Krakow - Poland's Prague
I left Poprad Tatry in a van from a bus station down by the river. Budget travelers should check out similar van transportation companies. They operate all over Europe. They are cheap, fast, and provide an opportunity to chat with other, mostly younger, budget travelers. The van traveled around the eastern end of the High Tatras. Since both Poland and the Slovak Republic are in the European Union, there is no longer a border post to check you in and out, but you know you have entered Poland by the change in the types of houses along the road. In this part of Poland there are many houses made from squared out logs. The Slovak Republic, on the other hand, sports more Tudor style half timbered architecture.
The Krakow bus station is next to a large , modern shopping mall. I walked through the mall to the busy street outside. I then proceeded to get lost for the next 3 hours. There’s no point detailing how this occured. It happened to me over and over again on this trip. My underlying problem was that I always arrived at a new city with no city map and no cell phone to guide me. I would have to guide myself by what I remembered from my research when I put the trip together at home. Since most of the cities I visited sat on a river, I would memorize where my hotel sat in relation to the river. If I found the river, (which was usually pretty easy), I would find my hotel. At least that was the plan. I found Krakow’s river easily enough, and since my hotel sat next to the river I had a 50/50 chance of finding it if I turned left or right. Unfortunately I turned left when I should have turned right and walked nearly to Krakow’s suburbs before admitting I had made a mistake. It turned out that I was almost on top of my hotel when I reached the river. I couldn’t see it because it was tucked in behind the Wawel Royal Cathedral/ Castle which was next to my hotel.
The Sheraton Hotel where I stayed was well worth finding. It was modern, comfortable, and provided an extremely knowledgeable desk staff. I wasn’t able to stump them with any of my rather arcane questions. When I purchased my bus ticket from Krakow to Lvov on line but had no way to print it out, a desk clerk had me send the ticket as an email attachment to the front desk where they printed it out for me. One minute and solved!
Despite the helpfulness of the hotel staff, Krakow did not end up being one of my favorite cities. Like Prague, the problem was the legions of tourists that infested the city. If you wanted to throw a kolacz rather than eat one, you couldn’t do so without hitting a tourist. (No I didn’t try. Kolacz’s taste too good to throw away).
As in Prague, Krakow was covered by groups of tourists following a raised umbrella or flag, and wearing childish uniforms so as not to get lost. Even after wandering around lost for three hours, I still considered myself lucky not to be drafted into one of those groups. I would rather be a lost adult than a comfortably located child. The tourists I saw were treated so much like infants that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I saw some guide make them all hold hands like children on a 2nd grade field trip.
Krakow’s second drawback was the large street construction project that extended south-east from the Royal Castle to the old Jewish ” Kazimierz” quarter. Street after street was transformed into 15 foot deep canyons with rickety wooden bridges crossing over them at intersections. The sidewalks were often nothing more than piles of sand. Although the Old Town main square and its tourist sites were not part of these excavations, crossing through the excavated area while dodging the tourist armies who were also interested in visiting the Jewish quarter was irritating at best.
My final problem with Krakow was a minor one. The craft beer in Krakow was the worst tasting stuff I had any where in Eastern Europe. Even the Ukraine sold better beer. For some reason the craft beer pubs in Krakow decided to imitate the traditions of British Pubs. The beer was warm and not very carbonated. They even used British type beer taps where you have to pump the handle in order to get any beer out of the keg.
I had to admit, though, that the area around the Old Town Square was impressive.
(Left click mouse over pictures to enlarge.)
I found the old Jewish quarter even more interesting than the area around the Rynek Glowny. It was an interesting mixture of the old, the new, and the recreated. I ate at an Israeli restaurant there, (certainly a relatively new resident of the quarter), which offered a menu of food that seemed as much Arabic as Israeli. Perhaps the restaurant was making a statement that Arabs and Israelis have more in common than is generally admitted. +
Then there was an old Jewish synagogue and cemetery which had somehow survived the second World War and both were busy with tourists when I passed by. Finally, a restaurant in the quarter that was highly recommended by the guidebooks had recreated a series of small Jewish business facades typical of the prewar period for its exterior. In the evening this restaurant offered live klezmer music after dinner on some nights.
In an effort to experience a darker side of Krakow’s Jewish history I crossed the Vistula river to the area where the Nazis built a ghetto to hold Jewish residents until they could be moved to concentration camps for execution. Most of the buildings from the ghetto era have been torn down, but a part of the ghetto wall and an apothecary that provided medicine to ghetto residents still remains. The ghetto occupied a flat area next to the river that remains one of the more dismal parts of Krakow.
The neighborhoods became more affluent and cheerful as I climbed the hill behind the ghetto into an area filled with large parks. Nowhere, however, did I see many people walking the streets on this side of the river. The whole area exhaled a sad and ghostly atmosphere which was quite at odds with the busy and hopeful ambiance I found in the Kazimierz quarter on the other side of the river.
I crossed back over the river on a bridge that displayed several hanging sculptures and thousands of locked padlocks. You can see such padlocks on many bridges throughout Europe. After a boy and girl fall in love, they pledge to never separate, and to symbolize their eternal love they secure a pad lock on a bridge’s grating and throw the key into the river below. From the looks of this bridge, the river bottom must be covered with keys. This practice might cause a problem, however, if the couple eventually breaks up. Seeing the symbol of a failed relationship that once offered so much certainty each time you crossed the bridge must be rather painful. Some wise or possibly cynical couple may have found a way around this eventuality. Bike paths run under both ends of the bridge. As I left the bridge on the other side I looked down on the bike path and saw a shiny key lying in the middle of it. So much for eternal love. 😉
As I walked to the bus station to leave Krakow a day later, I saw neighborhoods that caused me to realize that the city wasn’t just an open air museum. It was a large city with a varied economic base where only a small percentage of its inhabitants worked in the tourist industry. Perhaps Krakow was not Poland’s Prague, after all. Maybe it was more like Brno: a place to live, work, and raise a family. All the locks on the bridge told me this might be true.
