Krakow - Day Four

Sunday, December 30, 2007 – 9:30AM

Woke up early, and Agnieszka and I snuck out of the house in order to go see the inside of Wawel Castle. The reason we snuck out was because Rob didn’t want to go, and Rob’s two friends who had come to visit were still sleeping, so we headed out on our own. Turns out everything at the castle is free on Sundays, hurray! So we went on in and checked out the beautiful living quarters (wearing our sweet blue plastic hospital booties, I might add). The main things I enjoyed seeing there were the ceilings. In each room the ceiling is different, and also each element of the ceiling. For example, a few of the rooms had large, ornate gold flowers, framed in wood, on the ceiling, but each flower was unique and different. It was amazing to me how much work was put into that. Other rooms had beautiful paintings from the Baroque period overhead, and in the Throne Room, my personal favourite, the ceiling had sculptures of heads hanging down looking at you. I took a picture of it which unfortunately turned out blurry, as I took it in sort of a hurry, because pictures weren’t really allowed, or at least that was the message I had gathered from all the signs about with cameras x-ed out that were basically everywhere.

We then went through the armoury, which was cool. Anyone who has ever gone shopping with me and seen me ogle the swords at the House of Knives knows how much I like that kind of thing. We spent about 3 times longer looking at the spears, daggers, swords, guns, armour and canons than we had going through the whole other section of the castle.
We returned to the apartment and packed up, handed the keys over to the landlord, and moved out. Cramming all the luggage of 5 people, plus those 5 people, into our tiny car was quite the feat in itself, but we were successful and drove off to find accommodations for Rob’s friends at Elephants on the Moon hostel, and then drove to the Town Square. Walked around for a while, played with the huge numbers of pigeons – even had one land on my arm; I was so proud. Went to lunch at the Sphinx, enjoyed some amazing curried pasta (it sounds kinda gross, but trust me, it was quite the opposite), and then sadly it was time to take the car back to the rental place.
Carless and backpacked, we jumped the tram and headed for the train station, which conveniently has a huge mall right next to it. Wasted a couple hours there and then at last got on the train and headed back to Wroclaw. Unfortunately, I could not sleep this time, so I spent the duration looking out the window at the drab and bleak winter landscape fly past. Arrived back “home” and went immediately to bed, tired but happy.

Good times, good memories. =]