Krakow, Poland

Well, I got sick of Western Europe pretty quickly. Not only is it expensive to do anything there, like go to a museum, palace, concert, or have a beer, but the transportation costs of getting to Munich and then to Prague by train, as was my plan, would cost around $450 for a combined 7 hours of travel time. I couldn't believe how insane that is, so I decided Krakow would be a better choice (about $140 from Vienna to Krakow and Krakow to Prague, even though the distance is double my previous itinerary). Plus, the backpacker scene in Vienna, and I think this holds true for much of Western Europe, seemingly consists solely of Americans on two week trips with their best friends from home. Which is fine and all, I'd just rather do something else. Anyways, on to Krakow! I stayed in the mostly pedestrian-only Stare Miasto, or Old Town, where it seems like every other building is a church and Polish Gothic and Baroque architecture is omnipresent. It is also home to Europe's largest plaza, the Rynek Glowny (top left), complete with the "cloth market", or Sukiennice, a clock tower, and the impressive St. Mary's Cathedral (top right, bottom).


A park circles the entire old town in the former location of the now-gone walls but the castle/royal palace, Wawel Castle, still overlooks the city from a small hill near the bend in the river. On the right is Wawel Cathedral inside the castle.

Krakow has long since expanded beyond where the walls used to be, but for a tourist the little Old Town is the place to be, full of great sights and cool atmosphere, even if there are quite a few tourists. From left to right is Florianska Street looking at the main square from Florian Gate, a church (Saints Peter's and Paul's Church) on one of the main ways in the Old Town, and the Barbakan, an old defensive structure built to protect Florian Gate.

The main reason many people come to Krakow is its proximity to Auschwitz. I took a day to go out to there and to Berkenau, another concentration camp just down the road that was purpose-built for housing and killing the Jewish population of Europe. Berkenau in partciular gives a more real sense of the scale of the Holocaust than anything I've read or seen before it. It is something everyone should see and the museums have done a great job with the presentation and preservation of these camps. If you ever have a mind to go see a concentration camp, make sure it's here. These pictures are from Auschwitz, notice the Nazi slogan on the entrance to the camp "ARBEIT MACHT FREI," or German for "work will set you free," which is posted on all the concentration camps the Nazis built, something I always found particularly disturbing about them:

And this is Berkenau:

Krakow shares a lot with other major European cities in terms of layout and substance of the city but there is enough uniqueness in and of itself to warrent a visit and the enriching experience of visiting Auschwitz make the visit to Krakow worthwhile and unforgettable.

Beer of Poland: Poland has an extensive selection of pretty decent beer, available all over the place, especially in bottle and can form. While I prefer it on tap, I was still pretty pleased by the quality of the choices; they even have a few good darks and stronger ones. Below are a few typical ones, all lighter beers that taste subtly different from one another. Grade: A-.


Ice Cream of Poland: While the gelato and the scooped ice cream has recessed to Hungarian quality (i.e. mash the scoops on the side for tiny portion of barely passable ice cream), they have soft-served ice cream everywhere, available in loads of varieties from vanilla, chocolate, and swirl to vanilla with streaks of strawberry, apple, or chocolate to add a little extra flavor. And it's also under a dollar. While soft-serve isn't as elegant as other types of ice cream, I was happy to have it on those hot afternoons baking in the Polish sun. Grade: C+.
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Details:
Eurolines runs a few daily buses from Vienna to Krakow, I took the one at 8:00 but there are also buses at 14:50 and 21:00, the last being a night bus. The trip takes somewhere between 5 and 8 hours, depending on which bus you take (they follow different routes to get there) and the fare is 38 euro one way with a 10% student available. Check www.eurolines.com for the most up to date info. Getting in is a bit disorienting, but if you can't see a sign with a map or one pointing the way to the old town, just head towards the abutting mall, called Galleria Krakowska and turn left. Head in this direction until you see signs to show you the way (they aren't far). The bus station and train station are right next to eachother, and the buses are furthest from the old town and the mall is closest, if that helps. Anyways, a park surrounds the old town so just walk through it. Once you get to the Barbakan, a castle gate-looking thing, turn left and you are on Florianska Street. My hostel was about halfway down on the left, called Tutti Frutti, which was fun and set up well and it was easy to meet people (dorms vary in price according to size but the 6-bed is $19/60zl and the 10-bed is $14/45zl). Free internet, wifi and breakfast. Most things to see are in the old town and quite easy to find. Walking from the barbacan all the way down Florianska and the street that picks up in the same direction after the square will take you by most of the sights and ends at the castle. The castle is free to go inside, but the museums and cathedral cost money to enter (cathedral $1.75/5zl student, $3/10zl adult). However, they are very lax about checking tickets in the cathedral, so I would just go in and look around until they tell you to stop. The cathedral on the main square is easily the most impressive in town ($2/7zl for a student (?) but they will stick you with a $1.75/5zl camera fee if you let them see you take pictures). Getting to Auschwitz on your own is simple, just go to the bus station and head downstairs. At platform D7, buses leave every 20 minutes in the morning and early afternoon, buy tickets on the bus ($3/9zl one way, 1.25 hours). The buses leave from Auschwitz from midday to 19:00 from the same place they drop you off at. There is also a train that takes about the same time ($3/10zl) but the service is less frequent and doesn't take you directly to the museum. The museums are both free to enter, but joining up with a guided tour will cost something like $10/30zl. To get from Auschwitz to Berkenau (they are about 3km apart), there is a free bus ride every hour or you can walk, ask someone to point out the way, it is simple but hard to describe without being there (takes about 30 minutes).

