Tales from two cities

After six days in Krakow I was a broken man. Arriving there before I had planned, staying for longer than planned, and drinking much more than I planned.

In a way, however, I can pretend to have cause for this excess; demons to exorcise through the twin exhausts of booze and mindless dancing in Polish clubs.

Like so many, I was running from something.

As a reflection of all the circumstances that could befall one and imperil their existence, it was a self-inflicted and minimal plight, but in the narrow scheme of hedonistic pleasure that defines backpacking, it seemed harsh and brutal.

I had come to Warsaw with high hopes. I was to be couchsurfing and hanging out with locals for both a house party and New Year’s Eve. It promised to be authentic and entertaining. At least, so I hoped.

Thanks, Mr. Wedel

Kasia, my couchsurfing host, met me at the train station. At her apartment I met her housemates who only spoke Polish, and we went to the Old Town to see the Christmas lights. Sponsored by the Willy Wonka of Poland, a Mr. Wedel, they were really quite spectacular.

To celebrate the waning festivities we had a beer before moving to a communist style bar. A resurgent trend in Warsaw, these establishments offer cheap liquor and cheap food, with standing room only for the many swaying patrons, breath heavy with vodka, white sausage and pickled herring.

The next day we did a bit of a tourist loop around the city, heading up the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science for a panorama of the city. In one park there were some people ice fishing. Keen for a closer look I tentatively wandered out onto the ice, only to have it start cracking in the middle of the lake. With as cautious a step one can have in a frenzied panic, I hustled back to the shore.

That night was a houseparty that Kasia had been talking up all day. Run by some sort of clique of multinationals and with an allegedly exclusive list of people who were routinely invited to these gatherings.

Ice fishers

Ultimately, it was a fairly standard house party, if done in the Polish style. In Poland everyone brings not only booze, but food to a party. As a result there is quite an opulent buffet, as well as an array of bottles from which one can pick and choose. Held at the apartment of a lady called Marta, also present were four German gentlemen who had met Marta in the supermarket earlier that day, asking her where the salt and pepper were.

Not only were they invited to the shindig, as it was the birthday of one of them, we all paused at one moment to sing happy birthday in Polish. There was some limboing, some questioning of why on earth I was in Poland, a fair bit of drinking, and eventually we left.

It soon became apparent that Kasia was unimpressed with me. “I don’t like you anymore,” was the repeated refrain on the frosty walk home. Maybe she misunderstood the principals of the guest-host dynamic, but it seemed she wanted dibs on my attention. Talking to other people, particularly women, seemed to have caused some distress and a sense of betrayal.

View from the Palace of Culture and Science

The next day she apologised, but for mine it was too weird to stay anymore. There was an unpleasant tension that to be honest, I really didn’t need. Leaving after an awkward farewell, I felt immensely relieved, but I was faced with the fact that it was the day before NYE and I had nowhere to stay. The other issue was that Kasia had been in charge of my NYE celebrations, but obviously that had gone to poo.

Fireworks, anyone?

Thankfully, there were a few hostel beds unoccupied across the city, even if I did have to trek some distance out of town to get to them. Even more fortunately, at the house party I’d met Ewa, who offered to let me hang out with her and her friends on NYE after hearing of my fate. Oddly enough, it was with her that I’d discussed the curious dynamic of couchsurfing and what people expected from it while at the party.

Drunk skiing

My new hostel was in the Prague district, what I had repeatedly seen referred to as ‘the real Warsaw’. It had an enormous flea market outside of it full of cheap and suspicious items. Given NYE loomed, a good percentage of the stalls were selling fireworks. So it was that I was awoken from my pre-NYE nap by what my sleep-addled brain confused for gun fire, before I realised it was the letting off of fireworks. This was unrelenting from the early afternoon until well into the wee hours of the morning.

Speaking of the wee hours of the morning, I spent my NYE at a tiny club in Goclaw that was in the middle of nowhere—even further from the city centre than my hostel. It was full of old friends of Ewa and her brother, “wealthy French kids living it up in a cheap city.”

The only male there not wearing a shirt or suit, I was unconcerned as I focused my attentions on the open bar. Apparently my attentions were too avid, however, as I awoke the next morning in my hostel bed with little-to-no recollection of the night after we’d huddled outside as midnight struck and spun drunkenly eyeing the fireworks scattered across the sky.

Just plain drunk

Miserably hungover, I decided that New Year’s Day would see me out of Warsaw. So addled was I by the residual alcohol that I was unable to work out how to move from the metro station to the main train station, some 100m away, for a good quarter of an hour. As a result of this confusion and sweaty after an unsightly run with my backpack on, I missed the train I had intended to catch. I eventually booked a train an hour later and at last had means of transport away from a confusing few days.

Krakow couldn’t be more different from Warsaw. Warsaw is basically a new and modern city, the old town very small and that which remains, quite renovated. It was the victim of some rather nasty German occupation, and broadly destroyed after the Warsaw Uprising, a 63 day rebellion by Polish insurgents during WWII after which Hitler swore to tear down the city even more completely.

Krakow, on the other hand, was chosen as a sort of German base. With the main cathedral, St. Mary’s, having had its rather opulent altar sculpted by a German and the city’s beauty renowned,  it was spared the destruction the Warsaw faced and is thus far more pleasing to the eye.

