Alsace, a random castle in France, and Costco!

As some of you may know, the boss has been under a little bit of stress associated with her employment, and frequent readers of this blog may have noticed a little bit of a pattern:

1. Boss gets stressed out.
2. We take a trip.

We'd been kicking around the idea of taking a long weekend, but Friday arrived and we hadn't made any decisions. Her office went out to lunch offsite and closed up early, so she walked through the door at around 2:00 on Friday afternoon, and her "greeting" to me wasn't "Hi," or "Honey, I'm home!" She said, and I quote:

"My whole goal for this weekend is to have a glass of wine, outside, somewhere pretty."

Funny thing about it... I'm pretty sure I had her convinced that our deck was "pretty," as she was literally sitting at the table we have outside with a glass of wine before we somehow decided to pack and hit the road. Forty five minutes later, we were on our way out of town.

We had three reasons for choosing France as our destination:

1. Germany closes down on Sundays. France is one of four relatively close countries that isn't closed on Sunday. (Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands being the others)
2. We're Costco members. There are multiple Costco locations in France, the closest one being in Mulhouse, right across the border from Basel, Switzerland.
3. We have visitors coming in a couple of months, and we rationalized that our trip could be considered "research" if you squint really hard and tilt your head in just the right direction.

So... we hit the road a little before 3, and were checking into the Holiday Inn by dinnertime. No, that's not a euphemism. I'll try and minimize it throughout the blog, but there were multiple times throughout the weekend where I said "I'm not a _______, but I *did* stay in a Holiday Inn last night."

The hotel is in what feels a bit like a business park, with an Italian restaurant on one side and a steak house on the other. Yes, of course we ate at both of them.

After checking in, we headed down to the Italian place for dinner. Decent enough food, and the waiter spoke an almost intelligible version of English... which is lucky, as my French is limited to "yes,""no,""good morning,""goodbye," and "do you speak English?" His English was much better than my French, which we appreciated.

The restaurant in the hotel was closed for renovations and breakfast in the Italian restaurant was around €20 per person, so I found a nearby grocery store the next morning and ran out to get some pastries... lemme tell ya, grocery store pastries in France are better than pastries from a bakery in just about any other country! After breakfast, we hit the road heading north.

Let's talk geography for a moment. It's been a while since our last trip to Alsace, so a quick refresher:

The border between France and Germany is largely formed by the Rhine River, a major European waterway. Strasbourg sits on the border with Germany. Directly below Strasbourg is the Alsace region, along the western side of the Rhine River.

Alsace is the primary white wine area of France, and there's a "Wine Trail" around 170 kilometers (110 Freedom Units) long that passes through 67 different cities or villages. 

We drove north from Mulhouse toward Strasbourg. Our plan was to take the highway north, and take the local road back south through the little villages, but we hadn't discussed how far north we'd go before turning around. Dear reader, I made a mistake. I've taken a screenshot from Google Maps - see if you can catch my mistake (I've helpfully circled it for you):

Do you see those blurry pixels on that hilltop? I pointed those out to the boss.

Next stop... some random castle on a random hilltop in France. When will I learn my lesson, dear reader?

Since the Alsace region has transferred back and forth between the Germans and French for so long, a lot of the places in that area have two names. Such is the story of that castle. In French, it's called Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, while in German, it's Hohkönigsburg. Since I'm more familiar with German, I'll use the German name for it from here on out.

The site where Hohkönigsburg is located was first mentioned on a deed issued by Charlemagne in 774. In 854, the hill was in the possession of the Basilica of St. Denis (in Paris), and was the site of a monastery. There are no records of when the castle was built there, but in 1147, the monks from that monastery complained to King Louis VII of the castle's unlawful construction by Frederick II, the Duke of Swabia. He was Duke from 1105 until 1147, so I'm assuming that means it was built right around then.

Ownership of the castle passed from Duchy to Duchy, including to those pesky Habsburgs who have made so many appearances in these blog entries.

The castle was burned and looted a handful of times over the years, including by Swedish forces in the Thirty Years' War. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've had to share a story about the Swedes burning and looting something.

It lay in ruins for a couple hundred years, until it was presented to Kaiser Wilhelm II. He decided to rebuild and modernize it, in an attempt to legitimize the Hohenzollern family (his family) as the rulers of the Empire, and confirm his own worthiness as the heir to the (pesky) Habsburg Empire.

There are evidently a couple of levels of recognition for historic places in France; first, a place is "listed," then it's "classified." I'm not sure what the difference is, but there are a lot less places which are classified than are listed. The castle was "listed" in 1862, and finally "classified" in 1993... whatever those terms really mean.

It was a fun drive up the hill; they're not as particular about guardrails here as they are in the states. Once we got toward the top, we found the "parking area." The road splits in half as you approach the castle, it's a one way road around the right side of the castle. The castle effectively sits in the middle of a loop, where you just park on the side of the road. As such, when you pass a spot, you're taking a bit of a gamble that you won't encounter a closer spot. We ended up parking about 400 yards down from the top.

Dear reader, I lost that gamble. I put it all on black, and it came up red. Very red. We must have passed 20 closer spots as we trudged up the hill. At every single spot, one of the two of us would pipe up with "Oh, here's one - why didn't you park here instead?" or "Ooh - I should go back down and pull the car up here!" Every single available spot. Red.

