Ed note: Doug Krikorian is in Europe and sends this squib (short piece)

(Krakow, Poland -- Nov. 18, 2021) -- In Market Square located in the middle of Old Town, the largest medieval town square in Europe dating back to the 13th Century, there are countless restaurants and taverns and nightclubs and souvenir shops and, of course, people strolling an area that is filled with the glad noise of laughter and music and joy.

But what sets it apart from those of us who reside in Los Angeles County is that nobody I saw in the square itself or in any of its establishments was adorn in a mask.

Memo to our two esteemed leaders of the Long Beach Health Department, Kelly Colopy and Dr. Anissa Davis, who advocated the shameless shutting down of LB restaurants last Holiday Season and have instituted all sorts of silly masking regulations that still are on the books in the city: Stay out of Krakow.

They’d find the sight of so many maskless people -- even in supermarkets and large merchandise stores, mind you! -- horrifying.

And their policies wouldn’t exactly receive a warm welcome from the fiercely independent folk here who threw the Commies out of this country in the late 1980s and have absolutely no use for the irritating meddling of the type of officious bureaucrats that, alas, pervade the LB landscape.

Ah, it’s so refreshing, so divine, so delightfully wonderful to be in a place that reminds me of the world of yesterday.