No More Łódź

Dear Nathan,

This morning we checked out of the dorm and took a train to Warsaw. We did not do much sightseeing, however. We visited Warsaw before, a few weeks ago, and we are getting ready to be home (at least I am).

I spent the afternoon wandering the region near the hotel we are staying in. For dinner I got one last shaorma at Sphinx at the mall. You may remember this mall. I mentioned it in my post about Warsaw.



I was alone at dinner, since Philip and I made separate plans. However, it rained downporiously for my entire stay on the top floor of the mall. It was a nice show during dinner.

---

Tomorrow around noon we fly out. If you weren't in Budapest for the next four months, I would see you soon.

I can slice a tomato with a fork.

It didn't turn out pretty, but the sandwich needed a tomato and our knives are gone.

Dear Katie,

Right now I am sitting in the room with Philip enjoying a room-temperature slice of pineapple-banana-cinnamon pizza. I just returned from Project Salsa, where I had my last class tonight. This morning Thomas and Nathan checked out and got on a train for Budapest. Last night we returned our borrowed dishes and silverware to Kasia, and as a result ate out instead of having Wine Wednesday. Yesterday morning we had our last meeting with Professor Wilczynski. He gave us some final feedback on our papers. We will work on them with Professor Humke when we return, though we will continue to be in contact with Professor Wilczynski.

Yesterday I also got a haircut in anticipation for the heat that is much more present in Minnesota than it is here.

This morning I packed almost everything up. I have enough clothing to keep me decent for the next several days before we leave, and my laptop is not stashed... but that's about it. I feel like I am about done here. It's exciting because I am ready to go. Our projects are as done as they will become in Poland and I miss a lot of things about home. Most importantly, various people and a strong presence of English literacy.

But I am also a little sad to go. I don't think leaving the math department will be that big of a deal, but I am sad to leave Project Salsa. For the last month I have done something like ten hours a week of salsa dancing. I went out dancing most evenings, as a result of the other guys' hesitance to leave the dorm. I have as a result spent a lot of time befriending the salsa dancing community here, particularly Ania and Gosia, my instructors. I may see people tomorrow night if Mojito has a salsa party, but typically Saturdays are the nights for that. And on Saturday night I will be in Warsaw, sleeping in a hotel in preparation for flying out Sunday morning.

Sunday night (to the extent that the term applies on the day I will gain 7 hours), however, I will hopefully land in time to see Joey's circus show. Shortly afterward I will be back on the cell phone grid for the first time since early June. And in the days and weeks following that I will be excited to see everyone, including you, again. As you have pointed out to me, this has been the longest time we have gone without seeing each other since we met.

Lunchtime!

Dear Dad,

I'm sure you are wondering, with posts only about dinner, what I eat for lunch here.



Of course that doesn't all go on one roll (I use at least two), but that's all that would fit on the plate.

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On Friday Professor Wilczynski took us on an excursion. We went to Łowicz and saw a museum. Then we stopped at a very old building. I'm not sure what to call it... it's not a castle but the word mansion does not do it justice. It is very well preserved and has itself been turned into a museum. We had been planning on going to see the Chopin museum at his birthplace but were prevented from doing so by several factors. The traffic to get there was insurmountable, and we found that they have concerts only on Sundays.

At the first museum, photos were not allowed. They would not have been so interesting anyway, I think; pictures of old stuff are just not as exciting as seeing the old stuff in person. Most impressively, I think, was the weapon room. They had swords about as tall as I am, as well as a cabinet of very old guns (which were so large and decorated I would be surprised if anyone could carry them).

I did take some pictures at the second destination.



The structure from the front. It was so surrounded by trees that it proved impossible to see the whole building from any angle.



Tons and tons of old furniture.



There were several rooms with just one color. This olive green one was less impressive than the red room, which was quite overwhelming.



The main (maybe) staircase had walls covered in these pretty blue on white tiles. Each tile is unique.



In the back yard there were some gardens. They served as a buffer, I guess, between the house and the park that filled the rest of the grounds.



Oh, and did I mention that this place has some canals? You could make some excellent solitons in them.

Just Saw Dark Knight

Or, as it is known here, Mroczny Rycerz.

It was intense. Very good. Holy cow.

Wine Wednesday Numer Osiem

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

Last night was our eighth Wine Wednesday. We did not have one the first week we were here, which means that there is only one more (nine in ten weeks). I did not post right afterward because I headed off to the Dublin Pub again for salsa dancing. I was struck by irony while there; now that I am 21, and staying in Europe, I go to bars and order apple juice. This may be a special case, I suppose, since I go there to dance with my Project Salsa friends and not to drink.

