I will forewarn you that this is going to be a long one, but after the most incredible week in Krakow, there are plenty of stories to tell about the highs and the lows of my time there.  I also have to admit that I have never actually watched/read Eat, Pray, Love, but from the brief synopsis I read on Wikipedia, I promise my version is not nearly as radical.  Rather, my week in Poland can really be best categorized by these three areas and I intend to lay out this post in a similar way – categorically rather than chronologically.

I really didn’t want to go to Paris.  The French people there were mean, the cost of living was expensive, and I felt I had got everything out of the city I needed the 4 other times I had been there.  I had to go to Paris though because it was the jumping-off point for me to get to Poland (I’ll explain more in a following post), and I had to pay my good friend Art a visit at his bar, La Cave Café.  It was an evening spent truly like a local and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else.

I was starting to find a rhythm in my travels; for each busy, touristy city I would need to chase it with a calm, more peaceful, prayerful place.  Keeping this balance in my travel is how I answer the remark people make “that’s a long time to be gone!”  Although Barcelona wasn’t as much as Madrid, I still needed calm to follow the crazy, so just like Madrid had Manresa, Barcelona had Lourdes, just across the border in France.  I’ll admit, I was sad to be leaving Spain and the comfort of the language I knew, but I knew I needed to eventually start making tracks eastward if I was going to make it as far as I wanted to in the limited time I had.

It was a good thing I got the rest, peace, and privacy of the quiet little mountain town of Manresa because my less than 24 hours in Barcelona would be pretty much the exact opposite. I had spent a decent amount of time in the city when I visited 3 years ago, so I figured I didn’t need much time there as there wasn’t much new to see and really only one thing I wanted to go back and visit. It was more of a jumping-off point for me. It would be a fast and furious 20 hours in the city, but by the end I left feeling satisfied with my time, not wanting a minute more or less there.