Baby, it’s cold outside!

I officially love Poland. Krakow is an amazing city. There’s tons to do and see, museums (yes, I finally caved and started going to museums – but small ones, where I don’t feel like I’m spending an entire beautiful day inside) and the usual litany of things a tourist does. But it’s also a very livable city, or so it seemed in my 6 days there. It doesn’t hurt that I met up with a fabulous group of people at my hostel, and that is probably the reason I loved the city so much: I actually had good good people to hang out with. The hostel (the best feature of which was the Polish disco music pumped into the water closets and shower rooms) was super small and rife with Brits, and offered evening activities every night like going to the local shisha bar,

going to the Jewish quarter for potato pancakes (which were ridiculous and delicious and I thought my stomach was going to crawl out of my body and slap me across the face for putting such horrendously greasy food into it), and to the local beer gardens (which never ended up happening because we took a detour to some dance club where things got a little out of hand, probably due to the excess of re-mixed Abba music on hand). One weird thing, that I kind of noticed in Olomouc but not to nearly the same degree, is how much people stared while I was out running. There’s a beautiful bike path that follows the river in Krakow and lots of people use it for roller blading and walking and biking, but apparently not a lot of people run there. The reactions I got were totally weird, though, to the point where I had to ask the woman working at the hostel reception desk whether I was doing something culturally inappropriate, which, she assured me, I was not, though I’m inclined to think otherwise because I’ve never been yelled at by old people while running before. Or followed by police on bikes. Or yelled at in English by a random teenager, “hey, I’m talking to you!” Or just been straight up stared at so much. Totally bizarre, and I never figured it out, so that part of Poland will probably forever be a mystery. But the guy wandering around the main square in a beer costume redeemed any semi-creepy experiences.

I left Krakow last Saturday and headed to Zakopane for a few days, traveling with a Scottish guy I met at the Krakow hostel. Zakopane is in the very south of Poland and is kind of equivalent to Aspen or Vail – not a whole lot to do in town aside from shop, eat, and drink, but there’s some fabulous hiking when there’s no snow to play in. Unfortunately, since it’s in the mountains, it’s also really really cold and I definitely didn’t come prepared for that kind of weather. The hike we took was up some mountain, with what would be, I imagine, breathtaking views, but we couldn’t see them for all the fog and clouds, but when we broke through above the cloud cover it was gorgeous.

And really cold. Later that night it started raining, and really hasn’t stopped yet. So the last day and a half in Poland were spent indoors, the bus to Slovakia (which stopped at the border and I had to walk across) and the wait for the next bus were a bit soggy, and my hike in the Slovakian Tatras this morning were all stupendously soggy and muddy. And, of course, cold. My intro to Slovakia, then, has been pretty desultory, and I wish my hostel would crank up the heat a bit more, but hopefully tomorrow will be at least a bit drier, even if the trails are still mud and my nose still feels a bit icecube-ish. But then, at least the cold provides a good excuse to update the blog and catch up on my reading.