I don’t have any pictures to share just yet but I want to say that I’m already loving Poland. The people here seem super friendly. Despite what I’ve heard, they do quite a bit of smiling. At least they seem to smile and giggle every time I try my one phrase of Polish: Gin Quea (I’m sure I’m spelling that as badly as I pronounce it). It means “Thank You”. I’ve also learned beer (pivo), your welcome (prasha), yes (tak), no (nya), and I’m workng on good bye (doe vey zanya). That last one I keep forgetting but I’ll try it again soon.

Anyway, as to Krakow, it’s very cute (both the town itself and the women) and the bars are really cool. That’s about all I was able to experience in my first night in Krakow. The bars are all about 2 stories underground and made out of stone. The beer is cheap and the bar tenders, at least the ones we met last night, spoke good English and were pretty funny. At one time, Tom mentioned Southpark to me and the woman behind the bar who seemed to be paying know attention to us at all, suddenly said, “Screw you guys, I’m going home,” in her best Cartman voice. It was hysterical and Tom was even more in love with her after that.

Today I’m battling the snow and cold to see what else I can experience in this wonderful looking city.

…and our hostel sucked. Oh well, you can’t hit a home run every time. We stayed at Louise Hostel on Louisestrasse and it was really just a hotel with 4 beds shoved into each room. My mom taught me not to say anything unless I could say something nice so here goes: It was clean and…well, it was clean. Seriously, this place was bad. They had no real common room to meet people, no private lockers in the rooms, the staff could make no useful suggestions on what to do, and there was hardly anybody under the age of 50 staying there (yeah, I know, I’ve been complaining the whole time about the young ‘uns, but at least their fun). Lastly, they had no wi-fi - a first on this trip. I’ll get back to the wi-fi thing shortly.

On top of the lousy hostel, it was about 40 degrees and raining the entire day we spent here. However, I have to say that I’m a fan of Dresden. For those of you not familiar with the story, Dresden was essentially leveled at the very end of WWII and over 200,000 people were killed in a massive bombing raid (this was all made famous by Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter House Five”).

Since then, they have done a great job of rebuilding the historical sites of Dresden. We visited a huge palace and then saw the cathedral along with a few other Gothic style buildings. We then decided to try and find a wireless cafe. This was the real adventure of the trip.

We probably walked two miles or more stopping at every promising looking cafe we could find to pull out a laptop and see if we could get a connection. No luck. Cafe’s that would most definitely have wireless in the states had nothing here. But finally we found a little bar/restaurant and, after some trouble figuring out the passkey, we were online. We then ordered a couple of sandwiches and a beer.

After about 45 minutes we looked outside and it was pouring! So we closed the laptops and ordered another beer. Tom and I then spent the next 45 minutes solving many of the worlds problems. Still raining. Order another beer. We then spend the next 45 minutes with me explaining to Tom why my ideas are better than his.

Finally, after about 2 and a half hours in the cafe, we decide to brave the rain to find a movie theater. We found one just a couple of blocks away and they happened to be playing “Body of Lies” in English. Fantastic! Even more fantastic is that the movie theaters in Germany sell beer. So we grab another one and head to watch the show. As it turned out, we were the only ones in the theater so I took the opportunity to do a photo op that I have never done before. Yes, that’s me posing in front of the projector and putting my shadow on to the big screen. I also made shadow puppets if anyone cares to know but I have no pictures of those.

After this came my favorite part of the entire day. We walked out into the pouring rain and within a few minutes entered a large plaza in the middle of the city. The Germans are not deterred by rain. They had a large, mostly open air beer garden setup. We walked into one of the little “shacks”, grabbed another beer, and just watched in wonder as the Germans, everyone of them in a thick coat, sat with friends and family to drink their beer or hot apple cider with rum. It was one of the most authentic German experiences I’ve had on this entire trip. It was great!

You can see all of my Dresden photos here. One of them worth noting is the rainbow that appeared at about noon. That was pretty cool.

I just want to put in a quick note about breakfast. I probably shouldn’t do this right now because I’m stuck on a train with no food and I’m starving, but whatever, I will endure for your entertainment.

On our second to last day in Prague, Tom and I decided to treat some Aussies and Olli to an actual American breakfast skillet. Now if you’ve ever traveled abroad, you will no doubt remember that breakfast just doesn’t seem to be a big deal to most of the world. Sure, they have their croissants, maybe some cereal, and if you’re British you eat absolute crap (baked beans, boiled bacon, and a boiled tomato - yuck!). But Americans do it right and we were excited to show these people how good breakfast could be.

So Tom and I headed to the store and bought 10 eggs, bacon, a sack of potatoes, an onion, a green pepper, bread, and a box of juice. The total cost was 130 crowns - or $6 (I told you Prague was cheap). Armed with this food, we were able to make a traditional American skillet for 6 people. It was fantastic. Now if I can just get a good burger somewhere…

I just added the next two chapters of my book. Well, actually, it’s more of one new chapter and a couple of paragraphs to round out the previous chapter. Once again, I’d love any feedback - even if it’s just to tell me that it sucks. If that’s the case, I’d prefer to know sooner rather than later. So take a look and tell me if I’m on the right track, I’m a genious, or I’m an idiot that should never be allowed to write for entertainment purposes again.

Prague is incredible. If you’ve never been here you should come and visit. It’s beautiful, tons to do, the food is great, and it’s pretty cheap. But there have been entire tour books written on that. Instead, I’d prefer to try and entertain you with a story about Olli the guy from Manchester.

Olli insisted through the entire trip that he only drinks once or twice a month with his mates. But from what I saw, I think he is confusing “month” with “one or two days”. The first night I met him we had 3 half-liters of beer apiece before my friend Tom from Seattle showed up. It was Tom’s first night in Europe and Olli was quite happy to help us celebrate the end of his 31 hour journey from Seattle.

But we were all tired from traveling so we called it an early night at about midnight. The next morning, Tom and I got up early to explore Prague. We walked the streets, visited a palace complete with a torture dungeon, had an incredible meal, and even explored some of the more untraveled areas of the city. It was a great day. Then we followed it up by going to see a great band, “The Cold War Kids”, with a couple people I met in Budapest (Megan and Chris). We rolled in from this night out at about 2:30 AM (complete with a stop for a hot dog).

But Olli would out do us, he rolled in about 6:45 AM. But he dragged himself out of bed the next morning to join Tom, Chris, and I for a hike up one of the Prague hills for a good photo op. We then hiked down, I took a nap, and that night a bunch of us went to one of the greatest bars ever! (You will notice in that picture that Olli is in short sleeves, it was freezing outside - literally.)

Olli didn’t strike me as a particularly religious man but he has his own idea of heaven and it was the bar we were in that night. You walk in and the first thing you notice are four beer taps on each table and you pour your own beer! So how, you may ask, do I know this is Olli’s version of heaven? Well, because after looking upon the entire seen Olli turned to me and said, “This is exactly what heaven is like.”