When my friend asked me a few months ago if I wanted to go on a city break to Poland, I jumped at the chance as this had been on my bucket list for so long! We spent 3 days exploring Krakow and visited Auschwitz (I have a separate post on that here). The whole trip was just incredible and I feel so lucky to have been able to travel there!
DAY ONE: We landed early morning on Saturday 31st August, which meant we had the full day to explore central Krakow. We stayed close to the castle and so we chose this as our first port of call. We quickly realised it was a busy weekend, as there was a festival outside of the castle and the weather was insane as it was already 33 degrees at 11am! We grabbed a fresh lemonade which turned out to be a HUGE mistake as an army of wasps swarmed us and ended up stealing one of them! Nevertheless, we still managed to get in our first photoshoot (once we stopped screaming!).
We then decided to wander aimlessly through the streets of Krakow to see if we could figure out where the old town was. We saw so many beautiful churches and took an unbelievable amount of photos. Krakow is such a beautiful place, it would be rude not to!
We quickly found ourselves heading into the old town and we were overwhelmed with how beautiful everything was! We saw St. Mary’s Basilica but we struggled to get inside due to the amount of ceremonies taking place. We also attempted to buy a ticket to go up the tower but they had sold out – I would recommend booking in advance for this if you can!
After soaking up the atmosphere (and sun) for a while we headed into Cloth Hall which is a long corridor inside the central hall of old town, which has little market stalls on each side. We bought our traditional souvenir pins and spent a while looking at all the traditional dresses, carved wooden souvenirs and amber jewellery. The prices in here were a little higher than some of the shops we’d seen, but overall things were fairly cheap no matter where we went! We decided to grab some ice cream (the best I’ve ever had!) and headed back to the hotel.
Later that evening we headed out in search of traditional Polish food, which turned out to be a struggle as everywhere was booked up! We eventually found somewhere which was eerily quiet – Wisniowy Sad restaurant. We ordered some pierogies and unfortunately our experience there wasn’t great! The food was fine but we waited almost two hours and there were no other customers except us! The service was extremely slow and they seemed really uninterested in serving us which was incredibly frustrating as we were booked on a tour in the centre at 8 so we ended up having to rush there – Wouldn’t recommend!
The tour on the other hand was great! We booked onto a free ‘Macabre’ tour which took us through the back streets of old town Krakow, whilst our guide told us stories of serial killings, executions and unexplained murders. This was not for everyone I must admit, but our guide, Big Tom, was extremely passionate and we learnt a lot!
DAY TWO: We headed to Auschwitz-Birkenau on a pre-booked trip with Escape2Poland. I’ve written a separate post on the trip here, but it was an incredible, unforgettable experience that I would highly recommend!
When we returned to Krakow, we spent the evening eating Greek food at a nearby taverna and soaked up the city lights in a roof top bar overlooking the beautiful river and castle, whilst we processed what we’d experienced that day.
DAY THREE: On our final day we decided to explore some more of the Jewish Quarter as we had only seen a small part of this the day before as we headed out to Auschwitz. In all honesty, I wasn’t very impressed with the Jewish Quarter, we felt less safe in this area than in the old town and it felt quite dull and dark. We ate breakfast at Mirror Bistro, which was actually really good, I would recommend this. For 19PLN (around £4) you could pick 6 items off a menu (see below) and could add extras for 3PLN each. The food here was amazing and the fact that we could tailor it to our needs made it easier for us.
After umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether to visit Schindler’s factory, we decided to head that way and were disappointed to find that tickets had sold out. As we had walked a fair way to get there, we managed to get tickets to see the temporary exhibition about the start of the war in Poland. This was still pretty cool to see and to be inside the factory where Schindler had saved so many lives was still interesting!
We still had a few hours to kill before having to head back to the airport so we headed back to the old town, stopping at the Museum of Illusions for an hour. This was probably one of the most expensive things we did there at 50PLN (around £10), but we had so much fun taking photos in the different exhibitions. It was a good way to kill an hour and we laughed so much we were almost crying!
Finally, we headed back into the old town to grab some food and make the most of the weather before heading back to the airport.
If you’re reading this wondering about booking a trip to Krakow, my advice would be DO IT! It was such a beautiful place with so much to see and do! The food is also amazing and there is so much choice for everybody, no matter dietary requirements or food preferences! Three days was a good amount of time for us, but we easily could have spent more time here. I’d like to go back to Poland some time in the future and experience more of the culture. All in all, I’m so glad my friend suggested this trip and it was an amazing experience and a tick on my bucket list!
Just me, Kelly Marie 