Masz zgrabne posladki

So, Krakow has been quite a journey! I booked into my hostel for two nights but ended up staying 4! On my first day I just did my usual walkabout getting lost and discovering all sorts of great places including St Marys, the Jewish quarter, Wawel castle, the planty etc. I loved the city on first sight, the people are even more laid back than in the Czech republic and although it is very touristy here, it is not as crowded. The centre of town is surrounded by a strip of park which sits where the old city walls once were, it is gorgeous and apparently the place to hang out with friends and beers (though it is illegal to drink in public, so our guide said it would be best if we spoke some strange foreign language to the police if caught, or just run!) The town square always seems to have something going on. Like Vienna, there are loads of street performers, from demons, to levitating gurus, to silver painted skeletor figures. It is apparently the largest medieval square in all of Europe, and it is rather impressive with the cloth hall in the centre and St Mary's towering over it. I love all the little rivalries in this continent, the Polish argue that the Czechs have stolen their stories and traditions (for example the trumpeteer, the Polish one has been playing for hundreds of years, the Czech one, less than a decade!). Everyone also says, don't bother going to Warsaw, Krakow is better and they don't want us to get a bad impression of Poland by heading north! My hostel is a lot of fun too, the girls that work there are super friendly and on the first night they were doing lemon vodka tasting, who am I to opt out of that! They also have some strange characters that don't exactly stay in the hostel but hang out there nonetheless, they added to the atmosphere!

On my second day, I did the three hour walking tour with my train compartment buddies and we met another Australian girl and the Singapore contingent. The tour was great, our guide was very funny and spoke with almost a Borat accent (which of course inspired us to do the same for the rest of the day!). Every hour a guy plays the trumpet from the top of St Mary's tower, the legend is that the melody is cut short to honour a trumpeteer from the thirteenth century that was shot in the throat with an arrow, however according to our guide that is not quite right, no one knows exactly why it gets cut short, but the legend was spread by an American journalist who asked his tour guide why it was like that and she made up the story, he then wrote a book about Krakow and included it. Who knows what the true story is but I like to think that a little white lie has made its way into the Lonely Planet! After the walk we went to a cute little restaurant and tried out the typical Polish dishes with strange dolls watching over us. We had planned on doing the afternoon walk to the Jewish quarter too, but we missed the starting point and couldn't find them. The food here has been great, though I don't think I have ever eaten so much cabbage in my life. I have tried cabbage dumplings, cabbage leaf rolls, cabbage salad etc! What else to do but make our own tour and call it the bullshit tour. On our tour we pointed out shoes worn by some famous communist, pigeon courtship rituals and playgrounds of the rich an famous. I have not laughed so much in a long time, hard to explain, it was really one of those days that you had to be there to understand, but think along the lines of making up musical jingles about circumcision, practicing our new polish vocab with a Borat accent and just generally taking the piss.

We may not have found the tour group, but we did find the Schindler factory. I thought it would just be about Schindler and the history of the factory, but it was an incredible exhibition all about Krakow under occupation, was well worth the trip and we spent hours wandering around until the kicked us out at closing time. To finish off a brilliant day we went out drinking. Our last stop was Carpe Diem, a basement bar decorated with motorbikes and motorbike parts. They had karaoke in one of the rooms and the boys even got up and sang Creep by Radiohead. It was pretty strange in there, but good strange, imagine a heap of guys all looking pretty tough with their shaved heads (of course with a strip of hair left down the back of their head) or long hair singing Iron Maiden, but then, the same guys got up and sang "We are the world" by Michael Jackson! Odd but oh so fun. We had learned some rather interesting Polis phrases on our tour such as the title of this page, how to say "May I have the pin code to your heart" and "Thats not my baby, I don't know that woman". All very useful I am sure. It was the challenge of the night for every one to have a crack at saying it to a local, we all passed with flying colours and even had someone grab our vocab sheet and ask for the pin code in English! My brilliant hostel impressed once more, when I arrived back at 3:30 in the morning they informed me I had missed out on my soup but that was ok because they would just heat it up for me, where else do you get soup cooked for you at that time! Sadly I have failed miserably at all the planned challenges but who cares, the impromtu ones have been fun all the same!

Monday we went to Auschwitz. I am not even sure what to say about it, it was an unbelievably sad experience, there are not even any birds inside Auschwitz I, only outside the premises. I have always given birds a great deal of credit and I think it says a lot that they will not fly in the grounds. We went to Birkenau first and spent a couple hours walking around. Although there is little there now, most of it was destroyed by the Germans, it was still a surreal experience. What struck me most was how pretty the area is, I did not expect that at all and it was a strange contrast to what had happened there. I don't think I will ever be able to look at train tracks in the same way ever again. The museum at Auschwitz was an eye opener, we spent a good few hours walking through the exhibits, sometimes with tears in our eyes. There were moments when I thought, I can't do this, I can't go into another room and see more, of course I continued anyway but it was heart breaking. Along the corridors between the rooms were row upon row of photos of those that passed through. Under their picture was a name, date of arrival and date of death, I could not stop staring at them trying to find one that survived, but most did not make it more than a month or so from their arrival, some managed to reach a year but very few. I could say much more but most people know the dreadful history and remembering it is bringing tears to my eyes even now. It was a poignant reminder of the capacity of human beings to be on the one hand amazingly resilient and kind but on the other monster like, it was impossible to really comprehend what we were seeing let alone get our heads around how it was possible.

Today I am heading off to Zakopane, am really looking forward to getting out of the cities and into the mountain air! Two weeks in, and I am having the time of my life. Each place has been different but every one has touched me in some way. I will really miss Krakow, it has been oh so kind to me and it is one of the most magical cities I have ever visited. Krakow, I will be back one day!