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

Yesterday I went to Auschwitz, which, not surprisingly, ended up being quite an upsetting day - it was strange though. Not just upsetting because of the terrible history of the site, but also because of the tourism there. One of the first things you read upon entering the museum is that it is not recommended that children under 14 visit the site - but everywhere I went there were young children running around. These strange juxtapositions - the death wall, where so many people were executed became a place for children to place chasey. In the cellars downstairs in Block 11, where the nazis first used the poison they eventually used in the all their gas chambers, a man answered his mobile phone, and chatted away. I saw people getting their photographs taken beside signs, cell blocks and the railway line, as if to say "I was here" in the same manner they might take the same photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. It was quite surreal - this lightness, as though "just another site of human atrocities" (and I'm quite aware the world isn't lacking in those) alongside a room filled with human hair that the nazis had not yet sold when the camp was liberated. The tins the poison came in, the tangled mess of spectacles culled from the Jews who died there. Such a strange place - and so green. I found it hard to understand that the landscape was so green. I felt that, by rights, it should be utterly barren - or at least that same burnt look of the Australian countryside in the summer. It's hard to even think what to write about Auschwitz - in one of the cell blocks the walls were covered by photographs taken of the prisoners upon arrival. (That is, the prisoners who weren't immediately taken to the gas chambers, which was the fate of the vast majority.) In some of these photographs there was still a kind of fighting hope in the eyes of the prisoners, though mostly just a blank look - the determination not to give anything away. There were even a few photographs of women smiling, as though they hadn't forgotten that that was somehow their function - to smile, to hold onto hope in the face of everything. I watched a film made up of images taken on the day of liberation - watched as the liberated children - under 700 of them - came out in pairs. Mostly in pairs because so many of the survivors were twins, kept alive for medical experiments. Being out in the field at Auschwitz-Birkenau especially it hit home how difficult it would be to work there - whether kept on starvation rations or not. Yesterday the sun was oppressive - just as in winter the extreme cold would equally be a barrier. Like so many other people who have been, I feel that it was important that I did go - but still can't quite fathom it.

I'm still reading Kapuscinski - over the past few days I've read The Soccer War and The Emperor. I'm going to start another one this evening, lie down by the river and read.

I arrived in Krakow yesterday after taking the night bus from Prague, and after a lovely day walking around and visiting the largest English language bookshop in Poland yesterday (am now close to finished the Kapuscinski classic "The Soccer War") today I', visitind Wawel castle - have already visited the Royal Apartments, and in another hour or so we're going for the tour of the Royal Private rooms. "We" is another Kate (from Wodonga) and Jenny, from Brighton, England, beginning study at Cambridge in October. In between our allotted visits around the castle we had lunch in the local bagel place. If you're beginning to think my blog sounds like a bagel tour of Europe you may be correct.

Krakow is gorgeous. I was chatting with Susan in Firenze, wondering where I'd go when I left Italy, and mentioned Warsaw - it was her suggestion that I go to Krakow instead, and I'm glad I took her up on it. Tomorrow we're planning a trip to Auschwitz, and the day after a journey to the salt mines, which were among the very first sites listed by UNESCO as World Heritage sites (in the same batch as the Taj Mahal). The pope spent his share of time in Krakow before being given the funny hat - he was a bishop here. (Wait, doesn't that entail another funny hat?) Best of all the history of the places founding: it was founded by Prince Krak, after her outwitted the local dragon. I wandered through the dragon's den this morning too - a lovely cave. I imagine the dragon would have been quite at home there.

I'm still trying to think ahead to what will come after Krakow - I've definitely decided to go to Denmark, but am also thinking of taking a bus up through the Baltic states - I don't need a visa to visit them, and ferries from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then to Copenhagen are cheap. Feel a bit like I'm making a sudden dash everywhere, which, after several months of travelling slowly, is a welcome surprise.

I went out in Prague last Thursday night with Anna and others for Anna's birthday. Petra, the girl who cut my hair, came ut with us yesterday and took us to a couple of bars. After a while I worked up the courage and she got me an absinthe. A "small" absinthe. I'd hate to see what they call a large absinthe! I didn't bother with the whole process of caramelising sugar in a spoon and dropping it in - just drank it straight. Well, three sips. Three was enough. Anyway, I've since been told that the Czech absinthe isn't the really serious stuff - the only place you can still buy absinthe with the wormwood extract is in Estonia. It's strange the way I'm chasing after this stuff, when I don't even like to drink! Oh well...


Krakow

I'm sitting in the "Bohemian Bagel" in Prague tapping away, after a day visiting the house Kafka was born in, the Jewish quarter of Prague, the Polish consulate and getting a free haircut in the most prestigious salon in Prague. I'm not sure what it is about my hair that attracts the free cuts I've been getting the last few years, but I'm not going to complain.

I'm in love with Prague - have been spending days wandering around the streets, and I've got another three days of wandering to do before I head on to Poland, and Krakow. Have been hopping on and off trams around the city, which assuages my occasional homesickness. The girl who cut my hair today started to teach me some Czech phrases (only the very simple ones... and I've forgotten some of them already, because they're so foreign to me, I haven't quite grasped them yet) and she'll probably teach me some more tonight, because I'm meeting her for coffee too. Oh, and she cuts hair really well.

Oh, and I found my bottle of absinthe yesterday.

