How Do I Spend My Week Off

When I started this job and had 10 weeks off per year I wondered how I would spend all that time off. But now I wonder how I would fit in all the stuff I do if I didn't have time off.

First, it's not really like I have 10 weeks off. One of those weeks is dedicated to going to a pathology meeting for continuing medical education. Then there are usually a couple of weeks for family vacations. On the weeks I have left I have dedicated one to going to Scout Camp. That only leaves me about 6 weeks. Last week was typical of an off week for me when I don't have any big plans.

Monday I took Leah and Meg skiing at Sundance in the afternoon. Meg had a lesson, and on a weekday the group lesson turned out to be an individual lesson. She had a great time and that was all that matters, plus she is improving. Eric met me up there with Brandon and Anne. We made the kids go on the Back Mountain for a couple of runs, the snow was fresh and soft and the sun was out so it was a perfect day.

The rest of the week was a blur. I am lab director for a drug rehab center and a pain clinic that run only drug tests, and I have to make semi-annual visits. One of them recently dropped the management company that was helping them navigate the regulatory environment so those duties now fall to me. I have to go back and sign off a competency assessment for the lab tech.

Every time I'm off I end up doing some sort of car maintainance. I replaced some wiper blades on the van and took the truck in to get the oil changed and tires rotated. It's tax season so I spent lots of time assembling tax information and filling out forms for my accountant. I almost always have some work meeting that I can't miss, and this week was no exception as I attended the Breast Cancer Center of Excellence leadership meeting. I'm changing the way I invest my 401k so I have been researching asset allocation strategies and figuring out how much risk I want and how to implement it. Right now I'm mostly in cash and bonds which turned out to be fortunate since the stock market has been terrible this month.

Speaking of investments, I stopped in at Leavitt Medical a few times to drop off tax information that keeps coming to me. Matt has had his IHC hospital privileges "not renewed" because he doesn't work  for any pathology group and he suspects there are political forces that don't want to see him succeed. He can't bill the biggest insurance company in Utah now, so we have had discussions about how to proceed. I had to sign a bunch of lab stuff there too since I am a lab director for them. The company is also about to raise another round of capital at the same price as the last one. That means the company grew by 50% last year but the shareholders didn't see any gain because of dilution. It also means I will have to kick in more money if I don't want to get further diluted. It's exciting to see the company growing and it may be profitable in a year. I will have to see how much we can afford to put in this time. It's tough because it's not liquid at all and there's no way to guess if or when I'll get any money back out.

My week off is Rachelle's chance for a break as well, so I spend a lot of time picking up kids and driving them places. We did a few things together. We visited a kitchen design store to look at appliances because we are going to remodel the kitchen this year. On a related note, I did lots of dishes because our dishwasher broke last week. That was the last straw, we simply can't put off the remodel any longer. The best thing we did was snowshoeing up at Sundance. It was great to get out of the winter inversion in the valley and enjoy some clean air and sunshine. We saw an iced over Stewart Falls and got a bit of a workout.

I'm looking forward to a nice, steady, predictable week at the office because these weeks off aren't all about sleeping in and relaxing.

The Paradox of Regrets

When I see my kids growing up and doing interesting things I can't help but regret some of the ways I spent my youth. Not to mention the ways I spend my time now. But regrets are funny things because although I might wish I had done some things differently, I'm sure that the person that I am today would also be different if I had, and in that case I would still have regrets but they would be different ones. I'm overall quite content with my life right now and maybe if I had done things differently I wouldn't be. So these are some things I regret.

I wish I hadn't lived my teenage years in a fog of social oblivion. I see how socially awkward my teenage kids are and I want them to just act normal, even though when I was their age I was incapable of carrying on a coherent coversation with a girl my age. I would get nervous, and then look for the abort button but hit the self-destruct button instead. This still happens to me often when I talk to Rachelle. I say something obtuse, look for the "abort" button and end up hitting "self-destruct". But back to high-school. I wish I had learned to dance. Then I might not have felt so out of place at dances and social events. I missed out on all high-school social activity because of this social anxiety. Come to think of it, college wasn't much better. I didn't have much of a clue socially until I was well into my 20s.

