Saturday 27 November 2010

We get up around six in the morning. At 7 our taxi comes to collect and bring us to the Rotterdam Central Railway Station. From there the Fyra high speed train takes us in 25 minutes to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. We have coffee at Starbucks and do some shopping. Our Austrian Airlines flight takes off at 9.50 uur for Vienna. There we arrive on time at 11.20am. We have just enough time to grab a bite and go to the lavatory, as we are called to the gate at 12 noon for our connecting fligt to Cracow. It takes another 40 minutes before we get in the bus that drives to our aircraft. The DeHaviland jetprop of Austrian Arrows (a Austrian Airlines subsidiary) flies us in less than an hour to John Paul II  airport of Cracow. Snow is falling down on us and temperatures are around freezing point. In the arrivals hall we buy a train ticket from a vending machine for the train to downtown Cracow (16 Złoty for two persons). A shuttle bus to the train station is waiting outside the terminal. The bus ride takes only a few minutes. We transfer to a train ready for departure. At first it moves very slowly through the snow covered Polish landscape, but as soon as it joins the main network it picks up speed and delivers us in central Cracow in around a quarter of an hour. From the station it is a five minute walk to our hotel: Francuski. It is a rather grand affair, but a bit outdated. After a short break we venture into the old town. We have coffee and cake at the intimate café Camelot and walk on towards the main square, the Rynek Glówny. There is a Christmas market going on around the market hall. The hall is called Sukiennice. This one of the most striking sights of the country. It is a 14th century cloth hall, which has been remodeled in the 16th century. These days it fittingly functions as a covered market where traders try to sell a mixture of souvenirs and genuine Polish craftwork. On both sides of the building collonades have been added in the 19th century to add some grandeur. The other buildings around the square are nicely lit. After a round over the market and the hall we go to the Church of Our Lady Mary (Mariacki). This is a splendid 13th century church. Traditionally it was the merchants church. The two romanesque towers are different in shape and height. The North tower was used as watch tower. For a visit to the church we have to buy a ticket in an information office across from the church and enter via the tourist entrance. There is a separate entrance for prayer.  Inside the church the altar piece has been opened because of a service that is going on and we can admire the medieval woodcarving by the Nuremburg Master Veit Stoss, depticting scenes from the life of Christ (Annunciation, Nativity, Admiration, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost). We are lucky to hear the organ being played. After the church we hope to find a nice bar for a drink, but most of them have not really got started yet. We end up in an Irish pub amidst a group of English men on a binge. No doubt they flew in here on one of those budget flights, who have discovered a new market now Prague is getting too expensive.

At night we dine at at Miod Malina, a fine restaurant not far from the Main Square. Fortunately we have made a reservation this afternoon, as the place is filled to capacity. We have a good dinner. Erik has Polish specialties: Pirogie and a sauerkraut dish with sausage. I stick to lamb cutlets.

After dinner we walk back to the hotel via the christmas market.

Weather: snow showers and temperatures around freezing point.

 