Vienna, Austria

While it is an incredibly modern, progressive city nowadays, Vienna was the Hapsburg seat of power for hundreds of years and this fact creates the backdrop both literally and figuratively for the city today. The Hapsburgs were a family of monarchs that controlled the lands in Europe at various times from Poland to Portugal and the remnants of their opulence and power is all over the city in the form of palaces, architecture, cathedrals, and the obsession with classical music and opera. When I arrived, I headed straight to the Schloss Schonbrunn, the summer palace of the imperial family. It is large and... opulent, which almost goes without saying with the Hapsburgs, and is surrounded by intricate gardens and manicured paths while the palace itself has room after room of materialized grandeur and wealth, reminding me strongly of both the Palacio Real in Madrid and Versailles, outside Paris.

The next day I headed into the center of Vienna to check out the city. Sepctacular Baroque, Rennasaince, and Gothic architecture dominant the cityscape and every building feels as though it was designed to outdo the one next to it. My wandering took me to St. Stephens Cathedral (different St. Stephens than the one in Budapest), where I went down to see the cataombs where the plague victims had been buried under the adjacent plaza in the 1700s.

Then I walked around Belvedere Palace

before checking out St. Charles' Church (Karlskirch)

and making my way to the Hofburg Palace

and the Kunsthistorische museum, their Museum of Fine Arts. The Kunsthistorisches museum is supposedly one of the world's most renowned art museums, on par with the Louvre, the Prado, or the Met. I suppose that is true if portraits and religious paintings are your thing, but they aren't mine so I found most of it a little boring; there were a few in there I really enjoyed though.
The nearby Parlament and City Hall both were worth the stop even just to admire the buildings and their facades, though an outdoor opera/music showing festival was set up in front of city hall, blocking a good part of the view.

Since I had seen most of the cool sights in the city the day before, I had to be a bit creative in finding things to do on my last full day in Austria. Walking through the city, I found a flea market selling a bunch of quirky junk before getting to a residential area of the city where the famous Austrian architect, Hundertwasser, had designed a few buildings in a peculiar and interesting style.

My walk home took me along the route of Vienna's gay pride parade, though it didn't seem like all that big of a deal, just bus after bus of people of the same sex playing loud music as they passed partially-filled streets. I think Vienna has a lot more to offer than what I experienced, but it is an expensive city with expensive tastes so I doubt I will come back here for at least a few decades. But if I had plenty of money and wanted to go somewhere for an opera or a concert, this would be the place.

Beer of Austria: The massproduced lagers I tried, Gussen, Schwechater, and Ossakringer, were disappointing given how close Austria is to such brewing hotspots as Germany and Czech Republic, but perhaps I just didn't really give the full variety a chance. But, from what I had, I wasn't impressed. Grade: C.

