Kamila agreed to walk with us to the train station after hearing of our snafu in Warsaw. She had to get up early to go to her university to apply for reinstatement anyways, so it wasn't a big inconvenience for her. We got dressed, slowly descended the stairs still half asleep, and were abruptly awoken upon exiting the building into the freezing cold. We trudged through snow and ice to the train station. The ticket office and big board were in a separate building near the tracks. Kamila took our tickets to the desk and showed them to the lady to find out if our train was real or not. Again, the questions of where the tickets came from and statements that the train at that time doesn’t exist. We only had to wait an our for a train we could take that headed for another city and made a stop in Krakow. We passed the hour having some coffee and watching the local bums try to get a cup of coffee out of the others waiting and busily checking the change slot for discarded money. The big board with train times was the old kind that made tons of noise every five minutes as it updated. The train finally arrived and it was quite old. The compartment was closed but cold and there was no heat to warm it up. Again, we had an interesting array of people who came and went with good and bad smells. The train was late arriving because of a thirty-minute stop in Katowice but we finally made it. Our host was a Canadian girl named Rachel and her Aussie roommate Sami.
They turned out to be incredibly nice and were hosting another guy from Mississippi during our stay. It was nice to get a bit of home and find some people you share some commonalities with. We spent our first evening in Krakow wandering through the Christmas markets at the main square. Iz finally broke down and bought herself some amber jewelry after finding a bracelet that fits her unusually small wrists. She has almost lost it twice now. We had dinner with our new hosts at a local Polish cuisine style restaurant. We probably fifteen euros for a meal that would have been double that in Spain and it was quite tasty. We even got to try some dessert pierogis stuffed with bananas and apples.
On Thursday, we spent the day in Auschwitz and arrived back in time to get some nice sunset pictures of the main square. We had some drinks that night and tried the Polish drunk food called Zapakanka. It’s a long half of a baguette style bread covered with cream of mushroom, cheese, and whatever else you want. I ordered green onions, mayo, and garlic sauce and paid a whopping 1.50 for it. I could easily get used to these prices. Friday was our only day to wander around the city before our train left at four to return to Warsaw. So on Friday morning, with the snow falling and wind blowing, we set out to discover the home town of the former Pope John Paul II.
Our first stop was the Wawel Castle. The castle is on the appropriately named Wawel Hill. It was built by orders of a man named Casimir III the Great. Now that's a hell of a name. The hill is even more famous as there is proof people were living there since the Paleolithic Age, 50,000 years ago. We were told by Rachel that the castle is supposed to house a Shakra point but that the public has no access to it. The castle was incredibly important up until the beginning of the 17th century when the capital status was stripped from Kraków and given to Warsaw. A bitter rivalry ensued and still exists between the cities over four hundred years later. We walked around the courtyard area and in the church part of the complex. The inside was nice and lined with lots of ornate statues and carvings.
After walking around the complex, we went in search for the dragon. It's supposed to be a statue of the dragon that lived in the cave below the Wawel Hill where the mythical figure Krakus founded the city. After visiting the castle and the hill, we made our to St. Mary's Basicila on the main square. It is similar to the cathedral in Wroclaw in style. It dates back to the 13th century but was rebuilt in the 14th century after damage sustained from the Mongol invasion mentioned in a previous post. That invasion also provides an interesting story in that the church plays a trumpet signal every hour instead of chiming bells to pay homage to a trumpeter who was shot in throat when he tried to warn of the coming invasion. Ouch.
The inside of the church provided some warmth but not a whole lot. There are two options for visiting this Basilica. One, pay to go in, something I still find hard to do since most churches are free to visit and all should be that way. I guess some didn't get the memo. Two, go through door that says for prayer only and see the place for free. The inside, like most churches, is quite ostentatious and overly decorated. But then again, this is the home town of a Pope so I guess it's to be expected to see churches lavishly decorated. We checked out a few more buildings around the square, watched a choir practice for their concert that night, and had some more food at the Christmas market. Listening to a vocal performance in those old cathedrals is really quite soothing, even if you have no idea what they are singing about. We concluded our visit by passing our last couple of hours with Rachel and Sami before heading off to the train station to see if a train to Warsaw was actually at the time we were told. It was albeit a bummer when we found the type of train it was. We had a moment where we were riding in pitch blackness as the lights on the train went out after it was already dark, quite an interesting experience. The whipping wind and snow outside didn't make us feel good at that point but we made it back to Warsaw and had a hell of a time getting home with delays and such but finally arrived around midnight on Saturday. Overall, Poland was a great place and we'd love to visit again, but only in the summer months.
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