Wednesday, May 23, 2012
We arrived in Poland, the first place on the trip that
Taylor had not already been, at 7am. The
train station was very poorly marked, and a nice, but clearly begging old man
tried to help us get to the train. We ended up having to be quite firm in
telling him to stop following us and trying to help us. Eventually, we got out of the train station
and found a line of cabs. Taylor had to
take money out of an ATM and we got a cab to our hotel. The price was 25 Polish Zloty, which are
about 3.5:1USD, so about $7, not too bad.
We arrived at Hotel Ester and were not able to check in yet,
as expected, so we washed up a little and headed out to see Krakow.
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| Our cute hotel room! |
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| Taylor liked this sign |
The first stop on any tour of Krakow is Wawel Castel (sound
familiar?). The castle was the
Coronation point and home of Polish Kings and Queens all throughout Polish
history. The castle grounds were
beautiful and thankfully the grounds
were open so we could wander around, because the castle didn’t even open for
another 40 minutes after we got there!
Once it opened, we bought our tickets to tour the Castle and
some related exhibits. The first things
we did was tour the private royal apartments and the castle staterooms. For the former, we actually got a tour with
an English-speaking guide who pointed out all of the period pieces and the
significance of the furnishings of the room, which was really interesting. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take
any pictures! The next exhibit was very
similar to the first except without a guide.
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| Castle Courtyard |
After our castle tours, we went to see a famous Leonardo
DaVinci piece that was on display at the castle, called Woman with a
Ermine. It was a really beautiful
painting with an even more interesting story.
Apparently, it is a portrait of the mistress of the Duke of Milan and
was painted during DaVinci’s lifetime (1500s, I think?) but it was actually
lost until about 1800 when a wealthy Polish nobleman bought it for his
wife. It took years before anyone saw it
and recognized it as a DaVinci and then they went to great lengths to protect
it during WWII and now it’s on display in a castle!
Next, we visited an exhibit called “Lost Wawel,” which
actually winds through an underground area and shows excavations of Wawel
castle from before the 1500s. It was
very interesting to see the castle and all of the artifacts found within it
during excavations over the years.
We climbed one of the defense towers of the castle and saw
some great views of Krakow before heading to an area called The Dragon’s Den,
which is really just a cold dark tunnel that drops you out on the Vistula River
next to a statue of a fire breathing dragon (that actually breathes
fire!). The presence of this Dragon’s
Den is apparently linked to the fact that Polish legend has it that Krakow was
founded on the site where a dragon was defeated (or something like that).
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| Wawel from the defense tower |
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| The fire-breathing dragon outside the Dragons Den |
After all these sights, we were quite tired and hungry, so
we went to a nearby restaurant for some pizza and potato pancakes.
After lunch, we headed back to our hotel, checked in to our
adorable hotel, took a shower and a quick nap to recharge and then we headed
out to see the Old Town Square of Krakow.
Krakow’s old town square is actually the largest medieval square in
Europe. It is 200meters square and feels
gigantic! Inside, it has St Mary’s
Churn, which is very big and a clock tower that is the only remnant of an town
hall that once stood there. There’s also
a beautiful building called The Cloth Market, which used to be a market for all
sorts of goods and is now a long line of souvenir stalls. It’s really pretty, even though I really
couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy.
We walked around the town square for a while and waited for
the hourly bugle call from the top of St Mary’s Church. The call is really nice, and it stops
suddenly (at a different point every time) to commemorate a time when the
castle was stormed during a call and the bugler got an arrow in his neck
(yikes!). We then went to see what we
had heard was a beautiful old courtyard of the University Jagglieon, the oldest
University in Poland and the place that Pope John Paul II graduated from after
taking classes covertly during the Nazi occupation of Krakow in WWII.
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| The University Courtyard |
We headed back to Old Town Square and went inside St Mary’s
and another beautiful church nearby. We
then went to visit this exhibit we had heard about called Rynek (which means
square, referring to the old town square) Underground. It’s similar to “Lost Wawel” in that it’s an
underground exhibit. The exhibit only
had tickets available for later that night, so we bought them and went to grab
dinner before heading back to see the exhibit.
Dinner was pierogis and spare ribs. It was very god and VERY filling.
We headed back for our time slot at Rynek
Underground, and boy am I glad we did!