Running is an activity that I enjoy now and I've found that I'm better at it than most people. I wish I had run cross-country or something in high-school. I wonder how good I could have been if I had dedicated some time to running when I was younger. It would have been nice to be involved in a sport instead of just academics. I might have had more friends and it might have helped with the social anxiety. One time the basketball coach pulled me out of the nerd court in gym class where I was dominating and put me on the court with the best players in my grade. I didn't respond well, retreating into my shell, and returning to my comfortable court when I had the opportunity. The coach assumed I wasn't interested in hoops, as I learned when he was my drivers-ed instructor. Now I wonder how good I could have been at basketball if I had let him know I desperately wanted to play. One more athletic regret is not learning to play volleyball sooner. Toward the end of my time in college I roomed with some guys who played in the park all the time, and those were some of the best times. I'm thrilled that Brita tried the tennis team this year and that she wants to improve and play next year. That's something I never had the courage to do at her age.

I wish I had asked to learn guitar when I was a kid. I learned piano, and I'm glad I did, but I never loved it. I knew my dad had a guitar and I was curious about it but it never ocurred to me to ask to learn to play it. I guess I figured that I was already being forced to learn one instrument, so why would I volunteer for another? Now I'm learning it, and it's a good way to relax for a few minutes every day. I'm not dedicated enough to get good, but what would it be like if some of those hours devoted to Dungeons and Dragons, or even piano had been spent learning guitar? It's awesome that my kids are learning instruments and they even have the experience of performing in a band where they are key members. That takes a kind of courage I'm not sure I had.

Debate is another activity at which I excel and I love to do it. The debate coach in high school recruited me heavily but I turned him down because I didn't want to take early morning seminary in order to fit it in. I missed out on an activity that would have helped me immensely in my confidence because of sheer laziness. Now I take out my frustrations by baiting people with controversial posts on Facebook and destroying them with my logic. I could have been great.

When I did my MBA I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career. I would do everything different if I had it to do over. At the time I saw it as so many hoops to jump through. I put off taking Advanced Corporate Finance until my last semester because the teacher had a reputation as tough. It turned out to be the best class I had taken in my entire life. I loved it and it was too late to take more classes from Hal Heaton, or explore my new interest in finance. If I had done that I might not have ever gone to med school and my career path would look very different, so it all worked out for the best. I took a similar lazy approach to religion classes at BYU. They were low-priority for me so I ended up taking whatever class was convenient. As a result I ended up with glorified sunday school classes taught by professors from other departments moonlighting in religion. I checked the box, but I missed out on the opportunity to take classes from great Mormon scholars that might have inspired me and changed my outlook on life.

What am I doing or not doing today that I will regret? Someday soon my kids will be all grown up and I hope they don't remember me as the guy who worked all the time and then just wanted to be left alone to watch sports, surf the net or write blog posts. That's it, I'm out.

How I Became a Nerd

I don't know when it started, but I always knew I wasn't different from most kids. I'm sure everybody feels that way to some extent, but when I was little I remember watching other kids my age playing and feeling too awkward to join in. In gradeschool my favorite time of day was reading time, but it was never long enough, so I would try to read during other parts of school. This behavior continued into high school. When class instruction was over and most people turned to socializing, I tried to use the time to get my homework done early so I could read.

In middle-school and high-school whenever I was at school early or during lunch I would go with my friend Chris Evans to the library and read books. I liked to read history, mostly Civil War and World War 2 books while Chris read about how to do magic tricks. On weekends when most kids went to dances or social activities, I preferred to sit in my basement watching sports and reading a history textbook. I couldn't think of anything I would rather NOT do than go to a dance because 1) I didn't know how to dance, 2) it might require talking to a girl, a skill that I lacked completely, and 3) I might miss a Jazz game on TV.

Sports don't seem nerdy, but I found a way to nerderize them. I liked playing sports with my neighborhood friends because I was the oldest so my lack of athletic ability was masked by being older and bigger than everyone. But in the company of my peers I wilted into a timid kid who airballed free-throws because of nerves. I overcompensated for these athletic shortcomings by being a know-it-all about sports and stats. For a while I wanted to be a sportswriter and bored Mr. Spencer during mandatory journal writing in 8th grade English with my stories about BYU football games. I made up an early version of fantasy basketball, doing a draft during church on the back of the program, but since we didn't use actual stats we just argued about if my team with Jordan and Bird was better than his with Magic and Malone. Now I have blossomed into a full-blown fantasy sports nerd, complete with daily box score analysis and spreadsheets to try to figure out trades.

