First entry

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The older posts are migrated from here.

Cracovia - Yo-ho-ho, merry new year! (II)

Part II - Ze Cracou


The following days (27-8-9) me and Cristina visited Cracovia. For those who don't know she's my lovely girlfriend We caught a night train which looked slightly better that the rapid in Romania, but wasn't heated properly. Thank God it was a warm night. There were temperatures above 5 degrees almost all the 'winter'. Ionut waited for us at 6 am in the station in a memorable heroic act of defeating the morning sleep in a holiday. Well the battle was just half won because we all 'fell' soon after arriving at his and Ioana's residence in Krakow.
Krakow is a really nice historic city, less tourist crowded than Prague, kind of an Iasi situated in a better context. The whole center is surrounded by a park giving it a pleasant look. I think there was the biggest square I've ever seen, 200x200 sq meters. Other than that, the castle, of course with a view over the river (I guess this is repeating itself a bit everywhere) and a really nice inner yard(repeating again everywhere there's a castle in a way or the other), a church inside the yard (!!!) and everything you'd expect to find by now in a castle. Don't think I wasn't impressed by it or anything, it was really beaauuuutifull. It's just that old cities in Europe tend to look very much alike by my mind.

The food was also quite similar to the czech ones. I admit it tasted a bit better. We were in a really nice restaurant, half 'rustic' half really elegant right in front of the theater. Beer's twice the price as in Prague btw :p.

On the 28th there was Ioana's birthday, we went out with the trainees from Krakow to a club where they almost didn't let Cristina in because of id checking, I guess she didn't look 21 to them . Club was nice, typical house noize and kinda smokie. We got to know some of the people which was nice, for instance some indian guys which belonging to different casts had quite different upbringings which were clearly visible through their behaviour. They're even often discriminated among each other on this matter. Another fortunate event was the snow!! weee, it was the first 'serious' snow i've seen this winter, streets were all white and nice and at least that night it was really beautiful.

On our last day we visited the jewish quarters, the getto and Schindler's factory. For me it was quite emotional having known that all I've seen in the movie actually happened right before my eyes some 60years ago. The getto was looking very grim, all the buildings seemed to be left to crumble on purpose. The really cloudy, gloomy day also added to the effect after 2 days of bright sunshine.

The jewish quarter though had plenty of good looking buildings, fancy narrow alleys and synagogues. We also had the traditional kind of polish pizza, the zapekanka or something like that, cheese, mushrooms and spices on a loaf of toast bread with butter with salami or other kinds of toppings. Interesting stuff, good especially if hungry :)

For the drinks, one shouldn't miss the Zubrovka (Jubrovca), traditional polish vodka, very aromatic and with a herb inside :) The combination of that and apple syrup (Juberek) is totally irresistable to girls (or so I've herd) :p

We had a really good time in Kracow and i totaly recommend it to everyone :) especially if u have friends living there (unfortunatelly the Ions -Ionut+Ioana- ended their stay there).

So until they'll post their side of the story on our visit there, take my word for what i said was very close to the truth

Yo-ho-ho, merry new year! (I)

Since it's been quite some time since my last post I'll be mixing some of the events that just happened in some kind of wintery tale which is actually not so wintery (it rained a lot these days).

For you own good I'll split it into smaller chapters so that it's easier to digest.

Part I - za bighining

Being my first x-mas without my family and also in another country I expected I'd get less into the atmosphere but actually it turned out to be quite nice. It all started with the x-mas decorations from Ikea, very nice and cheap. Having the decorations we had no excuse for not getting a x-mas tree. In the search for the tree we ran into some guys that were also selling the traditional x-mas meal to-be: the wonderful carp! They were selling it right next to the x-mas trees so there was a high chance we'd get a slightly different smell than we would expect in our living room. We found then another place where me and Raluca got a really nice one. They were nice enough to chop the bottom to fit in the support as well and nicely wrapped it in a net. The tree was a hit! It's still vigorously pointing its branches towards the ceiling.

Then there came the visitors, 10ks of maize flour for the long craved 'mamaliga' which will last probably the whole year, fried home-made sausages in lard, hard-core sheep cheese, smoked cheese, 'belly' cheese and all other kinds of such romanian x-mas delicacies. And what would x-mas be without the magnificent sarmale? Well we had to make them so they brought the appropriate leaves :D and they turned out to be delicious. For those of you whose mouths are already watering as you're reading, I apologize but I really felt like sharing this . To the others, well you've either had them recently or you don't know what the f**k i'm writing about in which case you need to come to Romania :D

So having ended the food paragraph, I'm moving on to the x-mas morning. We had nice presents under the tree in the morning and then we had lunch again which was thoroughly quenched by Jidvei, Cotnari and such other kinds of Romanian wine :p

Having ended the drinking paragraph (for now), I'll get to the next days in the next post.