It's my last night in Krakow, and I'm sorry to be leaving - somehow a week and a half feels like it will be an eternity, and then it's vanished. Tomorrow I'm heading up the the Baltic, and then the day after I catch a ferry for Denmark, to Copenhagen. It's a strange feeling to be leaving Eastern Europe now - I think this has been the most interesting part of my trip, and I've met so many fascinating people while in the Czech Republic and in Poland.

A few days ago I visited the Museum of Pharmacy here - it was fascinating, though slightly unnerving to be shown into each room, and have the light turned off after I left. A Norweigan boy, Aron, was there at the same time as me, and we were shown from room to room, given explanations in English to read, had a few extra cupboards opened up for us, and then showed out again. Such a wonderfully strange mix! As well as all the glass bottles and porcelain containers and wooden chests of all dates and styles, there were also pharmaceutical curiosities: a stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling, mandrake root donated by an institute in Kew, England, a container which once contained human fat... There was a room of instruments which had previously been used in alchemist's attempts to improve on their materials, and had later been employed in the pharmacists laboratory. The museum is housed in a gorgeous building in the middle of the old town, and goes from the cellars to the attic.

I've spent the past couple of days wandering around with Julia Ambrose, a sculptor from the US who currently has work showing in a show in Warsaw. A rapid conversation about everything: politics, Africa (the more Kapuscinski I've read, the more Africa has opened up for me into something that, though still wildly tangled, I can begin to make sense of - or rather, begin to approach) folktales, amber. She has been buying up pieces of amber, rough and polished, all different colours, and has an impressive collection. A day of wandering around today from the Massolit bookstore to Demmers Teehaus to the Cloth Hall market in the middle of town.

I'm glad I've come to Eastern Europe: I feel like I've learned a lot here. I suppose it is because Australia is so far away - to arrive in Europe, there are always the sights people feel obligated to see. If you're in Paris, you visit the Eiffel tower, you visit the Louvre. When in Firenze it's Michaelangelo's David, and so forth. But at the same time, so many countries to the East seem to have somehow been lost behind the silence of their post-war status as "communist." Arriving in Praha, I feel like I'd forgotten that there was a Praha beyond the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, until I can face to face with a sculpture celebrating Mozart's Don Giovanni. Wandering around Wawel castle, there's Tiepolo, not to mention the fact that one of Da Vinci's few oil paintings is a fixture of Krakow. I suppose I feel confused by the decision to privilege certain types of history: the raising of Brunelleschi's dome is an amazing feat - it's easy to be blinded by that. I suppose I feel that learning to think about different types of history, and to talk about those histories, discover their rhythms is the most important thing I've learned so far, though it is another obvious lesson...

I've laid down Kapuscinski for now (I've read nearly all his books - or rather devoured them) and am wading through Annie Dillard's quiet observations in her "An American Childhood". After a lull, a few days rest from words at the end of my time in Prague, it's suddenly exploded again, and my mind is racing with ideas from everywhere.

Sometimes the dull ache of homesickness grasps it's way through me, but I think September will be soon enough for coming home. I've always dreamed of going to Denmark, and I'm going - my mind is a collage of Bog people and viking ships and medieval towns, Hans Christian Anderson, Karen Blixen and the Danish resistance helping Jews escape across the narrow slither of water to safety in Sweden.

Krakow