---



For dinner tonight I made something that I had not made before, although it was not really new and exciting. We had spaghetti with chicken. The first change is the chicken, which I had not done with pasta yet. The second change was that we used long noodles. In the past we have used shells, spirals, wiggles, and all sorts of other shapes based on availability.



We had a white Chilean wine. This week we chose the wine based on the bottle that looked good since we had nothing in mind when we went out to get it. The same was true last week, though I hope we come up with something exciting for our last Wine Wednesday next week. The wine was pretty good. It had an interesting taste to it in addition to the sweetness. Since the label said "Sweet Boa," we decided that the taste was probably a result of the wine being made of snakes.

Our frying pan is just about destroyed. It was low quality to begin with, and has seen almost two months of nightly use. It's to the point where I really don't want to use it anymore. Luckily, I only need to make about 4 more dinners in it. Sundays the groceries are closed so we eat out due to not having a fridge. Mondays and Thursdays I have salsa dancing during the dinner hour so the other guys fend for themselves. And next Friday Thomas and Nathan get on a train for Budapest to start their Hungarian language class. Philip and I will be here for another few days, we leave next Sunday, but I don't want to plan on the pan surviving for that long.

Wine Wednesday.

Yes I know it's Thursday now. I went dancing right after dinner last night.

Dear Mom,

Bragging time! One of the instructors at my salsa dancing class this afternoon did not believe that I speak no Polish. The movements tend to be explained (in Polish) then demonstrated once. However, as a result of having danced before, I am able to duplicate them reliably.

Tomorrow we will not be going to Zakopane as we had planned. This is for several reasons. Most importantly, we have not heard back from the hostel we wanted to stay at (with the alternative, according to the online reviewers, having mob connections). Also, we are eating lunch with Professor Hejduk tomorrow. Considering that Zakopane is an hour past Krakow, which itself is a 7 hour train ride, we would not be able to get there before 7am preceding a day of hiking. Sadly it's looking like we may miss the place that is supposed to be most scenic in all of Poland.

---

Yesterday was Wine Wednesday. However, I was not feeling particularly creative. This meal probably looks familiar.



The only change was that I used more than the usual amount of black pepper. However, purely by luck, that ended up going very well with the wine. (I'm uploading pictures on Blogger now. My St Olaf webspace is just about full. I'm a little obsessive-compulsive about consistency, though, so I may go through the old posts and do the same thing and clear out my space.)



Our choice of wine was pretty arbitrary. We have wanted to try a Bulgarian wine (since that is supposed to be a main place to get it from other than Hungary). We did not know how to tell if a wine is Bulgarian from the label (in fact, to be honest, I'm not even sure if we would need to look for Roman or Cyrillic alphabet). The wines are all behind the counter so we more or less pointed at one that looked acceptable. Isabelle ended up being Hungarian. It really lit up the black pepper.

After dinner I went to the Dublin Pub, which has salsa nights every Wednesday. Weird, right? That's not even the worst of it. They are located on the second floor of a supermarket. The night started off with everyone being corralled onto the dance floor and taught a short disco dancing sequence. From there we had some heavily beated salsa music. One half of the dance floor looked like a (crowded) salsa event. The other half was packed with people who just came to club.

The floor was very small. It was not ideal for dancing. There were people there from Project Salsa, so we will see if I make it back. So far Mojito has been the best place to dance by far (other than the classes themselves at PS). I guess Mojito, the bar across the hall from Project Salsa, has only been open for a few weeks. They are fairly connected so I see a lot of people I know there.

My classes end on Monday at PS. There is a class meant to be a continuation which will inhabit the same slots of the week. The same people will take this class. I have not yet looked into whether I can sign up for just half; I will be gone before it ends.

The weather seems to like it when we stay in Łódź

We have left the city 4 times: to Torun, Gdansk, Krakow and now Warsaw. Those four days have included three of the hottest from our entire trip. In Gdansk it was nice and cool because of the rainstorms. The weather in Łódź is almost always comfortable.

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Last things first, I suppose. Tonight was sort of exciting as dinner went. The decision was made that there would be stir fry. However, there was no chicken at the grocery store. It seemed like sausage would not mix well with soy sauce, so I went for a veggie stir fry. However, they were also out of broccoli. In fact, they were out of quite a few things and what they had looked quite picked over.