Sunday 28 November 2010

We have breakfast in the spacious breakfast lounge. There is wide range of all sorts of breakfast food. After breakfast we walk to the main square and have coffee at grand café Noworolski inside the Market Hall. After coffee in the classic café we visit the Adalbert Church, on the square. It is a small domed church, the oldest surviving building in the city, built in the 11th century. The church is a century older than the square itself. We continue to the 14th century Barbara Church just behind the Maria Church on the Small Rynek. There is a Mass in progress and that is our luck, because the church is rarely open to the public. The church is filled with faithful. We observe the service from the entry portal. During the partition of Poland, the Austrians took over the Mariacki church and this church was the only place left to worship in Polish. We walk around a bit over the smaller Market Square and on to the Church of the Holy Cross. This is a quaint early gothic church from the 15th century. It is very simple on the outside. Inside a palm shaped pillar supports most of the roof. 15th and 16th century murals have been restored in the 19th century by the Cracow artist Stanislaw Wyspianski. We walk back to the Main Square to hear the 10am bugle signal. This is homage to the watchman who sounded the alarm during a medieval storming of the city by the Tatars. The signal or hejnał, was a sign to close the city gates. During this signal he was hit by an arrow. These days the alarm sound is reapeated into all directions every hour and abruptly ends half way through the melody.  [Listen to the hejnał]. A bit further down is the Dominican monastery and church. During our visit a mass is about to start. We can have a look at some of the chapels like the Hyacinth chapel and the chapel of the Myzskowski family.  There are loads of worshippers, which makes you feel less at ease making pictures. We carry on to  St Peter and Paul church. Here is the grave of the missionary Skarpa. He came to Cracow in 1590 to head off the upcoming protestant movement. It is a nice baroque church with lots of devout believers. In front of the church is a row of statues representing the twelve apostles. We walk further down Grodzki Street to the Wawel hill. The  Wawel hill  is a 228 meter high hill on the banks of the river Wisla, on which a number of historic buildings have beeen built. We walk up and collect a ticket for state rooms of the royal castle. Cracow was Poland's capital until 1596. King Sigismund III Waza moved the capital to Warsaw at the unification of the country with Lithuania. Today it is a Sunday and access to the buildings is free. For the state rooms a maximum number of visitors per day has been set. We have to hand our daypack at the cloak room. We have to pass through a metal detector and my camera bag is being x-rayed. The rooms are nice and adorned with furniture and tapestries, paintings and frescoes. Funny is the Audience Hall with the heads of ordinary Cracowians staring down at us from the ceiling. After this visit we go for lunch at an Italian restaurant La Campana. After lunch we walk back up the hill to visit the Cathedral. This bishop's church was once the seat of Karól Wojtila, the later pope, and was built in the 14th century  at the site of a first church from 1020. The cathedral is magnificent and the base for many Polish royal tombs. Unfortunately photography is prohibited.  Centrepiece is the silver plated sarcopahgus fo St Stanislaw, a bishop, who has aperently been murdered .  The sarcophagus is 17th century. The bones of Stanislaw have been laid to rest here in 1253, after which it became a popular pilgrim destination. Nicest of the chapels is the Sigismund chapel with its Italian wood carvings. We go outside again to the tomb with the grave of  Józef Pilsudski, the first president of a independent republic of Poland and became a non-official head of state until his death in 1935. Opposite his grave is - controversially so - the tomb of Lech Kaczinski and his wife, the impopular president , who was killed in a plane crash in 2010. A long line of Poles moves slowly past the two grvaves.

We descend again to the old town and walk on through the park towards the university area. We visit the university museum inside the Grand College. Many academic artefacts are on show here, like instruments owned by Copernicus, and funily enought the cinema prizes won by  Andrzej Wajda, an Oscar being among them. In the courtyard a mechanical clock has been fitted in 1999 from which the carved figures of King Władysław Jagiełło and koningin Jadwiga emerge every hour. Unfortunately we miss it by a couple of minutes.

We walk back to the hotel and take a break. After that we head out into the cold for a cocktail at the Paparazzi bar. Next is dinner at Wierzynek at the Main Square. It is pricy and the food is not so special. The view on the square on the other hand is priceless.

After another break in the hotel we go out again for a drink in one of the many cellar bars of Cracow. We land in  Klub RE. The entrance is somewhat hidden in a courtyard, where a stairwell leads us downstairs. Inside we meet a relaxed atmosphere under the vaulted ceiling. 

Weather: scattered clouds and some sun shine. Slight frost.

 

Monday 29 November 2010

We get up a bit early at 6.45. The world outside is totally white. There is a thick layer of snow on the streets and rooftops of no less than 30 cm. After breakfast we wade through the snow to the bus station behind the train station. For 10 zł each we buy a single ticket to Oświęcim, or Auschwitz. A word, even after 65 years, that is still synonimous to the worst that mankind has ever produced. The bus leaves at 8.25 from platform G1. The bus a aged tour bus, but still going strong. The heating works in waves, so we get hot and cool every 20 minutes or so. After an hour and a half we arive at the  “Muzeum”, a place that was once a living hell for over a million people. We start with a hot drink in the canteen and then join the English language tour that is about to start. For  72 zł we get a receiver and a headset just in time before the guide sets of. We tune to channel 1 and hear our guide loud and clearly. We start at the famous entry gate with the cynical slogan  “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work sets you free) and walk into the concentration camp, that served as a Polish barracks before the German occupation. At first it was used as a penintentiary faclity for "political prisoners" from Poland, but from 1941 onwards it became a labour and extermination camp primarily for Jews. We visit a number of buildings with photo exhibitions about the history and practices of the Auschwitz camp and nearby Birkenau, also named Auschwitz II. A few of the blocks have remained in tact, among which block 11, the prison block, where people were tortured and punished, in connection with escape attempts or resistance against the guards.  Most staggering are the standing cells in which up to 4 people had to spend the night standing up. In this block the first experiments with the poisonous gas Zyklon B were carried out. Another block exhibits the tangible proof of the Nazi crimes. Most of it are the personal posessions of the killed prisoners. Mountains of shoes, artificial limbs, teeth, spectacles, suit cases, tooth brushes and god knows what, which was take off the prisoners at arrival. In this camp Josef Mengele carried out his perverted “medical” experiments on primarily Jewish and Roma twins.  The visit to Auschwitz 1 ends with a visit to the gas chambers and crematorium. As this gas chamber was also used as a bunker, it was not destroyed during the Nazi withdrawal from Poland in 1945, as they have been in Birkenau camp. The chamber is a converted ammonition bunker with holes in the roof through which pellets of Zyklon B were thrown down. Next to it are the ovens for the burning of the corpses. In 1943 the capacity of the ovens was insufficient to burn all the bodies and bodies were then burned in large dug holes in the ground. The stench of this must have been smelled in the wider area around. Next to the gas chamber a gallow has been erected to hang the camp commander Rudolf Höss in 1947.