You know what? We've toured lots of castles over here. Y'all have read about us touring lots of castles over here. Honestly, because it wasn't my summer home, I don't have a lot to say about this particular castle that made it stand out (that I haven't already shared about it). Here's all you really need to know about it:

• It was a cool old castle on a hill.
• We took a bunch of pictures, see?

After we toured the castle, we stopped at the restaurant (which we'd walked past on the way in) so the boss could have her glass of wine, outside, somewhere pretty. The inside of the restaurant was pretty full, but no one was sitting at the tables outside... and we soon figured out why. We got two glasses of wine and two pretzels, and took them onto the patio.

The restaurant has evidently arranged for a pretty aggressive bouncer. There was a "great tit" (a Parus major - a little black and yellow bird) whom our presence evidently offended. He was quite bold, literally trying to take pieces of pretzel out of the basket, and in one case, trying to seal a piece right out of my hand. Cute little bird, but his behavior left something to be desired - just a little bit antisocial.

Afterward, we drove back down the hill and headed south on the surface level road. We wanted to check out a couple of the little towns, so we stopped at Ribeauville and Riquewihr, wandering around taking pictures.

After our little bit of exploring, we headed back down to Mulhouse (where the hotel was), and headed straight to Costco. When I go back to the states, I'm able to shop at the Costco in Knoxville, but the boss only gets to go when she goes to Knoxville, or occasionally when she visits her cousin in DC. You only get 2 cards with a membership, so the girl child has one, and I have the other. Honestly, I think that's the only reason I made the cut for this trip - I have the Costco membership!

We didn't actually buy much stuff, but we enjoyed wandering around there. We stopped at the grocery store on the way back to the hotel - it wouldn't be open the following day.

That night, we had dinner at the other restaurant, a steak house called "Hippopotamus." The boss had a burger - pretty sure it was beef though, and not hippo - and I had wings, in case you were wondering. 

The next day, we drove back to Frankfurt... and I procrastinated on writing this blog entry for so long, our next trip crept up on us... so keep an eye on this space for another entry over the next couple of days!

An uneventful trip to The Hague, but first....

Just like last time, I tracked this trip in FindPenguins, feel free to check that site/app out for updates during our trips.

So the boss had to go to The Hague for work, so we looked around online for a place to spend the weekend. One of the quirky things about Germany is that just about the whole country is closed down on Sundays, so I was looking at medium(ish) sized cities in The Netherlands. While zooming in on Eindhoven, there was a museum right outside of town that caught my eye...

I've mentioned before that the family art critic decided when we moved over here that she needed a favorite artist. She figured that if we were going to be going into all of these museums, might as well pick a local(ish) artist to get interested in. She chose van Gogh. Also, she takes the the vast majority of the pictures when we travel... I'm not going to apologize that most of the pics are related to van Gogh - that's what most of this trip was about, after all! 

Take a look at the screenshot below and see if you can tell what caught my attention:

If you look really carefully in the top right corner of the picture, you'll see something that I (correctly) predicted would make my supervisor really happy. If it doesn't immediately jump right out at you, just be patient, we'll get there in a couple of paragraphs. 

The nearest Marriott property was in a town about 20-30 minutes to the north called... I'm gonna carefully put the city name on its own line, so there's no confusion about the correct spelling, punctuation, or my current blood alcohol content:

's-Hertogenbosch 

Additionally, just to prove I'm not making all of this up:

We booked a room there and headed out on Friday afternoon. We arrived in the early evening to find our hotel in a bit of (what felt at the time like) an industrial area. Let me take a quick break and talk about the Dutch language...

I know that *all* languages were "made up" at some point - I mean, the language was actually created, right? Dutch, though... it sounds like it's still being made up, while they're actually using it. It's enough like German that I can (mis)understand about every third word, but the rest of it honestly sounds like gibberish to me. You'll imagine that I'm pretty excited when I can recognize a Dutch word in the wild, right? Over our trips to (and through) The Netherlands, I've learned that the word "the" in Dutch is "den." When we go to The Hague, in Dutch, it's Den Haag. 

The name of the hotel was (and I am not making this up!): The Den. Yes, they really named the hotel "The The." This was a source of endless amusement for me over the weekend, but we all know that I can be a bit simple at times.

We checked into the hotel and inquired about parking. Turns out, we had to park in a garage a couple of blocks away, the parking lot for the local shopping area. Walking back to the hotel, we passed by several restaurants and a grocery store.

We couldn't figure out what we wanted for dinner, so we decided to head to the grocery store and pick up sandwiches... on the way there, we encountered a place called "Happy Italy" and decided to try it out (instead of cold sandwiches in the room). That turned out to be a pretty good decision - the place was good enough that we went back a couple of days later (but we'll cover that when we get there). There was a dessert on the menu called "Italian Mess," which we were intrigued by, but neither of us really wanted dessert that night.

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel, then headed down to Eindhoven to the Van Gogh Village Museum. 

