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124 days ago
I have decided that I will try and blog about the hijinks of Henry and John and Trina trying out parenthood. However, for now, I just wanted to get this video up. This is a video of Henry about 20 minute or so after he was born. Click player in the Media Player Window above to watch the video. More to come. John
362 days ago
We are back in Berlin now. We will spend a couple days here and then we are headed back home and back to work. Poland was fun and it was a good trip. Krakow was indeed a fun city. We made an additional day trip out to Auschwitz and picked up the major sites in Krakow as well. Auschwitz turned out to be much more interesting than I thought that it would. Much like the trip out Tiger Leaping Gorge last year, Auschwitz was probably a site that I would have skipped had I been traveling by myself. I had visions that it would be a bunch of empty buildings and that I would walk away from it like with the same feeling as when I visited the World Trade Center site (for that haven't visited WTC it, is really just a construction site). My assumptions were incorrect. The Auschwitz-Birkenau sites have been done very well. It was a very interesting, educational, and somber moment to walk through the various buildings, displays, and overall sites. We signed up for a guided tour as ...368 days ago
We are in Krakow now. I like this city. It has a vibe similar to what I have felt in Asian cities of just being alive with activity. It is what I love most about New York and what I miss about Chicago. Today, we spent the day wandering around the old town. We took in a church right off of the square and it was probably the highlight of the trip thus far. It was amazing inside. Every inch of the church was covered in some decoration. Definitely, not what I was expecting based off the other churches that we have seen on this trip. We wrapped up our time in Warsaw with a short trip out to Torun and Chelmno. The purpose of this trip was to visit the town that Trina's family came from. The trip was rushed but I have a sentimental feeling towards visiting ancestral areas. I have made a promise to myself to follow up and do the same for my family at some point. In all of the trips that I have made to Korea, I have not yet made it down to the town that my mother grew up in ...
372 days ago
We are safe and sound in Warsaw. Warsaw is everything that you picture when you think old communist city. Drab communist block buildings, wide streets, large squares. Classic. However, capitalism has clearly won in the new buildings that are going up. We went shopping for a new duffel bag in a recently built mall. It was like stepping into Bell Square Mall, complete with food court and everything. Getting here was somewhat of a mini drama. We purchased tickets in advance for the overnight train. From talking with the ticket counter person, we thought we had booked a private sleeper. However, when we showed up to the train, we were directed to the normal seating car. This was not what we expected. Then, while we were sitting there trying to make heads or tails of the situation an old woman that smells of liquor and looks drunker plops next to us, smiles a toothless grin, and starts devouring a sandwhich. I decide to do what any good capitalist would, when stuck on an ...
375 days ago
We are headed out to our last day in Prague. First a little bit of administrative business, we have made a couple of changes to the originally posted itinerary. First, we have decided to cut going to Lviv. We have been on the fence about that portion of the trip for sometime. It is not that we don't want to go but going there very much tightens up the schedule and it just seems to make more sense to try and get it on a trip in the future. Second, we have decided to reverse the order of how we are going to see Poland. We are going to head directly to Warsaw tonight via a sleeper train. Then, once we see Warsaw and the surrounding area, we will head to Krakow and then back to Berlin. The reasoning here is two fold. First, since we are taking a sleeper anyway we figured that we could just add the couple of hours that it would take to get to Warsaw while we are sleeping. Second, with the cutting of Lviv it allows us to play things by ear in Warsaw and either stay longer or leave ...
