wien, österreich.

so vienna definitely takes the cake.



the palaces are a little more regal, the bike lanes are a little wider, the people a little friendlier, the architecture a little more impressive... vienna's got the oldest zoo and the oldest ferris wheel in the world. the zoo was really cool, we saw some very, uh, interesting things.


stayed up all night the first night, then walked about the city at six in the morning... everything was so quiet, it was real nice. checked out some parks, napped under some trees, hit up an amusement park and a couple of palaces, a few restaurants, a botanical garden, a couple of churches, a zoo, various metro lines, a revolving cafe up on a tower (with an amazing view of the city) and the longest nap ever once we finally got to our beds. good thing, too, because we had a night train and a second class sleeper car is no party.


i'm definitely gonna have to go into sculpture you know, so i can sculpt myself a nice ol' fountain like the huge one we saw at the palace belvedere. except mine'll have a roll out water slide and it will be too cool for school. you'll see.



one of the coolest things was going to this museum centered on the work of hundertwasser, an artist with a very cool philosophy who undertook a good amount of architectural projects... houses with rolling, hilly floors or built into the ground with grass roofs, trees growing out of windows... interesting guy, very creative. he was a big environmentalist.


"the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind. but the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. the straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is the line which does not exist in nature... any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn. today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist knowhow and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. an aesthetic void, desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. even creativity is prefabricated. we have become impotent. we are no longer able to create. that is our real illiteracy." (i dug the guy.)

praha, česká republika.

prague! it’s gorgeous. (seriously magda, how many cities are you going to describe in the same way? i have an extensive vocabulary, for sure.)

okay, so the cool thing about prague is that it’s all so old school. it’s probably only actually the part that we’ve been in, but this city has way more of that quaint european charm… not so much that’s modern, but it’s great. the streets are almost all cobblestone! (quite a bumpy ride on a bike, let me tell you.) and the river that cuts through the city isn’t wimpy, either.

but at the same time, the amount of tourists here is overwhelming. yeah, it’s summer and yeah, i know i’m one of ‘em, but it’s like they all congregate in these little streets and then you can barely get through, but a couple of blocks farther, and it’s unbelievably quiet. this time i mastered the art of weaving through pedestrians on a bicycle. like a madwoman.

prague is very... european. charming churches and an uber-cool 15^th century astronomical clock and a castle on a hill and beautiful bridges... the st. charles bridge is probably the most well-known, because it’s closed to everything but pedestrians and that’s where all the local artists set up their stands, with everything from jewelry and photographs and crafts and paintings… and there’s always different musicians out doing their thing as passersby toss change in their upturned hat. my favorites were these four guys on an accordian, a bongo, a guitar, and a bagpipe-type thing. they were damn good. that’s gonna be us one day raising money for some wild road trips, yeah? (dude, bagpipes!)

berlin, deutschland. (the night starts here).

i think i fell in love with berlin. honestly, there were so many other cities in germany i felt like i would rather go to, but it ended up being berlin, and i’m so glad it did.

the city is beautiful. there’s the perfect mix of the old with the new and everything seems so large but at the same time, it’s all so accessible.

maybe the thing that really won me over was how easily we were able to maneuver around a huge, foreign city on a couple of rented cruisers with nothing but one of those free maps that advertise some tour for tourists or something. berlin is honestly the most bike-friendly city i have ever been in, and if you ever visit, rent a bike for the day and see where it takes you, because you can see so much more and it was seriously so much fun, i absolutely loved it. i mastered the art of taking photos from a moving bicycle.

also, public transportation in berlin is downright amazing. even at two in the morning.

and there were so many cool things to see. the berliner dom, which is the big german cathedral, the remnants of the wall and checkpoint charlie, and so many lovely parks off of the river… oh, and i saw two ludwigs, although one was in a sarcophagus and the other was a statue.

anyway, i loved it. it’s the kind of city i could see myself living in. i wish i had a hundred lives.

(the pleasure part, the aftershock, the moment that it takes to fall apart, the time we have, the task at hand, the love it takes to destroy a man, the ectasy of being free, that big black cloud over you and me, and after that the upwards fall and were we angels after all?)

wieliczka, polska. (today my heart swings.)

it’s sweltering here. a couple of days ago it hit forty degrees celcius. that’s really great weather for train traveling when there’s no air conditioning, you know. but on monday on our last day in krakow we went to this town called wieliczka where they have a giant salt mine hundreds of meters under the ground, where it’s nice and cool… it’s a pretty awesome place.

as you go through the mine, the walls and floors and everything are salt, and there are sculptures of all kinds of things that were also made from giant hunks of salt (dwarves and gnomes and dragons and famous people like copernicus and goethe and pope john paul ii). there are a couple of chapels and an entire church completely engraved from salt… that was the coolest part by far. they actually hold masses in there and it’s gorgeous… the sculptures and engravings all around the room are amazing. there were also some really pretty underground lakes and we got to see how they used to mine the salt hundreds of years ago when it was worth more than gold.

it was pretty chill. (ha, a pun!) i kept telling natalia to lick the walls but she wouldn’t do it.

we’re staying at my dad’s brother's house near warsaw now. he’s away somewhere so we’re chilling with my aunt and cousins for a little bit… it’s great because they’re pretty laid back. and they have a crazy dog. my laptop sucks and has problems connecting to the internet, but we’ve finally got steady access to it here, so i get to catch up.