Additionally, it was once the capital of Poland and thus benefitted from having some money invested in it in the past, but with the honours of the capital moving to Warsaw, it has been spared the ugly signs of commercialism and central business that go hand in hand with being a capital city. Instead it exists quite charmingly with a large student population, which comprises around 20% of its occupants.

Auschwitz 

Slightly dubious, but acting on the recommendation of someone I’d met in Estonia, I checked into Greg and Tom’s Party Hostel, bracing myself for something potentially irritating. I was met by a bunch of built English dudes who turned out to be marines, all drinking heavily and keen for another night of savage excess.

Embarking on the pub crawl that evening I bore witness to some terrible things. One of the English lads, Adam, was so ruined before we left the hostel that he’d pass out at every pub we went to within minutes of arriving. He was thus ferried from port to port across the shoulders of one of his mates. Previously he had been so drunk he had fallen flat on his face and thus sported only half of a chipped front tooth which he would bare, loose lipped, in one of his few and scattered moments of consciousness. Another of the marines, James, was something of a martial arts expert, and after a few drinks took to showing off his kicks and rolling around in the street grappling with whoever would join. Another’s official job title was helicopter sniper. 

Salt church

There were four Americans out with us, too. Two of them, brothers, were clearly unprepared for the sort of drinking that ensued, with one of them disappearing after vomiting all over himself in one the bars. The other two had rescheduled their flights for another night out with the British guys, so that should give you some indication of their bearing and conduct. Scrotums were licked, vomit was spewed, arses were bared, glasses were broken; dignity scattered to the winds.

So was established the theme of my time in Krakow; boozy excess followed by attempting to function the next day.

At 8am one morning one of the guys who worked at the hostel, Adrian, took me and three others skiing. Claiming it was only a 20 minute drive, I had no idea what to expect given I couldn’t see any snowy peaks on the horizon. For about 20 euros we were getting door to door service in his little car in which he perpetually blasted dance tunes, equipment hire, and 2 hours on the slopes.

Stones placed at ruins of a gas chamber. Stones are permanent, flowers fleeting

Slopes, however, is a rather grand word for the two, short rides that comprised this snowfield, but by no means did that diminish the fun. Still drunk from the night before and with no quality skiing attire, it was in jeans and fingerless gloves that I brazenly defied the elements, elegantly carving up the powder with only one humiliating spill.

More harrowing was the visit I undertook to Auschwitz. Having already been to a concentration camp in Serbia I thought I’d be prepared for the experience, but there isn’t much that can compare or prepare you for a place where millions have died. Indeed, it is only in visiting Auschwitz that the reality of the scope of the attempted genocide sets in. Putting a real location to the atrocities and seeing the remnants of where they bore out is something that chills to the core.

Most confronting were the Nazi-plundered relics of those killed. In one room in the museum there is a 15 metre long glass case heaped full of hair that was harvested from the bodies of the women killed in the gas chambers and then woven into material. As I left the room a man leading his daughter, seeing my face, pulled her back at the threshold and walked off in another direction.

Pierogi

Similarly, the cases of shoes, some baby sized, provide truly haunting relics of brutality left not so far in the past.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the camp where so many of the prisoners were housed and gassed, with areas marked on the map where the ashes of the incinerated bodies were scattered. The gas chambers themselves were demolished by the Nazis in an attempt to mask their actions, but enough remains to ably unsettle. What struck me was how small the gas chambers were, the processing of people through them and the incinerators in order to kill the vast number the camp claimed must have been a constant process.

Almost as macabre were the actions of some of the tourists. Posing with big smiles for a happy-snap at the end of the railway that was where the prisoners were dropped off before sorting—the weak straight to the chambers, the able-bodied to be processed and forced into labour—or in the restored gas chamber, showing no small lack of awareness of where they were or the appropriate behaviour for such a place.

The spectre of death looms over much of Poland once you touch upon its history. In Krakow’s Jewish ghetto there is a square where people were routinely gathered and killed by the Nazis, the monument now standing there scattered chairs, reflecting the way in which those brought there to wait—sometimes for hours—would bring chairs, and the empty chairs left by those who would never come back.

No man left behind

I also visited the salt mines in Krakow. Enormous and polished to a sheen by many feet before mine, it was a curious experience. Like nothing I have seen or will again, vast underground salt-chambers filled with salt-carved statues and chapels.

Staying at the hostel as I did for six nights, and with boozy festivities rendering all those staying there closely bonded through shared excess, it was sad to have to leave. One of the girls working there who ran many nights out, Dominika, became somewhat of a debauchery facilitator and partner in dance floor crimes. Fuelled by free bottles of vodka she could get at the bars, one fateful night I blew out the crotch of my favourite jeans as I was getting low. I also became chums with a lad from America, Dazza, with whom I’d pretend—for no explicable reason—to be brothers on nights out.

I also had the pleasure of dining on many Polish specialties, pierogis—dumplings, fried potato pancakes with goulash, beetroot soup, Zurek—a soup of eggs, sausage and rye meal, and paczek—fried donuts that can be either sugar coated and stuffed with jam, or much to my dismay, deep fried and stuffed with sour cabbage. Additionally, Krakow has now emerged as leader on my rankings of cities by kebab quality.

So yeah, Poland was an experience. Creepy, harrowing, curious, exhausting, fun.