Gingerbread Hearts and My Huge Fluffy Pillow

Gingerbread hearts and my huge fluffy are the two best things about Cracovia. Monday night we went to a 24-hour grocery store , where I found a package of brown heart-shaped bread-like stuff that smelled like ginger. Guess what! It was heart-shaped gingerbread! And I just ate one as I was laying on the biggest, fluffiest pillow ever-it is twice the size of a regular pillow and I will steal it when we leave.
So I still haven't really warmed up--to Cracovia or gotten any body heat back! Each day seems to be a little nicer than the one before. But the other really awesome thing that I discovered on the first day was the pocket inside my jacket! I am in love with this pocket! My wallet fits in there perfectly, so I can put it there and not have to worry about it. I put my can of pepper spray in my right outside pocket, so my false sense of security is back!
Monday night a WMSE program alum who lives in Cracovia took us on a walking tour of the city. It was rainy, cold, and windy. Yucky. For me Cracovia is more confusing than Bologna (again, I am the only one who thinks this). Now I know I was raised in Elkhart, which is supposedly really confusing because of the two rivers, but Cracovia has both a river that zig zags through the city and a castle (which looks totally awesome, maybe I would like Elkhart better if it had a castle). One of the places Julie took us was the former Jewish ghetto. It is on the other side of the Wisla, and the bridge that you have to cross to get to the area is the bridge that the Nazis forced the 60,000 Jews from Kaczimerz (the Jewish quarter) to use when the Nazis relocated to Jews to the ghetto. As I stepped on the bridge, I had the weirdest sensation, that my feet and legs were not my own, that they were being forced to walk. As I walked across the bridge, I felt like I was being pushed and bumped and jostled like there was a crowd of people crossing the bridge at the same time instead of just the twelve of us. Right after the bridge is a square that has a monument to the Jews of Cracovia, dozens of chairs spread out over a piazza (that's the only word I really know for it), some big, some small, some alone, some in groups. There used to be railroad tracks on the far end, which was where the two transports of people were deported. I found this out after something had told me to go over to that area. Stephanie and I were talking about living in the same area where such horrible things happened. I think that is a question that I will be asking a lot in the next few days, particularly with visiting Auschwitz on Friday. On the way back across the bridge, I realized that the people who crossed the bridge didn't go back across.
On a little bit lighter note, I stopped into my first church in Poland! Please don't ask me to pronounce or spell the name of the church, all I can tell you is that it is the one with the white facade and brick back with a gate out front that has all of the apostles on it. I realized that one of the reasons I loved Bologna so much was because I went into town so much and absorbed as much as I could; so if I want to try and get over my Bologna-sickness in Cracovia, I had better start to do the same thing here. So far it has been my experience that each church that I have been in has a different character uniquely its own, and makes you worship and reflect in a slightly different way. When I sat down in the church, I had this feeling that I had to pray and meditate. Some of the other churches that I have been in have made me simply stand in awe and praise, but the spirit of this one gave me the feeling that I had to confront everything that I had on my mind. Get things off of my chest. I don't know if that made sense or not. As I was sitting there, the organist started practicing. That made the experience truly amazing, because everything is better with the right music! Then I walked around the chapels on the perimeter of the nave, and the one that was closest to me was the chapel of Our Lady of Loretto. When I saw this, I literally broke down and cried. No, I don't cry at random pictures of saints. For those of you who aren't as familiar with Saint Mary's campus, our church on campus is the Church of Loretto, and in the chapel in the back is a statue of Our Lady of Loretto that (long story short) miraculously made it from LeMans, France to Saint Mary's. So Our Lady of Loretto is kind of special for this Saint Mary's Belle, and that is why I cried. I will definitely come back to it throughout the next few days.