My room in Dom Studencki Piast, where I'll be living until June! It's supposed to be a double but I've got it to myself so I can use that bed under the window as a couch! The room us pretty tiny (by Swarthmore dorm standards). I'm standing against the door, which leads out into a foyer with doors to Rachel's room and the bathroom which the 2 of us share. To the right of the picture and right next to the window is a door leading to a balcony to the right of my room. Rachel's room also opens onto it. It's a nice balcony and big enough for some chairs in the summer, but a family of pigeons has a nest on the floor in one corner! We would get rid of it and clean the balcony except that the pigeons have two eggs...so we can't. But we get cute baby birds in a few months!


View of my room from the balcony door.













Electric "icicles" hanging in some of the trees downtown. They also have very pretty white-blue electric Christmas lights in beautiful shapes mimicking water in the fountains downtown, since they can't have the water running in the dead of winter.








The oldest building of Jagiellonian University, the school where we take our language class this semester.

The Bishop's Palace where Pope John Paul lived when he was a Bishop in Krakow. There's a picture of him in the window above the arch because this is where he stayed every time he visited the city after becoming Pope. After leading masses, he would come back to the Palace and talk to Krakowians from the window.

A statue of the Wawel dragon! It supposedly lived in the cave you can see down the hill to the left of the statue in the Middle Ages. There a couple stories about it. The most official one according to the tour guide who took us around Wawel Hill is that a noble (I forget exactly what he was) in 1000 or so managed to slay the dragon and because of this was made the first King.

The dragon is on the bank of the Wisła River below Wawel Hill, where the Wawel castle and cathedral are located. Wawel is where the rulers of Poland lived for hundreds of years when Krakow was the capital of the country until 1596, when the capital was moved to Warsaw. The Cathedral is a major symbol of Polish nationalism.

Statue of Pope John Paul II outside the Wawel Cathedral, where he was Bishop before becoming Pope. He also led his first mass ever in 1946 at one of the altars in this cathedral.

The door leading into the cathedral. There are some bones that you can see hanging to the left of the door that were uncovered in the area. The really long curved one is a mammoth bone, but legend has it that it's a bone of the Wawel dragon. There are two other bones that are part of the jawbone of a whale from millions of years ago and are also supposed to be the bones of the dragon. Legend also says that everything is ok as long as the bones are hanging next to the cathedral door. If they ever come down, though...Poland will be destroyed and the world will end. Whooey.

More pictures in the post below! I confused myself with all the windows that I had open and ended up making two posts by mistake...oh well!