Five years ago I decided to run up a bit of debt in a good cause. The cause was experience. The debt ended up about five thousand U$D. The experience, a couple of months in Eastern Europe. The former East block, the USSR’s buffer, had been off limits to me for most of my life. When something is forbidden it becomes attractive. By the time I arrived, the Warsaw Pact and its tanks were gone. All the military and geopolitical posturing something for historians to ponder. Poland was at last free of the Nazi’s and Soviet Communists. I stayed two months in Krakow. Tired of tiny and too expensive hotel rooms I rented an IKEA equipped apartment. It was near the train station, itself a major attraction. It was on a street car line. I’ve never done the 14 day, 15 country type of tourism. Putting stickers on a suitcase like a gun slinger notching his Colt revolver. At my age I’d end up on boot hill with that much travel. No, I like to soak in the new place. Krakow was great for that. Like Madrid, Paris and a few other cities, Krakow was never bombed. When a city is a thousand years old it packs a lot of history into a small area. Krakow had that. It had tourists too, lots, including me I guess. I didn’t do the twenty year old thing and stay out all night. In the early evening I returned to the apartment with dinner’s ingredients. The train station mall included a supermarket. In that market, Ham and cheese and fresh bread, to die for, as they say. To die happy with clogged arteries. Fish too, fresh from Gdansk. After the evening meal I’d watch Polish TV or old movies on my little tablet. Someone I knew back in Ecuador was publishing online and I’d promised to keep them supplied. Fantasy stuff. Not traditional continuity comics, if there is a traditional form any more. A $50 hand scanner did a decent job of converting the watercolor sketches into files. I should make another stab at a strip but I’m not enthused much. What story needs telling? I can’t escape Hamlet’s take on this, “a tale told by an idiot,… signifying nothing” So visit toons, its just a click away.
