Day 43 - Cioa Italy, Dzień dobry! Krakow

Today we fly out of one of the 3 airports in Milan… of course we are flying trusty Ryan Air so we are at the furthest one away. We left our accomodation at 6.30am and walked to the station and got on s shuttle to the airport, there was a man sitting in front of us sniffling and if looks could kill from Katie, this man would of been dead before the bus departed central station!

We got to the airport, went straight through the security. Now I am not saying I don’t listen to my lovely wife but some idiot decided to not take out the butter knives out of the backpack and put in checked. That idiot got stopped and checked by security, his lovely wife throwing eye daggers from afar! So the butter knives got taken off me and I now need to find some new ones & will most likely buy Katie a leather hand bag too!

Ryan Air as per usual were splendid to fly with, we got on and sat down, got told we would be sitting for 20-25minutes till we could get pushed back. Not 5 minutes after that, the captain come over and announced the situation had changed, ‘yep, we can leave now,’ in a not so reassuring surprised tone. Also another perk of flying Ryan Air, I booked myself as the window seat… I got to my ‘window seat’ to find there was no window… so not a lot of views to be had there!
We got to Krakow, jumped on the train heading for the city.

Once here I tried to get in contact with the accomodation about dropping the bags off at 2pm, magically he didn’t see his phone but answered when I called to check in at 3pm. So while we waited we had an amazing lunch at Lajkonik Piekarnia i Kawiarnia - amazing sandwiches! We also had a walking tour at 3pm that we cancelled and jumped on another for 4pm, so we checked in and got ourselves ready and headed to the meeting point for the walking tour.

The walking tour started at Barbican, a defensive gateway from the 1490’s once linked to the city walls. We moved to the statue of Grunwald, the only battle won against Germany in 1410. The guide took us through town showing us interesting things like in the stones of the building of an entranceway, there are holes to extinguish your flame pole acting as light back in the day, also instead of house numbers, as many couldn’t read, they used animal pictures - the one she showed us was a peacock - FYI we are getting one of these instead of numbers!
We moved into Market square, Europe’s biggest open air market square! With St. Mary’s Basilica a focal point of the square. We moved down to the university learning about the buildings and war time, and then onto Okno Papieskie. An artwork on the window where Pope John Paul II talked to a crowd of singing young people when he visited when Poland was still under communist ruling.
We finished the tour where Katie thinks she should live… Wawel Royal Castle, this is from the 14th century and prettified in a variety of later styles. On Wawel Hill you have Wawel Cathedral, which has bones at the front door from what locals at the time of finding thought to be a dragon - no just whale and mammoths.
Krakow and Poland have a rich history, especially when Poland didn’t exist from 1795 - 1918 due to getting split between other countries, then after the war getting the whole country shifted to the West.

We took the guides advice and went to a local polish restaurant, Gospoda Koko, you can sit on ground floor or go down stairs into the basement which is pretty cool. Now the Italians do great pizza and pasta, Polish know how to do cakes and chicken (haven’t tried cakes… Wednesday!!) The food was amazing and so was the local Koko craft beer!

We slowly walked back to the accomodation to get some rest for tomorrow.Read more