Since I’ve managed to get behind in blog posts, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to post pictures and give a brief rundown of the day, at least until I’ve caught up. :-)
July 10th John wasn’t feeling well, so he relaxed and I wandered around Krakow, seeing more of the historical things to see. First I headed over to Oskar Schindler’s factory (yeah, the Oscar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame.) There wasn’t anything left to see of the factory, but there was a quite good museum on the Nazi occupation of Krakow, and on Schindler and his workers.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsbluff/4781699309/
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One of the things the museum has on display is pieces of firsthand accounts of life in the Krakow ghetto that were written by the children who lived there. Director Roman Polanski (yeah, the sleazeball) actually grew up in the Krakow ghetto. Whatever his sleaziness now, it’s hard not to be struck by what he wrote when he was 8 years old:
Roman Polanski, on the building of the wall of the Krakow ghetto: "I suddenly realized we were going to be walled in. I got so scared that I eventually burst into tears."
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Then I headed over to Zgody Square, now called Bohaterów Ghetta (Ghetto Heroes) Square. It was the main meeting place in the Krakow ghetto, and where all of the selections, deportations, and many violent incidents took place. Now the square has a bunch of empty chair sculptures. The explanation for the chairs was in Polish, but I assume it has something to do with commemorating the people killed there.
I swear I got a better picture of this with my big camera.
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On the square is the old pharmacy Under the Eagle, which was the only pharmacy in the ghetto (and the pharmacist was the only non-Jew permitted to live in the ghetto.) It’s now a museum on the Krakow ghetto. It cost extra to take pictures, and there really wasn’t much to take pictures of, as the only original piece of furniture that remains is a desk. Still, it was a neat place–the pharmacy ended up as a kind of community aid center. People who were being deported would leave messages there, and they’d sell things like hair dye (for people trying to look younger to avoid being declared too old to work and therefore shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz) and sedatives for infants so that they could be smuggled out of the ghetto. The whole place was really, really eye-opening and sobering.
After that I walked back across the river and through the old Jewish quarter of Kasmiriz, and then on to Wawel Castle, the old seat of power in Poland for hundreds of years.
Part of Wawel Castle.
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I wandered around for a while, then headed over to the castle’s cathedral to catch the 5PM church service. Pictures aren’t allowed inside the cathedral, unfortunately, but I took this one outside the cathedral.
Wawel Castle Cathedral.
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This statue is right outside the cathedral door -- Pope John Paul II celebrated his first mass here, and it was his cathedral when he was the bishop of Krakow. In fact, there's pope stuff all over the city. It's kind of crazy.
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After church, I walked through Planty Park from the castle to the old town square. Back in the 1820s, the city decided to tear down the old city wall (which was falling into disrepair and wasn’t being used to protect the city anyway), fill in the moat, and turn that space into a park. Now there’s a lovely green park that rings the entire old town, and it’s a really really nice place to relax on a hot day.
Planty Park.
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I forgot to mention that this entire time we’ve been in Krakow, there’s been a street festival going on, with different performing acts from all over the world (no seriously–there was an Iranian group there.) There was music, drama, performance art, and some just plain fun and silliness.
Bubble makers!
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I went back and watched the accordion players for a while (see the video in my previous post) and finally broke down and bought one of the CDs they had for sale. I couldn’t help it–they were fun!
I also finally managed to get the Hejnal on video. The Hejnal Mariacki is a traditional Polish hymn that was at one time used as a bugle call to signal the opening and closing of Krakow’s city gates. Nowdays it’s played once an hour, 24 hours a day. According to legend, the tune is cut short at the end because back in the 1200s, a bugler played it to announce the Mongol invasion of Poland, and was shot in the throat by an arrow. If you’ve ever read the Newberry-award-winning book The Trumpeter of Krakow, it revolves around this legend.
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I also stuck around until 9PM to watch a French musical group I’d seen rehearse earlier in the day. Now, I’d seen them rehearse in their street clothes, so I really wasn’t prepared for their actual musical act, which involved fire, monk’s robes, and Segways (yeah, those two-wheeled contraptions.) All but one of them were playing brass instruments that had been massively modified from their original shapes (well, except for one guy who had a plain old soprano saxaphone.) The one woman in the band was the only one who didn’t have a musical instrument. Instead, she had two wands with fire coming from them, and periodically in the act she’d light the ground on fire (I have no idea what they prepared it with ahead of time so it’d do so.)
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The whole thing (about 30 minutes) was beyond bizarre, but again, it was fun. :-)
That completed, I headed home… and managed to get really, really lost. It turns out that they closed the tram line for road construction that I’d normally take to get back to our dorms. Well, they didn’t actually CLOSE it — they switched the tram line to another route and street entirely, but called it the same line. And the sign announcing the change was only in Polish. (And yeah, I know I was in Poland, but given the HUGE number of tourists there, having a translation would have been HELPFUL.) And since it was nighttime, I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t the same route — silly me for assuming the same Line 15 tram that we’d been taking the past couple of days was anything but the same as it’d been.
I didn’t get home until after 11, at which point I was really, REALLY grumpy. But at least I made it home.
A side note about English. Both John and I have found the relative ubiquity of English really interesting. Heck, I heard a FRENCH person complaining in Budapest that a museum didn’t have enough English translations, or at least an audioguide in English. And that’s far from the only non-native English speaker we heard complaining about the lack of English. As John pointed out, it’s an issue of practicality, since English is more widely spoken than any other European language. And there’s something neat about listening to two people converse in English, but neither of them speak English as a native language (and in some cases, I’m guessing not even as a second language.) However, as a native speaker, I still felt a bit self-conscious and self-centered about wanting signage in English. Oh well.
…and I’ve now concluded I’m incapable of giving anything resembling a brief rundown. But you knew that. Sigh. :-)
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Where we are now:
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