Krakow, day 1

In the morning, our conductor woke us up letting us know that we had 20 mins to Krakow. Then 5 mins later came back to tell us we'd arrived!!! What happened to 20 mins? We were still groggy and getting out of bed and stuff!! Then 1 min later he was back shooing us out of the train!! Dude. talk about rude awakening.

Arrived in Krakow at 6am and had to book a sleeper reservation for our KRW to BUD leg. Had trouble finding the international window!! No one spoke english and no one looked particularly friendly either! kinda intimidating. I first went up to a window to ask (in czech cuz it's similar to polish). The actual words that came out of my mouth are in quotes and my meaning is in parantheses.

Me: "Anglisky?" (do you speak english?)
1st Lady in a booth: "No"
Me: (oh boy! now what?? ok...might as well try the other lady at the other booth) "anglisky?"
2nd Lady at another booth: "Polish"
Me: (huh?? how is that an answer to my question? great! now what?) [at this point R told me to just try saying "international reservations?" so...] "international reservations?"
the 2nd lady then proceeds to give us rather confusing directions to the main bldg of the train station in broken english!! what the?! i thought they didn't speak any english!! later we figured that maybe she thought i as asking her if she's English....but still...that makes NO SENSE. Thankfully, we were able to find the international reservation desk and the lady there had great command of english. AND we discovered that booking the reservation here was WAY cheaper than from the U.S. very nice...

After that we proceeded to walk to our hotel (~10 mins and once we got to the main street it was pretty easy to find, lots of signs) where we discovered that we couldn't check in till 2pm and that lots of stores in Poland are closed on Sundays (cuz the country's predominantly catholic). Great! But thankfully, a nearby cafe would open at 7:30am. So we wandered around Krakow's Main Market Sq (which was completely deserted), took pics, checked out St. Mary's Church just off the square where they were having mass, but we popped in, said a quick prayer, gawked at the beautiful blue ceiling with gold stars and popped out for a leisurely breakfast (where we borrowed the bathroom to put in contacts, brush teeth, etc). :)


Next we headed over to Wawel Castle, just 10-15 mins walk from Old Town. We arrived ~10am and got tickets for the 12:30pm english tour of the state apartments. We walked around the castle grounds, but it was chilly and rainy, so we spent most of the 2.5 hrs lounging in the visitor center on their comfy sofas (hey! we were tired from all the walking around in prague!!). The state apartment tour was short and wasn't all that impressive. The rooms were very sparsely furnished. One's gotta question the wisdom of a ruler who chooses Italian architects to build a castle without any indoor corridors in cold, snowy Poland! Afterwards, we went straight to our hotel and crashed. Didn't even have energy to get dinner!

There were a lot more english-speaking tourists here than in prague (where we were like the only ones i heard speaking english). And they seemed to ADooooooore John Paul II cuz they had rallies for him and his pic on St. Mary's church. Later, we realized it was cuz it's the anniversary of his death! And he actually came from krakow. ahh...now we get it!

Total walking distance: 3.5 miles