Saturday 10 August 2013

Krakow Calling!

So I've finally written this blog post, I have no excuse for why I didn't do it sooner, I have the attention span of a drunk goldfish. Anyway hope you enjoy day one, planning to do one of these a week, I give myself a week!

Now anyone that knows me will know that I am definitely not, in any shape or form, a morning person. It’s rare that I am up before 10 o’clock, and when I am I cant say that I am a social person to be around. But with an early flight I had to be up, if not social. I won’t go into detail about the airport, it was just standard early morning airport, we had a Panini (which I feel is a necessity in any airport) and after being informed that you can in fact get hay fever in Poland we were on the plane. It was a pretty standard flight although slightly worrying when the seatbelt signs came on midtrip, but we landed safely and that’s all that matters.

We got our bags quite quickly after arriving and headed straight to the city centre, here we encountered our first slight problem. Polish people hate notes. Even though their currency mainly consists of notes, the man on the train was extremely grumpy and didn’t want to take our paper money, we were clearly behaving unacceptably. But after playing the dumb tourist he did take the offending notes, unfortunately this was not the only money mishap encountered during our journey, but that's a story for another day. 

Taking in the sites!

When we arrived in Krakow we found the hostel quite easily, although we thought it took us a while, the 15 minutes it took to find it were nothing in comparison to the 3 hours it would take us in Munich, if only we had known that 15 minutes would by far be the fastest journey to a hostel! In Krakow we stayed in the Blue Hostel, at about £12 for a night it was a decent price for what we got, a decent sized room (we were given a room for four although there were three of us), there was free wifi, breakfast, the showers were good and the staff were friendly so I would definitely recommend the hostel to anyone planning on staying in Krakow. 
A couple of tweets from the day

After getting ourselves sorted we went to explore the town and get some food, there are so many restaurants and cafes to choose from in the main square it was nearly impossible, with all of us being quite indecisive, but they were all around the same price and selling similar food. When we settled down to eat we had our first experience of a street performer, although I’m not sure he can be called a street performer. The strange man playing the violin extremely badly was just making his way down all the restaurants playing exactly the same song, it would have been tolerable if we only had to listen to it once but because the buildings were so close to each other we had to listen to the terrible tune a good four or five times before he was out of earshot. 

Happy to finally get some food!

We then headed down to the Old Town and Jewish quarter where we found Schindler’s Factory, it was really interesting and one of the biggest museums I’ve ever been in, I would definitely recommend a trip there if you are in the area. It was really worth the entry price and full of exhibitions and interactive displays.

Dan in Schindler's Factory, looking at messages from people helped by non-jews

A little later in the evening we headed back to the main square and saw a variety of entertaining street acts including musicians, street dancers and a ballerina with a unicorn head, I’m not sure what the last one was meant to be. It was just scary.

The extremely organised Pub Crawl in the background wasn't part of the act


Terrifying Unicorn

We had quite an early night in Krakow since we were all tired from the early morning and we had managed to pack quite a lot into one day. At least it would have been an early night if it hadn’t been for the overly loud Germans next door. I wish that had been the end of the irritating roommates. It was only the beginning. 

                          Weird Sign of the Day




For more information on the Blue Hostel Click Here

For more information on Schindler's Factory Click Here

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Credit for most of the photos goes to @dan_magid who had a much better camera than me, and is pretty good at taking photos!

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