So overall, the flight to Krakow was pretty uneventful. The nearly 11-hour flight from LA to Frankfurt was smooth, and I managed to get a little bit of sleep. After zipping through the neverending Frankfurt Airport to get to the connecting flight to Krakow, the 95-minute flight seemed like a drop in the bucket. My luggage came out relatively quickly, and then I (along with another festival guest) was taken to the Hotel Stary in Krakow.
The room is quite nice and modern – I’ll take pix of it later on – but has an old-world feeling to it (the building is mid 15th century!). What’s really neat is that it’s right off the old market square, so every hour I can hear the clocktower chime – followed by the trumpet signal from St. Mary’s Church. This signal is basically four performances of the Cracovian Hymn on trumpet (one in each direction – north, south, east, west), every hour, on the hour. It’s cool to hear now, but I’m sure I’ll feel differently about this at 4am.
After freshening up, I met up with another panelist to grab a light dinner at a restaurant that served Georgian food (the country, not the state) and discuss tomorrow’s panel. The food itself was rather simple – just a lavash sandwich with chicken and cheese and vegetables, with (naturally) assorted shredded pickled vegetables (cabbage, carrot, etc.) on the side. We then walked through the slightly misting evening, exploring a little bit of Krakow and walking around the castle. The river was flooded (they’ve been getting a lot of rain) so we had to turn back after a point, but I was tired, needed to buy toothpaste (they confiscated it in Frankfurt… but not Los Angeles, go figure!), and so we headed back towards my hotel.
Even though it’s basically 2pm PST, I’m pretty tired – getting only a few hours of sleep will do that to you – so I’m sure when I wake up in the morning (and this blog post gets published at 10:54pm PST… so subtract 9 hours and that’s when I REALLY posted it!) I’ll feel a bit more refreshed.