I've been in Poland just over 24 hours now and have walked around quite a bit to get a sense of my surroundings, even though I'm only here one more day. Before hitting the somber notes from a day of visiting and walking around the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps (I'll compile my thoughts and aim to publish tomorrow), here are a few of my (sometimes amusing) impressions of Poland.
Polish has vowels. They don't like writing them, or saying them, but they do exist if you listen hard enough. It sometimes sounds as if they are trying to fit as many garbled sounds into one word as possible, and every now and then, if I listen hard enough, I can pick something out either because it has a cognate in English or there's some similarity to Russian, which I studied 10 years ago. I was thinking about how to phrase this and was thinking that a Wheel of Fortune reference would probably be in order, but they all seemed long-winded to me. Alas, I can't always be witty.
There is an obsession with receipts. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good receipt when I paid for something and need a record of it, but I do NOT need a record of when I go to the bathroom. Today, I had to use one of the public toilets that cost 1zł (zł stands for złoty, and it's currently about 3.89 złotych to 1 USD). So 1 zł, about 25 cents. To use the bathroom. And I got a receipt. I was trying to think about who I might need to show the receipt to, but came up empty. Instead, it just proved the obsession with handing out receipts here.
Poland is ridiculously cheap. Further on the theme of money, I have determined that Poland is really cheap. Part of it is a favorable exchange rate (at the upper end of the range over the last decade), but in general, things just seem very cheap. No complaints, just an observation.
If there is a line, Polish people will find a way to swarm it. Queuing, to steal a term from our friends in the UK, is not a Polish strong suit. Cutting lines and trying to push five people through a space clearly meant for one person at a time appears to be a common occurrence. The corollary to this impression is that personal space is just a foreign concept.
You have two religion options--Catholic or Jewish. It seriously feels like everyone is in one of those two camps. I suppose there's good reason it feels like this; official statistics say that 33 million people, 87.5% of the population, are Catholic. Strangely, there are only about 20,000 Jews in Poland, but the strong current of Judaism through Polish culture and history is evident. As such, while most citizens may be Catholic, it definitely seems that most tourists are Jewish.
Finally, it's nice to blend in. I'm used to traveling places where I stick out just by virtue of being there. Or me carrying a backpack is a sign that I'm an outsider. In Poland, I can look like a local (although I think there is a distinct Polish look, which has as much to do with physical features as it does the average person's way of carrying himself or herself) even when I'm carrying a backpack. Or rolling a suitcase down the sidewalk, because it seems normal. I get that part of this is being in a city like Krakow, and being in a tourist section, but I found this to be true even the farther away from the train/bus station I got. I don't automatically stick out.
As of now, I've really only spent time in Old Town Krakow and some of the surrounding neighborhoods. Tomorrow I hope to go to Kazmierz, the Jewish district, which has many synagogues and other Jewish-y things about it. We'll see what I find!
For today's video, I bring you one I took of a street performer. There are a lot of street performers in almost any major city in the world, but I find that they are much more visible here in Krakow. I even saw a bit of a dueling music interlude between this man playing the guitar and a guy with an accordion a little bit later. It was pretty sweet!
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| I love the way the light was hitting the church in the central square. |
There is an obsession with receipts. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good receipt when I paid for something and need a record of it, but I do NOT need a record of when I go to the bathroom. Today, I had to use one of the public toilets that cost 1zł (zł stands for złoty, and it's currently about 3.89 złotych to 1 USD). So 1 zł, about 25 cents. To use the bathroom. And I got a receipt. I was trying to think about who I might need to show the receipt to, but came up empty. Instead, it just proved the obsession with handing out receipts here.
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| Obviously there was a giant marijuana leaf walking down the street. Oh, you mean that's not normal? |
If there is a line, Polish people will find a way to swarm it. Queuing, to steal a term from our friends in the UK, is not a Polish strong suit. Cutting lines and trying to push five people through a space clearly meant for one person at a time appears to be a common occurrence. The corollary to this impression is that personal space is just a foreign concept.
You have two religion options--Catholic or Jewish. It seriously feels like everyone is in one of those two camps. I suppose there's good reason it feels like this; official statistics say that 33 million people, 87.5% of the population, are Catholic. Strangely, there are only about 20,000 Jews in Poland, but the strong current of Judaism through Polish culture and history is evident. As such, while most citizens may be Catholic, it definitely seems that most tourists are Jewish.
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| Wawel Castle Cathedral |
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| Smok Wawelski, Krakow's very own fire-breathing dragon! |
As of now, I've really only spent time in Old Town Krakow and some of the surrounding neighborhoods. Tomorrow I hope to go to Kazmierz, the Jewish district, which has many synagogues and other Jewish-y things about it. We'll see what I find!
For today's video, I bring you one I took of a street performer. There are a lot of street performers in almost any major city in the world, but I find that they are much more visible here in Krakow. I even saw a bit of a dueling music interlude between this man playing the guitar and a guy with an accordion a little bit later. It was pretty sweet!
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