Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

sprechen sie deutsch?

I spoke too soon (in the last entry) about not hanging out with Europeans. It's been all-German, all the time, this weekend. Friday night: talking with the bouncer of this dorm, a student of German. Saturday: lunch, dinner and beers with the Germans. Breakfast today: those Germans and some others.

I feel so technically apt. I bought more minutes for my phone and programmed the voicemail yesterday. Small steps, yeah: but that's how progress happens. Soon I will graduate to downloading photos from yesterday's trip to Pieskowa Skala castle. The battery light was flashing (what's up with that, I've hardly taken any photos since I switched batteries earlier this week!) so I tried to control myself and be selective, which turned out not to be too hard, because really, how many photos of Renaissance arcades do you really need, when all four sides of the courtyard look the same?

No photo-taking allowed in the castle rooms, which were filled with art/furnishings/objets leftover from the collections at Wawel. The garden was gorgeous, but completely inauthentic, all beds of annuals in boxwood hedges. The guide was out of her league in the art history field: "this very important painting is from the 17th century" but she could never tell you who painted it or even the school or nationality of the painter. Still, it was a gorgeous day; the river valley is geologically very striking; and I was happy to be in the Polish countryside, reminding me of why I picked this country to study in the first place.