The forecast for my trip to Krakow changed nearly every day between last Monday and Friday. I’d like to say I gave up looking, but I didn’t. Snow, sleet, rain, fog and very cold temperatures seemed to be in store, or all or some of the above. Glad to say I saw no snow, and the few drops of rain were manageable by putting on my hat. Okay, so I had hat hair occasionally, but it was totally worth not carrying the umbrella around. Despite the grey days, I LOVED Krakow.
Anyway, first things first.
I got up at 4:15 to get to the airport on time, two hours before my 7:30 flight. An uneventful bus ride and check-in led me to find a seat at the gate, where the television was tuned to an Australian beach workout. So this little black dog comes running into view and the lead workout chick is like, “Oh, Fido’s decided to join us this morning!” And this dog wanted to play. He barked at the feet of one of the girls, and found a stick and kept picking it up and throwing it at her. It was hilarious. She actually threw the stick at one point. Every one of my fellow travelers was watching, smiling despite the early hour.
Right. To the plane. I took my seat and settled in, and two Polish fellows sat beside me. One of them didn’t run out of things to say, and all of his sentences (none of which I understood) were followed by maniacal, high-pitched laughter. I began to tire of Chat-Laugh’s routine quickly, and hoped he was on some early-morning high and would soon crash and fall asleep. We were told to fasten our seatbelts and the attendants began the whole spiel about emergency exits and oxygen masks, and so on. Well, none of this stopped Chat-Laugh and eventually he was shushed by the flight attendant. This worked for about three seconds. He started up again until his buddy, between us, told him what I could only assume was ‘be quiet’ in Polish. Oy. It was going to be a long flight.
On the runway, waiting to take off, I had drifted into a closed-eyed doze, and suddenly heard “IN YOUR SEAT! SIT DOWN!” from a flight attendant in a loud, firm voice from the front of the plane. I opened my eyes, thinking Oh God, terrorists. It turned out the seat next to me was empty – Chat-Laugh’s buddy had decided that moment was good enough to leave his seat for God knows what reason. The yelling continued, as if he didn’t understand that the very moment before lift-off wasn’t such a good time to get up. “SIT DOWN, SIT DOWN!!” He finally lumbered back over to his seat, where I expected he would soon pee, throw up or have some sort of bodily melt-down. Alas, this never occurred. Then, he and Chat-Laugh ordered vodka with their Cokes. Oh gee, this is going to get MORE interesting? Nah, both guys fell asleep after a few sips, and I got into my Hugh Laurie book. (Yeah! He writes too!)
I got to my hotel, checked in, put my stuff down and went for lunch. I was starving! It was about 1:30 and I hadn’t eaten since about 6:00. I ended up in the main town square, Rynek Glowny, and stopped at nearly the first café I saw, called Europejska. I had a delicious soup with small pieces of sausage and shredded carrot, and a boiled egg cut in half (?), followed by pierogi with potato and cottage cheese. Holy cow – massively tasty. I paid and put back on my coat, scarf and hat and worked off some of that heavy meal on the walk to the meeting point for my tour of the salt mine.
