Oct 2008

Polish ‘milk bars’ are not really milk bars at all, but instead ‘no frills’ cafeteria-style dining, designed for the communist working class as a cheap place to eat Polish cuisine. We decided to try out one around the corner from hostel, where we tested a few things that don’t sound too appetising, but were actually pretty good, and damn cheap. Goulash and potato pancakes (yum), rice and mushrooms wrapped in steamed cabbage parcels (pretty tasty), and mushroom sauce with dumplings (okay…). We then caught a bus to the salt mines, which we’d heard were home to statues and an entire chapel underground carved entirely out of salt. It sounded intriguing, although it was quite expensive to enter on our very limited budget. On a rather hot day we had to take layers with us, as it was a constant 14 degrees down in the mines.

We sat waiting for our guide, and an Australian guy sat next to us who joined us for the tour. The guide was a middle-aged man with a very dry sense of humour who gave us a few laughs along the way. We didn’t really know what to expect, but the experience ended up feeling like a theme park ride. Except there was no ride. After descending 120m by staircase, we were introduced to the story of the mines (and the princess who the chapel was built for) through a cheesy demonstration with flashing lights on carved statues. The tour was filled with more of the same staged exhibits (one of which the guide even mocked), but the chapel itself was quite incredible. They hold weddings from time to time in the high-ceilinged space filled with religious carvings, and everything down to the crystals on the chandeliers was carved from salt.

The (only) other interesting thing was the salt-water lakes, which are filled with so much salt a diver would need so many kilograms of weights to even break the surface. After our tour was over we joined our guide in the museum, which was actually another highlight, as it was far away from the cheesy touristy performance. We then caught a lift to the top and jumped back on a bus into Krakow. Andrew also mentioned that it had been bugging him that he’d seen the Australian guy on our tour somewhere before, and we realised it was the same guy who had been annoyingly chatting up girls in the Hungarian bar not long ago (well, we were pretty sure, but Josh was slightly sceptical)… small world though.

We had planned to meet Marcin and some of his friends for drinks that night (an introduction to Polish vodka), and so Josh, Andrew and I went to Kazimierz for dinner beforehand. This time I was the meal-loser, as the boys trout meals were very tasty, but my salmon dish was very average. We had a few drinks there before moving on to a bar called Singer, which we’d admired during the day before, as all the tables are old Singer sewing machine tables. Walking in to the vibrant jazz playing throughout the bar, we somehow managed to find a seat, which according to Marcin is apparently VERY difficult on a Friday night, but we were in the right place at the right time.

Our first introduction was to Zubrowka vodka with apple juice, which is a pretty standard drink and quite delicious. Then we moved onto the honey vodka we had tried the night before… By this stage Josh was pulling a repeat of my Valence performance from many weeks ago, and barely staying awake at the table. Deciding he desperately needed some sleep, he went to bed and Andrew and I powered on to entertain our host, or be entertained… moving on to cherry vodka. Then there was an awful shot Marcin made us try, that even he said was disgusting and must have been a bad brand… We spent the evening trying to brush up on our Polish language skills, and teaching the Poles some English tongue twisters and vice versa. As we were leaving, one of their friends invited us to a party, but scared that we wouldn’t know the way back to our hostel, we wisely decided to decline. Instead, we planned to meet Marcin again for a trip out to Nowa Huta – the communist ‘workers paradise’.

Andrew and I awoke to discover that Polish vodka definitely gives you a hangover. Due to visit Nowa Huta with Marcin, we stopped for another round of goulash and potato pancakes on the way to meet him, which helped a little. The idea behind the area was to build a ‘workers paradise’ for the employees of the nearby steel mill in the 1950s. The area was free from churches or religious icons, and instead a purely practical, functional, grey, typical communist style area. The entire area, which was like a large suburb, was built within five years, and most of the buildings still retained their original 50s décor, but the whole idea failed, and now it is almost a ghost town.

The ‘milk-bar’ cafeteria had a 1950s drab interior, and was a bit of a depressing place. We went for a coffee in a bar covered with frills and fake flowers in a very folky style, which was a snapshot of its original glory. There was also a small museum that displayed propaganda posters and photos of Nowa Huta in the 1950s, and put the hard workers on pedestals. The idea was that their work could be measured in percentages, and there is a famous image of workers wearing sashes showing their percentage worked – one worker displaying 110%. As the area was being built the workers had to install everything that they could as it arrived, so that nothing was sitting around waiting. There is another famous image of a toilet being installed on the second floor of a building before the floor is even there, and instead it is held up by scaffolding next to a part-wall with a sink in it. It was very interesting to see the place now, and what it had become. We also travelled a bit further down the road, and ended up at the gates of the steel mill, which used to be named after Lenin, but now bears its new name.