Brabant (alternatively called North Brabant or Dutch Brabant) is a province within the Netherlands - vaguely analogous to a state in the United States - which dates back to the late 1100s and was its own state in the Holy Roman Empire. After the Eighty Years War in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the predominantly Catholic population of Brabant were systematically and officially discriminated against by the Protestant government of the Netherlands, leading to a very different atmosphere in this part of the Netherlands, and I bring this up for a very specific reason: van Gogh. It always circles back to van Gogh, doesn't it?

Van Gogh was born in a town in Brabant, and throughout a lot of his artwork, you can still see sights from the area. As such, places around Brabant (such as the village of Nuenen) where he spent a lot of time really lean into their connection with him. Nuenen is where the van Gogh Village Museum is located, right across the street from a house his parents lived in, and next door to where one of his girlfriends lived (if you can believe it). I'm being told (while I'm reading this to my supervisor) that her name was Margo. Do with that information what you'd like. I had to learn it, so now you've have to learn it too, because I share like that.

The museum was filled with mostly artifacts from the time he lived in the area, both items which belonged to him, and "representative" items from around the same time. A few pieces of art were included too (of course), but the most famous ones are obviously on display elsewhere.

One of his more famous works, The Potato Eaters, was painted while he lived in Nuenen, and is representative of the village, as well as the general clothing styles of the time:

The Potato Eaters was based on one of the neighboring families, and van Gogh considered it his most successful painting, saying "What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did".

The cottage where the de Groot family (the subjects of the painting) lived is supposedly somewhere in the area, but if you want more real information about it, you'll have to check with the family art historian.

Needless to say, I finished up in the museum earlier than the boss did, so I waited patiently in the cafe until she'd had her fill. Turns out, she hadn't really had her fill. There was a walking tour of the village that afternoon that she was interested in - the ladies who worked at the museum made a special call to make sure that a tour guide who spoke English would be giving the tour.

But first, lunch!

...and now that's brought up a sensitive subject that's near and dear to my heart. I have to share some personal information to put parts of this trip into context, so please bear with me (this story is going somewhere, I promise!).

When I was just a young pup, my mom and I lived for a few years with an older couple who functioned as surrogates for us: parents for her, grandparents for me. My "grandmother" had an adult brother who had Down Syndrome who lived with us as well, and some of my most formative years were spent sharing a bedroom with him - almost like brothers.

As a result, I have always had a very soft spot in my heart for (specifically) those with Down's. All of the people with Down's that I've ever met have been the most caring, genuine individuals I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I particularly appreciate places who employ them, allowing them to shine and flourish in their own way, while giving them responsibilities which are suitable for them.

Before we left for the Netherlands, the resident TV critic was watching a food show called "Somebody Feed Phil." I like food (and food tourism) shows, but there's just something about Phil that I find annoying, and I haven't been able to get into this particular show. The episode that she (the boss) was watching, Phil was in (among other places) Gouda, and he went to a restaurant in Gouda called.... and no, I'm not making this up... Brownies & downieS. Apologies for the weird capitalization - that's their choice, not mine.

It's a cafe that employs folks with Down Syndrome, and teaches them whatever tasks they're interested in learning, enriching their lives and helping them contribute however they're willing/able to.

It's settled. We're going there.

A bit of research first though. Huh. Turns out, it's a pretty successful business, with around 60 locations, all over the Netherlands! What's this? There are multiple locations in Eindhoven? There's one in 's-Hertogenbosch too? Well, sign me up.

So, we went to one of the locations in Eindhoven for a quick lunch, and it was exactly what I expected. A wonderful idea behind a wonderful cafe. Atmosphere was good, service was good, food was good... when I went up to the counter to pay, I struck up a conversation with the guy in charge, and told him how we discovered him, and a little about my back story. Turns out, the guy I was talking with was one of the founders, and two of his four children have special needs. I'll put more info in the next paragraph, so you can skip it if we're getting too far in the weeds.

The government of the Netherlands has significant social support systems. Companies who employ those with special needs receive subsidies, but unfortunately the wage rules regarding those with special needs are much more relaxed than the normal rules. Unfortunately, too many unscrupulous companies take advantage of them, getting cheap labor out of the deal, while not having to worry about providing these workers (with special needs) any sort of enrichment. The founder of the company didn't want his kids to end up in those kinds of situations, so he founded this restaurant chain.

I highly recommend visiting one of their locations if you ever find yourselves in the Netherlands. Here's a link to their web site, so you can learn more if you'd like. 

The weather was a little drizzly that afternoon, so I wasn't jealous of the boss's walking tour... yeah, that's why I didn't go. I just didn't want to walk around in the rain... let's go with that.

I had initially been planning on going to a nearby museum for Operation Market Garden, but I just wasn't feeling it that afternoon. Honestly, you're probably lucky. If I had gone to that museum, you'd be waist deep in information about World War II and the Allied push toward the Rhine River. Instead, I just parked in a nearby lot and waited for my intrepid explorer to complete her tour.

Turns out, she was the only person on the tour. Maybe it's just me, but if it's just you and the guide that's not a tour. That's a conversation. She saw bunches of places associated with van Gogh's time in Nuenen, as evidenced by these pics:

Good old Vince, wandering through a park he probably wandered through a hundred times before (according to the tourist brochures)

Supposedly, the subject of a famous painting...

...that you can evidently recreate in a selfie.

