We made it to our second and third Polish towns and had another great week of walking through beautiful old town squares and eating lots of perogies. We spent 3 nights in Torun and then 6 nights in Krakow. Let’s start with Torun. It is a much smaller town than Gdansk and Krakow, and sometimes we like that a lot better. It didn’t have too many “must do” sites so we just kind of took it easy for a bit. The town’s specialty is gingerbread so we sampled it in one of the many gingerbread shops. Not that exciting. It tasted like gingerbread. Way less tourists means less stress for us. We mostly just wandered the old city streets and sat in less busy sidewalk cafes.
Krakow was a lot busier than Torun. It is full of history, beautiful architecture and that means lots of tourists. Our first day was the annual Dachshund parade which meant the huge town square was full of wiener dogs. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good picture of it because we were on our first day “free” walking tour. But I did get a lot of pics of the city. One of the big attractions is St. Mary’s Basilica that has a trumpeter playing from the tower every hour. It is fun things like the trumpets make every city unique. We have been seeing a lot of picturesque old towns through the Baltics and now Poland but we aren’t tired of them yet.
Krakow has a lot of things to do and we missed a couple of the big tourist spots. Aushwitz concentration camp is only a hour away but we decided to skip it because we visited Dachau in Germany a few years ago. We also didn’t see Schindler’s factory because we didn’t buy tickets in advance. Missing things doesn’t bother us much because our life is still filled with seeing cool stuff. We did see the the Czartoryski art museum which had the Leonardo DaVinci’s “Lady with an Ermine”. We also saw the archeology museum under the main town square (Rynek Museum). The old medieval market was found right under the main square but wasn’t uncovered until 2005. The archeologists did their thing, they turned it into a museum, and then they just covered again with a new town square. Many people visiting the city don’t really realize that they are walking over an archeology museum.
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We have gotten into a bit of a rut of returning to our Airbnb after dinner most nights and missing any sort of nightlife. Sometimes we need to get out and see what goes on after dark. We love to see music and Krakow has a few jazz clubs that start later at night. We found really cool underground cave club (Jazz Club u Muniaka) and we had a good time staying up until 11:30 pm :>) Another night we decided to join an evening food tour because we had some free credits from Airbnb Experience. The food wasn’t great, but it was fun hanging out with a group of international tourists for a night. Sometimes it is fun to socialize with other people that aren’t part of our retired nomad groups that are mostly American.
We often miss our family and friends back home so we have been trying to be more social with our retired nomad friends. One of the nomad Facebook groups have developed functionality this year that let us check in to a city and see what other nomads are around. This has led to a lot of more meetups for us this trip. It is important for us to find “community” when we don’t really live in a community. We met Amber and Greg a few weeks ago in Latvia. Then we saw them again in Lithuania, then in Gdansk and now in Krakow. We had a good time with them each time, and the lesson is that possible to find “real” friends on the road. Unfortunately we will miss them by a few hours in Prague next week. We also setup a meetup for all the retired nomads in Krakow this week. 11 people showed up for our dinner and we had another great evening of sharing traveling stories.
We are now nearing the end of our time in Poland. We have one more week and we are going to one of the “underrated” stops in this country. We have 6 nights booked in Wroclaw!!!