I ended up grabbing some carrots (thank goodness), onions, peppers and beans. We went heavy garlic again because we still have lots. I used some more lemons because I like them, though it turns out they really need the broccoli to soak them up. And I threw in some honey at the end (why not?), though I did not use enough to be detectable.



I am determined to try honey again though, because it seems like honey and lemon just belong together. Lemon and black pepper also seem to belong together. Next time we will see if the relation is transitive.

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The battery in my camera did not last the whole trip to Warsaw. Additionally, it was only a day trip. In an afternoon we just did not do that much.

First, we arrived. Upon getting out of the train station, we saw the palace of arts and sciences. It is the tallest building in Poland, or so I am told. We saw an exhibit there about Einstein. We also got to enjoy the view, since the exhibit was on the 30th floor (pretty close to the top). We could see a long ways in every direction, though there really wasn't much to see.

This is probably because there isn't much left of Old Warsaw. We made a stop at the history museum. The old things were really interesting. The newer history is very depressing. Long story short, 85% of Warsaw was destroyed during World War 2. We stopped at a big old church. It was very nice. At this point my camera was dying so the pictures are pretty limited. This other church looked scenic. We did not go inside. We passed it while trying to find the Marie Curie Museum which, as far as we could tell, does not exist.

There was a mall, which we stopped inside of briefly. Thomas and Philip wanted some coffee so they stopped at a place called Wayne's Coffee. All of the barristas were female, so we assumed none of them were Wayne. I was pretty impressed by the roof of the mall. It's sort of like a Bucky Ball! We went to the Warsaw University Library. It's huge. In front of it are giant plaques full of knowledge. There were some with music and language. This one has a bell curve, pi, some molecules and Maxwell's Equations. Awesome. The roof of the library holds a botanical garden.

Hooray!



Something not quite right happened with the lighting here. You can't really read the plaques. Trust me though: knowledge.



Big building. Garden on top. Cranes? Reminds me of the new science center!



That's all for now. I have a meeting with Professor Hejduk in the morning.

Wine Wednesday, part sześć

Dear Penelope,

That name just jumped into my head. I don't even know anybody named Penelope.

Tonight I treated myself. At the store I decided that it really is reasonable to buy proper equipment if I'm going to be making supper every night. This realization was maybe a little late, given that we're more than half done with the summer.

I bought a kitchen knife and cutting board. Previous to today's purchase, we have only had some particularly sharp butter knives. The main reason we don't do stir fry often is because with said knives it takes half an hour to cut up the chicken.



Tonight was the best stir fry we have had by far. I liked the lemon last time so I also threw in a lime. Also lots of garlic was used, since we accidentally bought way too much a while back. Finally, and most importantly, I was able to add some zing to the mix.

We still have no fridge, so the options for hot sauce are quite limited. In fact, the only bottle without the word "lodowke" on it (meaning refrigerator) was tabasco. I threw a healthy amount of it in there. It smelled pretty funky when it hit the pan and I was worried that it might not work right. However, it was fine. After eating nothing even remotely spicy for six weeks, it was actually great.

(Not only has my cooking lacked any spice, but Polish food is notoriously bland.)



The wine was fine. It was from Spain. So far I'm finding it convenient that I can read (note: decode) wine bottle labels whether they be in English, Spanish, Polish or Hungarian (There isn't much wine made in Poland, but it's usually on the label due to being sold here). The Hungarian wines have so far been my favorites (the Tokaji last week and the Bikavér the week before). The bikavér was fairly dry though and sadly Thomas prefers wines to be sweet rather than dry. Additionally, Philip unexplainedly would not drink his Tokaji.

As long as I'm complaining about my roommate, the only vegetables that Philip seems to like eating are onions. As in, he picks carrots and broccoli out of his food to throw away. I have expressed my frustration and he does not seem to realize that it disrespectful to throw away food right in front of the cook. Carrots and broccoli are necessary for a stir fry, so Philip is a minor reason that it doesn't happen so often. It's minor because usually my preference over what I want to make overrules my willingness to cater to picky eaters.

I could go on forever about this. Rooming with Philip has made me realize that wasting food is a severe pet peeve of mine. Worse than flossing in the room, Chris. Way worse.

Conversely Nathan will eat just about anything.

---

Word on the street is that this weekend we are going to Zakopane. However, I am not aware that any real planning has been done.

This post has math in it.

Dear Dr. Kolan,

Suppose you have a circle of radius ε. Now you want to inscribe a rectangle of arbitrary proportion into it. We'll have it be well behaved; it's aligned with the x and y axes and necessarily concentric with the circle. It touches the circle at 4 places, at angles we call ±θ and π±θ. Without loss of generality we let the longer sides be horizontal, so θ is between 0 and ^π/₄.