I think this was (one of) the church(es) that he lived in.
If you really wanna know, ask the boss, she'll know more....
but *I'm* the one writing the blog, not her.

Something something van Gogh... like just about every other building in town

Another few steps, another site for another painting.
They *do* love their van Gogh here.

A sculpture of The Potato Eaters, just in case you'd forgotten that...
it was painted here...
inside a cottage here...
of a family who lived here.

I haven't been specifically told about it, but I'm betting that the church in the background has something to do with van Gogh as well.

Afterward, we wanted to explore Eindhoven a little bit more, so we went back downtown and had dinner in a local food hall. A little bit of wandering, then back to the hotel for the night.

As an aside, while driving around Eindhoven, we passed by the same sculpture three different times. It's called "Flying Pins," and it's quite eye catching. It's 8.5 meters tall (about 28 Freedom Units), and it's basically half a bowling ball surrounded by bright yellow bowling pins that are in the process of being knocked down. According to Atlas Obscura, "the municipality claims that the Flying Pins represent the combination of working and living in a city full of innovation." Sure. That's not what I got from the sculpture, but we already know I'm not the family art critic.

Next day was devoted to touring 's-Hertogenbosch. Quick note about the name of the city. That's its correct name, but we found out that it's more commonly known as "Den Bosch"..... you remember earlier we were talking about the Dutch language, and one of the only words I can truly recognize? Den? So, turns out that they call the city "The Bosch." Look at us - we're learning together!

The art museum in The Bosch had some van Gogh stuff on display (because they're in Brabant - of course they did)... so the family art historian got to indulge her van Gogh fascination for a while longer, then we wandered around the town stimulating the local economy. After a bit of wandering, we stopped at the Brownies & downieS location in the downtown area for a quick lunch. Didn't have dessert there though, because...

Turns out, The Bosch is known for something called "Bossche Bollen" (with an alternate spelling having only a single 'S' - also "Bosche Balls" or any other combination of the two words in English or Dutch or some combination of the two languages). It's a choux pastry filled with whipped cream and dipped (or alternatively just covered) with a chocolate glaze. 

Pic from Wikipedia

In Germany, we have these pastries called Snowballs (or schneeballen) which are (basically) scraps of pie dough formed into a patchwork ball and deep fried, then dusted with powdered sugar. I haven't tried one - I'm sure they're delicious, they just don't look very appetizing to me. 

Pic also from Wikipedia

Reading the description of Bossche Balls, I was expecting something similar. In reality though, they are nothing alike. Snowballs look like they're quite... rugged. Bossche Balls though are quite light and fluffy. The chocolate on top had a little bit of a weird texture, but again - we weren't sure what we were getting ourselves into. The filling seems to be just lightly flavored Cool Whip - I'm sure it's homemade, using some famous recipe that's been passed down for hundreds of years, but I'm just trying to describe it realistically. We shared one, then continued our exploration of the downtown area.

We eventually ran out of places to wander to, and headed back to the hotel. We ended up going back to Happy Italy (again) for dinner, and we shared the Italian Mess for dessert. Halfway decent, but we agreed that it could use more of the lemon curd.

I guess we were at the restaurant too late in the evening for our first meal, but for our second meal there were a lot more kids there, and interestingly enough most of them didn't have shoes on (which we found a bit odd). Turns out, there's a ball pit in a back corner of the restaurant - I didn't see any arcade area, but the closest comparison we could come up with was to Chuck E Cheese. Kids would run back to their table and have a couple of bites of food, then disappear again for a while. Yeah, so turns out, we (the "empty nesters" with kids in their 20s) unknowingly went to a Dutch version of Chuck E Cheese for dinner twice in three days simply because the food was pretty good. Not sure that would ever happen in the States. If that happened in the States, I'm pretty sure that'd be enough to get us put on a list.

We took our time checking out the next morning; we were less than 2 hours away from the hotel in The Hague, and check-in wasn't until 3. Instead of heading straight there, we continued what's turned into a "tradition" for us... when we get close to The Hague, we find a nearby beach town (the Netherlands borders the North Sea) and have a light meal and drinks on the beach. This is a tradition that the family travel agent instituted (you all know how much I love the beach and finding sand everywhere, right?), but I play along. 

Quick aside... this is a fruit beer from Belgium that we fell in love with on our trip to Bruges. In Belgium, it was served in a regular beer glass. We had it twice in the Netherlands, and both times it was served over ice with mint and a slice of lemon. Those crazy Dutch folks!

Nothing much happened while we were at The Hague, so I'm actually gonna skip it. Only 2 things of note to share: 

1. One of the first trips we made to The Hague, we discovered tapas, and now we try new tapas restaurants wherever in Europe we find them. The original one we went to in The Hague remains our favorite one though. This trip, we ate dinner there two different nights. 
2. On a sadder note, another early trip to The Hague, we found their "Food Hall," with 10-12 different restaurants sharing a common building (and seating area). We like those kind of places because we can each pick what we want, and not have to settle for a kind of food we're not really in the mood for. Well, sadly enough, the one at The Hague has shut down. That just means that we'll have to find other places we like as much... or we'll just have to go back to the tapas place multiple times in one week. I've seen us do it!

