Mary Ann had a weekend off in the middle of her summer school teaching, so we all took a train to nearby Wroclaw, which was supposed to be very pretty. Word is that Wroclaw is the new Krakow, since Krakow is the new Prague. I'm not sure where that leaves Prague, though. Wroclaw has a nice main train station.

Wroclaw, like the rest of Poland, was pretty much completely destroyed by the end of World War II. Afterward they rebuilt the old square to look mostly like it used to. It's odd because usually in Europe even the new stuff is older than the old stuff in the US. But the "old square" in Wroclaw is actually newer than most cities in the States.

We climbed to the top of the cathedral in Wroclaw. I may not be as young as I used to be back when we tromped around Rome and Cologne, but I can still carry a kid on my back to the top of a cathedral.

There were lots of tourists in Wroclaw. This meant that there wasn't the same gender disparity that I had noted in Poznan.

I'm unstoppable! I even carried the frog partway up to the top of this tower (in addition to BS on my back). In related news, my shoes are now badly in need of some new insoles.

Scattered around Wroclaw are a bunch of little iron gnomes doing random nonsensical stuff. Tourist pamphlets invariably describe them as "surrealist" which seems like an oxymoron. As a tourism gimmick they are a masterstroke; though their reason for existence seems a bit shaky. Apparently they commemorate the gnomes that the orange alternative movement used to paint around the city in opposition of communism. Weird, because I would have figured that gnomes would be communists. (Gnome picture 1 of 4)

W is for Walter!