When I woke up I was ready to hit the town, but not before I had breakfast at the hostel.
I started out by exploring some of the old town gates and the wall. There used to be a big Teutonic castle here, but now it is in ruins. The thing isn't well marked and I had problems telling if it was a castle ruin or just a ruin. There is a legend that in 1746 a soldier and his wife saw a dragon. They reported it to town hall, saying that it was about 6 feet long, brown and shiny, that it could fly and swim. There were a few dragon paintings around town, a statue and even a pizza place to commemorate the story.
Next up was the church of Virgin Mary. It was nice but nothing spectacular. They did have the symbol of the cult of the shroud on display though. Funny how I keep running into that.
As I mentioned before Copernicus was born here in 1473. His family owned a house here but no one is sure if he was actually born in this house or not. The museum kinda sucked. All I learned was that he had studied in Ferrara and that ginger cakes were a local specialty. There was a lot of stuff to look at but very little descriptions. The second half of the museum consisted of rooms decorated in a style that Copernicus would recognize. Overall I was pretty dissapointed.
As I had explored the different sites during the morning there were kids running around town doing what looked like a scavenger hunt. They kept asking me things. It was a bit odd because the same ones kept talking to me. I wonder if they didn't recognize me or if they were just teasing.
For unknown reasons I stopped back at the hostel before grabbing lunch. Jeanfrançois was just waking up and decided to come with me to get some soup. It was pretty good.
We had both wanted to visit the planetarium and were disappointed to find out that none of the shows were in English. We decided to visit the Orbitarium instead. This was kinda like a really tiny science center. It was packed with kids. Jeanfrançois joked that I was the oldest one there but also the shortest. The whole thing was interactive and we tried to play with the different displays whenever the kids would back off. After waiting in line for about 10 minute to see how much we would weigh on the mood we gave up. The kids just wouldn't respect the line!
Eventually we just wrote the place off as a loss and went to explore a bit more. The goal was to walk to a lake but it turned out to be more of a drainage pool. On the way we reminisced about our favorite Simpsons and Family Guy episodes.
Kamilla was meant to meet us at 8 to go out. Neither Jeanfrançois or me really felt like another late night. I had an early train and he was still recovering from the day before. While we were discussing this one of the other girls at the hostel told me that I had a phone call. I hadn't had anyone call me since I left home, it was really kinda nice. Kamila asked us if we would mind meeting up for a movie instead with a couple of her friends. Apparently she was telepathic.
At 8 we met to see Boski Chillout, or Pineapple Express. It was really really funny, go see it. Wait, I bet it was out months ago in the states and that I am really behind.
After the movie we headed back to the hostel and I got packed up before calling it a night.
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