After that we board the shuttle bus to Birkenau, some 3 km away. Compared to Birkenau Auschwitz was a 5-star hotel survivors have said. The blocks for the men we made of wood and do not shield agains the cold at all. On a cold winter day like this it is as cold inside as it is outside. The people spent the night in three story high bunk beds with up to 10 peole sharing a berth. People could only sleep on their side. Many Jews never got to the sleeping blocks, because that had been deemed "useless" and  condemned to die in the gas chambers. All children and elderly met this fate. From the others only the strongest were selected for hard labour. Often enough this was a prolongued suffering, not rarely ending in death on account of exortion, sickness or starvation.

The railway leading into the camp is an impressive sight. The lead to the selection platforms. Most of the men's blocks have been demolished. Only stoves and chimneys remain. Because of lack of materiel and time most of the men's blocks are built of cheap wood. Most of the women's blocks are still standing. The crematoria of Birkenau have been destroyed when the Russian Red army was approaching. Funnily enough the nazi's were very interested in destroying the proof of destruction and genocide. The Russians only met 7,000 prisoners when the moved in.  The rest, tens of thousands of people, had been taken by the Nazi's on death marches to Germany. At the far end of the camp area a plaque commemorates in Dutch the death of the victims. We walk back a kilometre to the entrance. It has been snowing for a while now and it is freezingly cold. Imagine to stand here in this kind of cold with only a pair of striped pyjamas and some wooden shoes, doing 12 hours of hard labour every day. 

At 2pm the shuttle drives back to Auschwitz 1. We grab a bite in the canteen. It is not memorable as lunches go. At 2.50pm we hop on the bus to Cracow. The journey takes a bit longer than on the way out and we get to the bus station at 5pm. In the hotel we relax a bit before we head for a pizzeria just outside the old town:  Mamma Mia on  Karmelizka ul. Fine pizza for next to nothing.

Later that night we have a drink at Swięta Krowa, a cellar bar n Florianska ul. The entrance is somewhat hidden in an gateway, connectint the street and the courtyard. Inside is a relaxed atmosphere with jazz music in the background. We have a beer and some Polish honey wodka.

Weather: snow and just above freezing.

Tuesday 30 November 2010

 We go down to the hotel lobby and wait for our guide from Crazy Guides for our Communism Tour. At 9.30 our guide Joanna enters the lobby. She is 26 year old girs who knows communist rule in Poland only for her parents' stories. We squeeze ourselves into the Trabant and are on our way. It is so cold and the car's heating so bad the the windows freeze up on the inside of the car. With typical Trabant motor hum in our ears we drive out of the city centre towards Nova Huta. This is a Stalinist model town, built in the late 1940s outside Cracow proper around - at the time - the largest steel mill in the world. Only half of the city plan was built according to a strictly symmetrical grid. Large avenues make up a (semi) star radiating from the central square, now named after Ronald Reagan. The Red Rose Avenue divides the town in two equal parts. We first go to the café and restaurant Stylowa, which in the earlier days was strictly for party faithful only. Its interior is unchanged since the 1970s. Over coffee Crazy Guide Joanna explains us the history of the founding of Nova Huta and its development since.  Nova Huta was - according to our guide at least - as a communist counterweight against the catholic, academic and rebellious Cracow. There is no other logic for choosing this site for a steel mill. The earth holds no iron ore, there are no coal mines nearby for heating fuel and it is not situated on a important river or railway line. The heavy industry that uses the steel is hundreds of miles away in other parts of Poland. The construction workers were recruited among the poor peasants  in the region with promisses of well paid jobs and life long free housing. The story ends with the emergence of the Solidarity Trade Union in the 1980s, martial law under General Jaruzelski and the estblishment of democratic rule in 1989. After the talk we walk to the Central Square. This is where Nova Huta's elite lived. All workers were equal, but some were more equal than others. On the square is still one of the original shops with its classy interior design. This shows that the model citizens of Nova Huta were privileged compared to Cracovians. The large Lenin statue has been removed from the Rose Avenue in 1989. It was bought by a Swedish Millionaire and is now on display in a theme park near Gothenburg. 

