The day after the performance at the Parnassus Theatre in Gent, André Posman takes us to Brussels, prolonging the utmost pleasure of being in his company - and saving us a little money, too.  Our parting is genuinely touching, as this soft-spoken, gentle man is goodness incarnate. 

At the Brussels airport we have to catch a Brussels Airlines flight to Kraków, Poland, where the second leg of our tour opens.  We do not understand the rationale behind paying extra for every kilogramme above the twenty, or so, Brussels Airlines allots its passengers.  It costs us €60 to get our luggage finally sent through, and then we fly to Kraków on a huge and practically empty Boeing machine that probably could, if need be, transport tanks, or bomb a non-white country.  So, why pay extra?  Capitalist greed, or what?  A week later, at the airport in Katowice just before we flew back home, Michelle was asked to pay $150 US for three kilogrammes of extra luggage — $150 for three kilogrammes!  Piotr said "screw them, enough's enough" and we distributed some of Michelle's stuff between us.  It cost us about ten minutes of frantic repacking, but it was all worth it.

In Kraków, our host is Marek Choloniewski, a noted experimental composer whose festival, Audio Art, enjoys a strong reputation as a hot review of the newest trends in electroacoustic and multimedia avant-garde.  At the airport, we wait a few minutes, enjoy delicious Polish mushroom soup, doughnuts and coffee, and then Marek appears as if out of nowhere, all smiles.  In his packed little van we drive to our apartment; yes, apartment and not hotel for Choloniewski prefers to place his guests in "normal" apartments, rented from a company that specialises in this sort of business.  So far so good.  Let's get out and see the city!

Kraków is one of Europe's cultural capitals, or aspires to be, fairly successfully.  Its centre core is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  To quote from the UNESCO website <http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/29>: "The historic centre of Cracow, the former capital of Poland, is situated at the foot of the Royal Wawel [pronounced Vavel] Castle. The 13th-century merchants' town has Europe's largest market square and numerous historical houses, palaces and churches with their magnificent interiors. Further evidence of the town's fascinating history is provided by the remnants of the 14th-century fortifications and the medieval site of Kazimierz with its ancient synagogues in the southern part of town, Jagiellonian [pron. Yagyellonian] University and the Gothic cathedral where the kings of Poland were buried.

"The historic layout of Cracow, with Wawel and Kazimierz, is one of the most outstanding examples of European urban planning, characterised by the harmonious development and accumulation of elements representing all architectural styles from the early Romanesque phase up to Modernism. The importance of the city is evident in the urban layout, numerous churches and monasteries, monumental secular public buildings, the remains of medieval city walls, as well as urban palaces and town houses designed and built by high-class architects and craftsmen. The value of the ensemble is determined by the extraordinary accumulation of monuments from various periods, preserved in their original form, with authentic fittings, which combine to create a uniform urban ensemble in which the tangible and intangible heritage is preserved and nurtured to the present day.

"The picture of the city's cultural richness is supplemented by Jewish monuments of Cracow's Kazimierz…  Cracow is an urban architectural ensemble of outstanding quality, in terms of both its townscape and its individual monuments. The historic centre of the town admirably illustrates the process of continuous urban growth from the Middle Ages to the present day."

And it is all true.  To us, touring artists, another thing is much more important, the city's cultural life.  In this department Edmonton, even Toronto, are light years behind.  There are virtually dozens of cultural events a day, ranging from street performances to heavy-duty theatre and orchestral performances.

Opera buffs, for instance, would go crazy, as in Poland operas offer regular seasons during which operatic, ballet and operetta spectacles are being offered practically every week, day by day, the usual break falling in the Summer.  And they do a lot of new operas by LIVING composers as a matter of course.  How it compares to those four or five poor "premières" by the Edmonton Opera, like the Edmonton Symphony so fond of flogging dead horses, we had batter not say.

Well, it is nice to wander around that splendid city, full of drunken Scots and Englishmen (the subdued and sober Poles look like teetotallers here, strange!), Piotr acting as a guide and showing us, among others, the apartment building on the Florianska Street where he lived as a child, but we are getting more and more anxious.  The reason?  Choloniewski keeps changing our rehearsal time.  Now it's in the morning, now in the afternoon, and now in the morning again.  Or is it afternoon?  It all smacks like one big improv — and we do not like it.