Kraków

The week before Christmas I hopped some trains and went to Poland. Everyone says Kraków is the place to be, and after spending a few days there I have to second that. It was the capital of Poland for many centuries, and around every corner there's some stunning building to drool over. At the same time, its architecture (and its people) haven't completely lost that post-Communist awkwardness that makes this part of the world so odd and charming. Don't ask me to explain what I mean by that. I think you have to be here to understand.

Since Polish is similar to Czech, I thought I would have a fairly easy time understanding basic signs and phrases. Unfortunately, I underestimated how preposterous Polish is. First of all, written Polish seems to use twice as many letters as Czech, making the words incomprehensible. What's more, Polish has several sounds that Czech doesn't have. So while Czech is universally recognized as unpronounceable, Polish is just plain absurd.

Still, my biggest culture shock wasn't the language (especially since Kraków is teeming with English speakers) but the massive, new, gleaming-white mega-mall that's the first thing you see as you walk out of the train station (see the bottom picture). It's three floors of shopping glory, and you can follow an endless stream of people pulsing out of the old town and into its big glass doors. Even for a boy raised in the glow of North American consumerism, it was overwhelming. I can't imagine what the older Polish generations must feel as they ride those blinding escalators, something like the crazy vertigo of a whole half-century passing in the span of a decade. Like a big whoosh.