all hail vic

Day 4 - Short Sheeted, Again

pardon me, but this story will be a little colorful in terms of my descriptions of my digestive processes.

i am now at the Strawberry Hostel in Warszawa (aka Warsaw). but today started at a somewhat different Strawberry Hostel.

i'll come back to that, though.

the day started with me waking up at 8:30. i had to check out from the Strawberry Hostel - Krakow by 10 and i wanted to actually see Wawel Palace today, so i needed a head start. so i woke up at 8:30.

i showered and then i packed my bag. as i was packing, i realized that i didn't want to carry any extra food around with me. so i ate and drank what i had left. (you can probably tell where this is going. it's a story everybody knows in some way...)

unfortunately, that included about a liter of water. most people that know me know that i can be a complete pain in the ass when it comes to road trips if i happen to drink anything along the way. and i mean anything. it could be something like coffee or a diet coke, needed to stay awake, or it could be something simple like water, or it could be something weird, like a yogurt drink... the problem with liquids and me is that my bladder is about the size of a peanut and i think my kidneys process liquids at a superhuman rate. i think they even produce twice the quantity of what i put in. regardless, what happens is that i have to use the bathroom relatively soon after drinking it. and then again. and again. and possibly again. i usually try to hold it, but it can get pretty uncomfortable. and this... THIS is why i try to avoid drinking anything for an hour or two before hitting the road.

this morning i drank a liter of water - i didn't want to carry that huge water bottle around, after all. talk about unnecessary weight. anyway, i also really wanted to see the castle. Wawel Castle has many areas available to see - there is: the Royal Apartments, the Royal Chambers, the Treasury and Armory, a temporary exhibition that changes every few months, "the Dragon Cave", an archaelogical dig (entitled "The Lost Wawel" or something akin) in the basement of one section of the castle and an Oriental Art exhibit. (yeah, i can see your eyebrow raising from here..) of those, the Oriental Art exhibit is temporarily closed and i think the Royal Apartments must be reserved weeks in advance, because even though i got there quite early, i still couldn't get a ticket for them. and they're supposed to be the best part.

anyway, so i packed my bag and stuffed my face. i walked all the way to the castle. and then i got in line to buy tickets. my kidneys, not liking a lot of movement followed by an almost stationary position, decided to kick into hyperdrive. but i didn't want to leave the line. NO. i missed out yesterday, due to arriving too late. i didn't want to be too late again today. i arrived at the line at 9:50. i needed to use the bathroom at that point, but i was already in line. i reached the front of the line at 10:50. you can imagine my agony, since i know everybody has gone through this at some point in their life. not to mention the fact that for about half of that time there was a couple directly in front of me doing some fairly obvious, um, PDA in a very public place.

since they limit the tickets that they sell for the Chambers and Treasury/Armory exhibits, they also give each ticket a specific entry-time. i bought my ticket at 10:50. my first assigned entry time was for the Chambers at 13:05. additionally, they also write an order that one should follow in terms of seeing the exhibits. first they say to see the "Lost Wawel". it was interesting seeing the dig and the history of the place... if only i could understand polish. in other words, the signs throughout the entire palace were sporadically not translated. most of them were, but some of the critical signs were not. so i didn't understand what i was looking at when i saw the dig. it did include some fascinating artifacts (like coins and busts and whatnot) discovered in the dig, but it was also a relatively short exhibit and took about 5 to 10 minutes to go through. so it happened that i then had 1 hour, because the next place in my progression was the Chambers, which had the assigned time.

and so i had a coffee.

which was a mistake. because i walked away from the castle.

(i should note that i had checked my bag in the baggage room before entering the previous exhibit and i wanted to get my camera from my bag, but the attendant insisted that i take my bag for the 1 hour i had in between, which was annoying.)

anyway, i had seen a bridge from the castle hill and decided that i wanted to walk there and take a picture of the palace from up-river (the "Vistula river" in English, or Wisla in Polish). it only took me about 5 minutes to get down from the castle and get to the bridge. i took a photo or two. and looked at my watch. uh oh. i still had almost an hour until i had to be at the Chambers entrance.

so i decided i would walk along the opposing bank until the next bridge, down-river of the palace, and back across. along the way, i stopped to write in my poem journal (which i only had with me because the lady at the bag check, who couldn't speak any english, made me take my bag), at which point i still had 40 minutes left.

