I didn't really know what to expect from the last 4 days in Poland. Poland has always been the far-off land of ancestors in my mind, and the reality of hopping on a plane from London and being there in a few hours was a bit strange.
Fortunately, I was pretty impressed with Warsaw as I walked around. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and there was a festival in town so the main street had crowds milling about for miles. The city was surprisingly beautiful, with parks and monuments all around downtown, and it also seemed to be buzzing with new buildings going up everywhere. The festival was celebrating Warsaw's international community and there was an interesting diversity of foreigners about, I even found some Senegalese selling jus de bissap who were happy to chat in French. Not what I was expecting I guess, but Warsaw is a very modern city, partially as a result of being almost entirely destroyed in the war. We learned all about it at the Warsaw Uprising museum, which was fascinating. The perspective on the war is obviously quite different in Poland, it seemed from the way the story was told there remains a bitterness about Poland's fate and the lack of aid the "west" provided despite being allied with Poland. Visiting on the seventieth anniversary of the German anniversary, it seemed to be a constant backdrop for the trip, not just in the museums but in the graffiti on street corners which still mentions the uprising of '44. The Polish today seemed remarkably friendly, especially our couchsurfing host Agata, who gave us a great place to stay in Warsaw just outside downtown despite having exams this week (thanks Agata!).
The food was a mixed bag. There wasn't too much for vegetarians but I did get to try a few new things, like the dumplings here, a fried-cheese dish sold on the street, and of course a Pierogi.
The necklace of mini-bagels was a pretty bizarre item. I'm thinking it's a tourist thing, or at least only tourists were putting it around their neck.
Krakow had a quite different feel, with more of its historic buildings preserved. There was quite a lot to see at the main castle, including a few museums on Polish history, a few royal collections, and a bell bigger than I could have imagined. The Zygmunt bell here weighs 11 tons and takes 12 people to ring.
There's also a statue below the castle of a dragon which actually breathes fire. These are the reasons you travel. I just never would have thought of building such a statue, but it fit in quite well with the area.
We wrapped up the trip by going to the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow. It seemed appropriate as the war and the Holocaust seemed to be a sad subtext to the trip. The experience of visiting a former extermination camp is quite different from reading about things or going to a museum. It was more raw but also more banal. The grounds of the camp are huge and minimally maintained, big sections are essentially ruins, and the tour seemed to focus on small details of the period in place of presenting any overall narrative of morals. To me this was much more powerful, as the site stands quietly in the woods as an eerie testimony to the past.
It was a great trip and wrapped up quite a nice year of traveling around Europe for me. I probably won't get much travel in until the spring due to work, the Christmas vacation, and the weather. But it was the best kind of trip in that it pushed me to a range of new experiences in just a few days.
This photo summarizes the beginning of her visit. I can sympathize though, as she had only a brief time after finishing her internship and then had to get ready for a semester in Russia and make an 8 hour time change. I actually got some useful reading done while she slept off the jet lag.
Soon though we were up and about and enjoyed the sights of Cambridge. Here we are on a punt. Alissa actually took over punting for a while and did a very admirable job. We did a tour of the main sights around town, like King's, Trinity, and St. John's, as well as the river and the parks.
We also did some fun new things I hadn't done before. Here we are on top of the tower at Great St. Mary's Church, the highest point in town, where we had a view over the whole town. It was something like 20 or 30 flights on a tiny, narrow staircase, but it was worth it. We also visited two museums. The Whipple museum of the history of science, which has a neat collection of scientific instruments like telescopes and slide rules from hundreds of years ago, and the Museum of Zoology.
We also had some nice time just hanging out with some of my friends here, cooking dinners and such. I wanted to make sure Alissa got the full UK experience, so here we are watching a big soccer game at a pub. 
Finally we got to spend some time in London. I still have only spent a handful of days in London, so there was plenty to see. We went to the British Museum (here we are next to a famous dog statue), Buckingham Palace, Green Park, and Harrod's department store. Buckingham Palace is only open for tours for one month a year so we lucked out on the timing.
We lucked out on the timing in general as I got a chance to spend some time with Alissa, and she got a chance to see England and get some rest before her adventures in Russia. It was only a brief moment but it made a very nice end to the summer for me and reminded me what a neat place I get to live in.
Here's a look at my newest means of transportation. I had wanted a road bike for some time but it was hard to procure one in the UK which hasn't caught up on the craigslist concept quite yet. I ended up buying this lightly used Cannondale off of eBay UK, and the seller was kind enough to drive down and deliver it because his wife wanted to visit Cambridge anyways (it really is a nice downtown). It's my third road bike and it's beautiful, in shiny silver, and being a Cannondale it has "Made in USA" prominently, along with the stars and stripes. I'm tentatively going with the nickname "Silvia," the bike is pretty enough that it deserves a female name.
The first feeling of being on a well tuned-bike on the open road was worth it though. England is a fantastic place for a bike, mostly flat, with endless miles of winding country roads and many small towns to visit. Here I am on a nice bend by an old stone church. Except for the bugs and the weather this country is a biking paradise. I remember living in Seattle owning a bike made a huge difference in the amount of the surrounding area I saw. Hopefully I'll get to do a fair bit of biking here as well, because there's a huge amount of England outside of Cambridge that seems worth exploring
To say goodbye to Garth we went out for full English breakfast (as opposed to the dreaded continental breakfast), which consists of a huge plate of eggs, toast, beans, and sausage.
We followed up with the less traditional game of tennis-golf. Less traditional as in, we just made it up in the last few weeks but it's already become a classic. Kind of like frisbee golf, you pick objects as the "hole" then have to hit them with your tennis ball in as few strokes as possible. There are a lot of places around Churchill to have interesting holes with bouncing the ball off of obstacles, the game is amazingly entertaining for how simple it is. That's the kind of innovation you get when Gates scholars from different fields mix.
