Prague Would Never Allow This
Things have gotten a little out of order anyway, so here's an account of Krakow before one of my trip to the southwest, even though the latter happened first, in the strictest interpretation of the "continuity" of "time."
We didn't originally plan to visit Kraków. Although I would never admit it, it's possible that up to a few weeks ago I only had a very vague idea that Kraków was probably in either Poland or Hungary, which is of course a very embarrassing gap in the knowledge of an editor of European travel guides, let alone a cartographer. But now I can tell you very assuredly that Kraków is in Poland, not in Hungary or the Czech Republic or any other Eastern European country. I can also tell you that in Kraków it is very cold (or at least it is in late November, and doesn't promise to get much toastier for many months) and dark most of the time.
The reason we chose Kraków as our "wait, we came to Berlin to be able to make many cheap trips to cities in central and eastern Europe and as of mid-November haven't really gone anywhere of note yet" destination is that my friend Jane (see note 1, "Berlin's Trendiest Babies," below) overheard us making plans around Jesse's kitchen table to visit Prague, and literally dropped everything in her rush to the doorway. From the doorway she was able to tell us not to go to Prague, newly (or maybe now not-so-newly) the tourist capital of central Europe whose hostels are apparently comparable to fraternity houses in their numbers of drunk, self-centered college-aged men looking for parties and gullible foreign girls. Jane seemed to feel pretty strongly about us not going to Prague, and I felt pretty stronly about not getting vomited on very much on this proposed vacation, so we said maybe Warsaw? Jane pointed out that Warsaw is made up of soviet concrete cubes with occasional windows. Where then, we asked our former Eastern Europe editor?
So we booked a flight to Kraków. EasyJet flies there (who knew?), so it was in fact neither hard nor expensive to plan a 2-day trip to the purportedly most beautiful largeish Polish city. And Kraków is pretty beautiful, as far as I could tell with the coating of snow and my near-constant shivering despite many, many layers of clothes. My conclusion was that the cold is somehow colder in Poland, perhaps in inverse proportion to the prevalence of very greasy food. Jeremy was delighted with pierogie and various fried pancakes stuffed with various dubious fillings, and I was delighted at the time but later full of both regret and heavy-sitting food. One thing Kraków does do very well is hot chocolate, which appeared everywhere in its greatest form, which is cup of something that could only have been solid chocolate up to the (very recent) point at which it was melted. The city (probably the whole country, but I wouldn't know) also has street vendors selling a kind of twisted bagel type bread for 1 zloty (30 cents!), and these vendors have somehow spaced themselves out such that the next one appears just as you have finished your first twistey bagel type thing. I am told that these are called Obwarzanki.
The sights in and around Kraków consist of Wawel Castle, the Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierez, some fairly amazing salt mines, and Auschwitz. We visited the first three of these, and avoided Auschwitz due both to time restrictions (it takes a whole day to get there, see everything, and get back) and the fact that it would almost certainly have upset me enough to outweigh any gladness I would have at having gone to see it. As it was, just walking around the city and the area around the salt mines, I managed to upset myself plenty by thinking of just how much colder it would be for someone not wearing several layers of winter clothes and boots, and able to buy hot food and escape into the relative warmth of buses and churches when the wind really picked up. And it's only November, just the first snow of the season.
So it wasn't all lighthearted playing in the snow and pierogie-eating. This will all sound very petty in comparison, but staying at our hostel, which was thumbpicked by Let's Go and was really quite nice as hostels go, reminded me of how much I've decided I just don't like staying in hostels. In addition to snoring people and kids coming back to the room at 2, 4, 5, and 6 in the morning, there was a really really horrible dude from Sacramento (I think Jeremy is describing him in his blog - I won't even try to) and a group of 26 American college students on a trip with their semester program in Florence. Then the hostel messed up a booking and had to add a bed (really just a mattress) to the middle of our dormroom floor, one of the four bathrooms stopped working just as the American students (mostly girls) decided they all needed to take showers, and the hostel phone refused to accept my phone card, because it is somehow not a tone dialing phone. But I somehow charmed a guy in the internet cafe downstairs to let me use their phone, so I didn't end up having to stand in a -5 degree phone box to call my family for Thanksgiving.
But what staying in the hostel most reminded me of was how much I actually dislike hearing backpackers talk about backpacking. This is, I realize, a bad quality for a writer of travel guides for young people, but I blame the backpackers for thinking that anyone wants to hear their opinions on how "oh yeah, Czech girls are really pretty. Prettier than Hungarian girls," or "Prague is really, like, I think it's definitely going to be the new Paris." The best thing I overheard was on a street with many trendy clothing stores and with many brightly lit window displays, where a youngish guy was talking loudly to his companion about commercialization, and finished by pointing at a storefront and making the pronouncement that, "Prague would never allow this." I kind of wonder if he has actually been to Prague, or to any city anywhere, for that matter. Kraków is the closest I've seen to a city that's stayed much as it was when the castle was actually inhabited. But then I've not been to Prague, so as far as I know, the guy could be right.
We didn't originally plan to visit Kraków. Although I would never admit it, it's possible that up to a few weeks ago I only had a very vague idea that Kraków was probably in either Poland or Hungary, which is of course a very embarrassing gap in the knowledge of an editor of European travel guides, let alone a cartographer. But now I can tell you very assuredly that Kraków is in Poland, not in Hungary or the Czech Republic or any other Eastern European country. I can also tell you that in Kraków it is very cold (or at least it is in late November, and doesn't promise to get much toastier for many months) and dark most of the time.
