2014 Travels: Krakow

Trip three of this year. I'd never considered Poland as a holiday destination but Nick, having been there before, was adamant it was worth a go. Who am I to argue? So in early June, it was off to Krakow.

We stayed in a lovely little hotel, The Regent, staffed by (mostly) English speaking people, close to a tram stop which took us into the city centre within 15 minutes: public transport in Krakow is fantastic! There were some gorgeous little restaurants nearby and we had mezze and cocktails here ->                    I could not recommend the area highly enough; there was a mix of bars and restaurants, almost all very reasonable and everywhere we went did fantastic food. Krakow is very easy on the pocket! Most local bars offer a variety of local or home made vodkas in a variety of flavours and both Mechanoff and Singer bars rated very highly for us indeed. They're great places to learn a few Polish phrases and while the night away with some fantastic quality drinks!  

The city is very picturesque at any time of day and, while the bars around the main square are predictably pricier than elsewhere, they're a lovely place to sit and enjoy a beer of an evening. We were very lucky with the weather while we were there, which definitely helped. We ate by the main square occasionally: Polish food is quite heavy but they do some nice things. Sharing some Pierogi with beers for lunch was pretty good; the Zapiekanka are tasty as a street food style of snack and Krakow is very well endowed with brilliant Ice Cream too. We also stumbled across a market selling gorgeous fresh fruit and, later on in our trip, an amazing antiques market: turns out that selling Gestapo and SS memorabilia in Poland is perfectly acceptable and, indeed, pretty common!

 There's a lot to see in Krakow itself but one of the basically obligatory trips while you're there is to Auschwitz - there are plenty of tours organised and most hotels will have contact details for one. The cost was about £25 per person for a full day trip, including guide and entry etc., and it was definitely worth getting a guide: ours was a fluent English speaker with some incredible stories to tell. Often harrowing, uncomfortable or painful, the tour really challenged us to think about what had happened here. It also gave me some insight into the history of Auschwitz that I hadn't previously known.



We also took part in a free walking tour with Tomasz, who had previously lived in Ireland, so his English had some unusual phrases added in! Needless to say, he was fluent and well versed in the history of Krakow, especially the WWII history. The 'Chairs' memorial on Plac Zgody was interesting, and the amount of fact included in Schindler's List was also pretty incredible: a lot of the film was shot in Krakow itself as, of course, it's set in the Plaszow Camp which was a few miles from the city. Apparently, there's little left of the Camp itself these days: whether that's a good or a bad thing is very much down to personal opinion.

We walked past many spots in Krakow that were used in the filming of Schindler's List, such as the staircase above, and eventually we got to one of the last remaining spots where the original Ghetto wall still stands. It was built in the shape of Jewish headstones; chilling in itself.

During our time in Krakow, we also visited the Oskar Schindler museum (basically obligatory!), which was pretty incredible, and featured testimony and eyewitness accounts from Polish Jews and non-Jews, including the director Roman Polanski, a Polish Jew himself who'd been incarcerated in the ghetto as a small boy. We also visited the Gestapo museum, a tiny place but well worth a look: there was an awful lot of incredibly moving information packed into a small space and the interrogation cells were just astounding. We also visited the Krakow history museum, under the Cloth Hall, for a bit of 'light relief' from all the war and suffering, and that was amazing too in its own way: it was incredible to see the foundations of the city from centuries ago; you'd never guess that a city's ground level would rise so quickly due to all the building.

Krakow was beautiful in so many ways - as a city that's recovered from the worst atrocities of our time, as a rapidly growing economy, as a historic place. Definitely somewhere we'll be going back to soon.