Elisa and I took the overnight train from Prague to Krakow. Compared to what I was expecting, we had a roomy comfortable compartment. The lady that sold us our tickets had misunderstood us though, so we were only in possession of a ticket upgrade instead of a real ticket. We were thankful that we had enough cash on us to buy our tickets from the conductor. During the night we worried that we would sleep too long and miss Krakow. Every time the train stopped we would both wake half-way up and listen for whether we had arrived. Finally I remembered to set an alarm so I could just rest for the last few hours of the trip.

Krakow didn’t impress us very well. We arrived at 6 am so the town was dead. We were pretty tired too. Our first sight-seeing destination was the old Wawel castle in the middle of Old Town. We took the kind of tour that always drives us nuts: everyone walks really slowly through an old building, learning uninteresting facts about faded tapestries (which weren’t even from Poland to begin with). I was not a happy person. We decided not to go through the other two exhibits we had already paid for because they were so stinking boring. What a waste! But we did go through into a pretty cathedral and climbed up its bell tower. The bells were enormous! After that we hiked down into a cave where their legends of dragons have come from.

Next Elisa and I checked in to our hotel and took a nap for a couple hours. Our original hotel had been over-booked and they sent us across town to a different one. We kind of missed out on the prime time for seeing the city. But we were exhausted. Then in the evening we went out again for food and window shopping. We were hoping that there would be a lot more sightseeing that would be fun for us. We were also hoping to have more luck finding some local amber jewelry. Only about half of the shops we have seen have people that are nice to us and/or speak English. My first impressions of Poland have been kranky people in a city that still has not recovered from the World Wars and communism.

We discovered another pet-peeve of mine–city names. It is so dumb that we do not learn the real names of cities. Instead we learn the Anglicized names. We went to Wien, Praha and Kraków on our trip. Why do Americans call them Vienna, Prague and Cracow?