Two Ninja Turtles in one day . . . and other stories

Yes, I saw Leonardo and Michangelo . . . but I'll tell you about that in a minute.

At this very moment, we are typing frantically in an internet cafe in the Rynek Glowny, the town square of old Krakow and the largest Medieval square in Europe, measuring in at 200 m x 200 m. The Cloth Hall, a precursor to today's shopping malls, stands in the middle. An old clock tower keeps the time in the southwest corner. To the southeast, tiny St. Aldabert's holds down a spot once held by a pagan temple. At the northeast, you'll find the mismatched towers of St. Mary's. When this basilica was built, the town made a condition that one tower would be town property to be a watchtower. This tower is therefore taller. The legend goes that a watchman saw the mongol's advancing and started his bugle call to alert the town. He never finished the tune for an arrow shot him in the throat. Now, every hour, twenty four hours a day, the bugle call goes out with an abrupt ending from the tower. Three men take shifts to blow the horn and do so each hour, once in each direction every hour.

If you follow the street north from St. Mary's, you are on the royal walk which leads you to the gate by which all travelling royalty would enter and exit the city. It's the only remaining gate and readers of T. Davis Bunn books should know the name: Florian's Gate. When the wall stood proud around the city, different guilds each had a tower or a gate to take care of. The fireman cared for this gate and named it after their patron saint, Florian. I think the gate itself is beautiful and not tainted by the McDonalds that stands close by.

Sunday, we found an English mass to attend. The regular priest was away and left the service in the charge of a young priest, Patrick, who was not quite confident in his English. The organist may have been a rookie as well. I could hardly sing along with the rendition of "Seek Ye First." The most touching part of the service was when he led us in prayer. That day the Poles were voting in a stage of the presidential election. Even after praying about it, he closed the service with an entreaty for us to remember the Poles throughout the day. The final vote comes later. So please remember the Poles.

Mer and I took Sunday afternoon as time to ourselves and wandered our separate ways. I went to the Czartoryski Museum. The Czartoryski family must have been rich because they left a legacy of art and exquisite antiques. Most of the things on display were nice, but not too exciting - especially since I could not read the Polish descriptions. But then I got to see the real reason for my visit: Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine. Krakow is one of five cities in the world to possess a Da Vinci painting. For those art lovers out there, it is incredible to see Da Vinci's work. I can't express how it affected me. (So that's one Ninja Turtle. I would have seen Raphael as well in the museum, but the work was lost during WW II.)

In the other section of the Czartoryski home, on the other side of the walkway which they built across the street to join their houses, I took in a special exhibit on Michelangelo (Ninja Turtle #2). It briefly showed how some artists incorporated his ideas and images into their own work. Again, I couldn't read the Polish, but that didn't matter for the heart of the exhibit: six of Michelangelo's sketches. There were two of his architectural sketches, a few sketches of humans, and a study of an arm for the Sistine chapel. Again, it was so cool to see the work of a genius.

Mer and I met up again by Florian's gate and bought some opera tickets. That night was the first opera for both of us. We sat in red blush seats in a balcony and took in Bizet's Carmen, the tragic story of a gypsy woman. It really made me realize how much classical music I have learned from cartoons. From the opening notes, I was having Bugs Bunny flashbacks. It really was quite nice. We ended the evening with desserts at a chocolate shop before going back to the hostel where we got to stay in a brand new room at Nathan's Villa hostel. The toilet paper dispensers hadn't even been installed yet.

North of our hostel and south of the town square, Wawel Castle sits proudly on a hill. People have reportedly lived on this hill for thousands and thousands of years. About a thousand years ago, it was developed as the seat of royals. It is quite an imposing structure looming over the city with its wall and towers and spires. Monday morning, several of the exhibitions were free so we went. I always go for free stuff. We wandered through some re-created royal apartments, went across a footbridge through some old foundations, and gawked at the collection of armor and cannons. There was a more to see there, including the cathedral and a "dragon's den" and just beautiful grounds. We hope to find time to go back there.

In the afternoon, we joined a motley group for a bike tour. Our guide, a former English teacher from Florida, would over-enunciate his words when he would go into a well-rehearsed schpiel. Our fellow tourists consisted of two recent university graduates from Ontario with an over-fondness for Trailer Park Boys, an Australian girl whose cycling ability was in definite question, and a hippie masseuse from Colorado who I think was out seeing the world for the first time. It made us nostalgic for our Berlin tour group, but we still had a good time. Our path took us by the Wisla river, the park the Austrians built to eliminate the old moat that once circled the city, Oskar Schindler's house near the same park, the archdiocese where Pope John Paul II served before his election as pope, and the other sites of the old city that I previously mentioned. We stopped near Jagiellonian University, alma mater of Copernicus and the Pope. It is the second oldest university in Eastern Europe and is very large today. The Nazis shut it down during the war in an effort to keep Poles uneducated, the slave bank of the Third Riech. Pretty much all the professors were killed.

