Krakow, but tonight will be my first night spent there. (Well, that isn't quite true - if you count wandering the streets till a late hour, killing time till boarding the bus to Ukraine.)The funny thing is - I have been to and through Krakow plenty. I have stayed quite late in Krakow a couple of times, and I have arrived quite early in the morning a quite a few times. Yet somehow the thought of spending the night, (and not just one night, but three,) makes me feel all giddy with anticipation. Maybe it is the life I have right now - living in a podunk backwater that makes it so exciting. Maybe it is Krakow itself. While I have walked the town practically from end to end, it has only recently begun to give up its secrets, the charming nooks and crannies shops and legends corner stores and slimy-good restaurants that all beautiful old towns have. (On a completely irrelevant side-note, in Barcelona I drank absinthe in Hemingway's favorite bar, which probably hadn't been cleaned since he was last there, and ate Indian food in restaurants where you wouldn't want to touch the walls, got the come-hithers from the hookers and lost money injudiciously to street-scams, and never even came close to feeling that Barcelona was a charming, or even very interesting, city.)
Krakow, on the other hand, has less wicked, crackling energy than Barcelona, and more of an air of staid reserve, under which pulses a strong current of life, with all the diverse manifestations which that implies. In Krakow you are not assaulted from every side with hawkers and the nimble-fingered. Although quite crowded in places, the feeling of being hemmed in and moved with a sea of humming humanity is not so great.
When entering Krakow by bus, you first approach the river Vistula, across which you can see the old royal castle Wawel (Vahvehl,) built not so much for fortifications, (though it certainly looks imposing) but rather as a seat of royal power. The Wawel is built in a crook of the Vistula, on a hill over a cave where the dragon used to live. Obviously the dragon doesn't live there any more, since a sly shepherd-boy came up with the idea of stuffing a sheepskin with sulfur and leaving it for the dragon to eat, thus winning the hand of the princess. (How she felt about marrying a shepherd-boy based simply on his sheep-stuffing skills probably doesn't bear dwelling on.)
After travelling around the Wawel on two sides, you cross the Vistula, and drive past a number of
large monolithic buildings decorated with oversized muscular workers doing very muscular-worker things, like making steel with their shirts off and hats on. (You also drive past a small, tucked-away gym and bath-house named "Spartacus," in which I receive the distinct impression that there are also a lot of muscular men with their shirts off, doing muscular men things, albeit probably not with steel, though maybe with hats, but then I wouldn't know, ahem.)This is an area with lots of University buildings, and consequently a lot of museums. Most are art museums, and the Wawel itself has the royal armoury, which boasts all sorts of lances, swords, daggers, armor and helmets-with-spikes-on and cutlasses-with-gun-barrels-installed, for the pirate who has everything, and likes it all to fit in a single, easy-to-carry package. (I may poke fun at this particular contraption, but don't let it fool you. I desperately want one.)
As you ride through this area, you are on the street Mickiewicz, which is the name of the Polish national poet, who has a street, a school and a statue bearing his name in every town in Poland big enough to fit a street, a school and a statue, and sometimes two statues in towns not big enough to host all three simultaneously. If your town cannot afford a statue or three of Adam Mickiewicz, you needn't panic, as there are at least four different Vodkas named for his characters, so there are less expensive ways of keeping reminders of his cultural greatness around, at all hours of the day. (I keep planning on buying his most famous work, a rather large tome entitled Pan Tadeusz, and reading through it while I am here. I have always found that reading the great literary works of a country gives one a feel for the cultural sensibility that might not be accessible anywhere else.)
So wish me luck, I'm off to the big city, to spend some days and evenings looking for fun and fascinating facts and historical crannies and old coins at reasonable prices.
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