Krakow

As promised – The Lost Krakow Blogs Entries!
(or: Amy Finally Gets Her Act Together!)

So, I arrived in Krakow on Monday the 22nd of February, after my flight had been delayed by an hour because the pilot was stuck in traffic and couldn’t get to the airport. True story. So, after sleeping on the floor by the gate for about forty-five minutes, curled up in my calf-length North Face down coat, and STILL freezing, I got on the plane, conked out (despite a child that could give Colin Craven a lesson or two in screaming fits), and woke up two hours later in Poland.

My friend Stan was waiting for me at the airport, and, good soul that he is, took me home to drop off my bag, and then straight out for a massive plate of pierogi. And I mean MASSIVE. Delicious! The restaurant was in the basement of one of the university buildings, and there was a lot of silly décor that made one feel vaguely as if they were at Disneyworld. Cheerful figurines of a distressingly large size, a giant fish-tank as the centerpiece of the room, and loads of wall décor. Mercifully, I wasn’t in Florida, but in the heart of Old Europe. Eating fried, fried food items.

Stan took me walking around the city for a bit after this, strolling by statues of saints, peeking into incredibly old churches, and meandering through the Old Town Square…Krakow is a gorgeous city. I really fell in love with it, and was quite disappointed to leave it after only two and a half days! Whereas Warsaw was bombed and destroyed during the war, then rebuilt in the image of itself shortly thereafter, Krakow remained intact, all of its history truly preserved. And oh, it’s worth seeing! There’s so much color, yet it feels relaxed. Yeah, it’s charming, but it’s not quaint. It’s not trying to be anything but a city that happens to be proud of its history. I found myself taking dozens of photos of grating. My eye was arrested everywhere by gorgeous, incredibly detailed grates that protected everything from contemporary windows to old, stained-glass ones. I’ll post a few of my favorites below!

A bit of personal history: Stan and I met a little over two years ago in New York, when he was visiting New York for awhile. We discovered that we both have a penchant for hanging out in coffeeshops, and that we’re also shutterbugs. Stan takes gorgeous photos. He’s a very dynamic, interesting guy, and his photos seem to reflect his love of travel and his insatiable curiosity. Anyway, we kept in touch, and hung out several times this past August, when his travels brought him Stateside again. It was a fabulous treat to now be shown HIS city, and to get to meet his family, girlfriend, close friends, and CAT! He’s going to be leaving Krakow soon for Leipzig, Germany, where he’ll be studying for three months. I had one of my most unique and delightful travel experiences EVER in Leipzig, so this amuses me. Perhaps as some point, I should dig out the notebook I kept while traveling on that trip (Sept – Nov 2007) and post some of my favorite entries. I really had such an amazing time. This all-too brief trip to Krakow really stirred up a lot of those memories, and I thought of all the amazing people all over the world I’ve been fortunate enough to meet.

I was astonished by the beauty of all of the churches. We went into something like six churches in two days, and they were all so majestic, and yet different! One had these flat, rectangular pillars that were painted to look like three-dimensional columns. I wouldn’t have known if Stan hadn’t told me to go over and take a good look at them. Another church was actually colder once we were inside it than it had been outdoors. I sat in a pew for a few minutes in silence, watching my breath freeze in the stillness. Stan and I had the church to ourselves, save for a lone woman praying, and in the cold and the quiet, I felt quite small. It happens sometimes when I’m in a place somehow emotionally or historically loaded (I remember quite vividly having this sensation several times before – when heading up the stairs of The Bronte Parsonage, at the Roman Baths in Bath, a tiny graveyard for pets alongside a river in Inverness, and also in one of the hallways of Hampton Court Palace), I get a sense of the immensity of history, of all the people who have come before, and who have walked the same stone steps or knelt at the same altar. It’s humbling. I always feel very human at these times.

After we’d hit up the requisite three churches for Monday afternoon, he took me to a café in Kazimierz called Alchemia. Instant obsession. You must know that I am a coffeeshop fiend, even if I’m not drinking coffee. It’s about sitting there for a lengthy period of time, either having a conversation with a companion, or nursing a cappuccino for two hours while you memorize lines, read a New Yorker, work on your German, tear through a novel…This place was SO cool. Deep, old-fashioned burgundy wallpaper, framed portraits high on the wall, and lit only by a single candle on each table, it’s perhaps not the best place to get a ton of reading done in the evening, but it was the ideal location for a latte and conversation with Stan. It may have replaced the one I went to in Copenhagen with my friend Ben as “Favorite Coffeeshop in Europe.” That’s a high honor. Some people go to national monuments when they travel. I go to places that steam milk and pull espresso.