That's all for now, thanks for sticking with it for this long. Go have a snack, you've earned it!

For some strange reason... Hannover?

Gonna try something a little different for this blog post. We've got a trip to a new place planned for this coming weekend, but I figured I'd write up a little about it beforehand, and we'll can all compare the "before" with the "after" (as a fun little group activity) once we're back.

First of all... is it "Hanover" or "Hannover"? Yes. Turns out, it's spelled both ways. The English spelling has one N, the German spelling has 2 Ns. I can't keep straight in my head which one is "correct," so basically you can pick whichever one you prefer (at that particular moment) and switch them out whenever you'd like - that's what everyone else seems to do.

Looking at what there is to do in Han(n)over... doesn't really seem like there's much there. The site that I check for Free Walking Tours, tours of Han(n)over aren't even a thing. If you check out Trip Advisor, the number one tourist attraction in the city is City Hall.

Evidently, there's something weird about the elevator in there - it goes up inside the dome of the building, and it's the only elevator ever made that tilts as it goes up. Every other elevator that climbs up a curved shaft (inside the Gateway Arch, for example) is mounted inside a "cage" of sorts which allows it to remain level as it climbs (and descends). This elevator evidently runs directly inside the curved rails, and the floor of the elevator noticeably tilts as it climbs. 

That's the number one tourist attraction in this city - the elevator inside City Hall.

So, the question at the forefront of everyone's mind... why are we going to Han(n)over anyway?

Well, the boss has a long weekend coming up, and we wanted to gȯ someplace we haven't been before, with the northern side of the country being our last quadrant that we haven't visited. Also, the travel agent was able to get a good deal on the hotel there, and it's got a lounge, so we get free breakfast, and don't have to eat at restaurants every night! So... we got pretty reasonably priced train and bus tickets (train there, bus back), and I'll write more once we're back!

Long trip to Poland, part II!

As previously promised, here's part 2 of our Poland trip... if you missed the first post, here's a link to the first post, so you can catch up! 

Next up was the city of Wrocław. Before we get any further, we need to talk for a moment about the Polish language. 

Let's look at the name of this city. Looks fairly straightforward right? "Roe-claw," right? Nope. To start out with, the Polish language is evidently related to German, because the Ws are pronounced V.

Also, that funny looking L (look - it's wearing a belt or something!) isn't pronounced as an L, but I'm honestly not sure how it's really pronounced.

Circling back to the city name (Wrocław), I'll try to spell it out, quasi-phonetically: Vro-suav. For what it's worth, the city name in German is Breslau.

Probably easiest to just pronounce it Roe-claw in your head - I won't tell anyone... but does this mean that we've all been butchering the pronunciation of "Warsaw" though? Is it supposed to be pronounced "vor-sahv?" I simply refuse to call it that.

We took a tram from the train station to (close to) the hotel, and walked the remaining couple of blocks. This was going to be a quick stop, but this felt like a pretty cool city. The city is filled with gnomes. Yeah, you read that right. To give you more information, I really need to step back a few decades...

Back in the old days, Poland was a communist country. Us old farts remember Lech Wałęsa, from the Solidarity movement and the fall of communism, right? Well, at about the same time, there was an underground revolutionary "group" (started in Wrocław) called the Orange Alternative. They specifically offered a way for people to oppose the authoritarian regime, using absurdity and nonsensical actions. The thought was to do things that the authorities wouldn't arrest them for, as arresting members of the opposition for silly demonstrations would open the police up to ridicule.

Other groups would paint anti-government slogans, and the regime would cover the slogans with splotches of paint... at which point, the Orange Alternative would go out and paint playful pictures of gnomes on the paint splotches.

This movement grew and grew, becoming one of the most important parts of the Solidarity movement. To blatantly copy a short part of Wikipedia:

The culmination point in the movement's history was the action organized on 1 June 1988, known as the "Revolution of Dwarves", during which more than 10 thousand people marched through the center of Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats. The happenings usually terminated with the arrest of hundreds of participants, who did not manage to escape in time from the hands of the militia. At one point, the participants were even able to provoke the Communist militia to arrest 77 Santa Clauses or, on another occasion, anyone wearing anything orange.

Where I was going with this story though... to honor Wrocław's place in the fall of the communist regime, there are over 800 bronze gnomes scattered around the city, in various poses, and with various accoutrements. There's a gnome at an ATM, a gnome drinking a cup of coffee, there are a couple of them trying to push a granite ball that's about a foot taller than they are, right next to a chimney cake store there's a gnome eating a chimney cake... just whimsical statues doing normal, everyday things. The family photographer took a few pictures of those.

Whimsical gnome

Whimsical gnome(s) #s 2 and 3 -
unless you're counting the picture as the number of gnomes

The Chimney Cake Bakery... honestly, "Chimney Cakery" was RIGHT there!
You can see the gnome on the right hand side of the picture.

Said Chimney Cake Gnome

Whimsical gnome #3 or #4
(depending on how you're counting... you know what?
You just go ahead and count them however you want. I won't tell.)

Yet another whimsical gnome

Look - more whimsy!

