At the station in Krakow, we got money, and immediately devoured a huge bottle of water. Geez. That was stupid.
Set off to get an overview of Krakow. It´s a unique city and it seems like it has a closer tie to a painful history than its more southern neighbors. The palaces and cathedrals are impressive. As is the main square and various sculptures (classic and modern) that punctuate the city.
Had a lunch at ´Chopskie Jadlo´ a restaurant near the main square that made us believe that Polish food could easily be put on the map as one of the world's great cuisines. Try the ´sour milk´ and sausage soup. Sounds horrible but is really exquisite. The texture of the dumplings served with a bbq rib dish, a Krakow local recipie, was indescribable except for ´otherworldly´.
Marcin Wisnewski was awesome to host us and help us with certain parts of the city including the city´s ´Museum Madness (don´t think that´s the right title)´ festival --where everyone goes to all the city´s museums for, like 50 cents, which are open until 2 in the morning (with people in them--including the ´army museum´and ´engineering museum´-- we decided to pass on the ´insurance museum,´ however. We also went to the ´Soup Festival´ on Saturday in the must go to district of ´´Kasimirez.´´ We went to Aushewitz on Friday which was a great experience and uncovers a lot more about Polish/Eastern European History. 
Sunday saw us board the train for Worclaw (´VOR-CLAV´) where we stayed one night, on our way to Jelenia Gora, a cute town in the Southwest where we did some nice hiking and some wonderful peace from the cities.
The next day, we were off on the bus to the Polish-Czech Republic border, but not all the way on the bus, crossing the border was on foot! We were dropped into the mountains and walked in front of the lined up cars along the checkpoint. They stamped us and we waltzed on in to former Czechoslovakia.
After about a 45 minute hike, we arrived at the next town, beautiful (´Hvarrich?´) where we waited an hour to catch a (what seemed like a
jaw-jarring city) bus -- bound for Prague.
We got into the beautiful (and tourist-flooded) city of Prague at about 5pm, found our place and set off on foot to explore. Before coming, it seemed like almost everyone we talked to wanted to keep us away from Prague. We understood, but were less sure about why they were so passionate about it... Too touristy, etc. While it´s true that although we are tourists ourselves, we tend to like places that there are less of us; it´s also true that we´d kinda like to see what it is that draws so many tourists in the first place! And Prague lived up to it. It is a magical city if you can tune out the clatter of everyone else being there, and at the end of the day, Prague still holds up its own as an unmissable stop on any Eastern European tour. Just go past the Palace and the Charles Bridge to the Fortress-turned-park
in the city South.
It was also to be the place Sarah could get her Mongolian Visa (Canadian Passport needs but USA doesn´t). It turns out what happened was though, they would not give her one unless she had a czech residency. we found out later that there was no precedent for this and either they didn´t want to deal with it - or they had some obscure rule. either way that stupid ass mongolian guy at the consulate made our lives more miserable as it was in a suburb of prague and took a lot of our day to deal with it. no doubt we would have to deal with it as well (probably with mixed results again) in some other crappy city wasting half a day on the crappy outskirts of town with some other crappy person (sorry..i was letting this travel logistic stuff get to me for a moment).
Back to Prague.
It is an amazing city. And if you can unravel Czech history (which we really couldn´t do properly) you can understand a lot about the history of Eastern Europe.
The beer is amazing...so fresh and crisp are the Pilsners -- The ´Budweiser (no joke, it´s the original) Budvar´ takes the cake as the best and even beats out the national ´Golden Boy`: Pilsner Urquell. And they are all about .75 cents US -- AT A BAR. The food, however, is absolutely forgettable. (we wished we could have brought a seperate backpack full of food from Poland. The kiosks that sold hot dogs, etc. were a better option than restaurants)
A couple of days later we met Slavomir Kaminsky, originally Slovakian but living in a suburb of Prague, who was nice enough to host us a couple of nights and share travel stories as well as his guitar and ´medicine,´ Becherovka (´BECK-A-ROVE-KA´).
After a few days (and since our visa didn´t work out), our goal was to go north through Germany (more specifically Berlin) and then on to Denmark. Our hope was to find a respite spot in northern Czech Republic countryside, then cross the German border along the Vlatava River. But time and major confusion on logistics (we were told it was impossible to get from Cech to Germany at Decin) made it much more difficult. We also, wanted to spend time in Berlin (an unexpected stop on our tour) so we wanted to allow an extra day or so.
This time we took the train and it was a spectacular one. Throughout the entire journey from Prague to Dresden (our waystation to Berlin), it wound along the Vltava River, passing by village after village (complete with sickeningly picturesque biking trails) until crossing the German border and thus the higher roofs and darker architecture of the country homes and taverns -- it´s also where the border guard asked Andy if he ´washed` his passport. We were expected to arrive in Dresden, Germany at 2pm. From there, we had to figure out how (train or bus (or both)) and when we were going to get to Berlin.
Thanks: So many thanks to Marcin for hosting us and for giving us background and colorful stories for our time in Krakow and to Slavomir introducing us to friends Sparky, David and traditional Czech/Slovak music with a pinch of Gypsy to spice things up.