Ice Cream of Austria: The quality is high, the prices are relatively low, the servings vary from large to enormous; Austrians love this stuff and it shows. The Italian influence means that gelato is served here, usually by shoveling it onto a cone or into a cup with a spade. Grade: A.
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Details:
There are tons of trains and buses that go from Budapest to Vienna. I came by bus because it was a fair bit cheaper ($15/10€ by bus, this is with a 50% student reduction). I got the 9:30 bus and it takes about 3 hours. Though Orange buses are generally cheaper, Eurolines has better student fares. Perhaps conveniently for some, the bus stops at the Vienna airport on the way in. I stayed at a place called Wombat Hostel Vienna - The Lounge ($28/20€), just down the street from Westbahnof train station, which is a great area of town for cheap grocery stores and cheap fast food like kebabs and schnitzels. It is also a 20 minute walk from anywhere. I wouldn't recommend it because it had a very hotel-like feel to it, where it was hard to meet people. But if you just need a place to crash for a night in Vienna, I suppose there are worse choices. Everything except the Schloss Schonbrunn is really close together in Vienna, you could walk moderately aimlessly and see everything in half a day by chance. Going inside anything, museums and palaces, etc. is a bit expensive but here are the ticket prices I paid (Schloss Schonbrunn: 11.40€, K museum: 7.50€, Catacombs in Stephansdom: 4.50€, all student prices though the ISIC only saves a few euros each time here). I think that you could almost skip anything requiring money and just admire the buildings from the outside and get a good feel of Vienna, with the exception of Schloss Schonbrunn, which I would recommend only of you have never been to a proper palace before (make sure to get the cheapest ticket, called the Imperial Tour, because the other addons aren't worth the extra money). The grounds are worth walking, regardless though. If you aren't on a strict budget, by all means, see it all.

Budapest, Hungary

After a crazy couple of weeks of travel through Greece, Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia, I can relax a bit because from here on out I'm staying in places a bit longer. Hopefully they all deserve the extra time as Budspest does. The city is on the Danube River with a long history of getting invaded by various nations and subsequently rebuilding, giving it a mishmash of architectural styles and cultural influences. Originally, what is now Budapest was actually two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the river. It was only when they joined in 1873 that it became one city and since then, so many bridges have been built between the two that you would hardly believe they had ever been separate. One of them, Chain Bridge is below with the Buda Royal Castle in the background.

On my first day I joined the daily free walking tour. I didn't learn much but I got a good idea of the layout of the city and had an awesome porkolt, a Hungarian stew. The car below used to be the car in Hungary, as our walking tour guide explained, meaning it was about the only model that existed there for decades. On the right is a statue on Castle Hill. The horse's balls are polished to a nice shine because the locals say that rubbing them gives good luck. I'll let you all know how that works out.

That night, the staff from the hostel took all the guests out for drinks at a place called Morrison's, which is, surprisingly, where all the local university students go for a night out with $1 beers. And since the year just ended for them, the place was packed as everyone kareoked and danced. The next day, I woke up to blue skies and sun so I got up and did some quality sight-seeing, heading to Heroes Square (left), a monument dedicated to seven kings and seven heroes in Hungary's history, then to Gellert Hill for the best view in the city (center). On the right is a former Communist statue on top of Gellert Hill that was modified and kept in place as a symbol of Hungary's liberation from Soviet control.

Just a but lower is Castle Hill, where the Buda Royal Palace is, though it never actually functioned as a palace and now there are multiple museums inside of it. On the right is the view from Castle Hill, with Chain Bridge and St. Stephen's Basillica visible.

On the other part of the hill is Fisherman's Bastion, seven towers set on the edge of the hill. Both the reason for its name and its purpose escape me but it and St. Mattias church next to it are cool to see.

Afterwards, I walked along the Danube to get a good look at the Parliamet building. Due to all the rain here lately, the river is flooding and the water level is above the level of the first embankment, flooding the low-level docks and roads at the riverside. It would need quite a bit more rain to get over the real embankmet, but it is pretty cool to see it so high.

My last stop on my monster sightseeing day was St. Stephen's Basilica, the most prominent religious building in the city. It is a bit peculiar in that instead of Jesus or Mary depicted at the altar, there is a statue of King Saint Stephen, Hungary's most famous king. They also have King Stephen's actual hand in a box in the back of the cathedral, though you would never know what it was until someone told you, mostly because of the dim lighting.

The next morning, with all my sightseeing the day before, there was only a few things I still wanted to do. I checked out the second largest synagouge in the world, the largest beeing in New York Ciy, and realized I have never been inside a synagouge before. As I entered, they even gave me a little kippa to where.