 For Polish standards the workers who lived here had it good. Their entire life could be lived without leaving the town. Their appartments were small, but equipped with all  modern comforts like a hot shower and central heating - unknown in Poland in the 1950s. The tramway line that connects Nova Huta with Cracow since the mid 1950s was meant for Cracovians to enable them to admire the workers paradise and to go shopping in the model shops. We carry on to the steal mill - the reason of the town existance. At the time of its construction it was the largest in the world. The industrial complex is immense in its size. It covers three times the area of the town and there over 300 km of railway tracks on its grounds. The mill was a major polluter of both water and air. In the wider area around it the air use to be heavy with fumes and Nova Huta's artificial lake was unfit for swimming, just as the agricultural lands around were unfit for producing food. The mill is now owned by  ArcelorMittal from India. 80% of the installations have been shut down. Only 7,000 of the original 40,000 workers still work here, but output is still 40% of the old production levels. This means that productivity has increased enourmously. The mill is no longer named after Lenin, but after a Polish steel engineer called Tadeusz Sendzimir.  We pass a veterans museum, where a Russian tank (T34) is stationed in front of the entrance.  Next stop is the large Catholic church of the town, the Arka Pana. In the original city plan for Nova Huta there was no space for religion and therefor there were no churches. After years of protest and open air masses the authorities had to yield. The inhabitants built a church themselves in their spare time, to a design by Wojciech Petrzyk in 1977. The then arch bishop of Cracow Karol Wojtila laid the first stone. The church is full of biblical and catholic symbolism. The design is modernist and clearly inspired by the works of Le Corbusier, the Swiss patriarch of modernist architecture. Although the church is devoted to the virgin Mary it lends its name  - Arka Pana = Ark of the Lord - to Noah's Ark. After the church visit our tour is over and Joanna drives us back to our hotel.

In the afternoon we take the tramway line 10 to Kazimierz. We buy a ticket for 2,50 zl at the kiosk at the tram stop and ride to the former Jewish Quarter. Since 1495 a sizeble Jewish communitgy lived here. The Nazis have destroyed this community completely. In 1941 the Jews are relocated to the Podgorodce district and the Synagogues were desacrated. Only a third of the Jews survived the Holocaust, among them several hundreds who were saved by Oscar Schindler. He put these people on a list of indispensable workers for his enamelling factory. Stephen Spielberg made his award winning movie  Schindler's List in 1993 and filmed here on loaction in Kazimierz.  Waves of emigration after the war decimated the jewish population even further. Today the synagogues have been renovated and the district has had a makeover turning it into a lively night spot with several restaurants with Jewish menus and themes. We go for lunch in the Arka Noego restaurant (Noah's Ark). After lunch we walk to the New Cemetery, which replaced the old one when it was full in the late 18th century. We walk back to the ul. Szeroka and visit the Remu’h synagoge founded in 1553. The synagogue is well restored and is the only one still in use as a place of worship. Behind this synagogue is the old cemetary.

We walk on to the Old Synagogue from 1557, the oldest still standing Jewish religious building in Poland. Unfortunately this synagogue is closed on Tuesdays. It is now a Jewish cultural centre. We carry on to the High Synagogue. Situated over shops this prayer hall from 1550 was also destroyed by the Germans, but restored in the 1990s and now functions as an exhibition space. The Hebrew texts on the walls can be recognised here and there. At the moment there is a collection of photos on display showing everyday jewish life in Poland at the start of the 20th century. We carry on to the Isaac Synagoge. It was founded in 1630 by a Jewish banker Isaac Jakubowicz. This one too was desacrated by the Nazis, but has been restored twenty years ago. There are plans to reinstate it as a working synagoge.

