Krakow

I went to Krakow with Lukasz in the weekend of the 21st of September to the 24th of September.

We flew with Sky-Europe from Amsterdam. The only remarkable thing from the flight was the amazing speed of the delivery of the English version of the in-flight messages. The words came at us like they were coming out of a fire hose, and it was utterly incomprehensible. It would probably have been better with a taped version of the messages.

We stayed at the Lemon Hostel in the center of Krakow. Very cheap, the room looked decent enough, although the walls were paper-thin. They also had some windows above the doors that would rattle like crazy every time someone was walking in the hallway outside. Across the hall from us were some really loud Greeks that would spend forever every morning getting up, chattering incessantly in very loud voices. This made it hard to get any sleep, as we would be partying every night until 3 or so, and the Greeks would start shouting around 8 in the morning.

We met up with one of Lukasz' friends, Paulina, and her boyfriend, Kuba. We walked through the main streets of Krakow, and then into a narrow alley, up some dark stairs, past some scary-looking dude with camouflage pants and a shaved head and suddenly we were inside this cool pub. We sat there talking and drinking for a couple of hours and met up with Sylwia, another one of Lukasz' friends.

We went to some other club(hard to remember those Polish club-names) and started dancing and doing vodka-shots. After a couple of hours Lukasz, Paulina and Kuba went to another club. A few shots later, the cherry vodka started to go to my head, so I found it best to leave for the hostel. Lukasz had given me the keys to the hostel and written down the address on notes stuffed in two different pockets. He had also sent me a SMS with the address. Obviously he was very worried about my navigational skills. What he does not know is that I have super-human navigational skills when I am properly drunk. It's kind of like a homing pigeon always knowing the way back. I walked back towards the hostel, and stopped to sample the local kebab. I always have less of a hangover if I snack on my way home, and this time I had the distinct feeling I might need a hangover-cure. Suddenly I received a SMS from Lukasz. I browsed through the SMS with my left hand, keeping a tight grip on the kebab with my right for balance when I heard someone screaming my name. Turns out, the club that Lukasz and the others had been in was right next to the kebab-shop, so we practically ran into each other on the way back. I wasn't the only one being drunk at this point, as the others tried to board a taxi to drive us the two blocks we had left to the hostel.

The next morning we had breakfast at a nice cafe called "Dynia" (If I remember correctly). The others tricked me into trying a Polish specialty for curing hangovers: a tall glass of beer mixed with Sprite. I'm not sure it helped all that much...

We started the day by walking around the city center up to the castle at Wavel. We went into the cathedral and down into the crypt to watch the graves of the famous Polish kings. We also went up into the tower to look at the Zygmunt bell, the biggest church bell in Poland, which is only sounded when significant events happen in Polish history.


We had a quick lunch at the market before going to Kazimierz - formerly the Jewish part of town, now mainly the entertainment-part of town. We had a stopover at a nice pub, downed some beers before going to an very nice Italian restaurant. From there we walked around until we found Sylwia's place. She was having a housewarming-party and naturally there were lots of vodka shots involved. After a few hours everyone went to a gay disco close to where Sylwia lived called Disco Plastic. We had the place almost to ourselves. It had a very nice party atmosphere with people dancing on the bar counter and lots of happy people drinking and dancing. We kept on dancing until four in the morning.


Sunday morning we woke up to the sound of the noisy greeks starting at 8 in the morning. We had breakfast at the same place, including the glass of beer and Sprite. It tasted better this day, maybe my hangover was worse?


We took a local train to visit the salt mines at Wieliczka. A miner guide took us down into the ground through a series of wooden stairs. We followed a very touristy route, complete with garden gnomes, salt statues and some hobo pretending to be the mountain king. "Stay away from my salt! Stop licking the walls!"

They also had a cathedral underground complete with a salt statue of John Paul II (The REAL pope according to my Polish hosts, not "that German guy"). The tour ended up in the gift shop - we had to queue up for the lifts up to the top floor to get back into the daylight. At the top we had to wait in a room for ten minutes before we could go outside without anyone telling us the reason why. Maybe they expected us to tip them or something?

We took a minibus shuttle back to Krakow and went to a very nice restaurant close to the market. The restaurant was serving traditional Polish cuisine and had many interesting dishes that I had not seen before. Here we also met up with Paulina's room mate Dominika. After a very nice meal, we went to a couple of pubs before ending up at a very cool club called Spokój. This club had a nice selection of booze, decent clientèle , 70's interior design and decent music (except for playing way too much U2). We met up with Sylwia after a while. Lukasz and I had a very nice time, drinking, talking and feeling the smoothness of the juice. We had a master plan of going to bed at 22.00 in order to get some sleep as we would have to get up at 04.00 to make our flight back to Amsterdam. With the pleasant company, and the drinking, we were having too much fun to be able to pull ourselves back to the hostel. None of us wanted to leave , and we ended up drinking until 01.00.

The flight back was painful, and in the evening I was really trashed, but it was totally worth it. Krakow to me was lots of nice clubs, gorgeous women, extremely cheap booze and decent food. It is definitely a city I want to go back to at some point.

My pictures

Lukasz' pictures