Later that night, we met up with Stan’s good friend Pawel, who is, in addition to being a cool guy, a licensed tour guide for the city of Krakow! You know what’s fun about that? Having him reel off tons of information about a particular memorial, say, and then pointing to some random detail on it and going, “Yeah, but what’s THAT about?” and getting an immediate answer. Awesomesauce. He plied Stan and I with lots of traditional Polish fare (ahh, the bliss of using that excuse of needing to try Traditional Polish Fare! The following afternoon ended in food coma when we stuffed ourselves with Traditional Polish Desserts), including some ridiculously good mustard that I forgot to buy, but Stan has been good enough to promise to send me. I’m talking stupid good mustard, okay? It’s not my favorite condiment, but jeez, I’d eat this stuff out of the jar. He also took the following day off work, in order to pal around with us and tell me tons of amazing things about all the places we went. Did you know a lot of coffeeshops in Krakow have little theatres in the basement for cabarets and band gigs? See, I didn’t, but he showed me one! Oh, it was such a perfect little venue, I nearly threw up in envy.

So, the following morning, Stan, Pawel and I went wandering about the city (after Stan made the two of us French toast – he and I are both big fans of New York City diners), stopping for a tour of some of the rooms in the oldest university in Eastern Europe, a quick duck into the high school they attended together (once again, nearly threw up, as it’s so gorgeous, and they went to HIGH SCHOOL there???), a brief stop at Café Camelot (the one with the venue downstairs!), a walk to Wawel Castle, and, most memorably, a visit to St. Mary’s Cathedral. Oh, my. I stared around me in slack-jawed wonder at the incredibly saturated blues, the gold, the organ pipes along the back wall, and the ceiling of stars! Pawel was there to tell me which artisan designed which pieces, and at what point in history, and many other fascinating things that I’m sure my mother is jealous she didn’t hear (you think I’m a nerd? This woman majored in history and has me beat by a MILE). It was stunning. If you are ever in Krakow, you are an idiot if you don’t go to see it.

It was that afternoon that the aforementioned Traditional Polish Dessert Lesson and subsequent food coma came upon us. A brief nap was in order.

That evening, Stan’s girlfriend Kasia came into the city (she lives about 40 minutes outside), and we were all hoping to go out to a bar that had live music. They found one that apparently would have two musicians with drums, a guitar, and laptops, and we decided it’d be as good a place as any. Okay – WOW, this place was so cool. First of all, the music was AMAZING. I have this dark sensibility as far as music and art that appeals to me - it’s the part of me that loves murder mysteries and suspense stories, that is obsessed with film noir, that immediately rewound A CLOCKWORK ORANGE the first time I saw it to watch it again, that adores Edward Gorey and Alfred Kubin, and couldn’t get enough of Punchdrunk’s SLEEP NO MORE at A.R.T. this past year (if you don’t’ know what I mean by that, do yourself a favor and Google “Punchdrunk,” as they are glorious). Stylistically, the music I’d like to be writing is a dark swing, a la Squirrel Nut Zippers, but a bit scarier. Just as tongue in cheek, though. I really appreciate a somewhat murky and beautifully unsettling aesthetic. Anyway, this was sinister and mysterious – one song had this long drone underneath everything, which was so eerie and unnerving that I felt indescribably happy. Then, to top it off, while Stan and I had been at the bar, Kasia found a little tiny room just off the main area where the musicians were going to be, that was kitted out with a chair, a nightstand adorned by a candle, and a bed that was wedged perfectly between the walls. There was a portrait of some saint above the doorway (so you could see it as you sat on the bed, which, let’s face it, is a little creepy), and a few Banksy characters spray-painted on the walls. It. Was. So. Amazing. Something else that struck me as funny was that I wasn’t bothered by the cigarette smoke like I usually am (in Poland, smoking in bars is still legal). I’m a non-smoker, and am typically sensitive to smoke…but perhaps it was just the general ambience of the bar, or the music, or something I’m at a loss to explain, but it enhanced the evening for me. The smell and the haze gave the impression of truly being in another time and a world away from home, not just out with friends in some bar that could be anywhere. I have no idea what the name was – as I recall, it was rather long and somewhat pedestrian. That bar will always be Krakow for me.

