Since we checked one bag to be able to enjoy our Kara & Nate bottled wine on the next leg of the trip, we had to wait for a bag at the carousel. We had an Uber adventure while trying to leave the airport. S called a ride which said it would take ~17 mins to get us coming from the city center. Well, the the driver proceeded to pick up other riders other than us and take them around Old Town as we watched on the app! We tried hailing another ride and they "arrived" but there was not a blessed soul anywhere near us. After almost an hour, someone else was able to pick us up. Finally we made it to Hotel Wawel and crashed.
Day 1
I slept in and then woke up in search of a chai. Around this time I was fighting off a sickness causing drainage and coughing fits. You know me, I kept pushing through to see all I could see! Thank goodness for Burt's Bees cough drops and Mucinex! I found my chai in the lovely Old Town Square.
Later on that morning we started the Rick Steves walking tour of Old Town to explore the city center. We paused to people watch from the Cloth Hall terrace for about an hour which was perfect timing because it rained really hard for a bit and we watched people take cover.
Lunch was at Taco Mexicano near our hotel. Texans, do not eat here as it was not very good! We arrived at the Wawel Hill (cathedral/castle area) a tad too late to view the church, but we were still able to tour the grounds.
Apparently dragons are a thing in Kraków, so I got a cute magnet with one on it. After sightseeing for the day, we had a Thai massage. Dinner was right next to the hotel at Czarna Kaczka where I had delicious borscht soup.
That night we decided to stay up super super late to watch Schindler's List since we were booked for a tour of the camps the following morning.
Day 2
If you are interested in visiting the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial, you can arrange things yourself, but make sure to visit the official website and read carefully. They are super strict with the size of bags. Since we were not in the area for a long time, we decided to book our tour through Cracow City Tours so they handled the transportation (about 1.5 hrs away from Kraków) and the guide.
We met up at the designated spot at 7am, which was harder than it sounds after going to sleep very late and being super cough-y. After listening to the guide's intro, I was promptly rocked to sleep on the bus and woke up right before we arrived. The bus had about 50 people and several languages represented. Our guide with Cracow City Tours spoke beautiful Italian and was our English guide through the camps. I loved her passion for history.
I had heard that tour groups at Auschwitz can be loud and not respectful to what is around them. Thankfully our group was great and reverent of what we were experiencing. The tour through Auschwitz I (the original concentration camp) took about an hour and half.
We toured several building and saw the famous gate with the motto Arbeit macht frei ("Work brings freedom"). This tour was really hard and I'm not going to be able to put into words how I felt being in that space where so many people perished due to racism and hatred. Let's make sure this NEVER happens again.
After a short break, we were driven to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The main entrance with the train tracks leading to the crematoria is haunting. There is a powerful monument at the end of the tracks. Once the guided tour wrapped up, we had roughly 20 mins to tour the grounds on our own. We wanted to go back to the memorial and had to jog at the end to make it back to the bus on time because the size of the place is quite misleading.
Apparently there used to be ~300 barracks at the camp. They have been restoring some so we were able to tour one. The conditions were appalling.
Upon returning to Kraków we had another attempt at Mexican food at The Mexican. While it was better than the first round, it's nothing like home. The weather in town was a 180 to what we had at the camps. It was beautiful at the camps and we had to bust out our rain jackets to get from the bus to lunch because it was pouring.
Next up was the Wieliczka Salt Mine Tour with Cracow City Tours. We had the same guide, but this time she was the Italian interpreter for the actual tour of the mine. We had heard you either like the mine or not. Thankfully we loved it! I would love to go on the miners tour in the future and get to crawl around in there!
Getting there took forever, so I had another nap. It was only 12km away from town, but it took us much longer than it should have due to a wreck. We had a fairly large group, but the local guide was fun. The first part of the tour was to walk down many flights of stairs (~53 flights).
The tour lasted about 2 hours and we walked a ton. The mine opened in the 13th Century and mined table salt up until ~2007 making it one of the oldest salt mines ever. Over the years the miners carved chapels and other neat sculptures into the salt. People still use the chapels! One of my favorite pieces was the Last Supper. It looked 3D! Our tour took us to only about 2% of the mine.
If you like mines, check this place out - just know it is super touristy. At the end of the tour, we were in the deepest part we would visit and thankfully took an elevator to the top rather than having to climb who knows how many floors.
The bus dropped us back near Old Town and we were hungry from a bunch of walking that day. We wondered the main square and most restaurants were only serving drinks at that hour. Eventually we picked a place still serving dinner and grabbed a seat outside. It started raining again so we asked if we could be seated inside, which we were. My dumplings were delicious.
Day 3
The following morning I grabbed my chai and some McDonalds for our breakfast. The agenda for the day was to visit the Schindler Factory Museum and Google offices. Since it was pouring, we took an Uber to the museum where we proceeded to stand in line for over an hour in the rain to purchase tickets.
If you visit at a peak time, I would recommend making reservations or booking a tour as to not stand in a really long line. Since we did not know when we wanted to visit the museum, we did not purchase ahead of time. They only give out a certain number of tickets per day, so hopefully you don't show up after they reached that number.The museum has a permanent exhibit of Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939–1945. What those people went through was terrible. We ended up spending about two hours touring the museum and just like the concentration camps the day before, it was a burden on the heart to see everything.
We then took a ride to see our first Google office which was away from the city center then made it back to Old Town to the main office in the square.
S got a massage after we toured the beautiful St. Mary's Basilica. A trumpeter announces the hour on the hour by a song from each side of the tower - but doesn't play the full song because back in the day a trumpeter was announcing the arrival of enemies when he was shot with an arrow so the song abruptly stopped. I did a little shopping and learned amber is a popular item there.For our last dinner in Kraków, we ended up at the fancy place we saw the night before. We ordered champagne and the waiter used a saber to remove the cork! Wish we would have filmed it! The waiters delivered everything with white gloves and the food was very tasty.
Once we stuffed ourselves, we grabbed the bags we stored at the hotel desk for the day and headed to the train station. We had booked an overnight train with Polrail after reading about it from a great train travel resource - Man in Seat 61. Our stateroom had bunkbeds and a small bathroom complete with a shower. The train left around 10:30pm heading towards Praha (Prague).
I was rocked to sleep and woke up ready to sight see! Next up - Prague!
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