Me, Myself, and Denmark: Seventeen in Kraków

In my Danish language class there were three Polish physicists: Marcin A, Marcin F, and Andrzej. I don't know how it all came about but they ended up planning on going back to Poland and so several of the people from my language class and several of the people that we have met along the way decided to join them. In total we were seventeen people.

3 Polish, 3 Russian, 2 Brazilian, 2 Canadian,

2 from the UK, 1 Austrian, 1 Dutch, 1 Hungarian,

1 Slovanian and, 1 Swiss in the Malmo Airport

For being so many people, we actually stayed together for the majority of the trip. On our first full day in Kraków we went on a free walking tour of the city. Afterwards we went back to the Market Square and had a coffee, explored, and some of us shopped. We went for dinner at a Polish restaurant and the majority of us got a very Polish meal! There was about seven different kinds of meat, and a few potatoes. It was so good but I think that I got my fill of meat for the next month.

Market Square

The meal of meat

On Thursday we went to Auschwitz. It was a very sobering experience. It's hard to explain what we saw and especially writing about it on a blog wouldn't do it justice. We spent most of the day here. We left the hostel at 9.30 and got back around 15.30. Our hostel was about a five minute walk from a supermarket and that supermarket was across from Wisla River which Wawel Castle is on. So we had a picnic lunch there which was absolutely beautiful and refreshing.

The railway that brought people to the extermination camps

Picnic lunch in front of Wawel Castle

That night for dinner we split up and several of us went to a vegetarian restaurant in order to counter-act the mass amounts of meat that we had eaten the night before! I never thought that I would be able to be a vegetarian, but if all of my meals were this elaborate and delicious (and cheap) then I think that I would be able to survive!

At 6.15 the next morning several of us met Andrzej for a tour through the forest and some bird watching. The weather was absolutely amazing and the scenery was beautiful. We saw a fortress at the top of one hill, a zoo, the highest point in Kraków, and the "three nuns" (a legend of three nuns fleeing who prayed to God to save them from their enemies and so he turned them into rocks). It was a beautiful walk, and 5 hours later we returned to the hostel to meet Marcin A who showed us around the city and took us to Wawel Castle.

The legend of the three nuns

Bell tower in Wawel Castle

And finally on our last day in Kraków several of us met Andrzej again for a picnic breakfast in the park and flying his new kite. It was an acrobatic kite which I had never actually seen before (only read about it in the Kite Runner) and it was SO much fun! We spent over an hour there laughing and running and playing with the kite. Afterwards we all went our separate ways: home; shopping; walking around the city; and myself and two others went to the National Museum. They had a little bit of everything there: contemporary art, Polish art, and Polish history all the way from medieval to 20th century. And there were even opportunities to try on old armour!