I woke up to turn off my alarm and noticed the word July pop up on my phone. This time a month ago, Ash and I were moving out of our apartment and taking all our belongings to a storage unit. Today, Ash and I were resting in a penthouse apartment in Kraków, Poland…. A lot can change in thirty days.
To start off the day, we decided to first get lost in the city square. There wasn’t very much Kraków, it turned out, to get lost in. As the St. Mary’s Basilica clock struck noon, a trumpet popped out of the tower and started playing the “Hejnal Mariacki,” a five-note Polish anthem. As the tune played, hundreds of crows flew around the clock tower, only intensifying the medieval aesthetic that haunted this city.
Halfway through the song, Ash had spotted a Zara across the square and darted off. I knew I’d have some time on my hands, so I set up camp at a bar across the square and ordered a half-liter of Polish beer called Okocim.
When Ash returned, again without purchasing anything (I was so proud of her restraint), we set off to explore more of the Old Town. The other main attraction in Kraków was the Wawel Castle. It was amazing that the Gothic walls still stood on the Wawel Hill overlooking Kraków seven hundred years after being built. We circled the large castle and drank espressos every few hundred feet. We couldn’t help but indulge in the casual caffeine kicks at a dollar apiece.
We had already decided that although there may have been a better meal somewhere else, we wanted to head back to Ti Amo Ti. There was a fifteen-minute wait before we could be seated, but our Polish waiter from last night spotted us and rushed over. “Hey, I remember you two!” he said. When we were seated, we saved him any sort of speech about specials and ordered the exact same meal as the night before.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is a model many live by. That model should also be taken into consideration in its reverse form, “If it is broke, fix it.” A wise man once told me: “If what you are doing is not actively filling you up and giving you as much energy as you are putting into it, stop doing it immediately.” Ash and I loved our time in Denver, but after two years, our lives were no longer filling us up. I was very reluctant to drop it all and leave, but we were now three weeks into our journey, and I was starting to see that what we had been doing back home was simply not worth the time we were investing. “Life is short” is a cliché, but have you ever heard a wise elderly person tell you about how long life is and not to worry about exploring the world because you can always do it later?