Poles Apart

We arrived in Krakow on Monday and have found ourselves staying with an eccentric yet  friendly and animated couple in their very plush appartment near to the middle of town.  Although grand and beautiful (largest medieval town square in europe) I am havng a good but somehow unfulfilling time here.  I don't know if I'm still Czech-lagged (!) or whether I am  less compatible with the Polish temperament but something is missing.

It could be that we have realised this week that in order to make Mongolia for the Nadam festival (11 July) we need to pick up speed - this has meant not only cutting our time in Krakow (we now leave on Thursday) but also we are now skipping straight through Latvia and Lithuania to Estonia where we shall spend maybe a week.  One of the early lessons has been that it is more rewarding  to stop at less places, but for a longer time at each.  Estonia looks too briliant to miss  and Latvia and Lithuania are close enough to home to visit any time I guess.

Today we walked around Wawel Castle.  Many areas cost seperately to get in, so we chose just the treasury and armoury.  The treasury was certainly intresting but the biggy for me ws the armoury - this was the closest I'm ever likely to get to the stocking up stage at the beginning of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign!  I thought that all that stuff was mostly fantasy, but they had it all here at the castle in full DnD style - maces, crossbows, flails, all kinds of ornate and plain swords, chain mail, scale mail, splint mail and full plate.  Horse armour, gauntlets, daggers and pole-arms of all kinds (one had so many bits it must have been the very munchkinly Swiss Army Polearm!).  The items were generally either home side (Polish) or away team (usually Hungarian or Turkish) and the detailling really was very fantasy indeed.

We also walked along the river to the Jewish quarter, or rather ex-Jewish quarter, where a huge number of people were firstly displaced and then exterminated.  Studying the background was sobering to look at so many old photographs of so many families that were lost forever, and the afternoon was good preparation for tomorrow's trip to nearby Auschwitz - somewhere I feel compelled to go to but I am looking forward to it with no small amount of trepidation.