We were pretty happy with the Christmas Markets in Wrocław... one thing that we noticed was that the markets in the last three cities we visited (Gdansk, Wrocław, & Krakow) were all run by the same company, Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy. All of the huts were the same styles, and all of the mugs have the name and logo of that company on them... Warsaw, though. Nope. Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy evidently hasn't made it into Warsaw yet.

As an aside, I've wondered for a while how the financial side of the Christmas Market industry works. I know that the huts can sometimes be used for other markets (Easter Markets, etc.), but when you see the size of some of the decorations that they set up specifically for Christmas Markets, there simply has to be a huge industry around just storing all of these decorations and huts for 11 (or so) months out of the year. Are there just warehouses across Europe that store all of this stuff outside of market season? Are the huts all broken down and flat packed, or are they stored in a huge warehouse like a sad little abandoned village? How do they move these things around? I've never (knowingly) seen a caravan of trucks carrying Christmas Market huts on the Autobahn. Welcome to my head. Exhausting, huh?!?

We were pretty impressed with the markets in Wrocław as well, and had fun wandering around. There were a few different market areas in the main portion of town - the wife had some Authentic Polish Kielbasa(TM), and I ended up with a new glühwein mug. We stopped at a little grocery store on the way back to the hotel, and I went upstairs. The family lush stopped in the bar for a couple of drinks (she got some sort of bonus for her Marriott Bonvoy level). 

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel, then headed back over to the main part of downtown to explore. On the way back to the hotel, the wife stopped at The City Museum of Wrocław. I'm guessing it showed her something about the history of Wrocław - you'll have to ask her about it.

A picture of the museum she stopped at, at different points in history 

We took the tram back over to the train station and I managed to avoid getting a ticket at this station.

The family travel agent booked us in a First Class compartment - a little separated section with 6 seats (there are whole train carriages full of these compartments). She'd reserved the two seats against the window, facing each other. This time though, we had to share the compartment with some other travelers. For the first part of the journey, the two guys in our compartment left and went to the dining car, coming back after a while. The guy on my side "fell asleep" when they returned to the compartment.

A few stops into our journey, two more people joined us, filling our compartment. It was a little challenging getting our luggage out of the compartment with 6 passengers in there, and one of those passengers still "asleep," not moving out of the way to make it easier for us. After we'd gotten into the little hallway, we could see that he had an empty fifth of vodka tucked down next to his leg, explaining why he didn't move when we and our luggage "accidentally" bumped into him a couple of times as we tried to exit the compartment.

Next up, beautiful Krakow. At this point in the post, go ahead and pronounce those w's however you'd like to. We took a taxi from the train station to the Grand Sheraton hotel. Now that I think of it, the family travel agent booked us into a bit nicer hotels this trip than usual. 

We walked over to the Old Town section, and explored the main Christmas Market, another Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy market. We wandered for a little while, then headed over toward another (smaller) craft-focused market a couple of blocks away. As we passed the center of the square (around the Krakow Cloth Hall, more about that later), the family travel agent encountered some sort of Flash Mob, or maybe it was just a DJ set up on the backside of the town square - not sure which. She went in that direction, and I headed on toward the craft fair, meeting up with her a few minutes later.

After exploring for a while, we wanted to get a little bite to eat, so.... get this, y'all... we stopped in a Bavarian Beer Hall.

Wife had a beer, I saw an intriguing "whiskey sour" on the menu. Only issue was that the menu said it was made with Scotch Whiskey, and I'm not a big fan of Scotch. I saw that they had some bourbons on the menu as well, so (it took me a few minutes) but I was able to get our waitress to put in an order for a whiskey sour made with bourbon... and lemme tell ya, it was one of the top 3 or 4 whiskey sours that I've had... in a Bavarian themed Beer Hall in Krakow, Poland, made with an American bourbon. Uneventful walk back to the hotel that night.

Next day... well, let's talk about szopki krakowskie for a moment, shall we? Evidently, this is a folk tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. They do these... they insist on calling them "nativity scenes," but I encountered a better description while researching this competition: "Something of a strange cross between a nativity scene, a gingerbread house, and a dollhouse, these unique handmade structures more resemble colourful, foil-covered castles or cathedrals than cribs"

A random example of a szopki krakowskie

Another random example

Turns out, Krakow is known for this particular display/competition; the first Thursday in December, townspeople carry their... szopki... through the town and they all meet up at the town square, where the DJ was set up the night before. 

The boss got a bit perturbed at me when I expressed a bit of disbelief that they call these things "nativity scenes," but take a look at that picture for yourselves, and tell me if you'd call this thing a "nativity scene." Or, go ahead and agree with her, and make me the bad guy - I just know what I saw, and I wouldn't call them "nativity scenes."

After the competition, the family cathedral junkie took a walk through St. Mary's Basilica, on the main square. There's evidently an altarpiece that's pretty famous in there.... it's called Altarpiece by Veit Stoss, and he carved it between 1477 and 1489. It's considered a national treasure of Poland, and in 1941, it was dismantled and looted by the Nazis. It was recovered in 1946, hidden in the basement of Nuremburg Castle. It was heavily restored back in Poland, and was put back into St. Mary's Basilica in 1956. The boss saw a nun opening the altarpiece while she was in there. 

