Rub Paw Press

part three in a surprisingly still continuing series by Keith Birthday. who knew he would have made it past part two?

I wonder if people who lived in Europe this winter will tell their children/grandchildren about the ‘great blizzard of 2010′. Although it seemed like a relatively reasonable amount of snow to me/my travel companion K (who also has been living in Siberia), about three inches of snow rocked Polish infrastructure as we know it. Case in point: A three-four hour train ride to Krakow turned into a seven-eight hour one. We tried desperately to amuse ourselves/avoid cabin fever, but the only thing we found funny was this sticker above the door. As far as we knew, when you weren’t supposed to do something you labeled an image of said action with a red circle with a line through it. Here we just saw red circles around things, and we contemplated whether that meant we were actually supposed to perform that action.

‘Does that mean we’re supposed to throw bottles out the window’

‘Sure seems like it, at least my american conditioning is causing me to think that’

polish recycling program

Sadly, the rest of my Krakow adventures remain mostly undocumented photographically, but these are some things I remember:

-We saw a fox out of the train window. It was a lot bigger than we thought.
-I most certainly suffered from cabin fever on this train ride. At some point I know I got very angry at the polish rail system.
-We shared our hostel with two other people, two girls. One was Australian and the other a New Zealander. The Australian girl was a bitch, the New Zealander was awesome. I think I fell in love with her but then her friend pointed out that she was gay, or probably bi. Either way, she apparently is going to be on the olympic field hockey team for NZ in 2012. We’ll see. If she is, I’m sure I’ll feel special/send her a facebook message about it.

-This same Kiwi made me feel special/awkward whenever K and I had some sort of dorky conversation. She kept commenting on how smart we were.
-Probably my favorite thing about her accent was the way she said ‘consume’. Out of her mouth, it was more like ‘conchume’. This was also her word of choice during the drinking part in drinking games. Where we would say ‘drink’ she would say ‘conchume’.
-The Krakow skyline is really pretty
-I made way too many jokes about ‘smoking krakow’
-When leaving, I realized that I really should have spent more time there. I promise I’ll be back.