The reason we chose Kraków as our "wait, we came to Berlin to be able to make many cheap trips to cities in central and eastern Europe and as of mid-November haven't really gone anywhere of note yet" destination is that my friend Jane (see note 1, "Berlin's Trendiest Babies," below) overheard us making plans around Jesse's kitchen table to visit Prague, and literally dropped everything in her rush to the doorway. From the doorway she was able to tell us not to go to Prague, newly (or maybe now not-so-newly) the tourist capital of central Europe whose hostels are apparently comparable to fraternity houses in their numbers of drunk, self-centered college-aged men looking for parties and gullible foreign girls. Jane seemed to feel pretty strongly about us not going to Prague, and I felt pretty stronly about not getting vomited on very much on this proposed vacation, so we said maybe Warsaw? Jane pointed out that Warsaw is made up of soviet concrete cubes with occasional windows. Where then, we asked our former Eastern Europe editor?
So we booked a flight to Kraków. EasyJet flies there (who knew?), so it was in fact neither hard nor expensive to plan a 2-day trip to the purportedly most beautiful largeish Polish city. And Kraków is pretty beautiful, as far as I could tell with the coating of snow and my near-constant shivering despite many, many layers of clothes. My conclusion was that the cold is somehow colder in Poland, perhaps in inverse proportion to the prevalence of very greasy food. Jeremy was delighted with pierogie and various fried pancakes stuffed with various dubious fillings, and I was delighted at the time but later full of both regret and heavy-sitting food. One thing Kraków does do very well is hot chocolate, which appeared everywhere in its greatest form, which is cup of something that could only have been solid chocolate up to the (very recent) point at which it was melted. The city (probably the whole country, but I wouldn't know) also has street vendors selling a kind of twisted bagel type bread for 1 zloty (30 cents!), and these vendors have somehow spaced themselves out such that the next one appears just as you have finished your first twistey bagel type thing. I am told that these are called Obwarzanki.
The sights in and around Kraków consist of Wawel Castle, the Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierez, some fairly amazing salt mines, and Auschwitz. We visited the first three of these, and avoided Auschwitz due both to time restrictions (it takes a whole day to get there, see everything, and get back) and the fact that it would almost certainly have upset me enough to outweigh any gladness I would have at having gone to see it. As it was, just walking around the city and the area around the salt mines, I managed to upset myself plenty by thinking of just how much colder it would be for someone not wearing several layers of winter clothes and boots, and able to buy hot food and escape into the relative warmth of buses and churches when the wind really picked up. And it's only November, just the first snow of the season.
So it wasn't all lighthearted playing in the snow and pierogie-eating. This will all sound very petty in comparison, but staying at our hostel, which was thumbpicked by Let's Go and was really quite nice as hostels go, reminded me of how much I've decided I just don't like staying in hostels. In addition to snoring people and kids coming back to the room at 2, 4, 5, and 6 in the morning, there was a really really horrible dude from Sacramento (I think Jeremy is describing him in his blog - I won't even try to) and a group of 26 American college students on a trip with their semester program in Florence. Then the hostel messed up a booking and had to add a bed (really just a mattress) to the middle of our dormroom floor, one of the four bathrooms stopped working just as the American students (mostly girls) decided they all needed to take showers, and the hostel phone refused to accept my phone card, because it is somehow not a tone dialing phone. But I somehow charmed a guy in the internet cafe downstairs to let me use their phone, so I didn't end up having to stand in a -5 degree phone box to call my family for Thanksgiving.
But what staying in the hostel most reminded me of was how much I actually dislike hearing backpackers talk about backpacking. This is, I realize, a bad quality for a writer of travel guides for young people, but I blame the backpackers for thinking that anyone wants to hear their opinions on how "oh yeah, Czech girls are really pretty. Prettier than Hungarian girls," or "Prague is really, like, I think it's definitely going to be the new Paris." The best thing I overheard was on a street with many trendy clothing stores and with many brightly lit window displays, where a youngish guy was talking loudly to his companion about commercialization, and finished by pointing at a storefront and making the pronouncement that, "Prague would never allow this." I kind of wonder if he has actually been to Prague, or to any city anywhere, for that matter. Kraków is the closest I've seen to a city that's stayed much as it was when the castle was actually inhabited. But then I've not been to Prague, so as far as I know, the guy could be right.
posted by Katherine at 11:24 AM
2 Comments:
Tsk, tsk, how soon you forget, Katherine dear. Actually, you have visited Prague, admittedly for just a few hours, when you were 10 years old during our drive from Seiffen, East Germany, to Vienna.
If you don't remember the city, perhaps you will remember my lame excuses, just after crossing into the Czech Republic, for not offering a ride to one of the several young lady hitchhikers, dressed in tight sweaters and short skirts, that you noticed standing by that lonely road. You thought I must have been mistaken when I said that they didn't really want a ride from an American family. Come to think of it, they might have accepted a ride from those drunk, self-centered college-aged men looking for parties and...
I have a vague memory of driving past a river, on the other side of which were buildihgs, and that those buildings were Prague. And I remember stories about the 'lady hitchhikers,' but I don't actually remember seeing them. So for all intents and purposes, I don't really know anything about Prague. Furthermore, I wouldn't really call 11 years 'soon,' but that may just be because I'm only twice that amount old.
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