Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

No, it’s not my interpretation of heaven. :-) I’ll explain later.

Monday started like any other day, except that I woke up in Krakow at 6 am. I knew that I needed to get more sleep, so I cranked up the AC and managed to sleep until 8. I read and watched TV until 9:30 or so. The TV here gets a network called NASN (North American Sports Network) that shows American sports 24/7. While there usually isn’t a live game, they show recent games without commercials. Even if you know the outcome of the game already, it’s still fun to watch the game without interruptions.

Breakfast at the hotel was excellent. I love bread and cheese; apparently Poland and Switzerland are the best places for good bread in Europe, so I lucked out. I ate a lot of food that morning and had some excellent English Breakfast Tea.

Then it was off to work. The Google office here is a just a 15 minute walk from the Sheraton. It was a little tricky finding the office. All the street signs here are rather hidden and the streets are packed, so it’s not conducive to stopping and staring at a map. Plus, I was trying to not look like a tourist, which was a little hard, since as far as I could tell I was the only Indian guy walking around Krakow.

Once I got to work, Kacper, Jarek, and Morg took me to lunch. The office here doesn’t have a cafeteria, instead everyone either orders in or goes out to one of the many restaurants close by. We went to get Italian food, and I ordered pizza. The pizza was good, but nowhere as good as the pizza in Zurich was.

The office here is in a palace. A real palace with marble floors, chandeliers, and various marble carving murals. And the bathroom is all marble with a giant tub. Some really wealthy guy owns the building and lives on the top two floors and rents out the rest of the building. It’s strange seeing very casually dressed software guys walking around a beautiful building. Not to mentioned having meetings in a room that has a chandelier. :-)

For dinner, we went to old town to find a restaurant. My vegetarian restrictions made it a little difficult to find a place, but we finally settled on what turned out to be a very romantic restaurant. It was pretty nice; it was in a renovated basement with lots of red lighting, and sparkling pink things. It’s strange that I was in such a place when I wasn’t forced by Crissy.

Dinner was good, but it took a really long time. I like the idea of multi-course meals and relaxing and talking during dinner, but Europe seems to take this too far. I had a bowl of tomato-basil soup (they were out of the minestrone) and spicy pasta with marinara. Both were good, but not spectacular.

For dessert, we went to another place. Charles ordered hot chocolate and we learned that hot chocolate in Europe is just that; basically melted chocolate. And they served it with cream on the side. It looked really good. I was leaning towards tiramisu, but the dessert menu cover had black forest cake and it looked really tasty, so I ordered that. Turns out it was really tasty. :-)

After that, back to the hotel. I had a 5 pm Pacific time meeting in California I wanted to dial into, but I couldn’t manage to stay up. I ended up falling asleep at my desk 10 minutes before the meeting.

And so ended Monday. :-)