Hands down the nerdiest thing I did as a kid was play Dungeons and Dragons. Video games were borderline cool back then, and I played my share, but D&D was the realm of true nerds. I couldn't wait to get piano practice out of the way when I got home from school so I could go to Chris' house and lose myself in this fantasy world where I would play the character of a 5th level, Elvish Magic-user/Thief and figure out clever ways to defeat a variety of monsters and amass experience points and treasure. Papers with all my character's stats and then rolling funny shaped dice seemed like the most interesting things in the world.

At home I didn't have D&D, but I did have other games that nobody would play with me, so I played them alone. I played Risk and made rules for strategies for all 6 players. The games that combined strategy war gaming with history were my favorites. I liked Dawn Patrol, where I played pilots in World War I, dogfighting over Europe with the aid of colorful little cardboard markers and dice. I eventually graduated to Arab-Isreali Wars, which was so complex only a nerd would attempt to learn it.

I still like games, but I'm smart enough not to get involved with some of these online gaming communities that I know would suck my time just like D&D when I was a kid. Now I scratch that itch with occasional board games with family or a strategy war game on the iPad when I can't get anyone to play, which is most of the time.

I'm probably not nearly as nerdy as I once was, even though I'm in a profession populated by mostly nerds. Although I'm certainly still and introvert, I can survive social situations without retreating into my iphone most of the time. I still have those tendencies. Fortunately, it's a lot cooler to be a nerd now than it was in high-school.

Excerpts from a normal week

I'm taking a break from the Poland trip posts because it's nice to record some of the daily happenings that might be interesting someday.

The big controversy at work lately is the bone marrow biopsies. Steve Freestone has gone to a lot of effort to train our pathology assistants in the procedure and we had premission from the previous chief medical officer (CMO) to allow them to do the biopsies under our supervision. The volume of biopsies that we are doing has increased and we don't have time to do them all. Besides, we are the only pathologist in the entire IHC system who do them. All the other hospitals have physician assistants or nurses doing them. The new CMO decided that our pathology assistants aren't credentialed at the hospital and thus can't do the procedure. Willes naturally exploded over that and is threatening all sorts of things, which is what he does when he doesn't get his way. I can see their point and if we change the bylaws we can get what we want but it may take up to a year. Meanwhile we will have to keep doing the biopsies to keep the hospital happy because they don't want to hire anyone else to do it and we are in the middle of negotiating a contract and don't want to rock the boat.

My exercise lately has been all about training for another Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim run. This time I'm hoping to actually run a little more and get a better time. I'm doing it with med-school friend Tim Yazzie, who does family practice in Ogden now. I ran into him randomly on the trail during last summer's King's Peak hike, and I've followed him on Facebook. My neighbor Mark Finlayson, who routinely does 20 mile trail runs a couple times a week also might join us. I have been running/hiking up Rock Canyon to the campground once or twice a week with a longer hike on the weekends. Last week I climbed Spanish Fork Peak but I was on the wrong trail and ended up bushwhacking to the top of a peak and then traversing rugged rideges until I found a way to the real trail. Another time I went up to Cascade Saddle and then Shingle Mill peak. Yesterday I took it easy and did the 8-mile Battle Creek to Grove Creek loop. I saw 6 wild turkeys near the spring.

I can hear Brita playing the piano in her room. She's working on Bohemian Rhapsody just for fun. I told her to get her band to play it because the keyboard part is so cool. She's impressing me with her ambition. She's in high-school now and taking a math class with all the smart kids a year older than her. She is also in AP geography. With a little encouragement she is going to be on the tennis team. When I was her age I was scared to try out for any sport because I knew I wasn't any good at it. What I know now that I didn't understand then was that doesn't matter. I hope Brita really gets that. She likes the idea of adding sports to her resume, even if she isn't crazy about sports.

Last year was frustrating with Leah because she was so disorganized with her homework and fell behind. This year she seems to be staying on top of it so far. She is taking honors science and English and her math teacher is the good one, so it's nice to see her feeling confident and motivated. She wanted to be in classes with her friends and so far it seems to be helping her.

Year two of Spanish immersion is underway for Meg. I wonder how much she understands. She doesn't like it when I speak Spanish to her, and she still complains about our reading time. She's back in piano lessons because that was the condition for her to play Minecraft and the practicing with Rachelle is still an ordeal that turn into an hours long power struggle. We might have made a breakthrough though by suggesting that she do it on her own. She likes it better, but we will see how effective it is. Friday morning she got up early, got ready, practiced and did all her homework including reading before breakfast. That was the day Rachelle was gone taking her parents to meet Doug in St. George, so I got lucky.

