Getting to Krakow was a much bigger pain that getting to Paris. The short of it is this: we arrived safe and sound after a couple flight bumps and delays.

And here is the long of it...

I was coming to terms with the notion that I had no control over how we got to Poland, where we stayed, etc because Scott's work set it up. I had researched the flights we were on, etc...and was reasonably comfortable. So we get to CVG to check in and they tell us that our original flight to Newark was delayed and we would never make our Munich flight, so they put us on a flight to Chicago, and from Chicago we would fly to Munich. I wasn't a huge fan of the change, but what can you do? So we get prepped for the Chicago flight. Then it gets delayed. Twice. Apparently Chicago had some snow and there was a groundstop in place. They put us on the tiny plane and then we sat on the tarmac. At this point it's snowing in Cincinnati, so the pilot announces they are going to de-ice the wings, which causes a moderate spike in my anxiety level. It appeared that Danny DeVito took time out of his busy schedule to de-ice our place. Dude looked just like him. We wait a little longer, and then we finally take off. Flight to Chicago was uneventful. Once we landed we had around an hour to catch our flight to Munich and deal with our seat assignments, as they had us sitting separately. A nice man on the plane offered to switch seats, so that worked out. We were on a large 777 with the in-seat video on demand consoles. I mostly watched movies and Arrested Development, Scott mostly tried to get rid of his headache (he has a cold) and sleep a little, though neither of us really slept at all. And they fed us some sort of Chinese food concoction that I immediately regretted eating. And so we arrived in Munich 8 hours later.

The Munich airport is a large one, so we had right around 2 hours to make out connecting flight to Krakow. We hadn't been assigned seats on the Lufthansa flight, so we had to pick up boarding passes. Of course the flight was full and we couldn't sit together. The plane had a 3 x 3 seat configuration, so I sat between two guys, one of which wasn't accustomed to deodorant, and Scott sat behind a crying toddler. Scott didn't notice it much, but this flight was extremely bumpy. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was freaking out, but they all seemed fine. Fatigue was setting in, so when I accepted the in-flight snack I initially thought is was a frozen banana dipped in chocolate and nuts. In actuality, it was a big soft pretzel. I was getting a little loopy at this point. And holy s***...they didn't lose our luggage!

The Krakow airport is super tiny. The driver, Janusz, picked us up and delivered us to our hotel. Driving through Krakow, you can tell it is a very old city. We didn't go into the City Centre during the drive. On the outskirts there are a lot of abandoned and half-finished buildings. We passed a few little shanty towns. The buildings had a lot of graffiti spray painted on them and it just generally looked run-down. During the drive we saw a lot of areas like that peppered with really old medieval buildings. What we've seen so far looks a little gloomy...like an area of the world that has seen it's fair share of atrocities and hasn't 100% moved on from it. And rightly so. Im curious to see the City Centre to see if it has the same vibe. All in all I think it's about what I expected.

The hotel is nice and our room is small and cozy with a lovely shower. I've yet to be disappointed with showers in Europe.

And that brings me to jet-lag. It doesn't hit Scott as hard as it hits me for some reason. My head feels kind of fuzzy, I'm tired, my stomach is pissed off, and I just generally feel like I'm coming down with the flu. Same as in Paris. Wore off after a couple of days. The fuzzy head-edeness lends to an increase in anxiety because I can't think clearly. Tomorrow will be a new day. Lukasz, a guy Scott knows from the CH2M Hill office here in Krakow has offered to show us around. I should have lots of pictures after that.