Full Krakow Post

Scheherazade, my soon-to-be sister-in-law, is teaching neurology at the Jagiellonian Medical University in Krakow for the month of May. Taking the opportunity to visit her was the impetus for my whole European trip!

I flew from Oslo to Krakow (via Munich) and took the city bus to the tram that stops near the university housing where she is living. In order to break my 100 zloty bill to pay the 3 zlotys for the bus, I went into the airport and pointed at a yummy-looking pastry. There were several to choose from; all of them were beautifully molded with intricate designs, and it looked like they had been covered with egg in order to have a nice golden glisten on the outside of the pastry. I went outside with my prize and sat to wait for the bus and took a nice bite of this dense pastry. It turns out that when she had said “cheese”, she meant that this was a block of cheese, and not a pastry filled with cheese. It was a very salty, squeaky smoked cheese, hence the outer coating that looked so pretty. It was pretty tasty—I sat and waited for the bus, gnawing on my huge block of cheese.

The first night, after uniting with Scheherazade, we went to the old town, which beautiful. The Cloth Hall is under renovation right now unfortunately, so the façade is covered with scaffolding, and the museum inside is closed. But St. Mary’s Church, with the bugler, is in full force, and it is really lovely. The bugler bugles every hour on the hour, and he only plays part of a song—back in the day when the bugler was bugling that the enemy was coming, he was hit in the larynx with an arrow and the song abruptly ended. As a tribute to his bugling, they continue this tradition every hour. Krakow made it through the war without being destroyed, and the old feel of the town is really nice. There used to be a moat around the whole city center, which has been replaced with a nice grassy and treey park that circles the city.

The food in Poland is outstanding. There will be a lot of food discussion here: we spent most of the time walking around the town, stopping in cafes to have coffee and cakes in between huge Polish meals. So. The first night, we went to a milk bar, which is a “self service” place that is incredibly cheap. The two of us had more food than we could finish and it cost $11 for the two of us. I had bigos, a sauerkraut-sausage-mushroom stew that is quite a hearty meal. I also had beet borsht, and Scheherazade had pierogi, little ravioli-like dumplings stuffed with spinach, sauerkraut, shrooms, meat or potatoes and cheese. Really nice stuff.

I went to the University with Scheherazade on Wednesday to hear her lecture on intracerebral hemorrhaging (bleeding in the brain). She got a really nice introduction from Dr. J, a professor at University of Rochester who organizes the exchange to Krakow each spring. After her lecture, I went off to explore the city and ended up at this little local market where they were selling everything from purses and underwear to pots, cheese and beautiful fresh vegetables and fruits. In the evening we walked around even more, and went to the Jewish District, the Kazimierz. This area is really great. It’s now pretty artsy and has a lot of interesting places to explore. Like everything in Krakow, there are really modern, hip places inside of very old, almost run-down-looking buildings. Each place is really unique and it’s so fun to look into each shop and café to see what could possibly be inside. And, almost every place has a cellar. So restaurants have more seating downstairs, bars and clubs have other rooms with more themes, it’s really great. Since it started to rain, we had delicious chocolate-pear-marzipan-cinnamon-cream cake and coffee and watched people passing by with umbrellas. Then we went off to have some beers with the Polish med students. Then, we went back to the square and went to a fancy restaurant (that is still so reasonable compared to US restaurants) and had delicious soups. Zurek, another traditional Polish soup, is made of sour rye and is served with a boiled egg and sausage. It can be a pretty clear broth, or more creamy. In the next days we had it many times and it was delicious in any form. I had a mushroom soup that was served in a tall bread bowl, also super delicious.

It was raining very hard but Heidrun finally made it! Heidrun is my Austrian cousin who was driving from Graz. The rain plus tiny Polish roads made her trip almost 10 hours, much longer than it should have been. To celebrate her arrival, we went to the little blue truck to have kielbasa! This is a few guys who park their little blue truck on the street between 8pm and dawn and grill sausages. Although the truck is small, the operation is very substantial. There are 2 guys, one who handles the money and the sausage-bread-mustard-potential-drink distribution, and the other guy has his hands full over 2 big fires, wielding 3 6-pronged sausage-flippers, each of which has a sausage on it. Grilled to perfection, they were awesome. We were not only the only non-Polish people partaking in this delicious late-night feast, but we were the only women. There were a lot of night-laborer types having their dinner. It rocked.

In the next days, Heidrun and I explored while Scheherazade worked and then we all met up and went back out to the town. The first day we headed up to the Wawel castle, which reminds me so much of a fairy tale castle, probably from Sleeping Beauty. It has a nice view of the whole town as well, and the architecture is so lovely. We went to see the treasury, which was mostly the armory, since so much has been pillaged over the years. And the tour of the royal apartments was similar—the architecture is legit but all the pieces have been reconstructed or are from the same period but from elsewhere since everything was destroyed when various armies occupied the castle. We also got Swedish massages, which turned out to be Polish massages, go figure.

We spent a lot of time in the Jewish Quarter, it was so lovely to walk around and there were much fewer tourists. And so much history everywhere. We had traditional Jewish dinner at a restaurant called Ariel (where we ended up on 2 more nights). I had a soup that was beef, veggies, cinnamon and honey. It was really tasty! And Scheherazade and I had the roast duck with cherries and latkes. The following night we went back to hear traditional Jewish music at the same place, it was really lovely. Violin, cello and accordion, and they also played some Hungarian and Slovakian pieces. It was nice to sit with a bottle of wine and hear them play (we had previously eaten at a Jewish milk bar where we had the usual delicious soups and also a bean-barley-beef stew).

On Saturday Tomek, one of Nishad’s friends from high school in India, and Ola, one of Heidrun’s friends, met us in Krakow, which was awesome. The five of us walked around town and to the Jewish District and hung out and caught up. Ola took us to this sweet café where the whole place is decorated with old instruments—trumpets hung from the walls and were used as hooks for coats and newspapers, an old accordion was a bookshelf, drums served as tables, and there were cellos hanging from the ceiling, pianos built into the floor. Also, the lampshades were all old music pasted around, and the door to the kitchen was a zither.

That night we went to hear live jazz in a cellar bar on the main square. It started raining while we were there and we ran to a restaurant that was still open and had a delicious midnight meal—definitely the best borscht I had in Poland. They served it with a stuffed and fried cabbage that absorbed all the beet juice and made it into delicious little pockets of borscht—yum! Heidrun’s zurek was also one of the best we had and Scheherazade’s kielbasa rivaled the blue van. And, downstairs in this seemingly normal restaurant, was a full-scale Tunisian restaurant, with little rooms with Persian rugs, hookas, and belly dancers. Little microcosms, so cool!

Heidrun left on Sunday, it was so sad to see her go. I headed out to Auschwitz and Birkenau, which are such haunting places. It was pouring rain the whole time, which seemed appropriate somehow.

I ended my European adventure with Scheherazade in the Jewish District, where we had a nice walk as the rain let up for a few hours and then a lovely dinner. We also went back to Ariel to buy some of these sweet Jewish lamps. They are a lovely amber color, which is fitting since there is so much amber in Poland. I’ll have to come back certainly—it would be so nice to spend more time in the city and also in the countryside. We were hoping to go to Zankopane, a nice village at the foothills of some nice hiking. Next time for sure, maybe on a sunny day.