It was nearing evening, and Marcin had invited us to another barbecue at his place to celebrate his flatmate’s birthday. We decided to make them good old-fashioned corn fritters and zucchini fritters, which both went down a treat. We were planning to spend the next day climbing the Tatra mountains on the border, which meant a 5am start, so we skipped the drinks that night and left around 10.30pm, all a bit shattered.

It rained all night long, so we didn’t think the forecast would be good for climbing the Tatras. We woke up at 5am, and Marcin said the weather wasn’t looking great, so we had to cancel, and ended up going back to sleep (with earplugs in, since some incredibly raucous knobs had decided to make a racket coming home from town). We decided that we hadn’t actually had a day off from being tourists since we’d started the trip and were all a little tired. A restful day was much needed, so we began walking to Kazimierz for some brunch, via a great little coffee place on our block. The Sunday flea markets were in full swing in the square, so we strolled through, and then sat down for brunch at a café made from instruments – pieces of pianos and trumpets making up the bar. We realised it was time to plan some more of our trip, as we’d been in Krakow for quite a while (only compared to how long we’d spent anywhere else…), but had a few more places we definitely wanted to see before we arrived in Prague. We sadly wouldn’t make the Tatras this trip, and decided from here it was up to Wroclaw to see a different Polish city, and then down to the Czech Republic. On the way back to the hostel we stopped by an antique store, which had some really great stuff, and Andrew bought a brass mortar and pestal similar to one he’d been admiring at Marcin’s place. The rest of the afternoon was spent booking hostels and looking for couchsurfing hosts, which both take up so much time! Then we decided as it was truly our day off from sightseeing, it was time to do something mindless and relaxing, and ended up at the cinema to see the new Batman movie (which we all loved).

When we arrived back at the hostel, the lovely girl Mary that worked there and we’d had drinks with a few nights earlier had cooked us a traditional Polish meal, since she said that we hadn’t tried traditional Polish food unless we’d had it homemade for us. She generously whipped up some cottage cheese dumplings on the hostel stove while she was working, and it was a very tasty meal, and such a nice surprise! We finished our meal off with a few sips of cherry vodka, and then the boys played pool and had a drink down in the bar with Mary while I tried to catch up on some journal writing. Seeing as how far behind I am now, I’m not sure how far I actually caught up then. Some very drunk young Irish guys at the hostel caused a bit of a scene, and one got kicked out of the hostel bar and fell asleep in the movie room… after stumbling from group to group hurling slurred comments. It was rather embarrassing to watch really, and we weren’t surprised to hear they even got kicked out of an Irish bar in Prague a week earlier. Hmmmm…

We woke up that morning to the remains of a night attack by bed bugs… our first experience on this journey, and were quickly shifted rooms while the hostel dealt with the problem… From there it was off to the bus station.

Knowing we were about to embark on an incredibly low day with a visit to the Auschwitz extermination camps, we boarded a bus and settled in for the two-hour journey to the area. We decided to get a guided tour, and watched the introduction movie beforehand. An old black and white harrowing introduction, the film was filled with real-life images from the liberation of the camps, and the frail and starving bodies of those that somehow made it through. We met our guide outside, who had been working there for ten years, dedicated to telling the story of what happened in the area she grew up in. We wandered the first camp and the smaller of the two, Auschwitz I with our guide, and were led through some of the most significant places, although she said you could spend a whole two days there and still not see everything.

I don’t really know how to describe it, so I won’t try, but it was an emotionally exhausting day, and haunting to see the real possessions that remained behind, and the confinement they were forced to endure. We moved on to Auschwitz II Birkenau where after an introduction to the site we were left to wander freely. Our guide said that being there in the heat of summer is a bit of a toned-down tour, as the place has far more impact in the winter when it's darker earlier and covered in snow. You get the sense of how cold and horrible the conditions were. The most horrifying thing about the second site was the sheer scale of the area, and we walked the grounds until the last bus returned to the original site. With one hour to spare before it was time to return we visited some of the exhibitions about particular countries, including the Netherlands, and the Hungarian exhibition, which you entered to the sound of a beating heart.

