I can't say chocolate in Polish!

Certain things about Cracovia grow on me each day. To begin with, the sun broke through the clouds for a few glorious minutes. The best part about walking through the Rynek Glowny ("main square") and the city center is the music. The three dueling accordions were back today, and there was a unique duet with a trumpet and an accordion on another corner near the cathedral. A violin played somewhere on the Rynek, but I never saw where. While I was trying to figure out if the piece the dueling accordions were playing was baroque or classical (I'm leaning toward baroque), I came across a guy with his electric guitar and amplifier at the base of the tower. Tuesday night and again tonight I listened to the organist practice in the one church, and last night as I was walking back to the hotel, a guy was playing the didjeridoo and the bongos in the center of the Rynek. While I was reading, I sat in the sociology corner of the English-language bookstore Massolit while they played Billie Holliday. After class, three men were (trying) to play New Orleans-style jazz on a banjo, guitar, and clarinet. I so wished I could have had someone there who would swing dance with me, because I looked pretty stupid trying to swing with no one to swing me!

I went back to the mall this evening in search of a warm scarfs, gloves, and a hat before we tour Auschwitz tomorrow. The Galleria Krakowska is three stories and a few football fields long. Walking around the mall it was hard to believe that something like this didn't exist here when I was born, but now here is this huge mall that is a cathedral for the gods of consumerism. Paradoxically, I don't mind this outlandish display of excess (I think that was redundant) but yet it makes me a little sick. It is a very nice, slightly upscale mall, with every clothing retailer imaginable and then some. It has everything: the garish window displays, corny decorations, food court, but not enough sale signs! Then again, I can only guess what saldi would look like in Polish. In the last few days I have realized that I am completely addicted to chocolate gelato, because I had it nearly everyday in Bologna. I found a place that looked like it had semi-palatable ice cream. I figured out which one was the chocolate, but then asking for it was another matter. No "due gusti cioccolatto e menthe, per favore." I couldn't even pronounce "chocolate" in Polish! I just stood there and pointed and tried hopelessly to make the combination of consonants come out, but it didn't work! I got three choices again, so of course I had fraggola and frutti di bosco. But it was ice cream. It wasn't gelato. Or custard. Or anything minutely close to any of the delicious scoops of heaven I'd savored in Bologna. It was plain, boring, artificially flavored ice cream. So very sad. Then on another floor I found what was supposed to be an Italian restaurant, which had many flavors of what appeared to be real gelato, but because I had filled up on ice cream I didn't have room for the gelato. But this cioccolatto gelato was really dark (the only way I like it) and the place had menthe, plus a blue concoction called "smurfy." I am really curious about that last one--for a minute I thought blue moon had made it to Poland! So there will be another trip to the mall for some gelato. What really made me sick was the food court, not just that the mall had one, but that it had a KFC, a Subway, and McDonalds. I thought I was going to lose it. I think it is just because I am American (and that I don't really like the big corporations in the U.S. either) that I reacted this way when I was confronted with them halfway across the world. I guess it's not surprising, because I knew they were here. Why shouldn't the people of Cracovia like Kentucky Fried Chicken or be deprived of the chance to loose weight by eating Subway sandwiches? I think that I make a bigger deal out of these companies being here than the Polish customers. Harkening back to my own consumerist tendencies, I am not sure I found the perfect scarf, so I am going to set off early in the morning and hopefully find the perfect warm scarf and gloves before Auschwitz.