Arvi ja Leah aeg reisimiseks: Kraków

18/10/13- 22/10/13

We were a bit unsure about how we would get to Krakow from Ždiar with busses to our stop over town Zakopane in the south of Poland having been cancelled the week before. We caught a bus to the boarder town and into Poland we went. All we had to do was walk across a bridge with a little Poland sign to the awaiting mini bus on the other side. Piece of cake.
We had a couple of hours to kill in Zakopane so we walked around the old town, which turned out to be quite a fancy alpine ski village. We ate some traditional Polish food and had cherry vodka tea and hot wine in big, log cabin style cafés.

Beautiful Zakopane

An alpine town.

A short 3-hour comfortable Polski bus ride later we were in Krakow. We stayed in a very new hostel that offered free dinner every night and had a pub downstairs.

The first night was cool because by chance we ran into a friend football friend from Wollongong who was also traveling. So we hung out together along with some other hostel guests and another Australian that we found out had Estonian heritage.

Old city wall

During our time in Krakow we enjoyed trying some Polish food in cafes, walking around old town and foraging through the flea markets in the Jewish quarter. We choose to abort the free walking tour early (about half the group had the same idea) because we were on the verge of being bored to death! Instead, we walked around the autumn coloured parks surrounding old town and visited the castle and fortress ourselves. We also sampled some of Krakow’s nightlife, visiting some cool hipster- like bars and finishing our night like the Polish do, with a freshly made Zapiekanka. This was like a halved baguette topped with a topping and sauce of your choice, delicious!

pretty parks

cute cafes

Polish fast food

old town

building inside the fortress

One of our most interesting and eye opening days in Krakow is when we took a tour to two of the Auschwitz Concentration Camps. Auschwitz was one of the handful of camps labeled ‘extermination camps’ which were built with the aim of killing people on a large scale, primarily people with Jewish heritage. Even though the Nazis destroyed many buildings in both camps when they realized they were losing the war, there is still plenty of evidence of the horrific events that took place here. One of the most moving things we saw on our tour was a room of different possessions of the people who were sent to the gas chambers, including almost 2 tones of human hair. These items were sent back to Germany to be resold if they were in good enough condition and hair was made into ladies hairnets. A very shocking but eye-opening experience.