It was such a fascinating look at the old town square back in Medieval
times. Basically, in 2005, they did a
huge excavation to find out what was underneath the town square. What they found were remarkably in-tact and
historically informing buildings, cobblestone pathways, and even the bodies of
individuals who were buried in such a way that it’s clear they were thought to
be vampires. The exhibit itself was so
well made, you actually walked on pathways past the old market stalls and
between layers of stone where you could actually see history stacked on top of
itself like sedimentary rock. They say
that the current town square is actually 2.6 meters higher than the old one,
due partially to the fact that people threw their trash all over the ground
because they did not have a good waste disposal system. It was incredible! And to think that the city of Krakow did all
of that excavation and research, designed, and built the exhibit in 5 years is
also fairly impressive.
Beautiful views of the square by night
After the exhibit, we headed back toward our hotel, got
changed, and went out near our hotel in the Kazmirez area of Krakow. It’s the old Jewish area, but is also known
as an up-and-coming area for young people to live and go out. We hit up a bar that the Lonely Planet
recommended. It was on a sort of square
with lots of other bars and in the middle was this large round building with
many windows selling late night food. As
we sat outside the bar we were at and did our people-watching, we noticed that
a lot of people were eating these long pieces of bread with melted cheese,
different toppings and sauces on them. They
kind of looked like French bread pizza but longer and a little narrower. We saw that they were called Zapiekanki and
vowed to return the next day to try them for lunch.
We headed back toward our hotel after a couple of drinks and
enjoyed some wine out on our patio before heading up to our room.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
On day two in Krakow we walked from our hotel across the
Vistula River to go to a museum housed in the enamel factory owned by Oscar
Schindler, the namesake of the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List. On our way, we passed through what used to be
the center square of the Krakow Ghetto where Jews were sent when the Nazi
occupation of Krakow began in September of 1939. Basically, the Nazi’s said that their
officers could not be expected to live side-by-side with Jews, so they sent
them all across the river. The told them
they could take all of their things, but when they got there, they realized
that 17,000 people were being forced to live where only 4,000 really could fit,
so most of their belongings were left in the square and stolen or pillaged by
Germans.
The museum wasn’t far from the square and it was
phenomenal. It tells the story of both
Oscar Schindler and his factory during the Nazi occupation, but also of the
city of Krakow during that time. Oscar Schindler was essentially a Nazi party
member, but sympathetic to the Jews, and he offered his factory to be an annex
of a concentration camp nearby, but he treated the Jews there very well and,
toward the end of the war when the Nazis started to suspect something was up,
he took 1,200 or so of his employees to another old factory that wasn’t even in
use and pretended that they were working for him in order to save them from
death. Pretty amazing.
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| Oscar Schindler's office |
The exhibit also had tons of info about how the German’s not
only occupied Krakow from 1939 to 1944, but truly overtook it in an attempt to
completely convert the city to a German territory (in addition to removing all
of the Jews). So they renamed all the
streets and the old town square became “Adolph Hitler Platz.” They closed all Polish schools and made them
German schools. They posted German and anti-Jewish propaganda all over the city
and opened stores selling images of Hitler.
It was kind of, no wait REALLY, nuts.
After the museum, we went to get our Zapiekankis for lunch
and they were amazing! Basically, the
base of all Zapiekankis is toasted breadk with a mushroom and cheese
topping. Then, you choose what meats or
veggies you want on it and what sauce you want on it. I got a
Grecka (Greek) with tomatoes, cucumbers and feta and then Dill
sauce. Taylor got salami on his and
garlic sauce. They were amazing! We decided that it would be the perfect kind
of think to sell late at night in a popular bar area in the U.S. And they were only like $3 each!
After lunch, we really just spend the afternoon relaxing and
enjoying the beautiful weather in Krakow.
We walked around Kazmirez and saw all the Jewish Synagogues and a
cemetery. We got beers at a café outside
and got ice cream and walked down by the river.
It was very nice and relaxing and it felt like we were really
experiencing city life.
At 5pm, we left our hotel to go to the train station for our
last city, Warsaw! The train, despite
some confusion with our ticket, was very smooth and the Polish countryside was
so pretty. We arrived in Warsaw at
around 9pm and got a cab to our hotel.
