We kept getting confused in Krakow as it was the first time we’d arrived in a city with nearly the whole day ahead of us! But of course this meant our apartment wasn’t ready yet, so we needed to arrange luggage storage. This is very easy. There are lockers EVERYWHERE but which require Polish zloty coins, so we went to the left luggage office where a very helpful man took our baggage. Find the office by following the signs showing a suitcase in a box. It’s open until 9pm.
Bags stashed, we meandered through the Old Town – Krakow really is stunning, the main market square is right up there with St Mark’s Square in Venice, for example.
Packed too – we had a drink in a restaurant, which took longer than anticipated so we should probably have done lunch at the same time…we carried on walking, past the castle and the dragon sculpture (which breathes fire every 5 minutes or so!) and walked along the river.
We tried a barge restaurant there, but a) the food wasn’t very tempting and b) there was a 40 minute wait (the place was not visibly busy), so we kept searching! We were now getting a little tight for time for our entry to the Schindler Factory tour. Our saviour was a lovely little tapas place called Vamos, small, friendly service, plates delivered quickly. Fish, bread, potatoes, meatballs, all great, and my glass of Portuguese rosé was just the ticket. The sun was beating down, again. There was a slight kerfuffle as their card machine stopped working, so they’d just accepted a 50 euro note (all the cash I had, and not quite enough to cover the bill) and we’d started walking away…when the waiter ran to us saying “the machine is now working!” All sorted. I did wonder if this was a wildly elaborate scam to refund me using a counterfeit 50 euro note…but I’m pretty sure that’s just my paranoia talking. 🙂
Schindler’s Factory is a tour mainly about Krakow in WWII, with a few mentions of Oskar Schindler. It’s interesting, and shocking, but of course lots of listening and no doing and NO talking for 90 minutes, so the girls did very well keeping it together!
Not a very photogenic place either really, definitely not for our usual cheery selfies! The tour was good, but I felt it needed a bit of preamble like, “welcome to Schindler’s Factory. This was a factory owned by Oskar Schindler producing enamel plates and cookware in the 1930s. While he was German and a member of the Nazi party, he did not agree with the plans to exterminate Jews. He hired many Jews in this factory, ultimately all his workforce was Jewish. He had connections in the Abwehr military intelligence which he used to protect his workers from being sent to a death camp. When he had the chance to move the factory (which had been co-opted to the war effort) to Czech Republic, as the Nazis were losing the war on the East, he managed to hire the families of his workers too, and take the machines, documents AND all his ~1200 workers out of Poland and they all survived.”
What was most shocking about the tour was the parallels with Ukraine and Gaza today. I don’t want to get too political, but the whole thing about learning from past horrors to avoid repeating them clearly doesn’t really work. Netenyahu and Likud know better than anyone the horrors of ghettos, stripping away rights and dignity, treating humans as less than animals…and yet, that’s what’s happened for years with Palestinians, right? It’s interesting discussing this with the girls, but it’s hard to be able to explain it.
We concluded the tour and found an ice cream shop en route to the tram back to the main station. There we collected the bags and trundled to our excellent apartment. Whilst the girls showered, I went to the post office to dispatch another collection of items I don’t think we’ll need for the remainder of the trip. I sent back a dark polo shirt, my blue trousers, V’s printed shirt (which she’s decided she doesn’t want to wash) along with the oddments of toys, magnets and keepsakes we’ve accumulated so far. The ladies in the shop were amazingly helpful and the office, close to the main station, was open until about 8pm, I think (I was there at 7pm).
I collected a few bits for a picnic tea in the apartment, nice and simple. Poland has little convenience stores everywhere – one of the biggest chains is Carrefour Express.
Next day, another run for me, very nice, sunny, easy navigation. I also stumbled on a great playground, which would come in handy later. Breakfast, then a coach pickup just round the corner (very handy being in an apartment so close to the station!) to go to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. A short coach trip, and a very busy mine with big groups with guides going into the mine like a machine being fed with fuel. It was a long tour underground, about 3km walk over 2.5 hours. Not as cold as I expected (I didn’t need my jumper or lower sections of my trousers, nor even my socks to wear in my sandals, which I’d brought in case of danger of frostbite!), and fascinating to see what the miners had excavated, almost entirely by hand, hardly any explosive or digging machines, over the 500 years or so of the mine’s life. And we only saw a fraction of the entire mine, apparently.
The long tour meant we’d kind of skipped usual lunch and it was getting late, but a kiosk, with seats, in a garden area near the old town sold us savoury crêpes, which was perfect. We took a tram to the playground in Henryk Jordana Park, stopping on the way at Papa Gelato to top up ice cream levels which were dangerously low. There were coppers everywhere including a riot truck – I asked the policemen behind us in the ice cream queue what was happening – a football match in the nearby stadium between two Polish teams.
The playground was excellent, and although we didn’t have swimwear in the bag, we did have an extra layer, so the girls took full advantage of the wet play area. There was scope for swimming, but they had a GREAT time running through the fountains and sprays with the other kids.
We strolled back through town – I insisted we look at the Austrian Consulate (which I’d noticed on my run) – through the main square and again opted for a picnic tea so we could watch the Olympics opening ceremony. Somewhat disappointed that the TV had none of the channels showing this in Poland (the TV was a Samsung, and was a big screen, but no WiFi connection and I think only terrestrial analogue channels). So we watched as far as Malta on my phone screen before the battery gave out meaning it really must be time for bed. 🙂
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