Exploring Krakow Old Town + Researching Next Steps

A morning walk took us into the Old Town and around the main square, Rynek Główny. The square is very large—just under 10 acres. At its centre is the Cloth Hall, which is now a museum on the first floor and filled with dozens of souvenir shops at ground level. It was once a historic centre of international trade where textiles, spices, silk, leather, and more were exchanged. Kraków is also well known for its nearby salt mine, which was one of the commodities traded here, along with imported spices from the Middle East.

There are two other very prominent buildings in the square: the Old Town Hall Tower and St. Mary’s Basilica. For now, we just wander around the full perimeter of the square, checking out the buildings, restaurants, and shops. There’s a noticeable sculpture—a monument to Adam Mickiewicz—but we have no idea of its significance. On the other side of the square, there’s also an interesting mask sculpture lying on its side.

The square was very busy with people last night, but this morning it’s much quieter. People don’t generally get up and out early, which is why we try to. A number of big roads lead off the square, but there isn’t much traffic. It seems to be restricted mainly to delivery vehicles, as there are lots of them parked here this morning. The nearby streets have very few cars, which is great.

Down one of the streets, Sarah spots a tall tower in the distance. It isn’t marked as a point of interest on our map, so we decide to walk in its direction to check out more of the Old Town. Note: Not being marked on our map just means we haven't yet known to mark it as "flagged" to visit it. Not that it's not on Google maps. 

The tower belongs to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul. As someone recently pointed out to me, we’ve now contracted a case of “the ABCs” (Another Bloody Church—or sometimes the C stands for Castle) 😂. You certainly end up seeing a lot of them in Europe. Of course, we don’t visit them all, but we do pop into some for a quick look, as we did today.

Lately, many of the churches have rewarded us with towers to climb for city views. This one, however, doesn’t appear to have an accessible tower. Instead, it hosts evening concerts, which is quite unique. While looking around, Sarah luckily spotted someone walking up some stairs from below ground level inside the church. In 2012 a significant renovation was completed, and we descended a small staircase into the crypt. It’s a series of small rooms containing large stone coffins—a bit macabre, but interesting all the same. We later discovered that this is Poland’s National Pantheon, and a number of historically significant Poles are buried here.

It was time to head back for a late morning coffee, and our route took us past another ABC—this time Wawel Castle. Just a view from the bottom of its hill today. We’ll come back to see it properly another day, but at least we now know where it is. That said, we’ll probably still need Google Maps to find our way back. 😂

We (read: Aaron) wanted something to go with the coffee. A pastry perhaps? There was a fancy-looking, expensive bakery we spotted down the road from the apartment that might be worth a visit. But even better—right next door there was a bakery open that we hadn’t seen yesterday because it was closed in the afternoon. Now it was open and had a great selection of breads and pastries. A small one with jam in the middle would do nicely! 👍 (Small?!)

By now it was a very late morning tea—as it was after 11 a.m. After a bit of reading, it was suddenly lunchtime. Sarah made us egg sandwiches. Yum!

The afternoon was spent mostly researching one of our future destinations and looking at accommodation options. We eventually narrowed things down but ended up not booking anything!!! 😕 Good grief—that took hours to achieve nothing. This is one downside of this style of travel: you don’t have everything lined up and planned beforehand, so you do need to allow time in the schedule for this. In this case, we’ve chosen to wait because a flight is involved, and we’re nervous that any disruption could have a domino effect on future bookings. Don’t worry—we’ll find something suitable in time, I hope. 🤞

For dinner we enjoyed pork steaks, salad, and Chinese noodles.