Today we turned left on Garbarska street after leaving school instead of turning right, our normal direction that takes us to the closest tram stop and home to Dom Piast. Just two doors down from the slightly sketchy-looking tunnel that leads through the store and apartment building on that side of the street was a gaming shop! There were some back rooms with a couple groups of people playing Dungeons & Dragons and Magic...and everything was in Polish! The cards, the board games. Amazing. Best of all, I found a Polish verion of this fantastic card game about bean farming that I played a lot this summer with my friends in DC and fell in love with. That was a must-have and is now sitting on my shelf waiting to be played with Brad and Rachel (the Swatties who are with me in Krakow this semester). I'm also very very tempted by a Polish version of Settlers of Catan and all the expansion sets...and the Magic cards!
We also did our first real cultural excursion today and visited an art gallery, Bunkier Sztuki (Art Bunker). The gallery was showcasing a special exhibition on collections. The whole first floor was a collection of old toys including dolls, doll houses and furniture, toy trains and cars, playing cards, postcards, board games, and tons of other toys from collections spanning the last two centuries or so. It was really cool but was very similar to the toy section of the Stadtmuseum in Munich and the Spielzeugmuseum in Nuremberg, both of which I visited last week (I have to remember to write a bit about Nuremberg at some point). The second floor was designed to be collections in as they are in there "natural" sitting, meaning collectible items are often stored by regular people. So the entire second floor basically looked like our basement at home. It was dimly lit and filled with dingy junk, of course all of it roped off. There was a book collection, lots of old machines and parts of machines, remnants of radios and computers, old cradles, bikes, and furniture, an extensive glass bottle collection, etc.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the postcard collection which was my favorite part of the museum! They had lots of cool things in it, including the first stamp ever used (a British black penny? I think that's what it was called...), the first stamped postcard sent in Poland, pictures of the men who supposedly invented the postcard (I would've thought that the postcard was a no-brainer and didn't merit the title of an "invention"), and postcards sent by famous Polish people. An interesting part was the display on postcards sent by lovers and the stamp language used for the purpose of conveying romantic sentiments and messages about clandestine meetings. They also used to write in tiny handwriting under the stamps, which would then have to be steamed off of the card by the recipient so that the message could be read! One said something along the lines of, "You must come over shortly after Christmas dinner, as if for a visit, and after you've stayed for awhile you must get up as if to leave. Then wait for me on the stairs where it is shadowy and I will shortly join you and show you into the salon where you can wait until the rest fo the family has gone to bed." All written under the stamps on the card. Hilarious!
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