Our hotel was actually somewhat inconveniently located near the airport
and not very close to downtown, so we stayed in our hotel and grabbed dinner
(more pierogis!) and a drink before heading to bed.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Last day!! Can you
believe it!? Are you tired? Because I sure am! Our last day was a full day in Warsaw,
Poland’s capital city. Our first
impression of Warsaw is that it is much bigger than Krakow and Prague, with a
proper downtown with skyscrapers that we could actually see from our hotel
room. However, after taking the bus in
to the middle of the downtown and old town area, we were very impressed with
how clean and quaint it actually was.
Our first stop was a museum that we heard from the Lonely
Planet offered an English-language video every day at noon detailing the
wartime destruction of Warsaw. It was a
great way to start the visit because it gave us such an appreciation for how
beautifully the city was restored from, literally, total destruction. In the video, we learned that after the fall
of Warsaw, the Germans literally tried to wipe it off the map. The city was so destroyed that no one even
lived in it for a solid 3 months after the fall. Slowly but surely, though, people started to
return and revive the city.
Our first stop was the old town market square, which was
full of cafes and men selling paintings.
The square was much smaller than Krakow but still very pretty.
From there, we walked to an area called the Barbican, which was an old fortress and one of the entrances to the city. You can actually walk along the city wall for a little while and it’s a really pretty area.
We walked through old town to the Royal Castle (number 3!)
and the Castle Square area. The Royal
Castle in Warsaw was completely destroyed in WWII, and it was restored from
1971 to 1984, when it opened to the public as a museum. Because it has been restored, this castle
truly looked like a castle inside. They
took care to re-construct every room with as much accuracy as possible (relying
on paintings or sketches or written descriptions of the rooms as
available). The rooms were beautiful,
opulent, and very interesting, and they had great descriptions in each room
(they were even in English!). We even
got to go in the room where the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791 was
enacted. I didn’t know this, but it was
actually the first true Constitution in European history and the second in the
world only after the United States!
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| Where the Constitution was enacted |
After the castle, we went in nearby St. Ann’s Church where
you are able to climb the bell tower and see awesome views across Warsaw,
including the stadium where the Euro Cup will be played in June.
From there, we headed out of the old town
area and down a road called Royal Way.
Along it, we attempted to go to the Museum of Charicature, which we did
manage to walk in to and even look in one of the galleries before a not-so-nice
Polish gentleman came to tell us they weren’t open (why were the doors unlocked
then? We do not know).
We then passed the President’s Palace and went to the Church of the Holy Cross, which contained probably the strangest thing we saw on our trip…the heart of composer Frederick Chopin. Yes, his heart. Now, we didn’t actually see his heart. It’s in an urn in the wall behind a plaque that says “Here lies the heart of Frederick Chopin.” Apparently when he died, there was some issue where his body could not be buried in his native Poland, so it was his wish that at least his heart be kept there. So it is.
After seeing Chopin’s heart, we went to Saxon Gardens, a
very nice park and just relaxed for a bit.
Then we grabbed some ice cream and decided to head back to the old town
square for a beer in the sun before dinner (notice the pattern…eat, drink,
eat…repeat).
For dinner, we walked further from old town and toward the
new hip and trendy area of town and went to a Mexican Restaurant recommended by
the Lonely Planet. I should know not to
go for Mexican in Europe, but the LP usually isn’t off on their recommendations
so we tried it. It was bad per se, but it wasn’t that good
either. Except the margaritas, those
were pretty good. After dinner, we went
to one more bar and had a carafe of wine before catching the bus back to our
hotel.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
After a VERY long and tiring trip, we figured we were due
some indulgence, so we reserved the hotel Jacuzzi and sauna for Saturday
morning before our flight and got up early to relax our cares away. It was very nice and a good end to our
trip. We caught at 10:30am shuttle from
our hotel to the airport and boarded our 12:40pm flight to Amsterdam right on
time. We had a 3 hour layover in
Amsterdam, but fortunately the airport there is actually pretty amazing. They have tons of great areas for relaxing
with comfortable furniture, TVs, free internet, you name it! They even have a casino! Our flight from Amsterdam to New York took
off right on time and I am sitting here in the tail end of it now finishing up
my recounting of our trip. We should get
back to Taylor’s parents house tonight around 9pm and will probably leave
sometime in the late morning tomorrow to drive back to Ann Arbor. We can’t wait to see our pup, sleep in our
bed, and be HOME for a while. It was a
great trip!!
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