(how are things on the west coast?)

dunajec river, slovenská republika. (it's okay to run, we expect you back.)

our cracovian hosts took us rafting on the dunajec river that makes up some of the border between poland and slovakia. there are really nice national parks on both sides, and mountain and cliffs and forests and all that good stuff. our boat had polish mountain men and nuns and a small singing boy on it and it was a great ride and a perfect day (maybe a little warm) and a gorgeous place.

the drive there and back was breathtaking. even though i’ve been to poland before, touring it like this is pretty cool… poland’s a beautiful country. rolling hills out here in this part of the country, i dig ‘em. and the mountain range in the distance… also quite impressive. and the sunset on the way back… uh, yeah. so like, the pictures don’t nearly do it any justice and i know i sure as hell don’t but um, it’s pretty chill. i could spend forever on the top of one of those hills, you couldn’t imagine the views.

(dreaming of a new land where the rivers wind through the villages and the people breathe so easily.)

kraków, polska.

oh boy. krakow. it’s the most beautiful city. i don’t even know where to start. the cathedrals, the rynek, the castle, the river, the university… it’s all pretty amazing. krakow has so many legends and so much history attached to it. unlike warsaw, the war spared the city for the most part, and a lot of the architecture is much like it always was.

the cathedrals, good lord, the cathedrals and the churches here are really something else. it’s not enough that they’re on every other block, but they’re amazing. the royal krakow cathedral is the oldest and most historically significant, housing the tombs of poland’s kings and queens and giant bells that can be heard throughout the whole city when rung (on special occasions such as the new year or the death of the pope). it’s up on wawel hill with the castle and it sure has some history. then there’s the basylika mariacka right on the rynek… oh man, i got dizzy standing in front of it, it’s so big. a trumpeter plays on the hour every hour from the top of the tower, and you can just see a little speck that is his trumpet in the window. the inside of the cathedral is gorgeous, there are incredibly old and intricate wooden carvings on the walls, the alter, everywhere… it’s so hard to describe the place, but it’s enough to make anyone awestruck. and there are so many beautiful churches, i couldn’t even begin to describe them.

the castle was really cool, and we got to see so many old pieces of artwork and architecture and carpentry and sculpture and weaponry… you name it. the museums are of course impressive and there’s no shortage of things to do in this city. the rynek or town square is probably the nicest in all of poland and it’s always the busiest part of the city, but the university district and the jewish district are refreshingly free of tourists. everything’s worth seeing.

we’re staying with a friend of my dad’s who has a nursery of his own. he has two daughters, but the one that’s our age is off on a sailing trip or something, so we didn’t get to meet her. it’s a really nice place, he’s got an amazing garden and quite a view, and with all the trees it smells like home. we’d never even met this guy or his family before but they took us in on short notice and bequeathed to us their guest house so we’ve been living in luxury for a while. on top of that, he bought us a boatload of gluten-free food and like a week’s worth of groceries (you have no idea… we spent our last night there gorging. “natalia, you can’t have any more ice cream until you eat more cake!”) and then he completely funded a tour of the city with his younger daughter and a ridiculously nice polish girl who works for him. and he picked us up from the train station and took us to restaurants and drove us around and wouldn’t let us pay for a thing. and of course we don’t eat enough so he has to feed us every chance he gets and bring us fresh bread and milk in the mornings. and then he didn’t want us to leave and tried very hard to convince us to stay for at least a couple more days. he’s telling me about how many great ski trips we’ll go on when i come back in the winter because of course i have to come back and visit them then. and that is polish hospitality for you.

dobrzyca, polska.

the towns just keep getting smaller and smaller… my grandparents are from a little town called dobrzyca surrounded by polish countryside. i love the polish countryside. alright well, i love any countryside, but poland’s got that ages-old feel to it, like things haven’t changed all that much… they still spread manure on their fields instead of chemical crap, it stinks but hey, it works. we visited my grandpa’s brother who’s got an aviary in his backyard full of parakeets and pheasants and maybe a cockatoo or something, i don’t even know what half of them were… they fed us many sweet things, of course. and i saw where my grandpa was born and where my mom grew up for the first six years of her life. they lived across from this crazy old palace where we went to take pictures, it’s like gorgeous.

the place has been ruined and renovated more than a couple of times. my grandpa has pictures of the place when it was still occupied by the germans and he wanted to compare how it looks now with how it looked fifty years ago so we spent hours taking pictures for this project of his. and then we’re going to have to type up captions for them. it’s quite an undertaking.

lovely little mansion, but the grounds were the best part… there were waterfalls and peacocks and giant trees and and baby ducklings and these amazing weeping willows right over a pondlake. and also the largest platanus acerfolia in europe. yeah.

and also, my great-grandfather was a king and his picture is now in the museum. i’m like royalty, chew on that.