheless.


The only downside to Prague is that so many of the streets are lined with tourist shops, but in winter there are significantly less tourists, so I only really reaped the benefits. A light blanket of snow suits the Gothic spires anyways; I couldn't imagine Prague without a few big snowflakes falling and a cup of hot wine in a cafe.

Krakow...is brutals.

I swear, sooner or later I am going to start waxing poetic about all of the amazing art I've seen and post some of my limited pictures from my semester-break jaunt into Prague and Krakow (aka Bubbie Tour 2011), but in the meantime, please let me share my favorite thing I've seen so far. Behind Wawel Castle, the big famous castle in Krakow, there is this awesome dragon sculpture. I know what you're thinking. "Gee, Pelks, that's pretty cool and all, but is any old sculpture of a dragon really 'brutals' ? Did it really warrant its own blog post and everything?"

As a matter of fact it did, because IT SHOOTS ACTUAL FLAMES FROM ITS MOUTH.

Good work, Poland. Good work.

The "-miş" tense

The Turkish language is a wonderful thing. It has fairly rigid semantic rules such that even a novice like myself can attempt entirely new constructions and find them to be grammatical. This unfortunately was not the case with my new word "nefretçi", which was my attempt at translating "hater" (nefret is 'hate', -çi is akin to the English "-er", as in builder or worker. A good Turkish example would be saatçi, a 'watch repairman/clock maker', since saat means 'watch').

In any case, one of the best and most wonderful things about Turkish is the "dubitative" or "reportative" tense, the "-miş" tense. This is the tense you use in order to report what someone else has told you, to deliver information second hand.

For example:
[I heard] There are two Americans in Uşak.
İki tane Amerikalı Uşak'ta varmış.

Now, this might not seem all that exciting until one realizes that it can be used in the first person to describe actions that you yourself did in the past but that you have no recollection of doing. The "-miş" tense is ideal for forgetful people, but even moreso, and more hilariously, for drunks. A friend of mine half-jokingly called it "the drunk tense", I prefer "the hangover tense".

For example:
I was drunk.
Sarhoştum.

[I was told that] I kissed every man and woman at the party.
Partide herkesi öpmüşüm.

[Supposedly] I danced on a table.
Masada dans etmişim.

Oh Turkish language, is there anything you can't do? I hope "nefretçi" makes it in to the popular parlance, as it will be my token of appreciation to the Turkish language after I return home.