Krakow

I’ve been in Krakow now for two days (and I am spending a third before heading off for Lviv in the Ukraine tomorrow).  There is so much great stuff to do and to see in the city.  It’s kind of overwhelming.  Ha. After four rather slow-vacationy days in Olomost and in Wroclaw, it’s hard to get back in full tourist mode.  But I think that I ‘ve been managing to do a pretty good job of it.

I arrived to find my hostel not exactly what I expected (Greg and Tom’s Krakow). I knew that it had just opened and their description on hostelworld.com said something like: we’re still working on the finishing touches. And the reviews on the site were good.

It turns out the hostel I am staying in is still under pretty major reconstruction and they didn’t make it that clear how much they were still doing on the hostel in their ad on line. The location is great but the bags of concrete or maybe bags of plaster and the sheet rock in the hallway is pretty bad. Oh and the construction starts at or before 8am (even today–a Saturday).  Some of this is stuff that I could over look if they were up front about it but really? You’re making me pay for this!? More or less it feels like one of my parents home remodeling projects where they decide: we’ll do this one little project but then they decide while we’re doing X we should also do Y and Y results in doing Z as well and all of a sudden the whole house is a mess and there’s dust every where, cans of paint on the floor and a little path to walk through to get through the house.

The worst part is that the hostel got such great reviews online and in the Lonely Planet guide.  I guess that I shouldn’t have been too shocked that yesterday morning after standing the shower for 5 minutes and waiting for the water to get hot, I got out wrapped a towel around me to tell the guy at the desk that I thought there was something wrong with the boiler. He said: oh yeah its broken. Thanks for not saying anything to me about this when I walked by the first time in my towel. He did offer another shower for me. I got a hot shower in a set of rooms the hostel runs half way down the street so at 7am he leads me down there in a towel. Past a little grocery store–luckily, I didn’t have my contacts in so I couldn’t see how people were looking at me in my bright red towel.

The thing is I could look for something else but I would rather not waste my time looking for something else when there is so much other good stuff to see. And frankly the location is great (and I am sure when all of the work is done it will be a great place to stay).

So rather than obsess too much about things I’ve taken to the city.  On the first day, I bought a walking tour guide to the Jewish ghetto (made famous by Schindler’s List) and gave myself a self-guided tour.  This part of the city is much smaller feeling and the streets and the buildings are much closer together.  The synagogues are pretty beautiful and the museums while small I felt were totally worth checking out.  The day was beautiful.

That night I went on a pub crawl organized by the hostel and another tourist agency.  I wasn’t sure what to expect but the group was small and everyone was really friendly.  Luckily for me the group was happy to have a few drinks and check out a couple of different bars but it wasn’t a group of people dead set on drinking heavily.  We tried a couple of different vodkas.  I had one that was a coffee vodka. Pretty cool but even cooler was the fact that it was flaming. Basically they put vodka in the glass and then five or six whole coffee beans and set the vodka on fire.  This infuses the coffee flavor into the vodka and warms up the shot.  Then you’re given a straw to drink the shot while it’s still flaming. Okay, I’ve never seen anything like this. I could only think to myself: these Polish people are nuts.  That and I was told that I had to drink it before the straw melted. Um, okay? Well, all said and done, after watching our guide do it, I did and it was pretty easy but I don’t think that I am going to get into the flaming shot craze. I don’t like the fire part that much.

The next day, I went to Auschwitz- Birkenau on a guided tour.  It was what I expected on some level and totally unexpected on another level. I am not exactly how to put it.  I think that the place is overwhelming in size and walking through the camp it’s amazing to think about what happened there.  I just wasn’t as impressed by the museum but this may have been because it’s 60 years old and the only other point of reference I have is the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.  Still, the whole thing all together was too much for words and the fact that the last thing you do on the tour is walk through gas chamber is pretty unsettling.  Needless to say, I cried on the group tour and will remember the experience for a long time.

Today, I am going to see the Wieliczka Salt Mines and I am looking forward to this.  I’ve heard that you can even lick the walls of the mine on tour.  I will be doing this.  Only I plan to stand on my toes and lick the wall as high up as possible–this way maybe I can avoid licking the same spot as someone before me.  If not, I am telling myself that salt kills germs so I am not really going to worry too much about it.  Then tonight there is a big open air Jazz festival happening so I’ll definitely be checking that out as well.

Okay, I am off to start my day!