Struggling without sleep

Attempting to warm and wake ourselves up with coffee, we quietly sipped away before loading our gear into lockers. Planning ahead, we had brought food from Eger with us, and so we headed to the square for an early morning picnic. Passing by commuters on their way to work, we ended up at the old town square, which is usually packed with tourists during the day, but was eerily quiet at this hour of the morning. We took a seat at a dew-covered table, and ate our food before deciding to go to the hostel to drop off some our extra layers before the sun hit us hard, and get some city information for the day.

Our hostel lay between the old town and the Jewish quarter, the latter home to the best bars in Krakow. We had an email full of recommendations from Brian, who we’d met in Lake Bled, which was incredibly helpful and gave us some tips on good cheap places to eat (which there are plenty of in Poland). We started at the Jewish Quarter ‘Kazimierz’, and visited the sombre ‘new’ cemetery once the guys had found things to cover their heads with. Filled with remains of headstones destroyed in the war, walls that bordered the graveyard had been created from pieces of broken headstones – a very moving sight. No one else was there, and we wandered the grounds in silence. The area has many synagogues, and we visited one that had another cemetery attached, and witnessed a Rabbi ceremonially adorning his robes.

We entered some churches along our way to Wawel castle, and walked around the grounds to enter Wawel cathedral – home to the burial tombs of Polish royalty. Feeling quite hungry by now, we found lunch at a typical Polish café, and filled ourselves up with soups, pastas and salad. Very fatigued from our non-existent sleep, we used our last ounces of energy to make it back to the train station to collect our gear so we could go back to the hostel for a nap. We had been in touch with a Krakow couchsurfer, Marcin, who had said that although he couldn’t host us as his house was already filled with guests, that we had organised a barbecue at his place for that night. We knew we couldn’t cope without sleep, so we managed a two-hour nap before picking up some goodies for the barbecue on our way to Marcin’s.

His house was a 15-minute bus ride away, and as we got further out of the city we started to panic that we were going the wrong way, but luckily we sat tight and were heading in the right direction. With the 2L of bull’s blood under our arms, we sat down outside with Marcin and his friends and enjoyed some food and drinks. A great bunch of people, they all gave us advice on what to do and what not to do in Poland, and warned us that visiting Krakow was not visiting the ‘real’ Poland, and there were certain communist areas that would give us a more accurate impression. We managed to make it to the bus stop in time for a night bus, and crawled into our hostel bunks for some much-needed sleep.