Day 42-43: Krakow

Hello! This is going to be a fairly short post, as we basically hibernated the past two days in Krakow. We arrived at the main train station, Krakow Glowny, on Saturday morning at 7am after a very long night on the train from Prague (see previous post). After some struggle securing Polish change, we locked up our bags and struck out into the Main Market Square, the heart of Krakow. Nothing was open yet, but the sun was starting to come out and the square was quite beautiful. Here are a couple of pics.

 *St. Mary's Church at sunrise

At 8am, we were able to get into a cafe for coffee and get out of the cold. We hung out in the cafe until 9:30, at which point we walked back to the station to retrieve our bags and made the short 10-minute walk to our apartment.

Everything went as planned and by 10am, we were in our new place. It might be our favourite yet, with nice flow, an updated kitchen, and a very comfortable bed (thus far, the mattresses have either been hard or the bed frames extremely squeaky, to the point that if one of us rolls over in the night it will wake the other up). We were exhausted from two almost sleepless nights and decided to take a nap. Yeah, we should have known to set an alarm or something. We were out for 5 hours.

When we finally got to moving, we went out in search of groceries but only found very small corner stores. We were able to procure some spaghetti and tomato sauce for dinner and fell asleep pretty early.

Sunday we woke up late (hey...we were still catching up on lost sleep) and set out for our 7-mile run. Luckily, Krakow has great walking/jogging paths along the Vistula River, which runs beside the city. Unluckily, it was still freezing outside and it took us about 20 minutes to warm up. It was great to see so much of the outlying city on the run and interact with local runners, who smiled and waved as we passed by. My favourite was an older gentleman who was setting a hard pace in full day attire...dress pants, shirt, and jacket. While he looked quite determined, the second we waved he gave us a huge smile and wave in return. So far, the Polish seem to be a very friendly people.

In the afternoon, we found a larger grocery store and stocked up on some items for our own little Canadian Thanksgiving meal. We fixed honey mustard chicken breasts, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and carrots, and topped it off with a bottle of wine and some local vodka.

We finished the night watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother. It was a great way to end a very lazy couple of days and prepare for the emotional episode that would come next: our trip to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.