Then we went further south to Kazimierz, the former Jewish neighborhood. The Polish King Kazimierz saw the need for a Jewish population in order to further the ecomonic development of Krakow and made home for them here. The Wisla (Vistula in English) river used to fork and form an island. The Jewish neighborhood took up one end of the island while a Catholic community was on the other end. The Catholic square had a large clock which chimed on the hour. The Jews could not see the clock, but because they could hear it, the Catholics would charge them for using it! We saw the Jewish cemetary full of the headstones of Orthodox Jews and the old synagogue. But sadly, none of these are being used by a Jewish community anymore. Before the Nazi occupation, over 60 000 Jews lived in Krakow. Less than 2 % of that number lived to see the end of the war. And then none of them wanted to stay in Krakow. Today, the Jewish population here is virtually nil.

When the Nazis took over and their commander lived in Wawel castle, they made a Jewish ghetto and forced all the Jews to leave their homes in Kazimierz. They were stuck in a run down neighborhood south of the river where there was not enough housing. A wall resembling Orthodox gravestones separated them from the world. They were sorted and kept in the ghetto based on their usefulness to the Nazis. Therefore, at one time the ghetto was 80% male. At its peak, there were 25 people for every room available in the housing. It is very bleak there still, with the ghosts of the past seeming to linger as the poor and unmotivated sit idly and smoke. It's the bad part of town.

Roman Polanski (remember The Pianist? the new version of Oliver Twist?) lived in this ghetto as a child. He donated money to a little museum there commemorating a non-Jewish Pharmacy owner who was the only non-Jew in the ghetto. The pharmacy was a place of resistance and one of the few places in the ghetto that acknowledges the morbid history. Meridith said it best. She said that its like Krakow hasn't dealt with its history like Berlin and Warsaw have.

We stopped for a while in Oskar Schindler's factory. For those of you who haven't seen Spielberg's film, Schindler was a greedy German man who saw the war as his pathway to riches. He lived in a house that rightfully belonged to Jews, owned a factory that rightfully belonged to Jews, paid the SS to use Jews as his slaves, and made his fortune selling mess kits to the German army. For some reason when he realized that the Jews were condemned to die, he incredibly found a way to save 1098 of them and take them with him to Czechoslovakia. It is an amazing story. We sat in his factory, saw his office and remembered scenes of the movie that were filmed there. Sadly, after the war, his life sucked. He remained a gambling womanizing drunk. At one point, he was in Argentina working as a farmer on his great idea of making fur coats out of some kind of very large rat. He died on the operating table in Germany. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the surgeon was Schindler's girlfriend's husband.

Tuesday morning came cold and foggy. Some people we'd talked to were headed to Auschwitz, the horrific Nazi death camp. After yesterday's heavy thoughts, we opted to see something cheerier and hopped on a mini-bus for Wieliczka, about 20 minutes from Krakow. The site to see there is a 700 year old salt mine, one of the bazillion things UNESCO has on their list. (www.kopalnia.pl) The legend is that a Hungarian princess was marrying a Polish prince. She didn't want to give the Polish people jewels as gift. She wanted to give them something they didn't have. And mystically, there was the salt. We arrived just in time to take a tour from an endearing old man whose name I believe was Emile. I didn't quite understand everything he said so I may have the legend a little wrong. We descended on a wooden stair case with seen steps per flight. I am not sure how many flights it was - over 60 anyways. The interesting things is that every square inch of the staircase - and it turned out every available piece of wood in the mine - was covered in graffiti. It was usually "so-and-so was here on this date" or "so-and-so loves so-and-so." For a moment, I was tempted to add my own John Hancock, but then thought better of it.

Salt rock is not the usual white crystal we sprinkle on our food. It is dark and hard and sometimes has streaking like marble. I licked a wall that looked like marble, but yeah, it was salt. There are hundreds of kilometers of shafts in the mine, but we were taken along the one reserved for tourists while several layers below us, 300 men still labor to retrieve the salt. The caverns we were paraded through had a many statues carved out of salt. There were rooms with re-creations of what mining had been like in previous centuries. Because the miners had basically lived below the ground, there were numerous chapels complete with salt crystal chandeliers. Some of the figures had been dissolved a little by water and now look like modern art pieces. It is surprising how a salt room with salt art can be so very beautiful. One chapel had elaborate wall carvings of New Testament stories. We descended a few more times before ending at a level of about 135 meters below the ground. We had lunch at a cafeteria - which we later regretted as the potato-ish thing we ate weighed heavy in our stomachs. We joined another tour guide for a look at the museum. He seemed robotic, only speaking at certain times, herding us in the proper direction. His moments of humanity came when I would ask a question. He would always laugh before answering. He showed us crystal encrusted ladders, gigantic mining wheels, and a cute miniature of the town from a map of the 1700s. Then we piled into a tiny mining lift for the rapid ride up.

After checking out the plethora of souvenir shops where you could get any kind of figurine mounted on a salt rock, we wandered past the castle, a sad looking church and the old square before returning to Krakow. We spent the rest of the afternoon poking through a bookstore. I only bought one book, which is a hardship for a booklover like me when so many intriguing titles at good prices are available. Now you are caught up on our European tour. Tomorrow, we depart for the mountains near the border of Slovakia.