Brendan Doms

Krakow was an extremely pleasant surprise for me. Despite it being the second largest city in Poland, I had never heard of it before this trip.

It's also one of the older cities I've been to in non-Mediterranean Europe, since a town has existed there for some 1400 years. The feeling of age has stayed intact, and among all the European cities I've visited, Krakow felt the most truly medieval.

There are several good reasons for this, not the least of which is that the center of the city, Main Market Square, and much of the surrounding area, is cobblestone streets limited to only pedestrian and equestrian traffic. That's right, for most of my time in Krakow I saw more horses than I did cars.

The sun sets on the bazaar Cloth Hall in the center of Main Market Square.

There's also Wawel Castle just a short walk from the square. When we toured it we paid extra to see a gallery of preserved medieval weapons and armor. It was like a tiny museum set into the castle itself, with relics ranging from cutlasses and crossbows to muskets and canons.

Wawel Castle from below.

At the castle exterior there's even a fire-breathing dragon statue, called Smok (which looks and sounds like the English "smoke" but I'm told just means "dragon" - I do wonder if the two etymologies are related though). It was fun to see schoolchildren on a field trip yelling in delight every time the fire came shooting out of the dragon's mouth.

Smok the fire-breathing dragon, just outside the Wawel Castle walls.

Within the castle walls there's also the sesquipedalian-named Royal Archcathedral Basilica of Saints Stanislaus and Wenceslaus, which serves as the Polish national sanctuary, and holds crypts and memorials for a lot of famous people who were Polish. It's also where Pope John Paul II was first a priest.

And this is a great moment to talk about how much Poland loves John Paul II. As the first Polish pope, and coming from a country full of Catholics, they adore him, even on a public, national scale. There are statues seemingly everywhere. There's a national museum devoted to him in Krakow. This amount of public appreciation for one person just seemed so strange to me, especially considering that the only relation he had to Poland was being from there. It's not like he held office or worked there for most of the latter part of his life. This fervour was something I struggled to relate to.

On the other side of the religious spectrum, Krakow is also known for having a lively Jewish Quarter, called Kazimierz. It has a lot of brightly lit, flashy restaurants, some shops, and a higher concentration of both cars and tourists than the rest of the city. It's next to a Jewish cemetery, and a few blocks away are the remnants of the Jewish ghetto. Going into Poland I knew I would encounter such things, but I was unprepared for how well preserved it was. Cement walls and black iron, barbed-wire fences were still up, and pictures from the time compared to the current streets and buildings still match up quite well.

Krakow was also my first introduction to Polish food and drink. The notable entries obviously include pierogies, which had a much larger variety of ingredients than I was expecting: from a typical meat to pear to blue cheese to wild mushroom. I also sampled Zywiec, a cheap Polish beer; a cherry liquor called wisniowka; and zupnik, a honey liqueur.

We finished our night at Opium, a bar with a rooftop where we could look out over the old city. Poland in general and Krakow in particular were both pleasant surprises, and I was excited to see more.

Opium, a bar and music club with several levels, including this open air lounge on the bottom floor, an enclosed dance floor and stage on the second, and an easily accessible rooftop above that.