I got in on Saturday night, and had only been in a few minutes when the girls in my room suggested we all go out somewhere for dinner. Found a Czech restaurant near the centre, and got to drink some of the Czech beer-that-is-cheaper than Coke. Great beer, but the downside of all the British boys coming over for their weekend long stag parties. Lots of interesting contrasts. The Communist Museum next to the Casino is the one that springs to mind immediately. Very beautiful, old Eastern buildings, but also a Parisian feel to parts of the city (says she who hasn't been to Paris) because the star of art-nouveau design, Mucha, who designed all the famous theatre posters for Sarah Bernhart in Paris, is from the Czech Republic, and there are buildings in Prague that have very much embraced the art nouveau style. I went to the Mucha Gallery here, which was gorgeous. Though of course it led to yet another thing to be fascinated by. The list of things I need to read more about when I get home grows ever longer.

Am still going with Vasari's lives of the artists, and stuffing myself with a bagel and bottomless cup of coffee at the Bohemian Bagel each day. Oh, and their chocolate cake is also very good. That is, have been reading Vasari over bagels morning and evening, as the Bagelry has become my office for the week so to speak!

Went out to dinner last night with Charlotte, a girl staying in my room at the hostel who is from England (the Lakes district) and studying in Belfast, and who may or may not be offended by the fact that I told her she reminds me of the Cookie Monster. I have since explained further that this is a good thing. She made what might be considered by most the grave error of drinking two absinthes, straight, the night I first arrived! I haven't actually tried the stuff, and am not at all convinced that I will, but have been enjoying the sight of all those bottles of stuff that looks like Listerine in shop windows.

After Krakow I've decided I'm going to try to get to Denmark to see the Tolland man in Aarhus, track down a copy of Seamus Heaney's Tollund Man poem and stand in front of him and read the words "Someday I will go to Jutland / to see him peat brown head..."

Praha.

It's my last night in Berlin, and I'm just hanging around, having packed up most of my stuff and listened to the Virgin Suicides soundtrack this afternoon. Will have dinner soon. Have been reading Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and am about to start another Henry James too - The Ambassadors. I think this will be the eighth for this trip. I was having trouble getting to sleep last night, and was thinking about the next extended piece of prose I want to write, in a year or two - thinking about how it is impossible to write the same way after reading Henry James. Not that I feel like I will try to emulate him - simply that his novels are a lesson, both in psychological development of a narrative, and in just what a sentence can do.

Today I wandered around - visited the Brandenburg Tor, the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz. Was hoping to visit the "Neue" National Gallery (there are three or four of them, starting with what one of the guides I was given described as "noseless naked guys" in the ancient collections) but when I got there I found out the permanent collection wasn't on show (the permanent collection includes among other things some abstract expressionist works of Newman that I particularly wanted to see) because the whole gallery had been taken over by an Armani exhibition. You can imagine my outrage, abstract expressionist ousted for fashion. Though I'd discovered a little fashion for myself earlier today. But we won't say anything more about that incident.

Oh what's the use of holding back -

MARK IS IN THE FINAL OF WIMBLEDON! Maybe Australia will learn to love him a little better now. I would just like to say I've liked him for years and years. Probably because I haven't followed the Davis Cup and always hated the adulation Pat Rafter receives. I mean, he's dating an underwear model. (I'll try to forget about newspaper reports a few years ago of a possible "flirtation" between Mark and Ms Kournikova. Anyway, I'll be in Prague this on Sunday, so I will have to try to find somewhere to watch the final there. I'm almost glad I haven't seen the last few matches. I just know I would have embarrassed myself squealing.

Just think, when all this is over, this will stop being Kate's tennis blog, and maybe I'll have some more insightful things to say about finding out I love Henry James.

I went to visit the Pergamon museum yesterday, which was quite amazing. I particularly loved the Islamic collection, and the eagle headed figures of the Babylonions. It was just a day of wandering along in a state of awe. Spent a long time lingering along Unter der Linden. My only disappointment with Berlin is that I didn't make it to see much contemporary art... I'm always running out of time.

Berlin

Not much time, not much time, always the problem. I'm in Berlin, staying in a lovely hostel in the East side, very close to the longest remaining section of the wall. I had a bit of a nightmare day getting here on Saturday, train, plane, two buses and a taxi, but I made it, and the hostel, which has a restaurant and bar attached to it, made me a free "welcome drink" and a gorgeous salad with bulgar wheat and goat's cheese, so I've been settling in and celebrating Mark Philipoussis's victory at Wimbledon yesterday.

To give the extremely rushed version of events I went to a market selling lots of old school Berlin stuff and bought a funny little red velvet purse and an old spoon on Sunday, went to the Czech consulate yesterday to try to organise a visa to find, at midday, that they close every morning at 11 and don't reopen till the following day. Went to the Australian embassy to organise a statutory declaration stating that my signature has, miraculously, changed somewhat in the last 10 to 15 years. Went to the tiny Berlin Guggenheim museum, a very interesting solo exhibit, but, horror of horrors, I've forgotten the artists name. In the bookshop I succumbed to a red inflatable teddy bear. Need I say more? Bought my bus ticket for Prague, so will be spending this Saturday on a bus again. Last night I hit the halfway mark of Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", which I endlessly mispronounce.

Today I had more success at the Czech consulate and need to go back on Friday to collect it. Also ventured to the Egyptian museum and saw the famous bust of Nefertiti, and the all but demolished bust of Akhenaten - a fascinating thing to see. Got caught in the rain twice, and ate Kaffee und Kuchen at Zoo station. Am in heaven with all the sour cherry everything here! Am going to continue having a quiet night with Dostoyevsky. I have become very interested in reading more about the ethics he developed - am surprised by how much I'm enjoying the spirituality of his works. Gorgeous.

Oh, and after a promising start, Arnaud lost in the second round. If I'd found out about it sooner than three or four days after it happened, there probably would have been tears.

Berlin.