and then i needed to use the bathroom again - thanks, coffee. but there were no bathrooms on the far side of the river. in the Czech Republic, it's perfectly acceptable to hide yourself behind a tree, but Poland is a much more conservative country and it seems as if that is unacceptable. so i had to hightail it back across the river. by the time i got back to the castle (having stopped along the way, ahem), i think i only had a few minutes to kill.

i rechecked my bag and i ended up getting the claim ticket number 79. number 79 is my jersey number for my ultimate jerseys, so i thought that was kinda cool and i wasn't so annoyed with having to recheck my bag in the end. (by the way, dave has updated my frisbee club's homepage, for those who are interested.)

i went through the Chambers, which contained some beautiful tapestries and wood work. the wall paper in a lot of the rooms was made of cordovan and was absolutely stunning. it's kinda weird to say that it was my favorite part, but it really was. there were some other cool things, like the ceilings - one of which had a series of sculpted heads in square nooks. hard to describe, but amazing to see. there were some great paintings as well - one of which was a family portrait, but the patriarch of the family was represented by a painting within the painting and one of the kids is pointing at it jokingly... it looked like a modern photo, in that sense, while simulatneously being a 17th century artwork.

after that tour, i took a short nap in the courtyard of the castle since i still had 20 minutes before i could see the Treasury/Armory. the Armory was impressive, with every type of weapon imaginable including a few models of sword-guns (i'm NOT talking about a gun with a bayonet, these were more swords than guns, actually) and an ax-gun (as before). there were also quite a few helmets that looked roman, even though they were 16th and 17th century helmets, and some that looked arabic in origin. there were many different types of two-handed swords and with each one i could only think how painful it would be to be stabbed by one, especially the ones that had ridges or were notched... *shudder* and then there was the cannon that, according to the plaque next to it, was commissioned and named "Lobster". i don't know if that was a mistranslation, but it certainly seems odd to name a cannon "Lobster".

i followed the Treasury/Armory with the unexciting temporary exhibition, which was a small collection of paintings, dated between the 17th and 20th centuries, featuring Wawel Castle in the background or foreground. and crypts and whatnot associated with the castle.

i meant to go to the dragon cave after that, but forgot and ended up walking to the Jewish quarter just to take a look. i knew i didn't have time to actually see their interiors, because i wanted to, ideally, catch a train at 17:30 or 18:30 to Warsaw, but i wanted to have a look anyway. the Jewish quarter in Krakow is not nearly as nice as that of Prague.

on the way back to the hostel, i had to pass the Castle again, at which point i realized i had failed to go through the Dragon Cave. i went to the exit first, which was at the base of the hill, thinking that it was the entrance. so then i had to go back up the hill to get to the entrance. i had heard there was some Polish fairy tale about a dragon, so i hoped that the Cave might illuminate it. but it was just a cave. which was fun. but there was absolutely nothing in it except some lights that lit the nooks and crannies.

after that underwhelming experience, i hoofed it back to the hostel to pick up my bag and get to the train station. i ended up catching the 19:00 train (the Dragon Cave had made me miss the earlier train at 18:00 - i had the times wrong in my head all day, thinking that they ran on the half hour, so i ended up waiting in the train station for awhile).

on the way out of Krakow, i saw a very tubular building. it was a big tube. circular buildings are not rare, but usually they have some square/cornered sections attached. this was just a 15-or-so story high cylinder. very weird.

after three hours on the train, i spent about 30 minutes in Warsaw's Central train station confused because there was no tourist housing service like most other stations in europe. there was a sign for one, which took me about 30 minutes to locate, only to find that it was closed. so i decided to walk to the only one that was advertising in the whole place. and it was booked full. but they pointed me here, the Strawberry Hostel - Warsaw.

of note, the Strawberry Hostels are temporary hostels as they just convert student dorms to hostels during the summer. the one in Krakow was like an older American dorm. this one is more like a 1970's dorm. it's kinda freaky. for you Carls reading this, Krakow was Sevy or Evans and Warsaw is more like Watson. it's kinda nostalgically frightening.

tomorrow, the world... er.. Warsaw. good night.

oh, and both Strawberry Hostels have provided bedsheets that are about half as long as the bed. kinda entertainingly funny, actually.

Posted by iain at August 12, 2005 12:48 AM