Poland

Sunday 5th February 2023 MrShuttle again sent a confirmation of the time of we would be picked up for our visit to Auschwitz and as we would be leaving before breakfast the hotel provided us with a packed lunch each in a brown paper bag. It included such shiny green apples that we felt it must be someone’s job in the kitchen to polish them. Auschwitz is about 70km from Kraków and on board the coach we watched a video about the camps. Auschwitz: a single word synonymous with genocide which conjures up the worst that mankind can do. A single word known the world over. Far from being a single place, Auschwitz was in fact a vast complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps consisting of Auschwitz I, the main camp or Stammlager; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and death camp with purpose-built gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben as well as dozens of sub-camps. A single word cannot convey the sheer scale of the site and we both struggle to describe the enormity of this place and therefore sometimes, below, we are indebted to better minds than ours for their words. Robert has visited […]

Sunday 5th February 2023 We planned to go to the Wieliczka Salt Mine in the morning and Oskar Schindler’s Factory Museum in the afternoon. The Wieliczka Salt Mine is about half an hour’s drive outside Kraków and Robert had booked a guided tour through MrShuttle to include transport and entry to the mine. The evening before, he had received a text confirming the booking and telling him what time we would be picked up from outside our hotel. Fortunately, this was later than expected and would give us plenty of time to have breakfast. We were picked up promptly at 09:00 and driven by car to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It briefly seemed to us as though this must be a very quiet time of year for tourism if there were only going to be the two of us on the tour. However, once we arrived at the mine entrance [see below] we were joined by a minibus full of other MrShuttle customers all waiting for the English-speaking tour. Salt or sodium chloride [NaCl] has been extracted at this site since Neolithic times. The surface water was such a highly saturated salt solution that it was undrinkable and was effectively […]

Saturday 4th February 2023 Matilda was delighted to wake up and realise that she had been successful in the Wimbledon Ballot for the 2023 Championships and had been offered tickets to the Men’s Singles Final. There was a brief period when she thought this might have been a scam but logging in to her account she found that the ticket offer was genuine. Her initial reaction of “Woah, that’s quite a lot of money,” was quite swiftly followed by “Wow this could be my one and only chance to do this”. One off the bucket list. Having confirmed with Robert that he would be her ‘plus one’ if no one else more interested in tennis, strawberries and Pimms could go with her she accepted and paid for her tickets. Matilda then spent most of the train journey from Warsaw to Kraków smiling to herself and is now really looking forward to July. We first came to Kraków together in 2016 before the inception of TravellingHerd.uk when we also visited Warsaw [see previous blog] and so we had already seen some of the major sights including the Royal Castle and Royal Cathedral. Having settled in to our hotel we set off, […]

Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd February 2023 The station building at Gdańsk Głowny [below] is quite splendid. Unfortunately, it is also being renovated so our plan to find a convenient place for coffee and breakfast while we waited for our train to Warsaw was thwarted. Instead, we had quite a long wait on the platform in the cold. Matilda wished she had put on her thermal underwear. Fortunately, as we were travelling first class we were offered complimentary hot beverages and a choice of meal which would be prepared to order with fresh ingredients. We both opted for salad with ham, pear and blue cheese which was definitely fresh and very tasty. After disembarking in Warsaw, as we left the train station we saw the imposing Pałac Kultury [Palace of Culture and Science] which was a gift to the people of Warsaw from the nations of the USSR and was built between 1952 and 1955. Matilda was convinced that she had gone up to the observation deck before and it was not until a little research revealed that it is remarkably similar to the Latvian Academy of Sciences in Riga that she realised her error, and that she had been […]

Wednesday 1st February 2023 We planned our walking route to the Europejskie Centrum Solidarności [European Solidarity Centre], taking in some of the ‘must see’ sights of the city. This included the Golden Gate which formed part of the old city fortifications and was the inland entrance to the Trakt Królewski or royal route of Gdańsk. Almost 90% of the city was destroyed in WWII and when the Polish came to rebuild, there was understandably some fairly strong anti-German feeling: the people did not want to spend money and effort on recreating old-style Germanic architecture. Instead, other European influences were drawn on, in particular the Flemish-Dutch connection from the time of the Hanseatic League and much of the old town now features traditional Dutch style gables. The Targ Węglowy or the Prison Tower complex was originally part of the Ulica Długa Gate and was built as part of the medieval city fortifications. The tower was added to several times to make it taller and, presumably, more imposing but when new fortifications were built between 1571 and 1576, it no longer formed part of the city’s defences and the smaller building was used as a courthouse and torture chamber while the tower was used as […]

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Our research had revealed that although the European Solidarity Centre is closed on Tuesdays, the Museum of the Second World War was open so we decided to make this our first cultural stop of the visit. Our route took us past the Gdańsk Crane, which is rather less iconic when covered in scaffolding. Robert wanted to sample breakfast at one of the well-known bar mleczny [milk bars]. Originally subsidised by the state, they provided affordable food for the people but with the fall of communism and the consequent removal of the state subsidy in Poland many were forced out of business. Some have nevertheless survived and Bar Mleczny Neptun is recommended for providing flavour as well as real value for money. There was no queue when we arrived and the very obliging man behind the counter helped us to make our selection and then translated our order [see Dish of the day] for the cashier. Having eaten breakfast, we walked along the Stara Motława waterfront towards the museum. This took us past the Gdańsk sign on the opposite bank, still sporting a festive Santa hat. The Museum of the Second World War opened in 2017 in purpose-built accommodation and a statue […]

Monday 31st January 2023 As we were waiting to to go through security at the airport, Robert modelled his Travel Hack #2. [Travel Hack #1 was the use of a vaporetto ticket instead of the electronic door key to ensure that devices continue to charge when you are our of your hotel room.] Travel Hack #2 is the use of a lanyard to transport your liquids [hands free] until such time as you have passed through security and can safely pack them away in your luggage. Matilda thought he just looked foolish but, ultimately, accepted that the hack worked. Unfortunately, having landed at Gdańsk Airport, we had an inauspicious introduction to the Polish railway system. The ticket machines on both platforms at the airport station were out of order but we were told by some helpful people waiting for the same train that we would be able to buy tickets on board. As rail enthusiasts we naturally had absolutely no intention of fare dodging and when the conductor walked through the train past us, Robert asked to pay only to be fined £20 for travelling without tickets. Apparently we were meant to pre-empt this by going to the first carriage […]