Friday: Krakow, Ireland

This is the final post in my account of my travels to Eastern Europe. If you haven’t read the first one yet, I recommend you read ‘Eastern Europe: Venice, Ljubljana’ before this one.

I woke up early on Friday, the last morning of the trip. Our flight was scheduled for 12:20, so I had a little time before I had to go to the airport.

I had been feeling a little disappointed by the previous day’s tour of Krakow. I felt like we hadn’t seen a lot of what Krakow had to offer, so I had some of the excellent Greg and Tom Hostel breakfast and headed out to view the city on my own.

It was gloriously liberating to be alone, even if it was only for an hour or so. I’d been traveling with 5 other people for a full week now, and it felt great to go at my own pace, go wherever I wanted. I went back through the city center, and made it all the way down to the castle in Krakow, a 500 year old model known as Wawel Castle. I’d forgotten my camera in the hostel during our tour the day before, and I had plenty of photos left, so now I snapped pictures like a madman.

I’m really glad I was able to make it to that castle. It gave a great view of the city, and had some nice gardens in the courtyard.

I ran back to the hostel through a beautiful wooded park, and bought some trinkets from some street vendors in the city center. The trumpeter playing on St. Mary’s warned me that I was nearly out of time, so I returned to the hostel.

Back with the rest of the group (all eight of us, for the other two were back from Prague), we packed and headed to the railway station.

The train took us out to the countryside, and dropped us of between a couple of fields. We then boarded a bus, which took us to the airport, located even farther out in the middle of nowhere.

We got through security quickly, and had a pleasant flight. We landed in Dublin. I had a bit of steak-and-Guinness pie at the airport- back in the land of expensive things!

The bus ride from Dublin to Galway was agonizing. It took hours, and we were already exhausted and impatient from travel. We got into Galway, though, and took a taxi to the Park Lodge Hotel. The weather was absolutely wretched- windy, cold, and rainy, the worst I’d yet seen in Ireland. None of my roommates were back from their vacations yet, so I had the whole cottage to myself. I spent an extraordinarily relaxing evening (alone, which was a luxury) by the fire.

Eastern Europe was a wonderful experience. When I look back on these blog entries and see the variety and scope of the things we saw and did- from Vintgar Gorge to the House of Terror to Auschwitz- I feel like we got the most out of the week. Overall, the cities were clean, safe, and friendly, and the language barrier wasn’t a problem. I got a good feel of being among another culture, especially through their fantastic architecture and public art. I learned a lot about Eastern European history, as well as about travel itself. I visited places most Americans have never even heard of, places I never thought I would see. We covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of stuff, and I’d do it again in a second.