Another interesting thing about St. Mary's. Every hour of every day, a trumpeter plays a "five note bugle call" from the windows atop St. Mary's, in the four cardinal directions. I put the part about five notes in quotes, because I heard it (a few times), and I distinctly heard more than five notes. That's their story though - who am I to cast doubt?!? Anyway... legend says that during the Mongol Invasion of Poland in 1241, a trumpeter was sounding the alarm about the incoming attackers, to tell the soldiers at the gates that the gates needed to be closed. The gates were closed in time, but unfortunately, the bugler took an arrow to the throat and died before he finished the full "close the gates" bugle call - and that's why the bugle call is cut off before the end.

The earliest written account of this story dates to a children's book from 1928. To be clear, the bugle call has been going on for hundreds of years, but the whole "Mongol story" part very well might be an embellishment. 

We wandered around the main square, walking through the Cloth Hall. During the 15th Century, Krakow was the capital of Poland, and was a center of international trade. Merchants would meet in the hall to trade their wares, and you'd frequently find a variety of exotic imports from the east – spices, silk, leather and wax – while Kraków itself exported textiles, lead, and salt from the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Now, it's a big hall filled with tourist shops. We didn't see anything that we couldn't live without.

The Cloth Hall

We walked over toward the train station, and stopped at a "famous" theater for coffee and some sort of cake. Evidently, this is the oldest "art cafe" in Krakow, and at some point in the past used to be a puppet theater. It was established in 1895, and the cake was pretty good, as I remember. The family travel agent had seen some video on YouTube with this place in it, so when we walked by while were looking for a place to have a snack, we simply HAD to stop.

The reason we were on our way to the train station is that we'd decided to check out a nearby town (again, the family Social Media Monster saw something online... ergo, we simply HAD to go!). We had purchased tickets to Katowice for that afternoon, but were a bit early for our train, so we figured out how to change the tickets for an earlier departure. We didn't have tickets to come back, simply because we didn't know how long we wanted to spend there. I made the argument that I didn't want to get stuck in this little city waiting all night for a return train to Krakow. According to the family travel agent, this wouldn't be an issue, as there were fairly regular trains all evening long. If you pay REALLY close attention later in the post, you'll get to circle back with us when we revisit this topic.

This was a monument outside the train station

Intriguing story about that monument, but I've gotta share some backstory first (Don't I always? The things I do for you folks!)

Ryszard Kukliński's father was a member of the Polish Resistance during WWII. he was captured by the Gestapo and died in a concentration camp. Kukliński joined the Polish People's Army, and eventually (in 1964) he started working in the espionage and counterintelligence operations section. Bear in mind, this was during the Cold War, and Poland was a member of the Warsaw Pact, a group of nations "aligned" with the USSR. 

In 1968, he started working on plans for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was so disturbed by the invasion and the brutality of the Polish Government against demonstrators (in Poland) that he sent a letter to the US Embassy to Germany (in Bonn, West Germany) in which he explained that he was an army officer in a communist country and asked for a meeting.

He was concerned about the purely offensive nature of the invasion, as the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact would force NATO (and the United States) to resort to nuclear weapons to protect Czechoslovakia. He didn't want to see Poland turned into a nuclear wasteland.

For 9 years, he passed documents related to the USSR to the CIA. At the end, he, his wife, and their two sons were spirited out of the country right before martial law was declared, and they defected to the United States.

United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński described him as "the first Polish officer in NATO."

In the eyes of some Poles, he's a hero, aligned with the United States and NATO. To other Poles, he's a traitor who sold out his country. Regardless, they unveiled this monument in 2006. It's been vandalized several times since then.

Now that I've (looked up and) told you this story... while we were next to the monument, a middle aged gentleman passed us while the boss was getting ready to take the picture, and a random commuter (I'm guessing) walked past the monument on his way to the train station. As he passed, he said something under his breath and spat on the monument's placard. 

Honestly, we don't have as many pictures to attach to this entry and this was one of them, so I figured I'd share.

Katowice Christmas Market was run by Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy (like all proper Polish Christmas Markets), and was pretty well done. One thing that this market really leaned into was these dioramas with animatronic Christmas figures in them. There were probably 20 of these plexiglas cases scattered around the market, with parents dragging their kids up to them to make them listen to the little Christmas songs.

Throughout the Christmas Markets in Poland, we'd been seeing this cheese for sale, and we finally got a chance to try it. It's called Oscypek, and it's a smoked cheese, made with salted sheep's milk. Vaguely similar flavor to pecorino, quite tasty. We got some served in the traditional way, one with cranberries, and one with bacon. Don't tell anyone, but we dipped the bacon covered one in the cranberries as well. Quite tasty. I'm adding it to the langos list of things I've encountered at Christmas Markets that I'll be keeping an eye out for.

Yes, we all know they kinda do look like pierogis. Nope, just smoked cheese.

One thing about the glühwein mugs in Germany versus Poland (at the markets that actually have them - looking at YOU, Warsaw!): in Germany, you get your glühwein in mugs and pay a deposit ("pfand" in German) that you get back when/if you return the mugs. In Poland, the mugs are a separate purchase. I just found that interesting, the different mindset between the two countries.

One of the things that the boss wanted to purchase while we were in Poland was some authentic Polish pottery. She'd popped into a few pottery stores, but those felt too "touristy" for her, so she found one in Katowice that wasn't touristy at all. 