We escape the cold by entering the café Alchemia, an old world café on the Plac Nowy, where you can enjoy coffee and cake or something stronger in a oak wood decor. Intimate and dark with an authentic feel. After that we brave the cold again, take the tramway back to the hotel. Later on we go out again for a beer in the bar Vis-à-Vis on the Main Square. It is sort of artistic hangout, with jazz music in the background, where you can sip your drink with a view on the busy square. On the walls poster size jazz stars look down on us. 

At night we have dinner at Copernicus in the hotel by the same name. Celebrities like Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski and Helmut Kohl went there before us. A prime restaurant therefor with food and service to match. I have starter with venison paté, followed by veal sirloin with truffles and a Sabayon as a dessert. The latter is a foamy wine sauce, in this case mixed with citrus fruit and cane sugar. Erik starts with goat cheese covered with beet root on a grilled eggplant. Followed by pork tenderloin with Polish Kasha (buckweat porridge) and balsamico and as a desert white chocolate mousse with cookies.

Weather: -5 degreest. Clear skies.

 

Wednesday 1 December 2010

After breakfast we walk to the main square for cappucino at Café Noworolski. After coffee we walk to the Wyspianski museum, that we are unable to find right away. We have a look at the exhibition devoted to the painter, designer and writer who was important for the Young Poland movement in the arts. A creator of Gesamtkunstwerke (universal work of art) with a impressionist slant. Besides paintings we also see designs for stained church windows, furntiture, stage dress and props. The museum has two floors and after 45 minutes we have seen it all. We walk around the centre in the freezing cold. There is strong wind which adds considerably to the windchill factor. We have another coffee at Coffee Company before we head back to the hotel. We get our things and walk to the station. We buy a ticket for the train to the airport (8zl each). The train leave at 12.30 and 18 minutes later we are at the airport. The free shuttle bus brings us to  Terminal 2. Our flight to Vienna leaves at 3.25, so we have lots of time on our hands. After a while the information screen tells us that our flight has been delayed to 4.15. That makes our connection in Vienna virtually impossible. Austrian has thought of that. They give us a new itinerary with a connecting flight at 8pm. But as all flight in and out of Vienna are delayed we might even make our original connection, we are told. That hope is washed away when we hear that our flight has been cancelled. We have to reclaim our bags and check with the LOT transfer desk. I go straight to the transfer desk while Erik claims the bags. I am second in line but rebooking is such a time consuming job that it takes more than 20 minutes before it is my turn. The weather has changed for the worse and I am advised to rebook to a flight tomorrow afternoon via Munich. It takes like forever before I get a new ticket for the 1.05 flight to Munich. The system is very complicated. Data are printed out and then feeded into computer again.

At another counter we are offered hotel accommodation in a  Novotel in Bronowice, on the outskirts of Krakau. Tomorrow we will be collected at 11am. In the hotel we get two hotel rooms (!), because two men in one room is to weird for the minds of the receptionists. We are allowed to eat and drink in the hotel for 100zl at Lufthansa's expense. It has been a tiring afternoon and we have made no progress whatsoever. In spite of all the adverse weather conditions the service of the Star Alliance airlines (Austrian, Lufthansa and LOT) has been exemplary.  We go to bed early.

Weather: -11 degrees. Heavy snowfall in the afternoon.

 

Thursday 2 December 2010

We sleep in until 8am and have breakfast in the hotel. We hang around in our hotel rooms when our taxi is outside waiting at 10.40am. With another passanger we are driven to the airport. After a while we are informed that even this flight to Munich is delayed until 2pm. Our very tight 30 minute connection in Munich is now impossible. The plane lands here at 1.30 and by 2pm we are airborn. The flight goes smoothly and we arrive at 3.15 in Munich. At Lufthansa's selfservice ticketing machine we can print boarding passes for our connecting flight, thus avoiding almost immeasurably long queue in front of the transfer desk. We have what we need within seconds. We have been rebooked for a flight at 7.15. The 4.55 is apperently fully booked. Despite the weather problems Lufthansa shows that it has got its act well together.  Again we have several hours of waiting ahead of us. We kill the time with shopping, waiting, reading and eating. Our flight to Amsterdam is delayed, because it has left behind schedule from Marseilles. When the aircraft arrives we have to wait for the crew that is delayed on a flight coming from Moscow. Apperently the weather is playing havoc with air trafic all over Europe.  In the end we depart more than an hour late from Munich to Amsterdam. When we get there, our luggage is first of the baggage belt and we manage to get on the 10.40 high speed train to Rotterdam. Around 11.15 we are home.

Weather: in Cracow -2 degrees and sunny. In Munich -5 and cloudy. In Rotterdam -2 and cloudy

 

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