I took Brita and her friend Jane Harvey to the high-school football game. It's intersting to me because three boys that I had in scouts are starters on the team. I don't know if Brita and Jane watched the game but they seemed to enjoy the social experience and Brita walked by the Mountain View crowd several times hoping to see this guy that's in her band who attends school there. I sat by Mike Easton and the Finlaysons, so I was social too. Provo is much better this year and won easily. The true test will be against Timpview next week.

The big event for the week was my Grandma Szymanski's 90th birthday party. We were late because Brita and Leah's bands were playing the "Taste of Utah Valley" festival in Provo and the party was in Ogden. We made it in time to join the performance of the chicken dance with all of Lon's posterity. Ben was there with 6 of his kids. I enjoyed talking to Esther but didn't know any of the others, and I hadn't seen Ben for at least 30 years. They performed the worst rendition of Billy Joel's "Longest Time" that I have ever heard. Everyone was singing their own harmony in a different key. Paul played something on the concertina, which is a miracle because of how he was paralyzed and nearly died a year ago. Kerry Bird looked well and I was happy to see him because he nearly died of stomach cancer earlier this year. I talked the most to Nathan Moore about his trip to Vietnam and Cambodia because I want him to take me there someday.

I made it back in time to ride my bike down to the stadium for the BYU football game. That game against Boise State was worth the entire cost of the season tickets as they won on a last minute bomb in the end-zone for the second straight week. It's great to be there in person for those types of games.

Staying at the Ancestral Farm

We drove most of the day Saturday from Krakow, through Warsaw and out to the last town before Lomza, called Konarzyce. The roads were better than I expected with a few stretches of freeway interspersed with 2-lane highways and towns. We stopped for lunch at a place that had a patio next to a lake. It turned out to be a pleasant break.

Chris and Cathy Moore and Jackie Demes at our lunch stop

Konarzyce is a one-road town where all of the houses have a sort of courtyard surrounded by barns in the backyard and narrow strips of fields belonging to the house behind the barns. We pulled into the Szymanski yard around suppertime, but before milking. Lydia came out to greet us and we all had to do the three kisses on the cheek thing. It was a little awkward at first but we got used to it. That's how we greeted the men too. Lydia is a short, round little woman and Jozef is a slightly stooped old man with bad knees that make you cringe when you watch him walk. His face and hair reminded me of my grandpa.

The house is two stories but the upstairs is unfinished. Jozef and Lydia stay in a tiny room off the kitchen with a couple of twin beds, and Jozef Jr, his wife Ewa and their two boys ages 3 and 2 have a bigger bedroom. The kitchen is dimly lit and cluttered with food and an assortment of old appliances. Another room has a big table set up for meals and a couple of futons against the wall. There is a small television in the corner that the kids constantly have tuned to cartoons. Upstairs is mostly bare with only some air mattresses for us guests. Stanislaw, who never married, normally sleeps up there. The bathroom is all decorated in pink and steamy hot because the water heater is just underneath it. There are always lots of flies in there, a sink, toilet that when flushed never really gets all the toilet paper down, and small tub with hand-shower and no shower curtain. It didn't feel very functional to me, and if I lived there and had to milk cows twice a day I probably would only shower once a week. I totally understand that now. The upstairs is going to be nice when finished but these people wait until they have time and money to do everything themselves and they don't believe in mortgages, so who knows when it will be finished. Young Jozef is obviously a skilled craftsman because the tile work in the new bathroom up there is spectacular.

New bathroom

Old bathroom

Dining room

Available at every meal

Kitchen

Kitchen table

All of Jozef's children look more like Lydia than Szymanskis. Young Jozef had to show us around the farm including cows, haystacks, fields in back, vegetable garden and he tried to explain to us the mix of feed he uses. Piotrek is a mechanic who lives down the street and he pulled in driving a tractor that he had fixed. Andrej lives a couple doors down and raises pigs, chickens and has an unlicensed butcher business. I probably shouldn't be saying anything about that here because he's paranoid that he will be discovered and shut down. I didn't meet Dorota, as both she and her husband travel to Germany to work for weeks at a time. Kristina and her family came to visit for the weekend from their home in Bialystok which was nice because she speaks some English. All the brothers come over at various times to help out with milking even though it was primarily Jozef's business.

