I can't decide if Krakow is absolutely wonderful or the devil.
I'm leaning towards absolutely wonderful though. I just have a feeling that I'm not going to sleep much while I'm here. The cost of going out is so ridiculously cheap - you can't say no. Last night set me back a whopping $8.
It turned out that this very popular 5-story Polish club was about a block from my hostel: ugly, black, windows still boarded over from the communist era, completely and utterly Polish. Not some place many tourists would stumble upon on their own. It was '80s night - something I wasn't too thrilled about, but I donned some leggings and after a couple of 4 zloty beers (less than $1.50) it didn't really matter that I was dancing to ABBA and who knows what other crap. Inexplicably, the DJ would randomly mix in Kings of Leon and Franz Ferdinand - I understand the Franz Ferdinand (which probably explains why I hate them), that fits right in, but it was a bit odd to hear "Sex on Fire" squeezed in between Michael Jackson and Madonna.
It was a Wednesday night, so by 2 am the dance floor had completely emptied and it was just me, two girls from my hostel, and two Polish guys I met my first day here. The two Polish guys are absolutely hysterical. They do these free walking tours together and are obviously very good friends, but they are complete opposites. One of them has long hair, a goatee, and wears combat boots with shorts, while the other is very clean cut and wears a sport jacket and loafers. They really knew how to dance to that '80s music. It's nice, because the music is so bad, it doesn't matter if the dancing is equally bad. You can kind of do whatever you want without any embarrassment whatsoever.
Today I went with Jill, this British girl I've spent all my time with here, to this massive salt mine located just south of Krakow. I had no clue it existed, but it's absolutely gigantic- something like 3000 km of underground tunnels, passages, chapels, etc. The miners were really religious because there job was so dangerous, and there's something like 35 chapels in the mine. We saw one, the largest underground chapel in the world - it was gorgeous and pretty unbelievable. The overall tour though was a little cheesy - we only got to see about 2 km of the mine and it was pretty commercialized with some dorky displays. Not sure it was worth the money, but it was still interesting seeing as I had no clue it existed.
After the mine we ended up going to the same Polish restaurant we went to my first day in Krakow. It was funny, because we were standing on the street, trying to remember where it was, and Jill turns to the doorway right next to us and is like "wait, isn't this it?" So I had more polish pancakes and after we saw this other girl eating these amazing looking crepes, we had to get those too. It was definitely the best meals I've had since leaving home. It's nice to be able to eat out here - in Prague and Berlin I only ate food from the grocery store. Although I'm not sure I saved much in Prague, because of that dangerously delicious bread and pastry section they had at the Tesco.
I've been trying to write this entry for an entire day now; the internet here is really faulty and will just randomly stop working. It's really annoying. Hopefully I can get this finished before I leave this hostel today. I hate days when you have to move, especially now that I seem to have accumulated twice as much stuff as I started with, so it's a real pain packing my bag.
This is the nicest hostel I've stayed in, and I'll be sad to leave. It's very cozy, and you feel like you're just in someone's house. Like in the kitchen, there's one big table, so you have no choice but to sit around it, and it really helps in socializing. The staff is helpful, the place is immaculate, and they even have wooden floors and interior brick walls. In the TV room, they have the same couches as my mom has in our TV room/Erik's stinky den - go Ikea! I watched some movies last night and it was almost like being at home. Almost.
We watched the Bourne Supremacy, which takes part mostly in Berlin - way more cool to watch since I'd just visited. Then we watched some pretty awful Polish comedy; I think I now know why you never see any movies from Poland. Either the captions were translated poorly, or the Polish say weird things. I think my favorite was when this one woman called this man a "pork chop clown." Not sure what I would do if someone called me that . . .
I'm debating staying in Poland for one more week. If I can switch my bus ticket, I think I will. I really like it here. If I stay, I'll head northwest to Wroclaw (pronounced vrots-wahf - who would have guessed that one?) and then maybe over to Warsaw, before heading back down to Krakow to take the bus to Budapest. I think my body just knows how Polish I am and doesn't want me to leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment