Festivals!

Some of you may have noticed that it's been awhile since you've heard from me on this blog.  Simply put, Laurel has been living a much more exciting life than I have been the past few weeks.  While I've been mostly working, Laurel had been trying her best to become Krakow's most over-qualified tour guide by learning every fact at every museum in Krakow.  Now that she's back stateside, I'll have to start living a more exciting life and posting more.

This weekend has two simultaneous festivals going on in Krakow: the pierogi festival and the lazy summer festival.

The pierogi festival is just amazing.  It's not overly-large, with about 15 vendors of pierogi.  However, there is a tremendous amount of variety in that pierogi.  Sure, you have the normal ones: meat, ruskie (cheese and potato), cabbage and mushroom, blueberry, but you also have more exotic choices: duck, Mexican, salmon, feta cheese and sun-dried tomato, banana, etc.  Have I mentioned that Poland likes garlic?

The lazy summer festival has a different variety of food, including Spanish, Brazilian, Hungarian, and organic Polish food.  It also has plenty of wine and a long list of music gigs, as it just seems to always have something different on while I'm there.

That last one is a little difficult to see: it's a guy slicing a whole leg of Jamon Iberico.  Click the link to see how much it would cost to buy one.  I dare you.

I also went down to Oskar Schindler's factory today, since I hadn't been there before.  Laurel has posted in more detail about that place earlier, so I didn't take as many photos.  I was intrigued to see what they actually made, though.  The reason the factory could stay open was because it made fuses for the German artillery, but when not doing that they made pots and pans.  Yup, boring stuff.  They made a lot of it though, and sold a bunch of them on the black market to have extra funds.

This week will be a short week at work due to the holiday on Thursday.  I'll be taking a side excursion to a fabulous but as of yet undisclosed location.  We'll have some fun seeing if anyone can guess where I am.  There might be prizes.

Edit: I should mention one more thing about Schindler's factory.  Throughout it all, there were many, many photos of Krakow in Nazi occupation.  There were many photos where I could immediately recognize the setting, maybe even having walked by there hundreds of times.  To see it draped in Nazi decor or with an artillery gun sitting in the middle of it was unsettling.