Jozef and his boys, Fraciszek and Antusz

One of the barns for the cows

Jozef explaining the cattle feed

Jozef's wife Ewa

The language barrier was a challenge. I had a hard time understanding old Jozef but Lydia and the kids made a big effort to help us understand. Lydia mostly communicated about food and was constantly urging us to eat, saying "Prosze" and motioning at the food. I understood a few words and used my google translate but it's far from ideal.

Lydia is a good cook but it amazed us that nobody ever puts the food away. It just sits out until the next meal, when they re-heated the soup and put out the same bread, sausage and desserts that we had for the previous meal and had been fly bait for hours. Most days Lydia would cook something new for the main meal, like chicken cordon-bleu for example, but they staples are bread, sausage and milk.

The day we arrived was bread-making day. They have a brick oven in the basement that Jozef was proud to tell me he built himself. He kneaded the dough and I took my turn punching it up for a few minutes. Then they let it rise and get the oven just right. Old Jozef built a fire in the brick oven and when it was hot they clear out the ashes and use a paper test to find out if the temperature is right. When they stick a paper in and it doesn't turn brown it's ready. Half-way through the baking Jozef bastes the top with olive oil, then when they take the bread out they baste it with water. I guess that keeps it moist. The bread is dense, brown stuff with sesame, sunflower and flax seeds in it. It tastes great and they are clearly proud of it and wouldn't eat any other kind of bread.

Heating the brick oven for bread

Ready to baste the bread

Stanislaw helping with bread

finished product

Old Jozef can hardly get around because his knees are so bad. He spends most of his time pottering around the yard sweeping or sitting on his bench under a tree. He has a bike that he rides everywhere, even if he just wants to get to the other side of the yard. He's very religious and he goes to church early on Sunday, riding his bike, to help out. He reminds me of my grandpa Szymanski with similar facial features and the same large hands with sausage-sized fingers.

Old Jozef working in the yard

Jozef on his bench under the tree

That first night we went over to Marian Szymanski's house. It's the house that my great-grandfather helped build when he was a kid. Marian has an education and a government job advising farmers. He doesn't seem to work nearly as hard as his cousins across the street and has a much nicer house. He gutted the old house and rebuilt it into as nice and modern a house as you could ever want. He has a nice garden in the back and his property goes way back to a creek where some old trees grow that might have been there when Grandpa Ben used to sneak away to play his concertina. Marian has limited English but we still tried to have a nice visit with him. Cathy and Jackie stayed at his house, which seemed like a 5-star hotel compared to where we were staying. He has an adult son that must be somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Marian Szymanski's house

Sunday we went to church in Konarzyce with everyone else in town. The service lasted a little more than an hour. At catholic mass there is a lot of standing up, and sitting back down. The congregation joined in a few hymns and they had some big TV monitors displaying the words. A couple of priests blessed the wine and wafers and then they walked around the chapel putting a wafer in the mouth of anyone who wanted it. It seemed to me like the priest dipped a wafer in wine and then ate it, so he took the wine on behalf of everyone there. Not everyone takes communion every sunday, there might be some requirement to go to confession and prepare properly for it. It might be better if Mormons took the sacrament as seriously.

Lydia braiding Leah's hair before church

After church we had a nice sunday dinner. Lydia made chicken cordon-bleu. Brita and Leah weren't feeling well so they napped a lot. I wish they would have been a little more social with the cousins because some of Andrzej and Piotr's kids came over. I played soccer and volleyball with them in the yard.

Andrzej suggested we go see a guy's dairy farm that had a bunch of robots to do the work, so we drove a few miles to check it out. Agricultural methods must be the most interesting thing in that town. It was cool to see a milking machine that the cows go into when they are ready, and a robot that cruises around the barn cleaning up manure. There was even a motorized back-scratcher for those cows. Jozef Jr. didn't come because he was either jealous or too busy milking his cows.

We found time to go to the cemetary in Lomza and see some family graves. The cemeteries are crowded but it's a family pride thing to take care of the graves.

Although Dorota was gone to Germany, her sown Pawel is a WWII history buff and he took us to some monuments out in the woods where the Nazis killed disobedient Poles in order to terrorize the population. There were three of these places, not far from the Szymanski farm and supposedly 12,000 people were killed there. He also finds relics, and has quite a collection of weapons from bayonets and unexploded hand grenades to an assortment of bullets.