After seven hours out there, we boarded a bus back to Krakow and arrived back around 9pm. Our late dinner was spent at a brightly coloured Polish place, where vegetables lined the walls and costumed hosts served the meals. Josh and Andrew got a little carried away ordering sides for their meals of turkey and pork and ended up with way too much food to handle, and I tried the traditional Polish dumplings, filled with mushrooms and sauerkraut, which were quite tasty once I’d added a bit of chilli to them. It was then back to the hostel, and Andrew dashed out to buy some of the traditional Polish honey liqueur vodka, which we sipped away quietly at in the hostel. We invited Mary, the lovely girl working behind the hostel desk that night, to join us for a drink and sat up chatting about travels for a while before bed.

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.

Breakfast at the hostel was spent trying to balance eating with talking to Sophie in Amsterdam and verbally confirm a new flat over Skype that we wouldn’t be able to see and just had to take her word for… Which we did… And so, with a home to arrive to when we finally got there, we made our way to the castle. Skipping the tours and the exhibitions, we instead walked the grounds and took in the views. There wasn’t a great deal to see, but it was a lovely day. We had spied a very tall and pin-thin tower not too far away, and decided to climb to the top. Luckily I am only mildy claustrophobic, as it was so hard to get up, and we had to duck so our heads didn’t hit the steps above us as we spiralled up to the top. It seemed to go on forever, but we eventually arrived at the platform that wrapped the top, holding on to the iron rail for dear life. We shuffled around the platform, and then attempted to get back to the bottom, which proved more difficult than the journey up.

Eger’s highlight was said to be the wine region, and not too far a walk from the town centre lay ‘the valley of beautiful women’, which was where all the wine caves were, and is apparently regarded as an incredibly deceiving name for the area… We arrived to find a varied mixture of different caves, from branded boutiquey renovated caves to basic ‘holes in the ground’ with mould-lined ceilings and big barrels of booze in the back. The idea is that you buy wine by the 2L plastic jug to take away with you. We started in one of the nicer places and enjoyed a different red each inside - each delicious, and it was so lovely to sit in a cool cave during the intense heat of the day. It was then time to move on to some of the cheaper places for some more taste testing, and we were on a mission to find some more bull’s blood to take to Poland, and something else a bit different. We tried some very sweet reds, which were quite odd to us, and some very tasty ones that you could only buy by the bottle, but our testing paid off and we walked away with 2L of bull’s blood, 2L of a lovely cabernet sauvignon, and a small bottle of bull’s blood so that the boys could recreate the legend of the bull’s blood name now that their beards were coming in quite nicely. All very cheaply priced and delicious!

It was nearly time to leave Eger, and we headed back to our accommodation to collect our things before running to get some pizzas for a picnic in the park before boarding our train. Luckily no one was around to witness Josh and Andrew with their tops off, pouring red wine through their beards and playing up to the camera.

We made our way to the station prepared for a long journey ahead of us, as we were catching a night train to Krakow. We had a change to make to connect up to the Krakow train, and when we arrived at the station with 15 minutes to spare before our train arrived, Andrew went to check out which platform we were leaving from. While he was checking, a train pulled up for Krakow, and we checked with the conductor (who didn’t speak much English) what time it would leave to see if it was our train. We thought he told us it would leave in 15 minutes, but when the train took off as we were waiting for Andrew we hit panic mode. Josh found another conductor who said it wasn’t our one (whew!) and that ours was running 45 minutes late. Then he left. Now we were basically the only ones at the whole station, waiting on the platform in the darkness, hoping like hell that the train would arrive. It finally did, and we jumped onto the most rickety old carriage, not sure we would be able to sleep a wink before we arrived into Krakow around 6am.

Josh searched down the rest of the train, and found a slightly better carriage (with seat covers), but the only sleeper carts were getting released from the train halfway through our journey in Slovakia. Josh met a Slovakian family down the train while trying to charge his computer at a power point in the hallway, and made instant friends who bought him a beer when they found out he was from New Zealand, gave him a gift of Bulgarian alcohol they had bought on their family holiday, and warmed his heart a little! Especially as all he had to offer in return was a tacky New Zealand postcard, but they were just lovely.It was beginning to get late, and we contorted our bodies through the cabin, but none of us slept more than a few very broken hours, in the uncomfortable, noisy cabin which got colder and colder as the night went on. We arrived just before 6am to a chilly dawn at the station, all very drowsy, unsure how we could face the day ahead...