bus tickets

A decided to buy all day bus tickets so we could ride around and see more of the city from the comfort of these street cars...but first breakfast at the "hidden cafe" in a courtyard garden i read about in another blog and you might recognize the entrance from an earlier post. it was a little chilly so A decided he wanted to check out the inside of the place. you can sort of see what it was like by the picture above and video below. this cafe is associated with a theater company and i swear the main actor waited on us. 

here's the vestible-like arched breezeway you go through to get to the courtyard cafe. this is facing back onto the street with the cafe behind. if you wait til the end of the video a tram makes a special guest appearance :) : also A makes a special guest appearance at the beginning :) :

our next stop was the old kantorowicz factory or what is left of it. This was a huge distillery and really well known for its liqueurs. the reason i wanted to see it is because it's the first clue i found online about herbal products made by Ashkenazim in eastern Europe between the world wars. at the beginning of my research, i stumbled on a photo of one of their intricate small glass bottles for a bitter with ingredients like gentian. after finding the bottle i became relentless in my search for more breadcrumbs on the trail to our first book. Here are some photos of the former factory and a short video of the buildings in the back beyond the archway:

across the street was another group of abandoned looking  brick 19th century manufacturing buildings but i don't know if they were connected with the distillery. Here's a bad picture of them behind a wall:

we next walked to a streetcar stop to begin our tour of the outskirts of the city. on the way to the stop this building caught my eye so i had to take a picture for you. it's like a little island of elegance in a sea of random construction debris and it has its own sphinx.

just outside its walls is a small elder tree (bez) shading a clump of nettles (kropeve).

below is the most interesting building from that first ride around the outskirts. to be fair, all of the highrises, cookie cutter as they are, are surrounded by parks with paths for pedestrians and bikes. the trams are steps away from any apartment complex and there are plenty of food stores to walk or ride to. 

i realized i made a misinterpretation of european aesthetics since i last ruminated in that direction. i once thought that european cities are generous in what they offer the city dweller in terms of living a regular life. i now realize that no, this is not generosity, it's just how people live. it is natural to have parks to walk through on your way to a destination like the store or the post office. it's unremarkable that there are pleasant market squares to buy groceries and flowers and benches to take a rest with a place to put your icecream wrapper once you're finished eating the snack you bought from the cafe in the park, etc, etc, etc. these things aren't special here or even something that gets noticed even. but for us it seems extraordinary. and it is extraordinary because we don't have those things really. so we are the exception because we dont even realize how deprived we are of these little tiny details that make day to day living so much more...pleasant and enjoyable.

on returning to town we decided to try a place called Kogel Mogel, a play on the old yiddish remedy guggle-muggle. it was like the anti-remedy because every dish was basically a variation of something with pork. nevertheless we had a couple of soups and their special and waddled out of there.

i'm getting a bit tired so i'll just add a couple pictures from our favorite cafe the little rocking horse:

and look closely at this building. there are window washers working away...i noticed them on another tram ride to a different outskirt.

we finally made it to Donatello for dinner but we will save that story for another time.

by the way, after all that tram riding, at the last stop, an undercover ticket checker made the rounds of our street car and asked everyone for their tickets. that was a first!