The following is a photographic diary of my life in Kraków, Poland.

Choked with traffic, abounding in churches, crumbling, youthful, and serene.  Music of every variety flows out the rickety wooden doors of its cafes and pubs.  Aged ladies stooped over to their waists haul heavy bags of groceries up wooden stairs, fingers grasping and clasping at worn handrails.  Pigeons leer off of rooftops, from among forests of antennae. Edifices of plaster and concrete, cracked, decrepit, luridly reveal their brick undergarments.  Trams whisper along, sometimes barking out at traffic with a peal of bellringing.  Wintry boots slosh.  Summery bicycles glide.  In pools of candlelight, conspiratorial guests exchange meaningful looks of longing, 

This is the land of my dream bar, where romantic ladies dance to Tom Waits and Nick Cave until dawn and pale beer tries to gleam through the fingerprints on my glass.

On the outskirts, billboards gnash at each other and masses of shoppers crowd into the hypermarkets of fluorescent horrors.  Cans of sardines, pressed ham, frozen pirogues. Banks and builders and insurers drive stakes into the earth and pitch massive concrete and steel circuses, young faces smile printed on vinyl on windows. Crisp suits and white cuffs flash. Garages doors open and black cars slither out into the litter and ash.

Birthdays of shouted songs ring out from the the neighbors windows, heard by sullen streetlight

teens with bottles and cigarettes. The resurrected bustle to work a-morning where they long for teacups and the smoked meats of easter.  Sundays the bells of the cathedral are echoed everywhere unto the statuary of cloisters, and armies of mohair berets underlined by bush white eyebrows assemble kneeling, mumbling, and rising with only a little difficulty.  Then coffee and cake.

This place has me.  It is for me to feel its rhythms, breathe its air, fight in it, love in it, sail the sea of its caprices.  These are my pictures, the results of my investigation, the evidence, the suspects, the crime.