We landed at Kraków Airport about 20 minutes early and had to wait a little for our tour guide, Joanna (no idea of spelling), because of how early we were, which was fine. I wish I could remember Jade’s reaction to her first sighting of Kraków once we were outside the airport, I think it was something like “Poland has a lot of car parking spaces”. It was nice and warm and, surprisingly, not at all rainy (unlike what we were told on the plane). On the plane I ended up talking to the woman next to me (I always seem to meet chatty women on planes…) who was a teacher from a school in Liverpool.
We had a 40 minute coach journey to the hotel and then we got divided up into rooms and we unpacked. After that we got showered (ours has a lovely cigarette burn in the bottom…classy) and got ready to go out for our meal at the traditional Polish restaurant - Chata. They prepared a special vegetarian meal for me…of fish. Cue first awkward Poland moment. I managed not to go into a rant about vegetarians vs. pescatarians and just explained that I don’t eat fish…and after a while the waiter came back and told me I could have Russian dumplings. Clearly, I didn’t have a choice, so I accepted that offer. It did mean waiting until everybody else on my table had finished eating before I could have my meal, but I’m strangely used to that after birthday meals gone wrong etc. The meal itself wasn’t as bad as expected, we had a vegetable/rice soup to begin, Russian dumplings for me and chicken with sauerkraut and potatoes for the others, and some form of apple cake for dessert. My response at the time, when asked by Lindsay, was “well, it’s not terrible”, which was true, it could have been a lot worse and I tried everything, which was the main point. It was such a cute little restaurant and it was fun to experience something traditional. The only issue I really had was that I got left out by pretty much all (not all, though, thankfully) of my table all evening except for when my main meal finally arrived and they all watched me. Great. Cue awkward Poland moment number two…
From there, we walked around Main Square and had free time. I went with Jade and Stevan because we didn’t want to drink and everybody else went off drinking. It wasn’t exactly the best situation because we’d all been approached by a random Polish man with drinks vouchers who took them all down an alley to a club. We later found out it wasn’t exactly as bad as we were all imagining, thankfully, but we were still a little worried for them all. Luckily, they had Pati (the native Polish speaker). The three of us took lots of pictures and sat and talked for a while which was nice. I’m now back in the room with Sarah and Steph and we’re thinking about going to bed.
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