End of vac

Sent Boeciana off on her way home, on the 1800 to Brussels. Ice-cream, cake and mosquitoes (-os?) at my aunt's, and then to bed. This after a week of sun, swimming (well, me, while Boeciana was lying in the sun - yes, really, despite her skin-cancer obsession - and snoozing off the WYD-induced exhaustion and fever that hit her after hitting my granny's country seat) sight-seeing and not quite enough sleeping.

We saw: the interesting medieval collection at the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, and the Nubian or suchlike frescoes kept there, from a dig in Sudan. The unexpectedly good city historical museum. An un-labelled unpretentious doorway leads into what one expects to be a few rooms with Roman coins and nineteenth-century pipes, but in fact takes up about fifteen houses and has sixty-one rooms, with lots of detailed maps of economic activity in the old and new towns in 1473 and things of that sort, which we enjoyed very much. A one-day dash around Krakow, enough to realise that one day is not enough. We saw the preparations for the ingress (?) of the new archbishop, which was to be the next day. That next day saw us in Czestochowa, where we did the "squint at the icon for three minutes while short stout old ladies push past muttering under their breath" and then conducted a survey of the tat on offer.

Did you know the archbishop of Warsaw consecrated the nuncio Ratti, the future Pius XI? And lots of other stuff, but as real life has now begun (two meetings today to sign contracts, re-sits to think about, driving test, this morning in the internet caff from 6 in the morning trying to proof-read stuff for a 9 a.m. deadline and not flick through blogs) I will leave it to Boeciana, who is an arts student and therefore has nothing much to do.