Thursday: Krakow

This is the seventh 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.

We got a slow start this morning. That’s another problem with traveling in such a large group: it takes a long time to get 6 college students up and running. This was also the first day of the trip when the weather wasn’t wonderful- it was chilly, and a light rain had begun to fall.

Eventually, we got up and got outside, but spirits were rather low. Some of us weren’t dressed as heavily as others, and it was a cold walk.

One of the trademarks of Krakow was the famous trumpeter of St. Mary’s. Every daylight hour, a bugler will play a tune from the top of St. Mary’s Basilica, in the center of Krakow. It’s a commemoration of a legendary trumpeter, who warned the city of an oncoming invasion. One of the peculiarities of his song is that it ends abruptly, in the middle of a note. This is supposed to reference the original trumpeter, who was shot in the neck while he played.

This is the center of Krakow. That tall building is St. Mary's Basilica, where the trumpeter plays every hour.

Next we went to see the Krakow Dragon, an old statue down below the castle. Apparently, Ljubljana isn’t the only city in Eastern Europe with a cool dragon statue. But Krakow’s statue actually breathes fire!

It shot off about a 4 second burst of flame every 3 or 4 minutes.

We hadn’t yet seen a synagogue from the inside, so we went to the Jewish quarter to rectify that oversight. We went inside a little old synagogue, not nearly as impressive as the one in Budapest would have been, but still charming and intriguing.

We ate in Jewish quarter as well, in an incredibly Jewish restaurant. It had the whole works: scripture written on the walls in Hebrew, Jewish music playing, menorah on the table, an old group of Jewish folks conversing in their language. Even the names of things on the menu were very Jewish; for instance, ‘The Soup of Beautiful Rachel’.

The troops were pretty cold by now, so we went back to the hostel. The girls went shopping at the nearby modern shopping complex (a surprising thing to see in that part of the world; it rivaled any mall I’ve seen in America.)

We ate dumplings at a place recommended to us by the hostel. It was sort of our last meal, as we would be flying out the next morning. It was nice to buy something and feel like we were getting our money’s worth. We all knew we wouldn’t get that feeling again until we returned to America.

Finally, we went out and had some Polish vodka. The interesting thing about the bars in Krakow is that they are all underground, cellars. It’s a really cool atmosphere. We celebrated the end of a good trip, then headed back for a good night’s sleep.