The O.S. Addict

Who among you can chat up a woman using jiberish and your smile alone and have her want to take you home in 15 minutes flat? Our son, that’s who. We stopped at a gas station/ trucker stop/ small restaurant. A group of old ladies was stoping ther on their way to a pilgrimage to Rome. Jason got situated with Nicholas and I went to the register to order food. When I came back Nick had two ladies playing with him making cute faces at him and calling him a little angel. Ten minutes later as they were leaving one came by again, kissed him and sai she would take him home if she could. The whole thing was very cute and made us giggle when we were there. This happens a lot. On the plane when we were holding him Nick eaould stand on Jason’s legs and smile at the lady behind him. Just about everywhere he can get the undivided attention of someone he will smile at them and try to get an exchange of chit chat and giggles going. The one place this does not work is at playgrounds cause parents are there with their own kids and don’t give him that attention, but then at playgrounds he ignores the adults and scoots towards the other children.

Prague is a beautiful city. Although, getting here with a baby takes longer from Czestochowa then the estimated 6 hours on Google, Nicholas needed play time outside of car, so it actually took 8 hours with the stops. Our hotel was advertised as “with a view of Charles Bridge” what that meant was that it was actually 50 feet away from our window. We could see tourists in detail running away from the rain and we could hear them sing in a drunken state at midnight. One night when Jason and I were finishing a walk with Nicholas we ran into a group of happily drunken students asking us to take their picture. Then they wanted a picture with us. Afterwords one of the fellas said to Jason “Thank you Big Boss”. There is a ton of tourists from all over n Prague and the ones in late teens early twenties enjoy staggering down cobble stone streets drunk with a beer in hand, its quite a site. There is so much wonderful old architecture that its nice just to walk down the streets and look at it. One does not have to see museums and churches to enjoy Prague, although we did go to the Mucha museum showing art of the “Art Nuvou” movement done by the artist Mucha. It was small and disappointing, but the ostrich dinner we had that night and the city overall made up for it.
Under the bridge, below our hotel there is a brand new playground, build in 2008, with swings, climbing structures, seesaws, and other cool play structures, oh yes, and a sandbox. We took Nicholas there in the morning although I think Jason and I had more fun at the playground then he did. Overall we find Prague to be child friendly, however, to find diapers or formula one has to go outside of Prague or bring their own because the grocery stores are tiny and we did not see any to carry those items. We brought enough supplies for Nicholas to not worry about it and were able to wait it out till we found a store with supplies.
That is all for Prague. As I write this we are in Munich and just had a fabulous breakfast in our hotel. Well, its time to do laundry and buy some Nick supplies, we are in a modern city today where everything we need is all around us. In Munich we leave the beautiful old architecture behind and see the modern marvels of the twentieth century: BMW museum and Audi museum. More on this tomorrow, or later.

We had a great time visiting with my cousin Malgosia, her husband Jacek and their three year old son Ziemek. They live in Kozienice, about an hour south of Warszawa. From there it was a three and a half hour drive to Czestochowa, which means “hides a lot”. This is one of the most important places for the Polish Catholics, in other words for most Poles. Czestochowa is home to the church containig the “Black Maddona”, a very old icon of Mary and Jesus. Wikipedia has a good description and history of the “Black Maddona” so I won’t go into it.
Our hotel Sekwana, was in a great location to take the stroller up the hill where the church was. There is the museum where you can see a copy of the icon up close and without the centuries of damage, as well as other interesting things, however with the baby we focused only on the church, which was beautiful and very cool versus the sweltering heat outside. We could not have found a better location for lodgings. On the same street as our hotel there was a pharmacy, a medical suply store (get your wrist brace here if you forgot to pack it like we did), an electronics store where we got a three-way power splitter, a grocery store and restaurants. We could have even gotten haircuts if we wanted to at the local salon. All this and that’s only on the hotel side of the street. It was a good time to be in Czestochowa because it was between the religious holidays and pilgrimage seasons so the streets were not swarming with groups of pilgrims (tour groups, scouts, church clubs, and religious personale from all of Poland and surrounding countries). Be warned though; Pilgrimage season starts sometime in the summer so check before you visit, especialy if traveling with children.

OS X Applications for System and Network Administrators » Nirlog.com

A good posting of some of the best stuff on mac for us geeks. I’ll be posting some cool new mac software I’ve found soon.