Krakow revisited.
OK, I've left a recap of our trip to Krakow way too long, but I'll do my best to catch up now.
We got into our hostel late on Tuesday night, mainly thanks to a couple of girls who noticed our furtive glances and hopeless pointing into the distance and figured we were tourists. They sorted us out with directions and one of them even went so far as to get off the bus a stop early and show us where to go. Which was nice.
Our hostel room was in the attic, which seemed a little bit Anne Frank at first but turned out to be great, seeing as it was quiet, had a viewish and was framed by hundred year old beams. It was called the Pigeon Coop which, I guess, made sense of a sort.
When we got up and had finished breakfast, we ventured out into the rain. Rain and snow were the default weather settings on our visit. Never mind, let's move on.
Krakow gets older and more ornate the closer in to the centre you get. Where we were based there was an over-riding sense of being in a 1960s council estate or 1980s East Germany. Moving towards the town square, the general architecture got closer to something I described to K as being like "Copenhagen after a war". I think I used a more diplomatic turn of phrase on Flickr and used the term "faded glamour". Krakow is a Miss Havisham of a city.
Fortunately, both K and I love decaying glamour and architecture and taking a ludicrous number of photos of said decay.
(Incidentally, one of the buildings we passed on our way into the city had a different sort of decay - the University has a bloody nuclear reactor in it...)
So if you're only in Krakow for a short while, here's what to do. Take a shed-load of photos; eat as much as you like (because, honestly, you can afford it); buy amber for anyone who has a birthday in the next year because, again, you can afford it (go to the Cloth Hall for this) and visit the Jewish Quarter.
There's a few sights in my life that have moved me more than I can say, and the old cemetery in the Jewish Quarter is one of them. Bulldozed by the occupying Germans, the walls are now built from the fragments of thousands of headstones exhumed after the war. Like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, prayers are pressed into the gaps. Auschwitz is somewhere we plan to go to if we make it back to Poland, but the graveyard was somewhere we're glad we went to despite knowing nothing about it.
We got into our hostel late on Tuesday night, mainly thanks to a couple of girls who noticed our furtive glances and hopeless pointing into the distance and figured we were tourists. They sorted us out with directions and one of them even went so far as to get off the bus a stop early and show us where to go. Which was nice.
Our hostel room was in the attic, which seemed a little bit Anne Frank at first but turned out to be great, seeing as it was quiet, had a viewish and was framed by hundred year old beams. It was called the Pigeon Coop which, I guess, made sense of a sort.
When we got up and had finished breakfast, we ventured out into the rain. Rain and snow were the default weather settings on our visit. Never mind, let's move on.
Krakow gets older and more ornate the closer in to the centre you get. Where we were based there was an over-riding sense of being in a 1960s council estate or 1980s East Germany. Moving towards the town square, the general architecture got closer to something I described to K as being like "Copenhagen after a war". I think I used a more diplomatic turn of phrase on Flickr and used the term "faded glamour". Krakow is a Miss Havisham of a city.
Fortunately, both K and I love decaying glamour and architecture and taking a ludicrous number of photos of said decay.
(Incidentally, one of the buildings we passed on our way into the city had a different sort of decay - the University has a bloody nuclear reactor in it...)
So if you're only in Krakow for a short while, here's what to do. Take a shed-load of photos; eat as much as you like (because, honestly, you can afford it); buy amber for anyone who has a birthday in the next year because, again, you can afford it (go to the Cloth Hall for this) and visit the Jewish Quarter.
There's a few sights in my life that have moved me more than I can say, and the old cemetery in the Jewish Quarter is one of them. Bulldozed by the occupying Germans, the walls are now built from the fragments of thousands of headstones exhumed after the war. Like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, prayers are pressed into the gaps. Auschwitz is somewhere we plan to go to if we make it back to Poland, but the graveyard was somewhere we're glad we went to despite knowing nothing about it.