The city is certainly a slower moving place than Warsaw - which makes sense since it is less populated but also because nothing is new or being reno'd like other 'after communist' places.
As tourists we want to see two things - the different, outstanding and interesting things of a place and then we want to spend some time with the regular people who live their lives in the day to day things away from the tourists.
We spent 2 1/2 hrs in a bus and walking tour where we 1st went to the area where "Shindler's List" was filmed. It's not the original Jewish ghetto because that area has since been fixed up and painted. Instead we actually saw the actual Jewish quarter where only 200 people of Jewish descent live.
As we left the actual Jewish area we saw a large concrete square where about 50 giant, iron chairs have been placed and spread out and attached for ever to the ground. These are to remind and to symbolize how the Jews were placed, lined up and then transported onto the trains to the various camps. It's amazing really, no one walks onto this area and it stands strong and naked in silence.
The main interest in Krakow is the old town which was an old medieval walled-in area and had within its walls a fortress castle with a large cathedral and many open squares and small town cobbled streets to house the people. Of course during the war, the entire city was taken by the Nazis. The main huge square, largest in Europe in a medieval square, was called Hitler's square. It is huge and today has hundreds of Polish kiosks, all under a quaint tent tops and are selling original hand-made Polish items. To us it felt as if we were back home at a Folklorama. We ate so many different perogies because in this their original birthplace, perogies that is, they put all sorts of things inside them and cook them in many different ways and serve them with many different sauces.
We met lots of nice people including other tourists that we just strike up a conversation with as we sit and ponder over the areas. As we walked back the 6 km to our hotel, we got to see the real life and ate at a Polish restaurant where we met a small family with two children and I just had to make googley faces at them. It's just one of the things I do when met with people whose languages can't be understood. So if we want water, I pretend to swim. If we want the toilets.. oh, never mind, you get the picture.
The polish language again is a bit ridiculous. You'll see about throwing letters up into the air as "wyjscie" means Exit and "wjazd" is Enter.
As we leave Poland, we wonder why it never dawned on us that we would be spending our trip seeing, listening to and learning about wars and man's inhumanity to man. Their history is rife with sadness and hardships and for many of these countries, they have had only and still less than 10, 20 or 30 years of freedom. Do we in the happier parts of the world know what we have?