I have no idea how much she spent there, but she bought enough pottery that she didn't want to hassle with trying to get it home on the plane, and had them ship it for her. Yay, more pottery.

As we walked back to the station, she started looking for the next train back to Kraków on her Polish Train App.

There's a very fine line between predicting the future and visualizing something into existence. We had to wait for over an hour for the next train. I'll let you decide for yourself whether I was able to predict the future, or whether I actually visualized the delay into existence. I'm guessing that you can figure out for yourself which viewpoint each of us hold.

Eventually, we had an uneventful train ride back to Kraków and took an Uber to the hotel.

We had signed up for a guided tour of Wawel Castle - and I have no idea how I'm supposed to pronounce that one.

The inner courtyard of the castle, with netting to keep the ubiquitous pigeons out

Evidently (according to the Wiki machine), the castle (and Wawel Hill, upon which it sits) is "the most historically and culturally significant site in Poland." The castle dates back to the 13th and 14th centuries, but some of the stone buildings on the site can be traced back to around the year 970. The Historic Center of Krakow (including Wawel Castle) was among the first selected sites upon the creation of the UNESCO World Heritage Site list; on the inaugural list, 12 sites were selected for inclusion. The only other one from that initial list that you might have read about on this particular blog is Aachen Cathedral. There's one other site on the list that we might make it to while we live over here, but I'll wait to tell you about that one if it happens.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this tour was that it was called a "hidden treasures" tour, or something along those lines. It was a guided tour, and the guide skipped over lots of the normal stuff that you'd see, to focus on the more significant items in the collection, including Szczerbiec, the ceremonial sword that was used in the coronation of most of the Polish monarchs from 1320 to 1764. Other individuals and groups were touring the castle at the same time, and we'd completely ignore rooms that other tourists would stop in to jump to the more important artifacts. More focused tour than we normally take, and quite enjoyable.

There are some... concerns about the veracity of some of the claims about the origin of the sword. I think the most appropriate reaction to some of the stories I could come up with was actually spoken by Michael Palin: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government... You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

Then again, I'm not Polish, so what do I know? 

The ceiling in this room had these faces inlaid in it.
Originally, there were 194 heads, but now there are only 30.
Some of the heads are of famous people (royalty, etc.), some are of unidentified people.

The castle was right around the corner from the hotel, so we came back to the room afterwards to relax for a little bit before our next tour, then took an Uber to our next location, Kazimierz, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Kazimierz is named after King Casimir III, the last king of the Piast Dynasty. He was very protective of Krakow's Jewish neighbors, and their town was renamed after him in 1335. Kazimierz was absorbed as a district within Kraków in 1795. 

On our walking tour, we visited the sites of "the" seven synagogues of Kazimierz. There were evidently quite a few other synagogues throughout the city, but but these were the seven most well known ones, and the ones that the tour guide specifically pointed out to us.

The last portion of the tour took us across the river to the Jewish Ghetto, where Jewish people were forced to live by the Nazis. Before the war, there were around 68,000 Jews living in Kraków. The Nazis forced the Kraków Jews to relocate into one small neighborhood, and classified them into two different categories: employable, and not employable. They were moved into different sections of the ghetto, depending on their usefulness to the regime. Jews were repeatedly reclassified, with those judged as being not as useful to the regime being shipped off to the (either work or death) camps.

By the end of the war, there were about 4,000 Jews remaining in Kraków.

There are currently more Jewish people in Panama than there are in Poland.

Now that we've broached the subject of Concentration Camps, I have to address this really briefly: We decided when we moved over here (this time) that we'd do one Concentration Camp, as we've heard the emotional toll can be quite high. We decided to do Auschwitz. Unfortunately, tours of Auschwitz were all booked during our visit, so we were unable to go... this trip. We've already decided that we'll be taking a long weekend and making a special trip back to Kraków.

The final stop on our tour was the Empty Chair Memorial at Zgody Square. Zgody Square was one of Kraków's main market squares before the war, and during the war, it marked the entrance to the Jewish Ghetto. That particular square is one of the locations where Jewish people were judged as to whether they were useful or not, and they frequently never went home after being lined up in that square. The square also turned into one of the dumping grounds for the personal effects and furniture cleared out of the (now abandoned) apartments of those shipped off to the camps.

Today, 70 empty chairs in the square face in the direction that the Jews walked to board the trains to Concentration Camps.

After the tour, we walked around the neighborhood looking for a place to eat. We first tried to get into a local Polish place, but didn't have reservations, so we had to move on. We ended up in an Italian place that was full of locals, and had a dinner that was quite good. They had a deal running where you could buy one drink (pretty much any kind), and get a second drink for 1 Zloty (about 27 cents)... so of course, the boss took advantage of that - hell, she was thinking of getting a second glass of my wine for an additional 27 cents (but she didn't).

After dinner, we took a tram back over to the main Christmas Market so I could get a Kraków mug. Next day, we took an Uber to the airport and flew back home - I talked the boss into taking an Uber from the airport, rather than dragging our luggage home on the metro.

We've got visitors in town for the next couple of weeks, so expect a couple more entries in the weeks coming up!