Friday morning our plans were to travel to Bolesławiec to buy some Polish pottery. Our trip was long:
- A 90-min train ride from Krakow to Katowice
- An hour wait for a bus
- An hour-long bus ride from Katowice to the airport
- A car rental
- A drive back to Katowice
- A 3-hour drive to Bolesławiec
- A mad dash around town to find information about the right pottery warehouse before they closed
We got to the pottery store at 4:20 pm. They closed at 5 pm. A German tour bus showed up right at closing time, so they stayed open for an extra half hour. Elisa and I used all the time to pick out a freaking cool tea set. We got some other fun stuff too.
For dinner we strolled around the center square and tried really hard to locate the source of a good crepe smell. We gave up and settled on really good pizza. The town square was really colorful. We hardly met anyone who spoke English or even German.
Our little compact car took 100 zł of gas (about $40) to fill up after the 3-hour drive. That was a surprise!
Day 2 in Krakow. Not so bad. We had a very lazy morning because we weren’t really looking forward to our sight-seeing options. We decided to hop on a bus and go to the Wieliczka Salt Mines. Besides trying to figure out where the bus stops were, which direction they were going and where you were supposed to get off–it was okay. I found myself saying a little prayer that people spoke at least German. No one did. I am much more capable and confident in speaking German than I realized.
The mines were so great! They were started in the 1200s and go hundreds of meters deep. We went as low as the third level of nine and were 300 meters underground. (800 steps 🙂 ) Miners had made sculptures of gnomes and other miners and world leaders and even Christ figures. A whole cathedral all carved out of salt! It was amazing! We had a great guide and had a lot of fun.
We spent the evening walking around the Old Town and eating hearty Polish cuisine–lots of cabbage. I got to try Borsch (a beet soup) and I liked it. We especially got a kick out of the ramekins of goose lard they would bring to the table with bread. Not too bad. We found some amber jewelry and laughed about how dumb it was that you had to pay to visit their church in the old square–it was very typical of our experience. We visited the former Jewish district. A small part of it was really nice but the majority of it looked plain scary.
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?
