I am in Krakow

That is a true statement. My first week and a half in Poland has been a grand old time; I started by taking the train from Warsaw to Torun, which is a beautiful medieval town in the northwesterly bit of Poland, where I stayed with my good friend Michal and his grandparents, who live there and are amazing. They don't speak a word of English, but his grandfather knows German quite well, so we would try to communicate on essential subjects like the greatness of the Reagan presidency and my pressing need to eat more in a heady mix of English, German, and Polish. The second morning I was there I slept in rather late having cunningly neglected to bring an alarm clock and was awoken by Michal's grandfather bursting into the room at about 10:45, puffing "Essen! Essen!" I correctly interpreted this to mean, "It is high time to be awake and eating some of God's great creation, you young lay-about!"
Also notable about my time in Torun is the fact that no fewer than all four of the Polish bands I know and love were taking part in an open-air music festival that started the day I got in. As a result I was treated to the once-in-a-lifetime experience of jamming out to Polish Catholic hard rock into the weeish hours of the evening on the grounds of a fifteenth-century Teutonic castle. Why not?
Reunions with other good friends, Paulina and Jadwiga, who are respectively Michal's wife and daughter, further proved the excellence of the decision to come to Poland. On the train from Torun to Warsaw, Jadwiga passed out with her head on my leg and proceeded to sleep with such athletic intensity that my entire right leg was left salt-stained with her sweat, as if a tidal wave of exhaustion had broken over her and spilled over into concrete reality, leaving only the high-water mark on my leg as evidence of its existence. I wish I could sleep like that.
Krakow is, as I expected, a beautiful city. The lectures and conversation at the seminar I'm on (Tertio Millennio) have proven to be surprisingly stimulating and interesting, and the people no less so. There are about forty of us in the seminar, and we seem to be getting along like a house that has very Catholicly caught on fire. This evening, after a luxurious meal at a restaurant that warmed up the stomach for the approaching tempest of deliciousness with thick slices of hearty bread on which one was to spread lard mixed with large chunks of bacon, the whole group inexplicably started singing songs in unison. I suspect that the ingestion of enormous amounts of pig fat swimming in beef fat may be the root cause of this outburst. Our musical orgy lasted about an hour and a half, with the song selection ranging from booming Polish folk songs to our respective national anthems to what I'm pretty sure may have been a 50 cent song. In short, a good time was had by all.
Other things have happened in the last week-and-a-half, as you may imagine, but time runneth short and my sleepiness groweth mightily. Tomorrow: Sunny, happy-go-lucky Auschwitz-Birkenau!