The mini-bus that took my group to the mine in Wieliczka, 15 minutes from Krakow, was tiny and extremely uncomfortable. I didn’t have a place for my feet and my knees were crammed into the back of the seat in front of me. I was trying to imagine some of my taller friends trying to sit on this bus and had a laugh to myself about it. We arrived at the mine, where I promptly got in trouble because my tour was starting and I had wandered off because I was confused about where we were supposed to meet after the washroom break. Nevertheless, the tour began and I made it. I was the last one in the line down the 378 stairs into the mine. It was a long walk, but they weren’t the toughest steps I’d ever walked. Nice and even, not too steep. Our tour guide took us through the tunnels and chambers of the mine (and up and down many more stairways), explaining the gears used to mine the salt, the horses that worked and lived in the mine, the legends around the salt mining, the truth about the process and told us of the many famous visitors who have come to the mine, including Pope John Paul II, George Bush Sr., the poet Goethe and Sarah Bemhardt. The most fascinating thing about the mine was all of the sculptures made by the miners themselves out of salt. There were several chapels – all made entirely of salt, all the way up to the chandeliers! And being that the mine was a constant 14 degrees Celsius, many of us took our coats off down there. There was, unfortunately, an accident while my group was touring. Before you guess, it wasn’t me! There were two older couples from Norway within our group, and one of the men was walking down a stairway just in front of me. I was thinking of saying to him, “I don’t know how you’re doing this – my knees are shot and I’m barely hanging in there,” but I decided not to say it since it might offend him. Just as I had the thought, he tripped on a step and almost righted himself, but not in time to prevent him crashing into a bench and falling to the floor. It was so scary. I think it knocked the wind out of him. He sat there for a while, embarrassed, the poor thing. Eventually he and his wife decided to ask for a wheelchair to be brought down. I wondered how the hell the thing was going to get 1) to us and 2) out of there. Luckily for him and the rest of us, it was nearly the end of the tour. We spent about 5 minutes sitting there in silence, all of us shocked at the incident. Ironically, we were to the point in the tour at a small pool where health treatments are given to people suffering from respiratory and other illnesses. Anyway, after that enormous fiasco, we were out of there.
It was dark when I got back to my hotel, where I rested for a little while, then headed out for a bite to eat. After my pig-out lunch, I opted for a salad at McDonalds. It was fast and easy. On the same street, I went into a shoe store and found, to my great dismay, Merrells for only 200 zl, which is equivalent to €48. I just bought the ones I was wearing for €95 in Dublin! After a quick walk with my head hung low, I settled in for the night. I quickly realized that being so close to the main town square has its disadvantages, and soon employed the earplugs that had been so thoughtfully left by my bedside. It worked like a charm.
On Sunday morning, I ate my breakfast at the hotel, then headed out for a morning “stroll around the Planty,” as my book recommended. The Planty, from what I can figure, is just what they call the old town, which is surrounded by a narrow park-like setting. I saw some of the other squares around my hotel, and the old city wall. Then I stopped for more coffee at a place called Coffee Heaven, where I accidentally grabbed another guy’s latte that I thought was mine. Several apologies later, I had a seat and waited for 10:00 to roll around, when the Muzeum Ksiazat Czartoryskich would open. I went in and wandered around, seeing armor and weaponry captured from the Turks during the Battle of Vienna in 1683, ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts, and finally the Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo daVinci. What IS that animal?!
Moving along, I made my way to Wawel Hill, where I saw the castle and cathedral. While I was on the hill, I decided it was time for the one and only photo of myself during the trip, and the couple I approached to ask to do the honors was – amazingly – from about five minutes away from my apartment in Dublin! What a coincidence. We chatted for a while about traveling and Dublin and then parted ways. Next I finished my tour of the hill by finding the famous fire-breathing dragon, called Smok in Polish. I bought a ticket (for very cheap, fortunately) at the top of a tower and walked down a million spiraled stairs to walk through a “cave.” Stupid, really. I guess it’s more for kids. It WAS kind of scary, being that I was the only person in it and it was very dark and I was afraid I would trip and fall and never be heard from again. Anyway, the dragon is at the bottom of a hill where I could have just strolled up and seen it do its fire-breathing thing.
It was about 2:00 and I headed back toward Rynek Glowny, where I quickly walked through the Sukiennice (cloth hall) and bought myself a new ring in one of the stalls along the way. I stumbled upon a café just around the corner and ate barszcz (borscht) – a soup made of beet roots, which my Polish friends told me was one of the things I had to try. It was pretty gross. Imagine liquefied beets. Ew, right? It looked like steaming red wine in a soup mug. I was trying to have soup and a salad, so I asked for a roasted vegetable salad, which turned out to be just roasted vegetables. They were tasty, but for some reason she also brought me something she called a croquette, which was shredded meat in a deep fried shell. So much for eating a light lunch. Well, I couldn’t NOT eat the delicious fried thing that the nice lady brought to me.