In the evening we went over to Andrzej's house to see his operation. He raises lots of pigs, but the place is much cleaner and not nearly as pungent as a normal pig farm. He showed us his butcher shop and trailer that he takes to do the jobs on site for his under-the-table clients. After the tour we had to go in the house, which was small but a little more modern than Jozef's. We had the obligatory treats and food, and then he pulled out the wedding album. Everyone wants to show us their wedding albums.

Andrzej and his trailer

Butcher tools

Rachelle and her piggy in her Sunday best

On Monday we did a few tourist things around Lomza. There was an open air museum of old farmhouses and beekeeping methods. We walked around the town square and saw the cathedral that had been miraculously spared destruction at the hands of the Red Army after the priest prayed all night and refused to leave it. There was also a statue of a Polish actress. We did a little amber shopping because it's a lot cheaper in small-town Poland than the tourist areas.

Brita and Leah at open air farm museum

Lomza cathedral where Great-grandfather Ben was baptized

Famous Polish actress in Lomza main square

We made it home for dinner and everyone wanted to know if they could talk to Lon. He's kind of famous around here becasue he corresponded with them when the kids were all little back in the '80s. I called him and we were lucky enough that both he and Eric were home working in their shop. Everyone was thrilled to hear his voice and see his face. Jozef Sr. said it was like looking in a mirror.

Skyping with Lon and Jozef after dinner

Jozef and Piotr greeting Lon on Skype

After dinner we went over to Andrzej's house to watch him slaughter a pig. He was remarkably efficient. He had his son hold a pig down, then he hit it on the head with a sledge hammer as hard as he could. The stunned porker just lay there twitching and squealing while Andrzej cut it's throat and he bled out into a basin in a little over a minute. In the next half-hour they had the pig gutted, shaved and cut in half with a hatched right down its spine. It looked like hard work. Even though we had just eaten, we had to go back for a homemade keilbasa roast. It was kind of a farewell dinner, or second dinner. The kielbasa was excellent but the blood sausage was nasty. It's soft and seems to be made of congealed blood and ground up kidneys, pancreas, liver and other stuff that you wouldn't want to ever eat. It was fun but I felt like we were kind of party-pooper guests because we didn't partake of any home-brew vodka or wine and we wanted to go to bed just as they were getting started. I did connect with Marian's son because apparently he likes to watch NBA basketball so after asking him if he liked LeBron James he spent the rest of the night watching and imitating me.

Cathy and Jackie at the kielbasa roast

Staying with our cousins on the ancestral farm was definitely the highlight of the trip. It was great to see how real Poles live and connect with our heritage. I wonder how long their way of life will stay like this. It was like going back in time 50 years except for the wifi. If I go back in 10 years will they still be making bread like this? Will the next generation still be farming or will they move to the city like Kristina and her family? I wouldn't blame them for leaving because it's a hard life and technology and the global marketplace is changing everything even in a small town like Lomza. Will people keep their faith or will Poland turn secular like the rest of Europe? I'd like to go back someday and learn the answers.

Krakow

Krakow is a big city full of young people. The roads are crowded and the parking seems crazy because people park the front of their cars up on the sidewalks. Some areas people parallel park on the sidewalks and that was where our host expected me to park. The van was tricky to maneuver into a tight spot up on the sidewalk. Our flat was a little nicer than the one in Prague with at least some not quite comfortable couches to sit on. They were better than a futon though. We are not impressed with the beds that have just a mattress with no sheets and a comforter. That seems to be the Polish way though.

The first night we went to the grocery store around the corner for some bread, cheese and cold cereal. In some ways I prefer staying at real apartments in a part of the city where real Poles live to the sterile, artificial environment of a hotel in the tourist places. It provides a totally different experience.

The next day we went to the salt mine at Wielicka. It dates back to pre-historic times when cavemen used to evaporate the water from briny springs to make salt. When that was insufficient they started digging in the middle ages to mine the rock salt. At that time salt was called "white gold" and was rare and valuable. The mine closed in the 1990s and now is just a tourist attraction.

The tour starts with a descent down about 50 flights of stairs into the darkness. There is a guide who told us about things through a little radio with earphones. The miners carved some amazing statues from the salt including a couple of ballrooms and a spectacular underground cathedral. At one point we went in a bell shaped room that had great acoustics and listened to something by Chopin. Then we had the obligatory shopping where the women folk spent way too much money on specialty salt before we started the interminable march to the lifts to get out. We used the same lifts as the miners, crowding into tiny elevator cars that I couldn't even fully stand up inside. At least it was a short ride, as we were only down about 65 meters.

