Krakow, Poland

Based on a few things we heard, we decided to skip Warsaw and head straight to Krakow, the ancient capital of Poland. The overnight bus ride from Vilnius to Krakow was our longest yet – 12 hours! While it's still Eurolines, the bus was just slightly inferior to the ones running between the Baltic countries. And forget wi-fi. Instead, we got to watch Flight Plan in Russian (by the way, one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time).

We found an apartment rental site and got a studio apartment for around $85 per night – a lot cheaper than staying in hotels and also a lot less than what we were paying in Croatia and Montenegro but so much nicer. Our studio (Apartment Violet) was nicely decorated and had all the modern amenities, including a dishwasher and a washing machine! It's nice when you're on the road to have a place that feels more like a home. And the washing machine came in handy as we were in need of doing laundry. After this place we're sold on the apartment rental concept. We only wish we had found out about this earlier.

Enough of the mundane details. After a short nap we headed out to check out old town. You'd think after 3 old towns in a row we'd get tired of them, but Krakow is different yet again. Krakow was spared during the two World Wars so much of the old buildings remain. It is very touristy, but the main market square is huge so it's a lot of fun just to people watch.

There was a cultural celebration in the main square with folk dancing, etc. At one point I thought the performance was over as the dancers walked off the stage. One of the men came towards me and extended his hand, and I took it thinking he wanted to shake hands with me. It turned out the danders were pulling people out of the audience to be their dance partners, so I got dragged on stage to dance in front of the crowd! I didn't do too poorly... my sandals only slipped off once.

And what's a festival without traditional food. Here are some vendors selling traditional Polish food. Yummm!

(Josh this picture is for you)

Before WWII, Krakow had one of the largest Jewish neighborhoods, so we walked around the old Jewish neighborhood, Kazimierz. It's now developing into a trendy part of town with bars and restaurants and outdoor concerts, etc. There is also a ghetto across the river where the Jews were forced to move to from Kazimierz, Padgorze. When the Germans came, they built a wall around a section of Padgorze and forced all the Jews to live within that area. Today only a small part of the wall remains, an there is also a memorial in one of the squares, but it's definitely off the tourist route and there were only a few signs pointing out the sights. Schindler's factory (as in the movie Schindler's list) is a short distance from this area and the Jews that worked there and were saved by Schindler live in Padgorze. We didn't have map of the neighborhood, so it took us a while to find the wall and the factory. It's still a working factory, but you can't see much because there's a lot of construction around it as they were renovating the museum.

Continuing on this communist theme that we've picked up unintentionally (and also because we were a bit tired of old towns and wanted to see something different), we headed to another part of Krakow called Nova Huta (aka Nowa Huta). Nova Huta was built during the communist era by the Soviets as a model of Social Realist upban planning. In other words, it was supposed to be THE model communist community - a “perfectly” planned community where even the number of schools and other services (post office, markets, etc) were calculated exactly to match the population. It's a great example of how Soviet communism may sound good in theory but is so impractical: this community was built for workers, so they also built a steel factory for the workers to have a place to work, except that there are no iron ore, the raw material needed to make steel anywhere near Krakow.

The buildings are so blocky and blah that it was a bit depressing to walk through. I have no pictures to show because I didn't even feel like taking pictures. There is one church that was interesting – in defiance to the communists, this church was built to look like Noah's Arc fell on top of the Communist designed church (use your imagination).

Sadly, the uniform, block buildings remind me of some planned developments today I've seen in various countries... and those were not planned by the communists!

We stayed in Krakow for a total of 5 days, including a day trip to Auschwitz. In hind sight 4 days would have been perfect, but we made use of the extra time by taking it easy. Besides, we were really loving having a nice, homey place to go back to at night.