Budapest is famous for its thermal springs and this was why the Romans took such a particular interest in the area in centuries past. Now there are tons of different baths scattered around the city, designed for the pleasure of locals and tourists alike. Although I hadn't planned on going, so many people told me that is was amazing, the highlight of their trip, the best $14 they ever spent, the coolest thing to do in Budapest, blah blah blah, that I had to check it out. Nearly everyone recommended the ones in the City Park, Szechenyifurdo, so I went there. There are indoor and outdoor pools of varying temperatures in the courtyard and inside an old building that looks like a palace. It is pretty cool to see, but I found it a bit boring, as they are basically a collection of glorified pools.

My fourth night in Budapest was an unofficial pub crawl organized by the staff at the hostel. They took us to loads of underground pubs and atmospheric bars for a really cool look into the nightlife scene in Budapest. But I was really surprised when my group was actually asked to keep the noise down... inside the bar. We weren't being all that loud, but I think it shows an interesting point about Budapest: the people really like their peace and quiet. As we walked through the streets in between bars, we had to either stay quiet or whisper so as not to disturb the residents. It makes for an interesting contrast between the young, fun locals and the serious, quiet, older ones. But the bars were cool places to hang out and talk so I had a fun little night before exhaustion forced me to go home. One of the places had a pretty amusing mural:

Hungary, despite its slow transition to becoming just like Western Europe, is still unique and quirky. I can't say I much enjoyed the food, as their big things are tray and line cafeterias, terrible pastries, and disappointing ice cream. Hungary is also the only place I've ever been that you have to provide your own bags for groceries at the supermarket (though I think this might be a new EU law). That was an awkward moment, standing at the far end of the check out counter with a mass of groceries looking around for a bag. There are definitely signs that Hungary is a little behind much of Europe, but it is still a safe city with old buildings and cool sights. It's funny that despite their apparent backwardness, their metros, escalators, and trams run at much higher speeds than I'm used to, which was fun. Below is the central marketplace:

Beer of Hungary: Hungary has four major brands of beer, pretty good selection for a small country. Their budget beer is Arany Aszoky, which is a passable lager, while their mainstay lagers Borsodi and Soproni are solid and tasty though without much to set them apart. Dreher is the real prize of the main breweries in Hungary. Usually a bit more expensive than the others, it is well worth it because it tastes much more refrshing, smooth, and drinkable than the others. Budapest also has a few places that brew their own stuff, though I wasn't able to sample as much of it as I would have liked. Grade: B.

Ice Cream of Hungary: I gave up on ice cream pretty quick as I saw how they scoop here. They take a tiny little scooper and get some ice cream in it, then smash the scoop against the side of the bin so that you only get half a scoop. It is the stingiest ice cream serving I've ever seen and could hardly believe it. It wasn't high quality either. There is also a local soft-served chain, but it just tastes a bit funny, though at least the portions are large here. Grade: D.

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Details:

There are two trains that run from Zagreb to Budapest without changing on Sunday, one at 9:58 and one at 15:45. To figure out the schedule for any given day, look at http://www.db.de/. Oddly, the return price is the same as the one way price. Anyways, they take about 7 hours and the fare is $41/215kn. I got in to the international train station, pretty much far away from everything, and walked (though you can take the metro for $1.50/300HUF) to my hostel near the domestic train station. I stayed at Carpe Noctem, a small, friendly, and fun hostel that seemed like it had more staff than guests, unfortunately, but I think the people who happened to be there for most of my stay were just a little lame ($21/4000HUF). Definitely a place for people who enjoy going out at night though. The sights in Budapest are a bit spread out, but you can see most of the main stuff in a day if you have a mind to. The best view of the city by far is Gellert Hill and probably also the best way to see Castle Hill, up close it is cool but nothing special. St. Stephens Church is worth the visit, especially because it is free, but while the view is cool, it could be skipped, though you do get an interesting look at how basilicas are put together ($2/400HUF). Heroes Square, up near the city park and the Szechenyifurdo baths, should not be missed. The baths themselves are pretty cool but if you aren't into that sort of thing, don't let people persuade you into doing it ($16/3000HUF, get 300HUF back if you leave within two hours). One of the coolest things to do is to check out the Parliament building from across the water. Other than that, make sure to see Fisherman's Bastion and Matthias Church up on the north side of castle hill.