Now draw a second circle, concentric with both previous shapes and within the original circle. We want to maximize the length of the circle's edge that falls inside the rectangle. What should the radius of the circle be?

I mean, of course it's εsinθ but how do you prove it?

Enters Nathan: "But you don't really need a proof. You can just multiply that by four and it's obviously an upper bound."

Duh.

That step had been hanging me up for a while today. I'm working at the moment on something called "concentric circle density." It has to do with taking a set of points on the plane and finding places you can draw lots of concentric circles, using only points in your set. That's all I'll say about it since a rigorous definition in text would be awful.

In fact, even Wilczynski's explanation on the board wasn't entirely clear. However, I came up with a definition based on what he said that may be what he meant. Really the only important thing is that I need to have worthwhile findings to show him when he returns.

The concentric circle density operator has sorta become my pet project while the other guys work on other problems Wilczynski posed. It's fun. I get to draw a lot of pictures and use old math like trigonometry and geometry along with the set theory. Some of the other things I find to be interesting, some are boring and some I do not understand. I like what we are doing, but I am also sure that I do not want to do measure theory for the rest of my life.

---

Relatedly, I did some more grad school researching today. It is overwhelming.

Not really that exciting

Dear Ashlee,

Thursday I went to my first salsa dancing lesson. It was good to do some partner dancing and there is enough English proficiency that I have no problems. Last night I went to the Mojito club, which is across the hall from Project Salsa. I wanted to watch people salsa dancing, as well as scope out this supposed good place to dance.

I met my friend from modern dance there, the one who introduced me to PS. He got me to dance once with a friend of his, which was not so good. After only one lesson I was quite unqualified. I had success with only the most basic turns, since she was not familiar with any of the swing moves I tried to lead.

However it seems like, were I to know how to dance, that would be a good place to go. Immediately upon arriving I was concerned that everyone came with a date (as a consequence of people pairing up young here). It is more prevalent there than, say, at Tapestry, but not insurmountable.

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We had our last meeting with Professor Wilczynski the other day. He is traveling for a few weeks and we will meet with him again to present the results of our research in early August. Until then, it seems that we will be managing our own schedules.

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I'm sure I mentioned earlier the group of English speaking students who live in our dorm. They still exist, but are difficult to track down. This may seem the case because we tend to travel on weekends. This weekend we stuck around, but I have not been able to locate them.

Next weekend we are thinking of traveling to Zakopane. It's a scenic city in the Tatra mountains on the Slovakian border. I had been hoping to make it to Prague, but that trip looks very expensive.

Train to Prague takes 12 hours. Plane is sufficiently expensive that we are inclined not to go. Two years ago Joey and Paul went all over Europe, but at that point you could buy 5 złoty for a dollar. When we arrived here in June it was 2.2 and now it has reduced to 2 even.

You may notice that, relative to the złoty, the dollar has lost 10% of its value in under 2 months. Gross.

It's that Wine Wednesday time of the week.

Dear Sleepy Reader,

This post will be short, since I am on my way to bed.

Today I went to my modern dance workshop. Afterward, I went with the other guy in the class (he has some Polish name that I can't pronounce or spell) to a place called The Salsa Project. Apparently Łódź actually has a lot of dance places, just no swing. Tomorrow I will start a 3 week salsa dancing workshop for beginners.

It costs money, as opposed to the free modern workshop. However, it's reasonably priced. Also, I am free to attend other classes at the same place since they tend to be short on guys. I'm looking forward to it; modern dance is much better than not dancing at all, but it will be good to get some partner dancing in.

Today we did Wine Wednesday, as you may have guessed from the title. There are no pictures, which may be for the best. We were feeling like a white wine so a heavy scramble did not seem appropriate. We were thinking pasta, but our sauce options seem to be spaghetti, mayonnaise, and salsa (we had a misunderstanding earlier in the summer about this... it's actually not bad on pasta). We're sick of spaghetti sauce for the moment, so pasta was out.

We decided instead to make a plain old modular meal. I threw some lemon, pepper and chicken into a frying pan, which turned out fine. Nathan made rice and boiled some carrots. Nothing fancy... actually we found that it was the most boring looking meal we've had yet. This was probably due to the accidental creation of way too much rice, which whitewashed everything. I think the problem came somewhere around the time when Nathan typed the instructions into Google translator.

