Kraków, Poland & Ostrava, Czech Republic

May/June 2024

First Thoughts

This was a long overdue trip to see a friend of mine from my undergraduate university, who through a series of clashing travel plans, I had never been to see in her home in Detmarovice, Czech Republic. I booked flights and planned a three-day trip to Poland, before meeting my friend in Czech for a further three days.

For once, I didn’t have many expectations and intentionally didn’t look up some of the recommended attractions allowing some things to be a surprise. I didn’t know much about either country, and have felt like my assumptions of a country had gotten in the way of experiencing it fully before, didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

By the time this trip came around, I felt very confident, having become efficient in the processes of planning and organising a solo foreign holiday. I felt reflective on the six foreign trips that I’ve managed to get on since I started travelling again and started this blog. Stepping on the plane from London Luton Airport one sunny Tuesday, I was once again very excited for the experience ahead, the things that I would see, the people I would meet, and most importantly, the food and alcohol that I would consume.

Days One and Two

Day one was quiet but long, having chosen to drive to the airport of choice, drove from my flat in Chester to Luton, and then used an app to find cheap long-stay car parking at a nearby supermarket. From there, I grabbed a taxi from the supermarket over to the airport, departing around 7 pm on Tuesday 28th May. The flight was straightforward, losing one hour on the way, meaning that by the time I landed, it was dark. I awkwardly and slowly walked with my suitcase a mile down the road from Krakow’s main international airport to my first hotel, Airspot Balice.

The following morning, I checked out of Airspot Balice, which was a very nice find in the outskirts of Krakow, before heading back to the airport, to exactly where I’d been the previous night, where I caught a coach into the city centre. I’d booked ahead, managing to get a seat at the front, at the top of the coach like some over-enthusiastic school child, getting a great view of the Polish countryside as we came into the city. Disembarking at Krakow’s central bus station, I headed southwards towards the ‘old town’, a cobbled area free from cars and trams, which forms the central district of the city, and one of the original UNESCO world heritage sites.

Once inside the Old Town, I made a stop at the first attraction on my to-do list; The Krakow Wax Museum. Made famous when it appeared on The Grand Tour in 2023, where Clarkson, May and Hammond stole the museum's Nigel Mansell figurine, it is now known as ‘possibly the worst wax museum in the world’. I enjoyed my time in the wax museum immensely, sharing a laugh with the other tourists inside (also mostly Brits who knew it from the Grand Tour), and posed with wax works which looked vaguely like Donald Trump, Wills & Kate and Adolf Hitler. Afterwards, I paused to have lunch at the restaurant opposite, Jama Michalika, where I had my first taste of Polish food; Large spinach pancake parcels with pourable garlic cream called Nalesniki – fantastic.

After lunch, I made my way south through Krakow Old Town, passing through the central Rynek Glowny, a courtyard square holding a large market, towers, museums, restaurants and Krakow’s main Basilica. The heat of the day began to crank up, and despite being in t shirt and shorts, I moved on to my hotel, CDR, which was just south of the Old Town. After a couple of hours of relaxing, I changed and headed out to the Krakow Banksy Museum before it closed. This was a short-term museum full of copies of Banky’s most famous paintings, which I had seen advertised when I had passed through the Rynek Glowny earlier. After the Banksy Museum, I attempted to get a tram back to the Glowny, but struggled, coming up against what seemed like to me, a non-sensical system that took you anywhere other than where you wanted to go.

After some time attempting to navigate Krakow’s trams, I decided to get out and walk (I had googled it, and it was only actually a minute’s walk back to the Glowny). Once back, I decided to visit a restaurant called Sukiennice right in the centre; where I had a healthy serving of giant schnitzel, chips, cabbage and pickle. After eating pickle for what I realised was the very first time in my life, I headed over to a Bierkeller within the central square, where the weather turned for the worst, rain pouring down, and lightning was able to be heard in the background. After the rain died down, I left the bierkeller, accidentally stumbling into a free Christian rock concert in the Glowny, which I stayed for the remainder of, before heading back to CDR for the night.

