Yesterday was Wroclaw’s first real snow day of the season and the city freaked out. Perhaps it didn’t freak out as much as it simply shut itself down. And that shouldn’t happen in Poland in the winter time. It’s only natural that we associated winter with snow. I know, I know, but in Poland that…
I’m a big fan of Google Photos. Even though I should probably be an Apple Photos person, given my Apple hardware usage, somehow Google Photos was first to the punch for me with cloud-based photo storage and it just stuck. I especially love how all my photos from my phone, computer, camera, and even sent…
In case you missed my write up of the Dresden Christmas Market last year, we went back this year to do it all over again. Mostly because Ania loves Christmas a lot, but perhaps also because we really missed that cheese and mushroom hot sandwich they serve there. Again, it’s only a three-hour drive at…
Jerry Seinfeld had a pretty good life hack back in his days in order to become a better comic. He put up a calendar on the wall and with a red marker he crossed out each day he wrote a joke. The goal was to write one joke each day. Write a joke, mark it…
While our Transalp test ride was mainly geared towards the Bieszczady area of south-east Poland, we had scheduled our return path a little differently to cover more of the unknown. Having never been to the cities of Przemyśl, Łancut, or Sandomierz, we decided to do a quick drive by, even if for a minute. First…
The idea behind getting back into riding the Transalp was to do at least one epic run a season. Now the jury is still out on what exactly would deem a ride ‘epic’, but right away my imagination started running wild. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, no, screw that, Albania! It’s all just a few thousand kilometers…
The Cracow trip described in the previous post wasn’t exactly a sightseeing trip from the get-go. The real purpose of the trip was, in fact, to check out a motorcycle I had found online and considered buying. The owner of the motorcycle had said that he will be available in the late afternoon, giving us a better…
Back in March, we took a quick day trip to Cracow or Kraków in Polish. It’s only a 275km (168miles) ride, and it’s all highway all the way there. Without a specific plan or city tour in mind, we simply started walking all around admiring this great city. Ohh, and of course Fado came along,…
Today was a pretty big milestone for me fitness-wise. I ran 21km’s (13.10mi) which is exactly half of a marathon. I also did it in an official event, the H2O Wrocław half marathon. Name tags, medals, an all. Given that I am somewhat overweight, simply finishing a half marathon is quite a feat for me.…
“Wait. You went to Switzerland? In Germany?” Yes. And no. Let me explain. Saxon Switzerland is a national park around the Elbe river valley south-east of Dresden, Germany. In 1766 two Swiss artists were appointed to the Dresden Academy of Arts, and in their letters back home they described their new place of residence as…
I seem to have a pretty weird luck when it comes to renting Airbnb flats for us and our dog Fado. A few years back I found a place on the Polish seaside that turned out to be a murder crime scene some years earlier. In San Francisco, I found a great apartment smack in…
Vozilla is not Wrocław’s first car-sharing service. It isn’t second either, as Wrocław has dabbled with vehicle sharing in the past. But it’s most definitely a first all-electric car-sharing service in the city and from what I can see around town, it’s the most popular one to boot. Vozilla uses Nissan Leafs as its vehicle of choice…
Even though we’re about halfway through January as of this writing, winter has been pretty modest for us in Wroclaw thus far. The temperatures have hardly dipped below freezing, snow is almost none existent, and I even rode my scooter to work a couple of times. In January! So today, on a tip from Ania’s…
This month marks the end of my employment with a company I called home for the past seven years (sans 2 months). I started at GOVECS in March of 2011. I was hired through an online job listing, by an American dude who also happened to be the co-founder. Statistically speaking, what are the odds…
Speaking of Dresden… There are quite a few things that took place between our trip to Dresden in August and today, but since today’s story also deals with Dresden, I’ll just write about it now. Today, however, the temperature was hovering around freezing, it snowed at one point, and most important difference of all, we…
Dresden is only a three-hour drive from Wrocław, but we had a long weekend to kill this past August, so we spent a couple of nights in East Germany to make the most of it. Naturally, Fado, our chocolate Labrador, had to come with, so I ran a quick Airbnb search for a place that…
Hey there. It’s been a while. How are things? You doin’ alright? How are the kids? Yeah OK, you’re right. I don’t really care about your kids. But after a prolongated period of absence on this blog I never really know how to hop back on the blogging bandwagon. So I needed something witty, if…
I’m not entirely sure why I picked up Ready Player One. I’m not a sci-fi geek, I’m not into fantasy, and having just finished two fiction books I was hoping to get through a biography while on our vacation this past week. But after reading just a few pages of Ready Player One, I was…
When my family arrived in the United States as Polish immigrants back in 1994, none of us spoke English. My dad knew a little, but when my parents somehow signed me up for middle school on Monday morning, having arrived in L.A. the day before, I had no idea how to even ask to go…
I didn’t really get much time to do any touristy stuff while in Cape Town this past weekend. I suppose it would have made total sense to extend my stay at least a day or two to check out local sights, but the trip itself was sort of a last minute thing and I didn’t…
