Poland!

So, as some of you may know, I recently went to Poland with my mom, my brother, and my brother's godfather. Actually, I guess we didn't all go together (in fact, we all got there on different days), but we met up there, and spent a week together exploring Krakow in the south, Gdynia and Gdansk in the north, Lodz (where Alex had a speaking engagement) in the middle.

Being November, and given that it turns out Poland is pretty far north, it was quite cold. And it got dark rather early (think 3:30 or so). BUT the treat for me was that at least it wasn't raining like I'm used to in Portland, AND it was pretty sweet to play in a whole new country. Even if I didn't understand anything going on around me (actually, I kind of like that, just in the sense that it reminds me that my little comfortable Portland slice of the world is such a tiny, tiny portion of reality).

It's funny, too, to be somewhere where history is so... historical. I mean, nowhere in the US can you walk into a cathedral that's been standing since the 1300s. We've got our own kind of history, but it was fun in Poland to, say, go see the college where Copernicus went to school:



And the hotel we stayed at in Krakow was just a ten-minute walk from the old Wawel Castle (which apparently is worthy of nighttime illumination):



Anyway. For more pictures and ridiculous captions, feel free to check out the new Poland album on my Picasa page (for that matter, check out any other pictures you want, too:)

In just a few days, James and I are off to Honduras for a cousin's wedding, too--so stay tuned for more travel! Yay!:)