St Benedict hostel is a really good deal if you're staying in Krakow and you don't ask for a fancy place to stay. It has everything what's necessary for 5E/night and even more -like breakfast included and hairdryers that you can ask in the reception. Plus, it is only 7-minute walk to Rynek, the very center.
I arranged the checking in -only not so nice thing is that they ask you for an extra fee for being a tourist, but it's like 50 cents per day-, left my stuff in the room and just when I left the place to meet with Aida and Timour I found them in the ground floor door.
They also left their stuff, made the check in and we went just to the supermarket downstairs to get something for dinner. There was a small kitchen in the hostel, so we took bought some noodles and some beer to have a rest before having a little stroll in the night.
We found our way to Rynek thanks to a map they gave us in the hostel. It is a very nice square and it looks different from morning to night. We naturally continue to Grodzka and found mighty interesting pubs, but because we were a bit tired from the trip we came early to the hostel for taking advantage of the following day.
We woke up early on Friday and change some euro to zloty before joining the Free Walking Tour in front of St. Mary's Church. Because we arrived with some minutes in advance we took a quick look to the inside of the church, impressive! It is not allowed to make pictures, so I'll just post two from google images and you can check the beautiful colors and structure.
At 10 am the tour started. As these kind of tours, the guide normally combines historical facts with some more recent stories, always referring to the buildings in the surroundings to begin with. It lasted for 2 hours and a half and Asia -our guide-, showed us Rynek and nearby, like the Barbican, the University, the Archdiocese where the pope John Paul II used to accommodate when staying in Krakow, and then down to the Castle (Wawel) where the visit finished.
The most curious fact I got from this tour -besides being told that John Paul had a great sense of humour-, was that like the human chakras, some scientists recently discover that there are also kind of chakras in the Earth -normally in sacred-related places like Jerusalem or Tibet. Nevertheless, one of them is located in Krakow's Castle, exactly in a corner before entering the Palace's rooms. Of course, like others, I rubbed the wall after being suggested such thing -it really felt like rubbing a wall tough.
Having a great view of the river when we finished our visit, we decided to take a look to the fire-spitting dragon statue and then walk by the riverside to the Jewish Quarter to get some pierogy. Unfortunately, and I think due to Poland being in general quite a religious country, the pierogy place that our walking tour map had provided us -with all sorts of recommendations about what and where to see, eat and drink in Krakow- was closed. We decided to walk a bit further to get some zepianky in Plac. Nowy Warszauera.
After the zepianky we also sat for a while in a coffe place -I ordered some hot chocolate with a lot of whipped cream, nomnom-, we stroll a bit through this quarter. We didn't realize so much at that moment because many places were closed and there were not so many people in the street, but when we pass by the following day we could really tell is quite a modern place -hipster like in some spots, like Jozefa street.
So, as I said, after our break we explore a bit more the quarter -a bit lost even with the map-, and then headed back to the center trough Krakowska, Gertrudy and Dominikanska. Since it was getting dark and we felt a bit tired of walking all day we came back to the hostel to rest a bit before going out by night.
After a rather unhealthy kebab we found a place in Maly Rynek called something like Alternative in Polish, and we went there for a beer. It was very nice to find a place that fit everybody's interests, I totally agreed with Aida that we should take that place back to Bratislava -but not superpowers for that yet. It was an underground and some reggae music -continued for some disco one- was playing loud. At some point it got too disco, so we found another place, Indigo Pub, in Florianska. It was a rock pub but with the right high of volume so you could talk. Posters everywhere and a mini altar to Kurt Cobain, so nice -and cheap beer, even better!
We left for having some rest for the next day. Aida went to a day-trip to Auschwitz and Timour and I stayed to explore the city. We started with the bus station, in order to get our tickets for leaving the following day -Sunday. After that we just kept walking trough a not so touristic area, passing by the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus -by chance more than a planned thing- before reaching a local market -Hala Targowa.
We kept going south until reaching an old Jewish cemetery and back again to the Jewish quarter. Since we bought some fruit to a kind seller in the street, we walked for some time before lunch, when we headed to Wrega pub for -this time yes-, some Polish pierogi.
After a tasty lunch with kind of strudla for desert, we enter this modern side of the Jewish quarter, finding a kind of a small Notting Hill like street -at least it reminded me of that. We made few more pictures because it started drizzling, but still we continued to Jewish ghetto quarter by a pedestrian bridge, Eastern style -full of lover's padlocks.
We arrived to Rynek Podorgski and have a look to the very nice St. Joseph's Church -Timour pointed out that it looked like Disney's castle, find the resemblance? But besides that this district wasn't as nice as the other ones, and because of the drizzling started to be annoying we got back by taking the tram in the Square of Ghettos Heroes -google maps says that's its name-, and got a free ride until close to Dominikanska -we really really wanted to pay the ticket, but there was only one machine in the tram and a mighty long line of tourists before us, ale nevadi.
Across Rynek, back to the hostel for some afternoon break before meeting my Polish friend Michal -who I met last June for the trip Olga organized to Montenegro and Croatia. He is from a town close to Auschwitz but he knew the city, and therefore took us to really nice places like a tea house with a huuuge fat cat (Cafe Bar Magia) and afterwards to dinner in a vegetarian buffet place, Chimera -both of them quite close to Rynek.
In the evening we passed by the jazz club U Munianka -and left right over the concert because we are volunteers and didn't want to spend 5E for the entrance-, and then arrived to a random hostel place where they were having a Halloween party -1E beer leaflets brought us there. It was nice to see Michal again, but we didn't stay longer either that night. In any case, he doesn't have a problem to find party on his own -as he already did in Montenegro, haha.
Woke up on Sunday 3rd of November, packed everything, bought some food for the way and went to take our bus from Krakow to Katowice. Such a rude driver, he didn't want to open the luggage handler in the bus stop close to the bus station when we arrived to Katowice, so we had to get down in the last stop, took our things and spend some time in the train station having some snack before getting our bus back to Bratislava. The impression of Katowice wasn't so nice in a grey rainy day, with all city under construction -but still some buildings in the center were pretty.
Yeah, I had quite a good time in Poland. It's a beautiful country and I was surrounded with good people, so nothing could have gone wrong. I hope some other time I can visit also Gdansk, by the see -I haven't heard so much about other cities besides Warsaw, which apparently is quite industrial, something I'm not very fond of when I'm traveling.
Anyway, it was a great trip :) Hope you enjoyed the pictures, this time I made them! But also took few of them by Timour, the ones I'm in, mostly.
See you in next posts, attentive readers,
Warm hugs,
Ali
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