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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Partial Dance Success!

Dear Jamison,

Yesterday was the first day of some sort of jazz dance thing here. I showed up at the wrong time and the person at the front desk did not know English. After some (obviously botched) grunts and gestures, I was led to believe that I was supposed to go to the music academy across the street. It closed as I arrived, so that was not correct. I returned to my room and did some emailing.

It turns out I had been at the right place, but I had been told the wrong time. Today I showed up at the correct time, but improperly dressed. Tomorrow I will be able to dance.

It's unclear what sort of dancing exactly. The word used is jazz, but the clothing required is more what we had in modern.

The instructor has strong English. The workshop I think lasts a few weeks, several days per week.

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Tonight was also the fourth Wine Wednesday. And today we tried something completely new. There were chicken breasts at the grocery store! Usually there is only sausage, ham and other sorts of meat that don't belong in a proper stir fry. Tonight I was able to do it right.

We still have no fridge, so everything has no choice but to be fresh and delicious.



I couldn't find pineapple, so I threw in a lemon. It smelled GREAT while cooking. Also, it soaked into the broccoli and gave it some zing.



I also made a discovery at the supermarket. They had Bikavér! It means "bull's blood," which is not at all appetizing. However, it is the sort of Hungarian red wine that I enjoyed very much in Budapest. This was not as good as the bottles available in Hungary, of course, but compared to Polish wine it was spectacular. I had not noticed it at the supermarket before. I hope it continues to exist.

Of the past 38 hours, I have spent 15 on trains.

Dear Hannah,

We spent Sunday and Monday in Gdansk. The city is far north, on the coast of the Baltic sea. However, it's not a beach city; the coastline is full of shipyards. It is a tourist town because Gdansk is the city where the Solidarity movement, which opposed Communist control in Poland, started.

	We got on a train at about 6am to arrive in Gdansk around lunchtime. Most of the time on the train ride was spent sleeping. We also made it through a game or two of hearts. Once we arrived, we immediately set off in search of our hostel.
	We had made reservations ahead of time, though the hostel lost them. Even so, the place was cheap. The hostel filled at least one floor of an ancient apartment building. It proved impossible to get a picture of it, however, because there was only about 8 feet of room between the hostel and a highway. The selling point of the hostel, actually, was the short walk from the train station. The hostel served breakfast for free, which was nice. It was clean and there was a public internet computer. However, it was absolutely packed. No inch was left unused, as you can see from this broom-closet-turned-bathroom. There was actually not enough room for a person and a toilet to both exist comfortably with the door closed.
	We went out for some lunch. We arrived at the Neptune and had food. It was good, but expensive (as we had worried might be the case in a tourist town). We were about to leave when a downpour started. It was the windfall the umbrella salespeople had been waiting for. The living statues ran down the street, trying to find cover before their makeup washed off. We saw this pair of dachshunds many times over the course of the day.
	Shortly after eating at the Neptune, we found a statue of him. We had to wait a while to get a picture of him without a pigeon on his head (which makes him a lot less impressive). It must be a pretty relevant statue, since if we had bought postcards there they almost all would have had him on them. We proceeded towards the big church (St. Mary's, I think it was). You can see the tower rising up over the houses here.
	We entered the church and we struck by how big and old it is. It was full of columns, of course, and it seemed like each column had some relic attached to it. You can see a few from this angle (the rest of the decorations are just flowers). On the right is a banner celebrating the millennial anniversary of Gdansk.

The organ is very pretty. You can also see their stained glass window which sits between the entryway and the body of the church. The baptismal fountain, part of which is in the foreground, was built in 1557.



Jesus. He is present several times in this church.



This clock is very old. It tells about the time of day, the phase of the moon and some things about astronomy. When it was built, it was the largest of its kind. It is so large that Thomas could not even fit entirely in the picture.

	For a small cost you could climb the tower. This seemed like a good idea at the time. We ascended a great number of stairs in a very narrow spiral staircase. We finally emerged above the domes, though still well inside the church. It looked like the domes had been recreated recently out of concrete.
	We walked past the domes, then continued to more stairs. Looking up it seemed like an Escher painting as they spiraled around the square tower. The stairs were numbered every 10; by the time we arrived at the top we had climbed about 360 of them.
	We finall emerged from the top of the church. We were heavily fenced in, as you can see. Even so, the view was outstanding.

You can get some idea of the view here. And if you squint, you can see the numbers on the metal flags. This church is very old.



It's very tall.



This is taken right inside the main entrance. The trapdoors above are at the same level as the domes. They are as high as the spiral stairs go, which is at best two thirds of the total height we climbed.

We visited the memorial for the shipyard workers killed at the beginning of the solidarity movement. We also saw the associated museum. Very depressing. Rock on, John Paul II.

The memorial had a plaque in several languages.

We had planned to go to Malbork and see the old Teutonic castle. Unfortunately, museums are closed on Mondays (a non-trivial miscalculation on our part). We are sad to have missed seeing it. We got apple pie instead, at pi coffee.

Watch out for robots.