Krakow: Finally finding Narnia (and a dragon)

I regret not staying in Krakow longer than a few days. Ok, partly it was because we missed the 'Tram Party', which is exactly as it sounds: a party in a disused Tram.  But I also felt there was a lot more to explore away from the centre. Equipped with our warnings from Kevin (a laid-back American we'd met in Berlin, who told us not to set out into the area we happened to be staying in) our options were pretty limited in the evenings. We ended up in Alchemia, which first looked deceptively like an English pub, but turned out to be a maze of dimly lit rooms.

The first room was reminiscent of an antique-style drawing room and contained a great wooden wardrobe at the end of it. We didn't really want to be the tourists who go over to an empty cupboard, expecting Narnia or something, but eventually our curiosity got the better of us and we edged our way over to it. We stepped through the wardrobe into a candlelit room, which oddly enough turned out to be the smoking area, essentially hiding the smokers away in an extremely-expanded cupboard.



Alchemia (I won't pretend this isn't a picture from Google)

The food we found was hit and miss in Krakow. One place we went to had 4 things on the menu, 3 of which were ravioli. I'm almost ashamed to say we opted for Italian on the first day, because whilst I'm up for trying most local cuisine, when you've been on a walking tour with no lunch (tour complete with a visit to see some dragon bones), none of us were be prepared to try and figure out the Polish menus, or worse: the dubious translations.

When we booked the hostels we were spoilt for choice with loads of quirky places in Krakow. Personally I favoured the 'Goodbye Lenin Hostel', complete with elaborate paintings of Lenin, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix - an odd combination really. We opted out of Hostel Flamingo, not sure what to make of the tagline - a hostel "run BY flamingoes, FOR flamingoes" and eventually settled on a safe option - Orange Hostel. Little did we know that the building would feel like it was going to drop us through the several flights of stairs that we struggled up with our rucksacks. Or that it would switch the lights off mid-journey, forcing Amber to flee back to the supermarket, too scared to continue on her own. We also weren't prepared for the overly intimate bathrooms, whose walls had no tops to them. This essentially meant whenever you walked into the bathroom it felt like someone was having a shower in the same room and would shortly emerge from behind the curtain. But we enjoyed our stay in Krakow, and when we weren't watching strange Polish breakdancers and impressive flamethrowers; trying to work out what was up with the Krakow dragon; watching our tourguide get his head stuck in an art installation, or being persuaded to get energy from leaning against a magical wall, we were entertained by excerpts from a new phenomenon: 'Klara's Diary'.



Auschwitz

How can I even begin to describe it. I don't think think there are any words I can write, any words you could say, that would even start to explain the feeling of Auschwitz and Birkenau. When you see all at the same time, the torture chambers and the tourists taking photos; the girl smiling away in flip-flops and shorts, posing inside the birkenow camp; the man spitting on the floor and thinking nothing of it. Until you're standing in the watch-tower and can see the lines of barracks, the ditches they dug, the remains of the gas chambers and the harrowing precision and planning that must have gone into the conception of these camps, until you've seen all this I don't think it you can truly perceive the break-down in humanity that Nazi-ism brought. Even simply listing these aspects seems cold. But to ignore it in this blog would feel worse.