Vacations in Poland

This vacations we travelled to Poland, from July 30th to August 29th. It was very good and different to what I had seen other years in other places. We went to Cracow by plane, with a stop in Brussels, on July 30th. Cracow is probably the second most important city in Poland, and was the ex-capital of Poland.

The city was very pretty, especially the old section of the city. There was quite a lot of turism and many Spanish also. Shops worked practically the 24hr, including restaurants and most didn't even close on Sundays. Streets were very wide and statues of the polish Pope could be found everywhere, as well as churches. They had the city walls and a medieval Barbican perfectly conserved in the city. They ate in large cuantities, especially meat and cheese, including in breakfast.

We also visited the concentracion camp of Auswitz and the Salt Mines. Both were very good, though the Polish lack a lot in organization skills. The Salt Mines were the most important in Europe and the oldest, still working since the Middle Ages.

Roads were terrible. My parents said they were like here 40 years ago. It took us 4 hours to travel 110 km south. So when we went to see Warsaw for 3 days we got the train. It took us 3 hours by train, but it took 4 by car!! Warsaw had been almost utterly destroyed during the Second World War, but it was very well rebuilt. It was pretty and the old part was very good. Not like Brest in northern France, which was horrible and had also been destroyed during the war.

When we went back to Cracow we visited small towns in the country-side, but they are nothing special. Very dispersed and weakly centralised, with no shops or anything prepared for tourists. The country-side was very green and very flat, small hills and enourmous territories of green flat lands. There were quite a lot of mosquitoes, and wildlife. We saw a pair of foxes and a hare.

We had a very good weather. It was hot when the sun shone. But it was very changing. In one single day you could have clouds, sun, rain and sun once again, all in a single day.

There was a lot of pratiotism in Poland. Apart from all the memorials to the dead and deported during the war, you could see Polish dressed as second world war soldiers marching around the city singing pratiotic songs.

The Polish language is very hard to learn, and only learned a few words in all the vacations. They speak very fast and pronounce the "w" as a "v". It surprised by that they said for hat, chapel (txapela) which is very similar to euskera. I think the language is sort of a mix in between Russian and German. Words I learned where thank you (yenkuye, not sure hot it was written) and good bye (dubitzenia)

In conclusion I had a lot of fun during my vacations, they were very good. Next time I'd like to go and see the Baltic, where amber is very common, though amber could be found in shops all around Poland.