Prague and Krakow

Piwo = beer in Polish.

Vacation time! We spent the first half of last week in Prague, Czech Republic, testing the premise that the beer is good and cheap, the food is good and cheap, and the buildings were never blown up in World War II. All true! We enjoyed the pilsners, since it is summer and warm, after all, but the dark beer was still our favorite. Experimental design requires that we test the impact of environment and time of day by drinking at lunch or dinner or evening, and inside a restaurant or pub or outside on the sidewalk tables. Results? No statistically significant difference - all good. The next variable was whether Polish beer is different from Czech beer. Results? Maybe. Deserves further study. In Poland they sell Czech beer, but they also have a couple local brands. We were only there two days, so didn't have time to do a full factorial experiment, and I'm sure we would need one.

Cubism = no right angles if at all possible

Prague is full of buildings that are from all sorts of architectural styles, and they somehow all fit together. We took lots of pictures of building facades, which our guide told us the names of, but which we will have a hard time labelling now, after the fact. It is a photographer heaven! Krakow is also full of old buildings, but somehow it felt homier to us. We couldn't quite figure out why.

Anyway, we enjoyed wandering around Krakow. Maybe it was because of our guide, from Crazy Guides. He was fun. He drove us around in a Trabant. A Trabant? The "people's car" of the Communist era. It is made of the same stuff that you make toilet seats out of, and the driving force is basically a lawn-mower engine. There is virtually nothing else under the hood. It is a vehicle that gets people to honking at you when you are in front of them on the road! Our tour was to Nowa Huta (pronounced no-va hoot-a), the Communists' planned community surrounding their steel works. An awesome social engineering experiment, indeed. Big prefab apartment buildings, arranged in squares, to keep the number of people down so that they could form communities. Each block had a kindergarden and an elementary school. Universities and churches were strictly omitted - those lead to trouble-makers, after all. The center square was quite nice-looking, surrounded by neo-Renaissance buildings. The apartment that they had to show us, original cabinetry and furniture, really looked like the kind of place I knew as a child. Vinyl surfaces, veneer cabinetry, even a picture of Jesus that was the same one my grandma bought from a door-to-door salesman.

Why was there a Jesus on the wall? Because they had to keep their religion inside, and out of sight, and Poland was just about as Catholic a country as you will ever find. Our Crazy Guide felt that the religion issue was a big part of the fall of the Communists. They expected the poor, ignorant farmers that were imported into these great places with running water and private toilets, to become loyal Communists. But they wanted a church, and by the time they finally got one, they had learned that they had power themselves.

The salt mine is cool, too - 57 degrees F. In 700 years or so of mining, the miners carved elaborate sculptures into the walls and out of the salt after they had mined a vault of its salt. Now it's a UNESCO monument and during the 60's, they carved the 7 dwarves along the tourist route. No picture from me, because flash pictures just do weird things bouncing off the salt. You'll just have to imagine The Last Supper made of salt. Or you could go to this link: Wieliczka.

Next week, it's off to Scotland. Maybe a DOE on whisky?