The next day, I was due to leave around one, so Stan and I hauled ourselves out the door at an absurdly early hour (8am on vacation is not the Amy Jackson way) so that we could make it to the nearby town of Wieliczka in time for a 9am tour of the salt mines. Now, I could talk and talk and talk about them here, but you should really just google the place, and the salt mine website will pop right up. Basically, it was a working salt mine from something absurd like the late 1200s until 1996, when it mined rock salt from the ground below. Today, it mainly operates as a museum, though they do mine top salt still. If you go to the website, you’ll see photographs of many structures and statues that look nice and everything until you realize that they’re carved out of solid salt. At which point you go, “Whaaaaaat?” I can’t even describe how wild it was. There was a statue of Goethe! Y’know, cause he visited one time. So why not carve a life-size likeness of him? You enter the mines by descending, at a pretty quick clip, fifty flights of stairs. There were only six people in our tour group (I love traveling on the off-season, and getting up that early didn’t hurt, either), which meant there wasn’t a lot of jostling around to see things. Or touch the walls of the mine – solid rock salt. I should know, seeing as how I licked one at one point! I felt like such a rebel – licking a wall, sticking it to the man! The man, in this case, was probably comprised heavily of sodium.

The air was incredibly clean and clear down below. It was chilly, and so crisp. So quiet. Difficult to believe they were once full of men, removing tons and tons of rock salt. Oh – they had entire stables down there! For many, many years (that is as accurate a number as I can recall, unfortunately), much of the power was derived from horses, hitched up to these enormous wagon wheels. They would lower the horses down on ropes and pulleys, and down in the mines they stayed! Is that not CRAZY???

As Poland is a very Catholic country, there were several chapels carved out that we passed through. Many of them were quite simple affairs, simply with a crucifix and a place to kneel, with a statue here or there (some – gasp! - weren’t even made of SALT). One chapel, however, was quite different. There is one chapel still very much in use – in fact, there’s a Mass there every Sunday, and people are sometimes married in it! I cannot…I do not have words for how stunningly gorgeous it was. You enter at the top, and look down over it…White and grey…The chandeliers, which are carved from salt, light up a grand hall, where salt tiles are carved into the floor. You descend a staircase, which has reliefs of biblical scenes carved into the wall. There is an entire altar (and what we Baptists would call a pulpit) and crucifix, all carved from the grey stone. Among the Gospel carvings in the wall: The Last Supper, Palm Sunday, Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet, and the Lord being sent before Pontius Pilate. There was also a statue (larger than life) of Pope John Paul II, prominently displayed on your way out. The workmanship is unbelievable. Such attention to tiny detail! Everything looks perfect up close, and then to step back and survey the whole…I had several moments in which I thought, “Where am I?”

Perhaps my other favorite bit of the tour was a chamber in which there was an underground (manmade) lake. The guide hit a button, and the lights went dark. One of Chopin’s nocturnes began playing (oh, how I wish I could remember which one!), and various bits of the chambers were lit and dimmed, according to the music. The light show was all very well, but the music, the music! It echoed so sweetly in that chamber. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for me, it was a moment of profound beauty. Incidentally, Chopin visited the mines when he was 19 or so, which is why they selected music of his specifically. Regardless of why it was chosen, it’s magnificent.

After the mines, Stan found me a gigantic kebab, which I ate in the car on the way to the airport. I hate goodbyes. I adore New York and all (and I was headed back to London for a few days before coming back home, anyway), but there is something so special about traveling around and being with people you love and see far too infrequently. Hopefully I’ll make it back to Poland soon, and have a proper visit. Two weeks, haHA! Two days was a mere tease! We crammed so much into those days, though, that I have plenty of food for thought and delightful memories to sustain me for now.

Whew! That was perhaps the longest blog post in the history of time. For your viewing pleasure, I’m including some of my favorite photos from the trip below.