Krakow (the beverages)

As is often the case, and despite warnings during study abroad to 'not find the cheapeast flight and then take it because you'll end up in the sticks', we ended up in the armpit of Poland because of a cheap ryanair (damn you michael o'leary!) deal to the sticks. So imagine our relief when, after four hours of finagling at Europe's third dodgiest transportation station (only in comparison to Coventry Pool Meadow and Glasgow Queen Street), we arrived into a sparkling Krakow Glowny Station on a sparkling October afternoon.

Would you believe me if I told you that Krakow has beautiful food? And that you pay a third of the price of that anywhere in Western Europe? And that it's a gorgeous city? What a relief.

day/evening one involved mostly food and beverages, hence the beverage tour, though we didn't drink all of this in one day:

Paul, Paolo, Paola, depending on the day, drinking his beer in the oh so masculinely Polish manner

orange hot chocolate at Cafe Camelot

Zubrowka!
Polish flavoured vodka
drinking hot beer with a straw in a jazz cave in the heart of the city





Halfheartedly, I wish I could report that we did lots of exciting adventure-filled and crazy things in the course of the week. We did not. Unless you count eating and drinking. It's the first holiday in a long time that I stayed in one place for longer than two days, watched the pace of the world slow down and investigated the nooks, crannies and posh alleyways of a medeival city without my usual sense of agressive wanderlust.

It appears i have begun to heed the advice of a young but wise anglo-italian when he said 'relax yourself, fool!'. Indeed.

Katowice

is the armpit of Poland.




the most notable happenings during our 3-hour, very unnecessary stint in the armpit:

1. passport control
me: handing over my passport and grinning like an idiot

border guard: looking very eastern european and flipping through my passport 'i cannot let you in to poland'

me: 'um! what!' thinking i just got off a hot pink airplane to fly to the buttcrack of a nation in the middle of nowhere

border guard: 'no place for stamp.'

me: sweating it out as i'm thinking okay, fair point, i need to get more pages in my passport 'uh?!'

border guard: waiting for roughly seven minutes and drawling before busting out an impish smile 'okay, i find one more place!'

2. Crawling on the public bus from the airport to the city centre to get the train to Krakow only to watch the direct minibus to Krakow zoom right past you

3. Looking for something like platform 2 and 3/4 that leads directly into a bricked up wall while old Polish men point and gesticulate rapidly into the air, a Polish tramp begs you for zloti you don't have and you contemplate if Warsaw is within walking distance from Krakow because at least there's a train going there and it's got to be better than Katowice