Images
Top left: Airspot Balice on the outskirts of Krakow
Top right: Posing with Will & Kate in Krakow Waxwork Museum
Bottom left: Rynnek Glowny

Bottom right: Dinner at Restauracja Sukiennice

Day Three

Day Three began by leaving CDR, and with my suitcase, heading back up through Krakow Old Town to the main train station, to get my train to Ostrava, where I would meet my friend the following morning. Walking back through Krakow was more of a challenge than I first imagined however, passing through an enormous religious ceremony by Wawel Royal Castle, which I had walked past the previous day, which I later found out was called Corpus Christi. Determined not to be late for my train, or disturb the ceremony, where almost all the locals had stopped what they were doing and were stood in silence, I ducked and dived between the different sections of the procession going the opposite way.

On the way to Ostrava, I had decided to stop at the Polish town of Oswiecim, known in German as Auschwitz, home to the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. This has been a place I had wanted to visit for a very long time and had somewhat of a chequered history regarding appropriate tourist behaviour in recent years. Oswiecim town itself was very nice, as I walked through the town to get to the concentration camp, where I had booked onto an English-speaking tour. Auschwitz has a collective of different language tours, and when booking your visit, you need to make sure to book on to the correct one.

My tour guide, Allison, was a local who spoke very good English, telling the information about Auschwitz in a blunt, matter-of-fact but approachable manner. I was surprised by how little information was provided in terms of boards or displays, and how much was remembered by our guide. Unlike most large historical tourist attractions, Auschwitz has not had much done to it to show tourists around; it is very intentionally kept as close as possible to how it had been found in 1945. The displays do include collections of hundreds or thousands of shoes, belts and stripped clothing in some rooms, to human remains such as hundreds of hair knots. The tour then puts everyone on a minibus to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the larger ‘expansion’ site just outside of the town, where you can see the remains of the destroyed blast furnaces and a more recent international monument to commemorate the fallen Jews. Our tour guide promoted the fact that the first tour guides and attraction curators were all survivors of the camp and that the site took charitable donations to ensure that the information remained accurate and the camps were maintained.

After the tour, I realised that I had missed the train I had booked to take me on to Ostrava, which I thought wasn’t a problem as it would be an hourly train. A quick check online proved me wrong; the next train wasn’t until midnight and would get me into Ostrava at 2 am. I decided that I couldn’t face seven hours of waiting in a town where I couldn’t speak the language and booked a train to the nearby Polish city of Katowice, and then on to Ostrava. On my train to Katowice, I was joined by some of the Brits who had been on the same tour of Auschwitz as me, a set of older couples, who, upon hearing that I was a trainee teacher, regaled me with stories of nightmare teachers from their youth. When I arrived in Katowice, the equivalent to Polish Sheffield or Manchester, I found that the next train to Ostrava was not for a further two hours, which would take me two more hours on that train. I headed round the corners and found a place to have dinner and wait, before boarding my train and arriving in Ostrava, and the Czech Republic, at 10.30 pm.

Images
Top left: Me departing Krakow Old Town
Top right: Oswiecim town train station
Bottom left: Entrance to Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Bottom right: Entrance to Auschwitz II Birkenau Concentration Camp

Day Four

On Day Four, I got straight up and out of my third and final hotel, Hotel Rada, walking around the corner to where my friend picked me up. Together we sample a few traditional Czech pastries before moving on to our first main stop of the day, Ostrava Zoo. My friend and I worked around way around the zoo, and I marvelled at something I was certain I’d never seen in a UK Zoo; A fully-grown hippopotamus. The Zoo was certainly larger and well kept, containing a huge array of large typical zoo animals, comparable to Dublin or Edinburgh zoos. I was particularly impressed with the large herd of elephants that the Zoo housed, the most I had seen together outside of larger safari parks back in the UK.

From there, my friend took me on a driving tour of central Ostrava, explaining that the Mining industry had been its staple employer and money earner until the last coal mine closed in 2023 (where she had worked). Our next main stop was the Dolni Vitkovice, an enormous ironworks which has now become a commercial tourist attraction, with a mining industry history museum, restaurants, cafes and an event space for medium-scale concerts. My friend and I bought tickets to travel up Bolt Tower, the tallest section of the whole site, which now has a café placed near the top where we bought coffee and cake. I then headed up to the very top platform above the café, to take in the sites of all of Ostrava; mountains to each side, rows of apartment blocks of various colours, and of course, more heavy industry sites littered across the city and into the countryside beyond.