After lunch I saw the inside of St. Mary’s Church, which is a huge cathedral in the middle of Rynek Glowny, and from whose tower an hourly henjal (bugle call) rings out. In the 1200s, a sentry in the watchtower saw Tatar horsemen approaching and as he played a warning call for the town, a Tatar arrow caught him in the throat and killed him. However, the town was saved by the call since it was able to prepare and fend off the Tatars. The bugle call that is played hourly every day is played in his honor, with the final note cut short. Pretty neat, huh? I sat in the church for a while, looking at the largest altar of its kind in all of Europe, carved by the Master of Nuremburg himself.
After the cathedral and the miles of walking I’d done that day, I went back to my hotel for a while to rest my aching knees and feet. I took a quick nap and watched some CNN and then went out for a light dinner – for real this time – of a Greek-type salad at Café Camelot. It was a good experience after the initial sinking of my chair leg into a hole in the wooden floor! Only me…
I went back to the hotel and got mentally prepared for Monday – my trip to Auschwitz. I read an article in one of the tourist books at the hotel about the camp and then moved on to my Hugh Laurie book. Before long I was asleep without the aid of earplugs. Apparently I was exhausted.
On Monday morning I ate breakfast and went to the meeting point. On the ride to Auschwitz, a documentary film was shown about the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II). The footage was shocking and absolutely appalling. I couldn’t believe that shortly I would be walking the grounds that the victims themselves had lived within, many dying there as well. The mood was somber, to say the least. It became even more real, as amongst the masses of tour groups was a group of students from Israel, wearing Star of David flags as they toured the camp. Another very peculiar thing that I noticed as I toured the camp was that the sun made its only appearance during my entire trip to Krakow. Ironic, I thought. Although I’ll describe a bit of what I saw, it’s hard to put into words such grisly sights. Among the more moving displays were the children’s shoes, which filled a large case in one of the buildings – thousands of little shoes in a pile bigger than you can imagine. Another image I won’t forget is the human hair – two tons of it in another case. Another room held piles of prosthetic limbs, confiscated from the prisoners by the Nazis. It was horrifying. The living conditions portrayed in the camp were beyond belief. My walk through the gas chamber was one I’ll never forget. After leaving Auschwitz I, we got back on the bus and went to Auschwitz II, Birkenau, three kilometers away. I couldn’t believe the size of it. Wooden barracks were lined up as far as the eye could see. It was a pretty quiet bus ride back to Krakow. The trip made my own problems seem so small.
The bus dropped me off at the edge of the city center, and I took the last few hours of daylight to wander Kazimierz, the old Jewish neighborhood with its synagogues and cemeteries. I thought it was appropriate.
As I left the “new” Jewish cemetery, I could see the towers of St. Mary’s in the great distance, so I began the long walk back to Rynek Glowny. My legs were hurting from so much walking and standing! It was about 6 when I got there, and I was starving. There had been no time for lunch during the busy day, and my appetite had caught up to me. After a quick rest in the hotel, I tried to go for dinner at Piwnica Pod Baranami, which some of my friends recommended. Apparently it was a bar, not a restaurant. It was pretty cool looking anyway.
I ended up at the local pizza joint where I had gnocchi with gorgonzola. Holy deliciousness. Not healthy, but I figured I could afford the splurge after all the exercise and starvation during the day. I called it a night early (pathetically early – I think I may have been asleep at 9:15) since I’d had such a big day.
Tuesday morning at breakfast in my hotel, I chatted with some Americans who had also been to Auschwitz the previous day. We talked about other parts of Europe they had seen and what all of us liked best. I thought, at one point, they were going to kill each other because the husband kept interrupting the wife as she was trying to describe stuff. It was funny. Awkward, but funny. And then I caught my flight home, where thankfully, no one was seated next to me. It was super-nice.