We had another Hungarian wine. This time it was Tokaji. I don't know that it went with the food particularly well, but the wine itself was pretty good.

Poles have interesting ideas about what goes on a pizza.

Would you like another slice of ham bacon tuna tomato onion chive asparagus?

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This post could alternatively have started out called "partial dance failure." I spoke with the dance instructor today. He used to dance swing himself (I think now he does everything). To his knowledge, and the knowledge of some of the girls in the class, there are not any opportunities to dance swing in Łódź. He has also not had enough interest to start up a class of his own; he won't start with fewer than 6 and has had no more then 3 interested. He might do some swing movements in our modern class, but it would be singles and not couples as a result of the outrageous gender asymmetry.
I am glad to have found this modern class, since at least it will let me do some dancing until I get back.

---

Dear Alyssa,

I'm pretty sure you don't even know that this blog exists. But if you did, you would be entertained to know that, somehow, we got to talking about punching horses while in Krakow.

The first thing we did this weekend was miss our train. There were some navigational mishaps on the way to the station, and we ended up almost making it. But the woman at the counter luckily would not sell us tickets at 6:12 for a train that left at... 6:11. We took a bus instead. It ended up being no trouble, since the stations are joined and the cost and time involved are similar. We arrived in Krakow and left almost immediately. We hopped a train to Oświęcim. If you know how to read Polish, you may notice that Oświęc sounds about like Auschwitz.

Oświęcim was sunny for most of the day. Between the brightness and the mass of tourists, this infamous gate looks unimpressive. This sign is particularly morbid, so hopefully it's a little too reduced for you to read it.

The sign at the entrance to Auschwitz was translated into probably twenty different languages, including several I could not identify even from the flag. The signs around the camp were typically in Polish, English and Hebrew.

Some of the barracks were all locked up, but a series of them had been converted into museum segments. They had a whole street dedicated to the nations from which people had been deported to Auschwitz.

We returned to Krakow and went to bed. In the morning we went to the museum. I don't recall what the name of te museum was, but it was the big art one. National museum maybe. They had a statue out front. We arrived at about 9:15. The museum opened at 10. So we wandered around some. The other guys wanted to fund a coffee shop, but they had no luck. In Poland there isn't much open on Sundays. However, we did find a cool sculpture of the sun, earth and moon in front of a library (there was a coffee shop in the basement of the library, though it was closed for the summer).

After the museum we went to see the castle. There were tourists all over trying to find a tour to take them around. The statue of a horseman looked down on them all. We found the ticket counter to be so mobbed that we could not even get on a tour ourselves. It was hot out (over 30C for one of few times so far this summer), so we just browsed what was visible. We got a few pictures and noted that the castle was very old.

The castle is on a hill, which means looking out from it provides a pretty nice view. Additionally, the castle campus (for lack of a better word) is enormous. Note the picture on the right. Imagine that you are at the center of a circle, and that there are buildings all around you, each as far away as that one is. That was the inner courtyard.

We headed to the Jewish quarter. There were an awful lot of synagogues there. The Jewish Cemetery was supposed to be worth seeing, though we could not locate it. The place where our map claimed it existed held only a construction site. We stopped at the Temple Synagogue.

It was pretty dark inside, which made it difficult to get good pictures. However, it was beautifully constructed. We also stopped into a large church on the main square of Krakow. This one was also enormous, and the blue ceiling made me think of Boe Chapel a little bit. Photos were not allowed inside, though I almost took one outside with the human statues. I got a nice wide picture of the main square itself. You may notice the blue rock and roll stage tent and the Hancock poster.

We ate lunch across the street from the Temple Synagogue at a place called Bagel Mama. It was run by a guy from New York. It was nice to hear some American English and his bagel sandwiches were very tasty. Twenty years ago he moved to Holland from NY. Twelve years after that he visited Poland. He met a girl. They visited back and forth across the continent for a few years (since you can get away with the in Europe), then he moved to Poland. At this point he still knew no Polish. Apparently Polish girls have a reputation for being irresistible. From what we have heard, Germans often come to Poland to find a wife. Our Polish friends also predicted that at least one of us would meet a girl here and not go back to the states. I think the culture in that respect is quite a bit different here (I see many people our age wheeling around strollers). I don't anticipate anyone staying here.

On the morning before we left I got some szarlotka, apple pie. It was not as good as the pie at pi coffee in Gdansk. However, they did do some silly bird thing in chocolate on the plate. We stayed our night there at Mama's.

In the future I will have to find somewhere else to put pictures. I have actually filled my St Olaf web space already using pictures from this trip.