After the Dolni Kitkovice, my friend took me to a place she’d found online recently but had never visited herself; U Hajcmana, a pub decorated with the insides of a mine, with toilets labelled ‘danger! Keep out!’ and a bar designed to look like a coal mining cart. The decorations of the pub alone were entertaining enough, as we worked our way through the menu, my friend suggesting several different traditional Czech beers. After several drinks as well as condescending looks from the locals (all of whom looked like they had been Czech coal miners), we headed back to my friend’s house on the edge of Detmarovice, a small town on the outskirts of the city.

Back at her house, I met her husband and parents and was treated to a tour of their house and garden (which in the UK we could call a small non-commercial farm) before we settled in for dinner and drinks, plenty of both. My friend and her husband put on a film and explained that Czech humour is dry and odd, a little like British humour, and I was treated to a very funny film called Emergency Situation, about a runaway train carriage where all the passengers were in someway incompetent, so only made the situation worse. They then put on a second film, but by this time I had consumed so much red wine that I could not remember a great deal of it.

Images
Top left: Hotel Rada in Ostrava
Top right: My friend and I in Ostrava Zoo
Bottom left: Myself on the platform on Bolt Tower

Bottom right: U Hajcmana

Days Five and Six

Day Five began with a bit of a hangover, followed by a fantastic set of toasties to nurse me back to the land of the living. We slowly got up and dressed; heading for the main attraction left on my list; Triborder, or Trojstyk, where the Czech Republic meets Poland and Slovakia. It was roughly a ninety-minute drive out to this point in the countryside, which bears no significance other than it is where those three countries meet. We crossed the friendship bridge, where I took a quick photo with each country’s sign, before a very short walk into Slovakia (my phone network going crazy with roaming texts as I hopped from country to country). Although I claimed that this counts as visiting the country and ticking it off my list, my friend disagreed, saying “I wouldn’t count that”.

Although I was enjoying myself in Trojstyk, my friend and her husband stated it was very touristy, and we decided to move on. On our way back to Detmarovice, we stopped at a small city called Karvina, to get lunch at a restaurant called Baron. At Baron, amongst other places on this trip, it took me a moment to get used to the cost of goods in that area of Europe; I bought a rare fish with vegetables and dessert for the equivalent of roughly £12/13. After lunch, we headed to Božena Němcová Park, a large city park bordering Frystat Castle, before walking back to Masaryk's Square in the city centre to get some fantastic ice cream.

From Karvina, we drove back to Detmarovice, where we had one last dinner, before a final early night. The morning of Day Six came early – my alarm went off at 3 am, and I showered and packed up my suitcase one last time. My friend and her husband drove me to Katowice Airport, in complete darkness the entire way, before rushing through the small airport, only to sit in the airport duty-free with several other tired-looking Brits. Once back in the UK, I made my way back to Luton’s Asda, before embarking on my three-hour drive to Chester.

Images
Top left: Myself by the Slovakia sign at Triborder

Top right: Masaryk’s square in Karvina
Bottom left: Ice Cream in Masaryk's Square

Bottom right: My friend's house in Detmarovice

Final Thoughts

As a country, Poland is not what I had expected. The food and alcohol are great, the cities feel safe, and you are as likely to find interesting tourist attractions within them as you are in cities in Switzerland, Germany or Austria. Unlike other major touristy cities in central Europe, Krakow is pretty cheap, but the public transport is hard work compared to other places I’ve visited recently. It’s a country for lovers of good food – but it’s certainly food for the soul, not the waistline, as the closest thing to healthy is the Fried Cabbage and Pickle, which they seem to serve with almost any meat or potato combination.

Czech Republic seemed more uncertain with its history, and less used to English tourists blundering around than Poland. However, it also had several interesting tourist attractions of its own, and a mix of natural and human features to see. I’d recommend a visit to this area of Europe for 6-9 days, if for the food and scenery alone.

Useful Links

https://visitkrakow.com - Krakow's main tourism website

https://www.ostrava.cz/en - Ostrava's official city website

https://www.poland.travel/en/ - Poland's official tourism website

https://www.visitczechia.com/en-us - Czech Republic's official tourism website

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/visiting/ - Guidelines for visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/donate/ - Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation donation page