Cracovia

Once a year David travels to an obscure location for a meeting of one of his NATO committees. I missed the last three--Croatia, Moldova, and Estonia--so I wasn't about to miss another. This year's meeting was held in Krakow, Poland.
First, a brief lesson in Polish:
W's are pronounced like V's
The W sound is represented by an L with a line through it.
The rest of the letters are a mystery.
For example:
Dziekuje (with a little squiggly under the e's) is pronounced jen-coo-ya.
It means "Thank you" and it is the only word that I can consistently remember and say with recognizeable accuracy.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that I am no longer complaining about French.

Krakow, linguistic mysteries aside, is a really wonderful little city. Think Prague dirtied up just enough to look lived in with a few hundred (OK, 123) churches borrowed from the Baroque effusion of Italy plus one tiny room each of the Louvre and the British Museum. Throw in a Pope and a heretic and you just about have it. It was nice, and very digestable. My new second favorite church in the world (St. Chapelle will always be the most sublime) sits on the market square and glistens with jewel tones and varnish. I happened in on an Solidarity Mass on Monday night and watched as Lech Walesa marched out through the nave at the head of the procession. I actually don't think I would have been able to pick him out of the group if someone hadn't told me he was there. I think a big bushy mustache is essential for membership in the Solidarity movement. Several nights later the conference arranged for us to climb the bell tower at 9 pm to hear the trumpeter enact his hourly ritual. Hundreds of years ago, as an invading army approached the city, a guard sounded the alarm from this very bell tower. As he trumpeted the warning call, an arrow pierced his throat stopping the alarm. After the bell tolls the time each hour, a trumpeter plays the same tune and stops mid-note to commemorate the event.

Both Pope John Paul II and Copernicus studied at the Jagiellon University and studied in this room in the 14th century Collegium Maius.

Isabel Czartoryskich (I have said that name 300 times and still can't get it right) amassed a fabulous art collection in the 18th century, including this Leonardo Da Vinci.
This is a modern artist's take:

I like Leonardo's economy better.

The Franciscan Church houses this magnificent stained glass window depicting the moment God separated light from darkenss. Pretty edgy for turn of the Century, huh?

The Castle hill houses a respectable Renaissance Palace and a stunning cathedral pieced together over the centuries.

We had a fabulous but really quirky middle aged guide with a classic Eastern Block dye job and a bizarre penchant for bathrooms. She kept calling our attention to them in a conspiratorial fashion, opening closed doors and ordering: "You must look. It is a beautiful room. The President's bathroom." or "This toilet. It is made of sandstone. Only the king could use it." I prefered the tapestry to the toilets, but to each his own. Cracow was great--another place that I had never known about but thoroughly enjoyed. I keep asking myself, "What else am I missing?" I have nine months to find out.