Bucket List Entry No. 47
"How Hannah and Anna authentically experienced Krakow."
In the years following the time they became BFFs, Anna and Hannah wasted no time compiling a bucket list. So attached were they in friendship.
The first list out of several had 50 objectives laid out for their first trip. 50 was a good number. People became old around fifty, and their BFF-ness had to last very long if they didn’t want to feel very, very sad.
The entry for bucket list entry No. 47 was poetically simple: "pay homage to the crumbled remains of Birkenau crematoria and be sad; wander through the spiritual otherworld of Kazimierz synagogues, their walls peppered with the bullet shots of camera snaps; take a selfie with the Wawel dragon in its den; play chess with the Lajkonik along the shores of the Vistula River; and eat sausages and drink beer in an old cellar during a Tatar invasion while whispering conspiracies like the old days when secrecy was the only luxury in the pre-surveillance-state era.”
Anna was from Germany, Hannah the USA. Their Grand Tour was as spiritually and emotionally fulfilling as it had been meticulously executed: they had already harangued with the philosophers of Paris (No. 17), partook in a spiritual nude experience at Stonehenge like the pagans, (No. 44) applauded the chocolatiers of Brugge, (No. 26) indulged in long-awaited fantasies in the Feminist Red Light District in Amsterdam, (No. 1) eaten the best hamburgers in Hamburg, (No. 17) reeled their way through several aquavit pub crawls in Copenhagen, (No. 49) soaked in the fondue spa in Geneva, (No. 34) went urban bear hunting in Berlin to help save the environment (No. 2) and, most recently, befriended the mermaids of the Vistula who frequented the riverbanks of Warsaw. (No. 45)
Now they could give bucket list entry No. 47 their undivided attention.