We were all tired from all the walking in the mine but we had a tour scheduled to see the main sights of the city at 2:30. We postponed it until 3:30 so we could eat and rest but most of us still wanted to do it. I'm not sure Brita and Leah wanted to tour anymore that day but they trooped along anyway.

Aleksandra was our guide and she first showed us a building where John Paul had stayed when he was Pope. He opened his window and greeted some people, and now it's a famous place in Poland. There is a park all around the old city where the defensive walls used to be. They tore them down around 1800 and replaced them with a green belt but you can still see the ruins in some places. Anyway, there was a display of photos of John Paul in the park too. I get the feeling that he's kind of like a rock star in Poland. They give him some credit for the fall of communism that coincided with his reign.

Next we walked up Wawel hill where we saw the palace and cathedral. We like climbing towers so we jumped at the chance to go up the bell tower. This was different than other towers because we had to crawl around and through the heavy timbers that support the structure. There were several enormous bells along the way, but the biggest one at the top had a legend that if you touched the heart with your left hand a made a wish it would come true.

Entrance to Wawel Hill

One interesting thing about the cathedral was that women couldn't enter with bare shoulders, so Jackie and Aleksandra had to put on shawls or sweaters before entering. This was the place where Polish kings were crowned. There was an elaborate silver coffin just inside that had the body of St. Stanislaus, who had a dispute with the king and was martyred and chopped into pieces, but the pieces miraculously re-formed, symbolic of Poland itself. Several other kings had their own chapels with statues of them as well as sarcophagi containing their remains in the crypts. A few more modern people including the poet Mickewicz and heroes like Pilsudskie are also buried there. Overall this cathedral wasn't quite as grand as St. Vitus in Prague but it seemed to contain more history.

We saw the palace, that was modeled after Italian palazzos and heard stories about how the Austrian soldiers lived there for a while after the partition and trashed the place. My favorite thing was the ruins of another church on the top of the hill that they had made into a pretty flower garden after the Austrians had torn it down.

We went down the hill to the river bank where a statue of a dragon stands. Every 5 minutes fire comes out of his mouth. There is also a legend about how a clever shoemaker tricked the dragon into swallowing a sheep stuffed with something flammable and that's what killed him. From there we saw a couple more smaller churches and the Jagiellonian University, the oldest in Central Europe. There was a nice old hidden courtyard and museum there. We ended in the main square that used to be a major regional marketplace. We went in the big church on the square, St. Mary's and admired the blue ceiling and stars, although there was a service going on. The nice thing about Krakow is all the buildings are original because both the Polish army and German army declined to defend the place so it avoided major damage. It is definitely all about tourism in the old town now although unlike Prague most of the tourists are not foreigners. They seemed to be mostly Poles.

Palace on Wawel Hill

University courtyard

St. Mary's church

I once again pumped our guide for stories about the change from communism to a market economy and enjoyed hearing her tales about shortages and long lines to get things. She wouldn't tell me much about how she felt about Putin.

It seems like we spent a lot of time in Krakow eating. We mostly had Polish food at nice restaurants. We tried Italian one night and it was disappointing. I had herring one night and it was not very good. We liked eating right on the square outdoors and enjoying the sights and sounds. One problem with eating in Europe though is I can never get enough to drink. Water and soda cost more than beer and wine and they bring a tiny bottle and expect that will be enough for dehydrated tourists that have been walking all day. I feel like I'm walking around thirsty all day.

Street musician playing for Leah

On our last day in Krakow we took a tour with Aleksandra of the Jewish Quarter and Schindler's factory. We went into a synagogue and learned about some Jewish traditions. I didn't know that the Germans forced the Jews to move across the river to a ghetto where they were crammed into a confined space and walled in. There is a nice pedestrian bridge to that area now. The whole neighborhood is a trendy place now with new buildings springing up and lots of culture and vitality. The Schindler factory was mostly a museum with a chronology of everything that happened in Krakow during the war. It left deep scars on the Polish psyche. The museum ends with a giant picture of Stalin, so the war didn't have a happy ending for Poland. Rachelle and Brita sat out that last tour and I wish Leah had too because she looked totally bored and couldn't tell me one thing she learned.

I had to put this on to go into the synagogue

The synagogue had bare walls with painted on decorations

Monument where the last of the Jews were liquidated in the ghetto