After spending three days in Berlin, we flew to Poland, where we only had 48 hours to soak up as much of the culture as possible. We flew into Kraków, where we spent our first night. The hotel we booked was just a short walk from the Main Market Square (or Rynek Glówny in Polish), which is the biggest Medieval plaza in Europe. The square was absolutely beautiful, with horse drawn carriages and lots of quaint restaurants offering meals in heated, transparent tents (as it was winter when we visited). We decided to have lunch in one of these tents so as we could still enjoy the sights of the square whilst we ate. We ordered Polish duck dumplings (which were very different from any dumplings I’d tried before), a Sex in Kraków cocktail for me (because I wanted something with Polish vodka in it) and a Polish beer for Nick. The thing that struck me most about the food and drink was how unbelievably cheap it was! In the evening, we returned to the square where we had dinner in a Michelin starred restaurant, which only came to around £30 for the two of us! If you’re looking for an affordable but beautiful European getaway, I would definitely recommend Kraków.
One of the best things we did whilst in Kraków was going for drinks in an Alcatraz themed bar. It is set up to look like a prison and you are even seated in jail cells to enjoy your drinks.
I would fully recommend ordering a cocktail from there if you’re as big a lover of novelty cocktails as I am! You can also order food there if you want to, but as it is just standard American food that you can get in any diner most places in the world, we decided to just stay for drinks.
The following day, we got up early and drove from Kraków to Oswiecim, where we had a guided tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. This tour was the reason we had decided to book a trip to Poland in the first place, as it is somewhere that we both wanted to visit and learn more about. It was very emotional and overwhelming to be there and hear all about the atrocities that happened right where we stood. It was raining heavily on the day we visited which, whilst cold, wet and not ideal for a largely outdoors tour, added a pathetic fallacy to the day which was in fitting with the sombre and reverential atmosphere. Having spent the trip reading The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak respectively, it was a very strange experience to be shown around the place where the events described in those books actually took place. If the Holocaust and second world war are something that interest you, then I would definitely recommend booking a trip to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. I think that it is very important that we educate ourselves on such historical events and don’t allow them to be forgotten from our collective consciousness, so that they are never allowed to happen again. As George Santayana says: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
From Oswicim we drove to Katowice which, unfortunately, after a busy week of exploring, and a long and emotionally exhausting day of being shown around the concentration camps, we didn’t have much energy to explore. We spent our limited number of night time hours in Katowice enjoying the hotel’s spa; having a delicious meal in the hotel’s restaurant (making sure to soak up the last of the Polish culture by drinking lots of Polish wine) and preparing for our flight home the following morning.
We really enjoyed our whirlwind visit to Poland and were happy with what we managed to fit into the short time we had there. It’s somewhere that I would happily return to visit again in the future.
Comments