This guide includes not just a calendar of events, then, but also articles and descriptions to help you take the first steps to immersing yourself in the culture of this city. The tone of the articles ranges from the informative to the only half-serious, but the intent everywhere is the same: to give the reader a sense of place, and a foothold.

Summer in Kraków has something unnatural about it - all the students go home or abroad, half the city's residents escape to elsewhere in Europe, and the cultural institutions go into their summer hibernations, the curators, actors and conductors donning their floralpatterned Bermuda shorts and heading for the Baltic. What remains is an avalanche of summer festivals, which bear the burden of the city's cultural life, and do this job in fine style. Keep your eyes peeled for posters, study the pages of this guide and explore - and though it's summer you may yet find something like the "regular" Kraków.

As a final note, another intention of this seasonal quarterly is to make it interact with foreigners - and those looking for foreigners in Kraków. If you have something you'd like to point out, complain about, a question you need answered, you're looking for a job and you'd like to post an ad, or if you're looking for an foreigner to hire or otherwise use, let us know before our fall issue comes out.