Poland

Our second stop on our trip was Krakow, Poland. When I was going through these pictures, I was really surprised to find that we had a lot less pictures for this stop, because Joe and I both agree that it was our favorite. I guess we were too busy just enjoying the city to really stop and think about taking pictures. Plus, it was in the middle of the trip, and it seems like you always take more pictures at the first and last stops.

We really enjoyed Krakow because it seemed to have a lot more local flavor than Prague. Unlike Prague, there were actual locals speaking actual Polish almost everywhere we went. Krakow is also a smaller city, and Joe and I just seem to be drawn to smaller cities anyway.

This picture is of the Cloth Hall in the main square in Krakow. Krakow's main market square has been a center for trade since the 11th century, and in the 14th century they built a permanent structure for the cloth traders. This building is actually from 1555, when it was rebuilt after a fire. There's still a market in there now, with lots and lots of souvenirs.

The taller tower on the left of this picture is the watch tower, and the middle building and tower on the right are St. Mary's Church. Every hour, a bugler plays in all four directions from the top of the watchtower. According to city legend, the song he plays is the same song the watchman played during the Tatar invasion in 1241 to sound the alarm. During that invasion, the bugler was shot in the throat by an arrow, and so the song was suddenly cut short. The current buglers honor this memory by cutting short the song in exactly the same spot every time they play it now, which makes me wonder if anyone even knows how it's supposed to end anymore.

This is a view of the square from a little outdoor cafe where we stopped to have (you guessed it) a pint.

Another view from the same restaurant.

Another view of the Main Market Square. You can see the Cloth Hall on the right, and in the center is the Town Hall Tower, which is all that remains of the 14th century town hall building, when Krakow used to be the capital of Poland.

This is the Royal Way Walk, which is the street that leads from the Main Market Square to the castle on Wawel Hill. While we were in Krakow, the city was celebrating some "birthday" or day of independence, when they fought off one of the many invaders in their history. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, because we got the story from a waitress who was really friendly and super helpful, but her English was pretty limited, and the conversation involved a lot of hand-waving and smiling and nodding. Mostly I couldn't tell if she was trying to say these events took place 6000 years ago or 600. Or 800, for that matter. Regardless, there were lots and lots of banners hung up throughout the Old Town, and there was a reenactment of a battle in one of the big city parks (pictures of that in a minute). The whole thing seemed to be sponsored by the Discovery channel, because their banners were everywhere. (They must have a History channel? Clearly I don't have cable.)

This is the entry walk to Wawel Hill, where according to Rick Steeves, a castle "has stood since the beginning of recorded time."


This picture is taken from the main square on Wawel Hill inside the castle fortress. In the center of the picture is Wawel Cathedral. The white base of the tower is what's left of the original building, and then over the centuries the different ruling parties kept adding on and adding on, which is why it's such a mix of different kinds of architecture. Over the door of this cathedral there are some really big bones, and to quote Rick Steeves again, they are "thought to come from extinct animals." Joe thought that was pretty entertaining. As if no one could determine just what the bones are from.

As a side note, Krakow is where Pope John Paul II served before becoming the Pope. I had heard that Poland, and Krakow in particular, is a very religious country, but I was struck by how many monks and nuns we saw walking around in Krakow. There are huge churches and monastaries on almost every other block. My favorite nun sighting was a little middle-aged nun carrying a bag from a Nike store. I came up with a lot of suggestions of what might be in that bag (sports bra? running shorts? swimsuit? the latest Maria Sharapova T-shirt?), but I couldn't seriously think of what Nike apparel a nun would need.


Here's a closer view of the domes of the different chapels in Wawel Cathedral.


This is the palace courtyard on Wawel Hill, behind the Wawel Cathedral. The wall on the right is just a facade--there are no rooms behind those arches. They did that to make the palace look bigger than it really is, and when dignitaries would visit, they would cover up the windows so that it would look like they were entryways into rooms.

Also interesting is that the corner of the courtyard opposite this picture is supposed to be a powerful chakra point. Apparently it's one of seven places on the Earth where the chakra energy is particularly strong. While the rest of the courtyard was pretty empty, this one corner was pretty full of people trying to get a chance to lean against the wall and absord the good energy. What I thought was amusing is that we had to go through airport-like security (metal detectors and x-ray machines for our bags) to get into this courtyard and it's corner of peaceful energy, as if they didn't really trust all those wall-leaners.


Here's a view of Wawel Cathedral from the wall on surrounding the edge of Wawel Hill.


And the same view with the addition of Joe.


Here's the reenactment of the battle that I mentioned earlier. This went on for the whole weekend, and supposedly there was a big exciting battle with fireworks planned for the evening. We had thought we would check out the afternoon's activities and then go back in the evening, because the park wasn't that far from our hotel, but after 45 minutes of watching these dudes on horses stand in this exact same position, we decided we didn't need to see the evening performance as well. The dude on a horse representing the king (I think) gave a speech that lasted at least 30 minutes. At least. And clearly the speech would have been more exciting if I could have understood even just one word, but I have a hard time believing any family event in the states would rely on a 30 minute speech alone to capture the audience's attention. Why bother getting all the other dudes dressed in medieval garb and up on horses if you're not going to let them do anything?

