Saturday June 25, 2011

Arrival in Poland

We have arrived to the beautiful country of Poland! From the air it looked lush with thick forests, rolling green pastures, and little pockets of towns...so different from the grid streets of the United States. Our bags all came with no problem and Piotr was waiting to take us to our hostel in Krakow. It is a charming old building with our rooms at the top of 80 stairs called 24 Guesthouse. Yes! We had to climb 80 stairs to get to our rooms. It seemed a long way up because we were so tired. In order to stave off jet lag we had to stay up all day so we decided to walk to the center of Krakow and see what it was like. Since we had our handy dandy map with a geocache loaded onto a GPS we decided to look for our first cache.( For those of you who would like to find more about this game you can go to geocacheing.com.) It looked fairly simple so we began our walk. We walked and walked and walked some more. The GPS would only work sporadically so we really couldn’t rely on it. So we just kept stopping people and tried to speak a little Polish or find people who would speak English and see if we were going in the right direction. Each time we were able to get a little further. I am sure it was frustrating for Pam, Diane and Josh. I just really wanted to do it and was determined to get the travel bug into the cache. A kind person finally was able to direct us to the bookstore where this cache was located. It was a quaint store loaded with all ENGLISH books….we were looking for a Polish bookstore! We signed the log and were on our way. We got ourselves back to the town and really started to enjoy all the sights, sounds and smells. It was wonderful.
We visited Wawel Castle. It is an amazing fortress that I am sure Diane could tell you all about if I can get her to make a post. Maybe people can comment and try to get her to tell you all its history. She is our walking encyclopedia! We took in the views of the countryside by the castle and listened to a concert on the river. We headed back for the town centre.
We ate our dinner at an outdoor restaurant. I had Russian pierogis. Did you know that pierogis are actually from Russia and not Poland? I didn’t. Diane had a borscht like soup, Pam had mushroom soup with dumplings, and Josh really wanted a chicken sandwich, but was informed by the waiter they didn’t have it. He opted for a chicken salad, but wasn’t too pleased with the dressing. We told him we would find some lody (ice cream) to stave off his hunger. We were just about finished as a cloud burst forth with its bounty of water. It came down and made it quite difficult to remain at our table. Check please!

We got our lody and headed back to the hostel. Back up the 80 stairs! We are all tired puppies…time for bed!