Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Well, considering I’ve been home for a few days now, I should probably finish writing about the trip. :-)

Tuesday morning I woke up and checked my voice mail to discover that Charles (who flew in from the East Coast) was doing a bit better with the jet lag and had already had breakfast and gone out for the day. I pulled myself out of bed and headed down to breakfast.

A nice, well-traveled Scottish guy sat at the table next to me and we chatted for a while. He originally took me to be a Canadian since I have a neutral accent and I’m friendly, (”Canadians are so nice you sometimes want to punch them, aye?”). We had a nice and pleasant conversation, and like a lot of people around the world, he had a lot of questions and opinions about the current state American politics.

Next, I left the hotel to head into Old Town for some sight-seeing and souvenir shopping. I found lots of nice things for everyone, but since I haven’t given everyone their presents, I can’t talk about what I bought. The tourist-trap stores were filled with all sorts of amazingly detailed amber carvings. They were unfortunately also really expensive. :-(

This trip, I did by myself something. There’s some legend about a dragon in Krakow, so there were lots of little dragon figures for sale. I spent some time looking for the coolest dragon and finally picked the ugliest dragon figure I could find. It was just so stupid looking, I had to by it. :-)

Next, I went to the office and we started our design review while munching on some pizza (mmm… pizza). The meeting was very productive despite most of the team being having varying degrees of jet-lag.

That night we went out to a nice Italian restaurant for dinner. I had a decent Caprese salad, spinach and cheese cannoli, and tiramisu. The sauce on the cannoli was excellent, but the cannoli stuffing was dry, not very cheesy, and not very good. I’m happy to report that my spinach Manicotti stuffing is far superior. I plan to experiment and see if I can copy that sauce though.

The next day started with a quick early breakfast, brief scenic walk to work, and then jumping straight into the design. Lunch for me was a green salad, a small sheep’s milk cheese appetizer, pizza, and some cheesecake. At the Krakow office there isn’t a served lunch, but they have a neat food service. You go to a website that has menus of 5 or so local restaurants and click whatever you want. And at 1 pm, the food appears!

I also discovered that my Blackberry phone was off by 10 minutes. It’s not that big of a deal, but really annoying.

For dinner that night, we met at the hotel. Most of us were tired, but we still had lots of fun. I had minestrone soup, a Greek salad, and chocolate brownies with vanilla ice cream. The Greek salad was amazingly good, thanks to the high quality feta cheese. I wish we could get Feta like that here in Seattle.

During dinner we noticed that the piano player disappeared when our food order went in, so we decided that the pianist was also the cook in the nearly empty restaurant. Also, if he didn’t start playing before the food came out, the food was cold. Clearly there is some sort of connection. Being the brilliant engineers we are, we realized that the kitchen is powered by the piano. If you want hot food, someone better be playing the piano. :-)

And then it was off to bed for what turned out to be an exciting trip home…