We went to Kraków (or as I like to refer to it: "Warsaw;" seems I have trouble with Polish geography) for Mother's Day weekend, so we'll be reaching back in history a bit for the next few days.
Kraków was Jeff's idea; he really wanted to go somewhere for the weekend. When put to a vote, three of us voted to stay home, and one voted to go to Krakow. So, we went to Warsaw Kraków. Some days democracy wins, some days, it doesn't.
It's about a four hour drive north east, so not a terribly arduous journey. We (which means "Jeff" since the rest of us were on strike and refusing to have anything to do with this trip) rented an apartment in the center of town within easy walking distance of the Old City and the Castle and restaurants with English menus and set off on Friday night after school.
And, as it turns out. Warsaw Kraków, is beautiful. The weather was not Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, so our (Jeff's!) photos are not quite as grand as being there, but the city is definitely worth seeing (1). Dating back to the 7th century, Krakow is old even by European standards.
This is Market Square in the Old Town.
The Old Town district of Kraków is chock full of horse drawn carriages, gorgeous, ancient buildings, pigeons, featuring somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand historic sites and more than two million works of art, including this one:
I'd say this is crocheted. But is it yarn bombing, or just art?
The building below to the left is Cloth Hall, a market place that has been the center of Warsaw Kraków commerce since the 15th century. Today, it is a place for tourist vendors to ply their wares, but its historical import is quite far reaching. And it is a gorgeous building; not that you can necessarily see that in these photos, but, use your imagination.
One of the highlights of the Old Market Square is the church below. You can just see it behind the bubble blowing hooligans. St Mary's Basilica was originally built in the 1200s and rebuilt in the 14th century. Astonishingly old, the church is also well known for what is believed to be the largest hand carved wooden altar in the world. We did go inside, but the church is used for services and I struggle with photographing places of worship while people are worshiping (the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, for example, does not allow tourists in during prayer times, so it makes it a little less uncomfortable to snap a photo). Clearly a personal issues as people were snapping photos all around us.
Really interesting historical tidbit: every hour, a trumpet signal—called the Hejnał mariacki—is played from the top of the taller of St. Mary's two towers. The tune breaks off in mid-stream, to commemorate the famous 13th century trumpeter, who was shot in the throat while sounding the alarm before the Mongol attack on the city. The noon-time hejnał is heard across Poland and abroad broadcast live by the Polish national Radio 1 Station. Think about that for a minute: how far is Poland from Mongolia? That Genghis Khan really got around.
Krakow also has one of those awesome bike rental systems we have seen in a few European cities (Barcelona and Vienna spring to mind). BikeOne - a reasonably priced system of public municipal bikes. You need to register and you are given a personal PIN code that allows to grab a bike from self-service rental stations. The nice thing about this system is that you don't need to return the bike to the same station you rented from - just grab a bike for a few minutes to transfer from one point to another and drop the bike at any station you want. FABULOUS way to travel around these cities! Well, not so much for us, as we generally have Thing 1 and Thing 2 with us, and they are too short yet to ride the available bikes. But for grown-ups, it's an awesome option.
More tomorrow:
Warsaw Kraków Castle, Bouncy and Otherwise
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(1)Of course, Krakow's place in WWII lives in infamy. We chose not to visit Auschwitz, as the children are far below the recommended age of 14. Jeff and I visited Buchenwald in Germany before we had children, and certainly plan to expose them to these critically important periods in human history, but when they are older and better able to process the lessons and impressions these sites leave.
It seems that Jeff is right most of the time, if not all :-)
Beautiful! I love Europe!
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