We spent Thursday at home, mostly, and Friday too as we both had to work from our laptops. We did manage to visit the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden late in the afternoon–where we spent a lot of time taking pictures. In the evening we went to see a show, íSa by dancegroup T.R.A.S.H., and on Saturday we visited Amsterdam. We had some luck with the weather this weekend–Amsterdam was delightful to walk through. We visited the Nieuwmarkt (where she bought some lovely cheeses), De Wallen, De Dam, and we had a walk along the canals and saw may interesting sites along the way. Of course we also had a canal-tour later in the afternoon, and a wonderful dinner to finish off our visit to Amsterdam (after which she tried Jenever and decided it was enough like Wodka to like it). Unfortunately we didn’t have enough money on ourselves to pay for dinner and we could not use our cards… Aleksandra had to find a cash point outside to get some money to pay for dinner. But it was part of the fun!

Sunday I had rehearsals for Midsummer Night’s Dream but Aleksandra entertained herself in Leiden all afternoon, and in the evening we had a roast chicken from the oven for dinner. Then, on Monday we first visited Madurodam in the morning. Later we had coffee in Den Haag and saw some of the Madurodam sites for real!

In the afternoon Aleksandra wanted to visit Kinderdijk because she really likes windmills. Even though I grew up about 20 kilometers from that site, I had never visited it before. I was surprised to learn it is on the Unesco World Heritage list, it does not look very spectacular and it also does not feel significant. It’s basically just three rows of windmills (ok, some of them are old) without much information. Nevertheless, we spent a few hours there taking pictures and walking along the canals and windmills. Today Aleksandra is flying back to Katowice. I cannot visit her anytime soon because of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which premieres in one month), but I want to visit her again by car!

It means that all my new posts will no longer be posted to makoho.WordPress.com, but to www.makoho.nl.

Aleksandra and me at the top of Sania Skala 

Poland is a lot more beautiful than you would think! And in some areas a hell of a lot more ugly, too. On the one hand there is Krakow: this city sits on the banks of the Wisla river, with over 1,000 years of history collected in its churches, castles, parks, and squares. Krakow is inspiring and very beautiful.
	On the other hand there is Warsaw. It was destroyed during WW II by a little angry German man with a small moustache, and in the following years it was rebuilt by a Russian man with a much larger moustache, in the prevailing style of that era: concrete, in various shades of gray. Warsaw is really ugly. Seriously.
Luckily Aleksandra and me spent most of our time in Krakow, and a few days in Zakopane: a village at the foot of the Tatra mountains, with great views of the snow-capped mountaintops in High Tatra. We went for walks in the valleys and climbed a few mountaintops, ate highland food (very salty and fat), drank hot beer, and took lots of pictures.

Yes, that’s right. Hot beer. I had no idea this custom existed in the universe, but apparently the Polish have been heating up their beers all along! There’s special herb-mixes you can buy in the shops to add to your beer as you cook it, and they make the beer taste darker and more like autumn or winter. I tried a few beers like this, but it isn’t my cup of tea. I did bring some of those herb-mixtures with me, but I’ll save it for special occasions. I like my beer cold.

	On my first day in Krakow, Aleksandra had to work but she prepared an entire program for me! First she arranged for me to visit the Wieliczka Salt Mines in the morning, then in the afternoon she planned a walk in Krakow with little assignments and questions in 10 envelopes.
I saw the Main Square with the Market Hall and the famous St. Mary’s Church, the Barbican Theatre, the Wawel Castle on the banks of the Wisla river, and some places where the late Pope John Paul II stayed (the Polish are very proud of him and commemorate him in many different places around the city). She also guided me to some of her favourite places in the city.

Other fun things that we did were:

• taking a trip to Zakopane by bus;
• walking through the Koscieliska, Strazyska and Bialego valleys;
• visiting the Jaskinia Mrozna cave (even though Aleksandra suffers from claustrophobia!);
• climbing Sania Skala (+1372m);
• riding the very steep train to Gubalowka;
• walking the banks of the Wisla river at night;
• walking through the Jewish Quarter of Krakow;
• taking some night-pictures in Zakopane.

Aleksandra is coming to Holland in October, for 5 days, to stay with me. I think I will go back to Krakow in the near future to see her, and there are many places I still want to visit (Auschwitz, for example). The story will continue.

Here are some of the pictures I took. There are none of Aleksandra (except the one above) as she prefers not to be on display on the Internet.

Me at one end of the Koscieliska valley

Interior of a cafe in the Jewish Quarter in Krakow

Wisla river by night

 
Part of fence in the Jewish Quarter in Krakow

 
Courtyard of the Wawel Castle 

The sink full of bubbles from the Jacuzzi, in our hotel room, Zakopane. 

Album “Krakow en Zakopane“

10/9/2008

The weekend was a great success, with a boat-trip, a barbecue, an evening of hilarious sketches, and a lot of beer. Some things that I remember are looking out from the top of Fort Penningsveer in the middle of the night when the fort was bathing in moonlight, playing rounds of improvised sketches on Saturday night and walking around the room as a dress-up boy dressed in plastic bags, laughing until we spilt our beer talking about porn-channels and genitalia, and seeing Lorien take the rudder of the boat in front of ours, losing any feeling for direction, speed, and danger, and managing to  almost drill her boat into the side of the 150-feet wide canal.

The fort itself was rather nice, built in the early 1800′s and a part of the Amsterdam defence line organized in the early 1900′s, and serving as a camp to detain NSB members after World War II. It is no longer a military complex since 1950.

Here are a few pictures of the weekend:

Anyway, the theme of the Toverlei weekend is Improvisation. Thank goodness we don’t have to dress up like last time (its theme was Glamour), but they did ask us to bring some kind of decoration to hang on the walls.

I found, in one of my closets, a huge picture of myself that was used during the performance of the Three Penny’s Opera in 2006. I fiddled around with bits of paper and glue, and I quite like the result. Here’s me being happy with the decoration I made:

(it says: Big Brother is Watching You)

It is a bit too complex to capture on a blog, but I found a small youtube video of the song they perform in the middle of the toys department (but that does not show on the video):

One of the fun things about this show was that people were still shopping when it was going on: there was one scene next to the escalators, where people were coming down throughout the scene–to find two actors in front of them and 60 people looking at them. Most of them had to laugh, some were very shy, and there was one little girl who stood aside and watched the rest of the scene wide-eyed with interest.

The show lasted 2 hours but was not tedious at any point. Changing location for different scenes helped in this respect, but the fragmented story of Anne carried enough momentum and information to keep me interested anyway. It was the first time I have ever heard a woman say “Long live porn!”!

My first round harvested books leading up to 65 euro, so I made a stricter selection and ended up with the following:

• Polish language, a quick-guide;
• Vernon God Little (DBC Pierce), a novel;
• Continental Drift (Russell Banks), a novel;
• Travels in the Scriptorium (Paul Auster), a novel;
• Ojo (Sam Kieth, Alex Pardee, Chris Wisnia), a comic book;
• Oversight (Phillip Hester), a collection of short stories in comic format;
• Wide Angle (National Geographic), a photography book;
• Holland From the Top (Karel Tomeï), a photography book;
• Binder folio;
• Agenda 2009.

That’s not bad. Not as spectacular as some visits to the Boekenfestijn have been, but not bad at all.

I had some problems getting home, though. My bike was in the secure section of the bike-parking facility, and they close at 1.30 am. The trouble is, trains from Den Haag back to Leiden leave with a one hour interval from 0.30 am onwards. I thought I would take that 0.30 am train, but the movie finished at 0.32, much later that I had anticipated. There was no way to get back to Leiden in time to collect my bike. And I always thought I live in a well-organized urban area…

After considering our options we decided to have a few drinks.

We leisurely walked to the station at around 1.45 am (after the terrace was closed), said goodbye for the evening, and I waited for my train. It was a bit weird as the hall was almost empty, save for a few souls waiting for their trains:

I got to Leiden at around 2.50 but had to walk home as I couldn’t get to my bike. Normally that isn’t a problem but I was wearing my Sunday shoes and they’re not cut out to walk on comfortably for more than 15 minutes at a time. It took me almost 35 minutes to get home, but I really enjoyed the solitary splendour of Leiden in the deep of the night. It surprised me that there were still people around–although admittedly one of them dead drunk trying to bike in a steady line, or at least roughly between the edges of the pavement.

Today I collected my bike after getting a free ride on the bus (carried only a 50 euro note and had to pay € 1.20, so the driver kindly let me in without paying), and hung around in the city as it is really lovely weather. If I’m not too tired tonight I think I will take out my camera and tripod and capture night scenes again.

Another thing I did yesterday was book a flight to Warsaw. More on that later : ).