Eventually they did have all the dudes and horses do something, but sadly, it didn't satisfy my ADD much more than the speech. I think they were trying to display their horsemanship, and the Poles in the audience around us were very interested (and from the oohs and ahs I heard, also very impressed), but these dudes had nothing on the cowboys and cowgirls at the county fairs at home. They rode in circles with one person always lagging way behind, and then spent three minutes trying to get all their horses to stand in a line. It was at this point that we decided to skip the evening's activities. That and the increasing wind and cloud cover. The blue sky that you can see in this picture is pretty much the last we saw for the rest of the trip.


On the sides of the park with the dudes on horses there were several food and souvenir shops. While all the little Polish boys were begging for wooden swords and matching shields, Joe was drooling and staring at the huge pans of kraut. His admiration came just a little short of allowing him to boldly stand there and take pictures, so it's a little hard to see the giant frying pans in this picture. But the steaming pan on the left is one gigantic pan full of sizzling kraut. Joe's heaven.


In a little square just off the Main Market Square back in Old Town, they had another reenactment of sorts for the festival. They had some tents with fur blankets, wooden clogs and other folk art/stuff, and then several tents with food and beer. Joe is enjoying some fried cheese with some kind of stewed cranberries. The cheese was really salty, and the tang of the cranberries was perfect with it. Behind Joe you can see a bandshell that was set up at one end of the square, and they had different groups perform throughout the weekend. We saw a great jazz group, which was proceeded by a slightly terrible but very exuberant city band (it made me think of Brassed Off with fond memories).


Like all of the cities we visited, Krakow has a Jewish Quarter (called Kazimierz after King Kazimierz the Great who encouraged Jews to settle in Krakow), with lots of interesting sights in various states of repair. We tried to go to several of these sights, including a muesum and several synagogues, but they were all closed for one reason or another. So the only sight we saw was this cemetary.

The afternoon after we visited this cemetary, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. When we were first planning this trip, we couldn't decide if we wanted to tour these sites or not, but we're really glad we did. Auschwitz has most of the museum displays, but Birkenau was profound in the way it forced you to experience the huge, physical scale of the place in a way that movies or books cannot convey. Pictures at Auschwitz are not allowed, and though we could have taken pictures at Birkenau, it didn't occur to either one of use to stop and take a picture. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. You've seen the images in movies. You have to go there to really understand it; to see it with your own eyes and feel the cold wind whip across that field, and to hear the stories of the dedicated and moving volunteer guide is something that can't be replicated.


Our room at the "bed and breakfast" in Krakow entered onto a balcony in this interior courtyard. The B&B turned out to be more of an adventure than we'd planned. We arrived in Krakow just after 7am on the night train from Prague, and I was really, really looking forward to a shower and a bed. While the walk through the city early in the morning when things were just getting going was really enjoyable, the fact that our B&B was not really staffed with a receptionist/front desk/anyone who can tell you what the heck is going on was not. There was no sign for the hotel, so we finally wandered into this interior courtyard because we knew it was the right address and asked a woman at a hair salon if she knew of a place by the name of our "B&B" (which is what it claimed to be on the internet). She took us to a locked door with a little note taped on it, which told us that if we wanted to access the B&B, we needed to call the listed phone number. Well that's all fine and good if you have a functioning cell phone, but neither of us did.

I'll just skip an hour's worth of frustrated wandering in this story and tell you that all of the payphones require a special phone card sold only at stores that open after 9am. A very friendly front desk clerk at a different hotel finally let us use her phone to call our hotel, and then it was just another 1.5 hour wait until the person actually showed up and let us into the place. We had arranged our arrival time with the proprietor when we made the reservation before leaving the States, so when she showed up late and began her apology with "I'm so sorry, but we had no idea when you would be arriving," my combination of lack of sleep and crankiness was nearly lethal. Luckily Joe predicted this and jumped in before I could say anything. Once we got everything straightened out the place was really nice and a great place to stay.

Except that the lack of a front desk did come back to haunt us in the end. Remember how Joe and I both had colds at the end of our Czech Republic stay? I had run out of Kleenexes by the time we arrived in Krakow on the train, and between the two of us and our running noses we used most of the roll of TP in our bathroom before the second day was over, which made days 3 and 4 interesting. We looked for TP in every available store on day 2, but had no success. Finally we just started filling our pockets with extra TP at restuarant bathrooms and established a collection of wadded TP in our hotel. It wasn't glamorous, but it worked.


This last picture I took from the train as we headed through the mountains in the SE corner of Poland toward Slovakia and Hungary. I wanted to get a picture of the yellow house, because the majority of the houses in Poland were painted this color, with pretty red flowers in the windowboxes.

The countryside was also beautiful. Though the 8 hours to our next stop in Hungary got pretty long, I was really glad we took the train during the day so we could see the towns we were passing. I would definitely take a trip back to this part of Poland--it looked like the perfect country for a bike tour. Or maybe a car tour, depending on whether or not you are Joe.