It's my birthday and I'll....

I decided that the birthday person (in this case me!) should be allowed to plan the day. I did not choose churches and the art gallery on the other side of the square where Leonardo Da Vinci's "Woman with an Ermine" is displayed, even though I do want to see it. This is what how the day went:

I got up earlier than Nelson and John (which is the usual thing) and went for a walk in the Crakow town square, stopped in a church service and lit a candle for the family at home. Then I bought myself some flowers at the flower stand in the corner of the square. We learned later that it's the last remnant of the market from the middle ages! I went back and got Nelson and we walked to the top of Wawel Hill and had coffee at a cafe on the castle grounds. We could see the Vistula river and the old & new city landscapes. (We could also see all the tourist groups and the film crew making some kind of movie at the base of the "dragon's den" tunnel!)

At 1:00 we joined a bike tour of the old town and the adjacent Jewish quarter and even rode out to where the Schindler factory is located. The movie Schindler's List is cited often on the tours and in the travel literature. Our guide was emphatic about the fact that it was the Germans, not the Poles, who built the concentration camps, and it was the Polish inteligencia who where the first victims in those camps. There is a memorial at the base of Wawel hill to the thousands of Polish army officers who were murdered by the Russians after the war. In both cases the goal was to get rid of anyone who might have influence or power to resist what amounts to colonization. As one tour guide put it "It's not a good place for a country, stuck between Germany and Russia!"

The bike ride was not all death and depression, of course. In fact it was a beautiful day and the bike tour was a lot of fun. We rode three speed "city bikes" and mine had a wicker basket on the front. I felt like someone out of a movie! One challenge was the fact that there were no hand brakes on my bike, it was the old fasioned "back pedal to stop". Until I got used to it I was a hazard in traffic because I kept grabbing the handle bars and then being shocked when nothing happened! The people I almost hit were probably more shocked, but by the time they recovered I was long gone and if they had anything to say to me I couldn't understand it anyway!

After the bike ride we had a drink (beer, wine, fanta...you guess who got what) at a restaurant on the town square and listened to the trumpeter ring in the hours as he has been doing for hundreds of years. Well, not that man specifically, of course! He plays the "all clear" three times, once for the church, once for the king, and once for the burghers. He never actually finishes the song because once upon a time, when the trumpeter was in the middle of playing, he was killed by a Tatar arrow (or axe, we heard both versions) and the song was abruptly cut off. This may sound like a legend, and it probably is, but the guy actually plays every hour and we are going to climb the tower and meet him!

My birthday dinner was Italian food (go figure) at a restaurant located in the square behind an old house...for those of you who are well read in classic children's literature, it was what I have always imagined the garden in Francis Hodson Burnett's book "The Secret Garden" to look like...and we had a table under the big tree. Candles and twinkle lights came on as the sun went down and the food was as fantasic as the ambiance.

It was the perfect birthday in Crakow.