Excuse my French, but I'm in France.: Kraków

Hey y'all,

One of my friends here had some time off and we decided to take a random trip. Destination: Krakow, Poland. Why? It seemed like a cool city. Plus, it's super super cheap. From Tuesday to Sunday (lodging included), our trip cost 150 euro each. Yeah. That's cheap. And, it's actually a place I've always wanted to go. Y'all know that I've got a gypsy soul to blame and I was born for leaving, so I was obviously down for this adventure.

I'm going to preface this by a joke that my big bro Stephen sent me before I went to Poland.

A Polack goes to get his eyes tested. The bottom line of the eye-test chart read C Z Y N A S Q H T M. The optometrist asked, "Can you read the bottom line?" The Polack replied, "Read it? I know the guy!"

I die. I die.

We arrived in Poland and were a big scared...we caught a bus from the airport to the train station in the "center of the city". However, when we arrived, no one really spoke English and thus no one could tell us where we were. It was about 9pm and completely dark and it was just rough! It was actually very frightening. We thought about just walking and trying to somehow find a road that was on our map in our guidebook but then we were like, mmmm betta not. We bit the bullet and caught a taxi - only cost us about 4 euros. Loved Poland already.

The next day with toured around the city. It's a neat town with a really pretty 'old city', so that was cool. Here's the main square:

That's the church of Saint Mary, I believe.

The interior of the church was GORGEOUS. It was so bright and colorful. I loved it. It was a refreshing change from the French gothic cathedrals that lack color.

Wednesday was a beautiful day, but it was coooooold. Also, the Poles are super accommodating for vegetarians. Wasn't expecting that.

We spent most of the day walking around in the cold, but I enjoyed it.

The old part of the city is neat because there's a wall that goes all the way around it and there's a big gate into the city.

The city actually reminded me a lot of Prague (they even had someone play a trumpet from the top of the church every hour on the hour. loved it). Those Eastern European countries.

One time we ate this whole pizza. No shame, y'all. No shame.

Oh slurp.

The beautiful thing about Poland is that everything is so so cheap. Our most expensive meal which was a really nice traditional Polish meal was about 16 euros total. 4PLN = 1 euro. Now that's an exchange rate I could get used to.

On Thursday, we went on a tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. I'll write a whole post on that later. I will say though that it was incredible.

Friday we walked around some more and toured the Jewish quarter. Oh by the way, it snowed about 6 inches on Friday. Woof. It was very pretty, but so so cold. The snow soaked through the one pair of boots that I took with me, and I'm not going to lie - I'm not quite sure how I still have toes. No joke. The Jewish Quarter was alright, I suppose. We were going to go into some of the synagogues...but you had to pay...to enter a Jewish place of worship. Insert joke here.

Here are a few shots of Krakow in the snow.

This is the church of Saints Peter and Paul. There are statues of each of the 12 disciples, but I couldn't fit them all in there. Sorry about that, Bartholomew.