It's so good to be back in the land of people who speak English!

Well, I finally made it to the hostel on the first night after walking forever and via I think most of the suburbs of Krakow to get here. I walked for 1.5 hours to get to somewhere that was only 15 minutes from the station. It doesn't help that the bus station isn't where it is marked in the Lonely Planet and there are no signs in the bus station directing you to the city. I ended up following the mass of people assuming that they would be heading towards the city centre but obviously not. I wandered on streets that aren't marked on my map for a while before finally going by sense of direction instead and finding a street marked on the map eventually.

For people who don't want to take the walking tour of the inner suburbs, you need to go up the escalators into the bus station from where you are dropped. Walk through the bus station and out the other side. You come out in a little square thing full of vendors. Go through this and then down and under the rail lines to the railway station. From here there are actually signs. But you just need to walk through the square in front of the station and down the underpass which will bring you out in the park. From there head towards Florian Gate (head right) and then follow Florian Street into the main square.

I dumped my bags at the hostel after walking up the large number of stairs and headed straight out to get something to eat. The square was fairly full even for a weeknight so I wandered through there and to a vegetarian cafe called Green Way which is just off the square. It wasn't bad food, all preprepared but tasty. I had a quick bite and then it was back to the hostel to do some washing. My clothes were a bit on the stinky side after three days of hiking without doing any washing so I was very pleased about the free washing machine. My clothes smelt and felt so good the next morning.

The next day I went to Auschwitz which you can read about in the other entry. I was still feeling a bit funny afterwards so I had a quiet evening reading my book before an early night. I did have a nice dinner at the cafe next to the hostel. It's in Bracka St and is called something like Coffee Revolution. They do really good sandwiches and have a non-smoking section out the back next to the counter.

On Thursday I had an organisational day and started with the information desk to find out when the english tours at the salt mine were and how I booked tickets for the castle tours. I had to go down to the castle to organise tours for that so I headed down in that direction. The weather wasn't great again and you couldn't see muchof the view from the castle because of the drizzle. I booked some tickets for Sunday's tour of the castle in the morning in the hope that I could beat some of the tour bus crowds. It's quite easy to book tickets and it only costs 16 zl extra per booking. It means that you then join the much shorter queue at the booking office to collect your tickets and you just have to be there 20 minutes before your tour starts to pick them up and pay for them.

After that I headed off towards the Skalka, which is the church of St Stanislaw (the patron saint of Poland). St Stanislaw was the bishop of Krakow in the 11th century and he got a little bit angry at the king for some of his non-christian behaviour. The King refused to repent and the bishop excommunicated him. The King didn't take this too well and took to the bishop with an axe. The bishop was beheaded and then quartered and then thrown into a pond outside the church on the Rock. He was made into a saint in the 13th century and is the patron saint of Poland. Before he died he put a curse on the royal family of Poland and after a prolonged period of bad luck they decided that they needed to placate his spirit a bit. Each year they would walk down the hill from the castle at Wawel and bring his relics with them. They would then pray for forgiveness at the Skalka church. This still happens every year on the anniversary of him becoming a saint. The church has a monument to the saint out the front where the pond used to be. They used to drink the water out of it as part of the ceremony (it supposedly had miraculous powers) but I feel looking at it now, they have quit on that.

Inside the church there is an altar that has the log on which the saint was chopped into pieces, but the rest of his relics including the bits of his head (the sign didn't specify which bits) and his arm bones are kept in the Cathedral at Wawel. Unfortunately, the altar is being cleaned so I couldn't see it.

Downstairs in the crypt are the graves of many important Poles. They are artists and writers and people like that mainly. You have to be pretty impressive to get a spot. The last guy buried there had won the Nobel Prize. The graves are pretty flash too. Lots of dark marble.

I then walked up the street to St Catherine's Church. It was a gothic church but the inside has been redone in what I would guess is Baroque by the number of angels on the walls. The whole of the front of the church is dug up at the moment as they re-lay the marble floor but you can still go in and have a look. There are some enormously impressive graves and some huge paintings on the wall that are worth seeing. It is also one of the few churches in Poland where you can light actual candles so if you are looking for somewhere, here is a church to go to. I then turned off the street slightly and went to the town hall square. It's not particularly impressive because over time the square was made smaller to fit more buildings in. They are also working on it at the moment so there are lots of piles of sand and blocks of wood around. The town hall itself is not a stand out building in the area but does have museum inside. I was enjoying the fact that it wasn't raining so decided to stay outside and look around instead. I headed from the town hall, across the square to the Corpus Christi church which isn't very impressive from the outside but very impressive on the inside. Now it was definitely Baroque. They have gone all out with the angels on the walls and the pulpit is a boat complete with mast and sail.

Here I left the Christian part of Kazimierz and into the Jewish quarter. Originally they were two completely separate areas, separated by a wall but at some point the wall was knocked down and the two sections joined. I went to the Old Synagogue which is now a museum of local jewish history. It was the first Jewish building in Poland and they think that it was built in 1407. It has been rebuilt a couple of times since then and one wall is actually part of the original wall around the town. It has been altered to make it into a museum by connecting the male and female areas of the main temple. Most of the contents of the temple were stolen by the Nazis during the war but some was hidden and other pieces have been brought from synagogues around Poland to make up the collection. It has great information on the basics of Judaism as well as the history of Jews in Krakow. It's not huge so takes less than an hour to look at everything.

I wanted to go to the Remuh cemetary but it was closed for some special occasion so I headed back into town instead and went back to the hostel. Friday I headed out first thing in the morning to the Salt Mine at Wieliczka which is about 20 minutes out of the centre of the city. There has been a salt mine on the site for over 700 years and there are more than 300km of tunnels in the mine. You have to go on a tour in the mine and you cover only 2.5km of the total but go down to 130 m below the surface. It's not cheap at 61 zl per person (it's an extra 10zl to take photos inside) but it was worth it. It's unusual and there aren't that many mines which you can go into. The tour groups are large (I think there were 37 in mine) which does make it hard especially as some of the people on our tour didn't speak english so were getting others with them to translate, making it difficult to hear the guide. The mine is full of statues carved out of rock salt which tell the history of the mine and folk stories associated with it. They are really very good. There are several chapels in the mine as well. The miners were very religious as they tended to be involved in accidents on a regular basis and they felt that they might need God's intervention. The largest chapel is dedicated to St Kinga who is the patron saint of Polish miners. She was actually Hungarian and was married to the Polish king (someone the Chaste). She was made a saint by Pope John Paul II. She actually owned the mine at Wieliczka when it was first started. Salt was original made in the area by taking water from hot salt springs and drying it out. When the springs dried up someone realised that by digging in the area, they could get rocks of salt and save a lot of drying time.

The chapel of St Kinga took over a century to complete. It took 40 years just to open up the space which it's in and then three men worked for over 60 years to complete the decoration of it. They have carved the walls with stories from the life of Jesus as well as statues of St Kinga, the Virgin, Jesus and God. In the back of the church is a new statue which is of Pope John Paul II and was only put in a few years ago. He visited twice before becoming Pope but didn't make it back again. You can get married in the church and it's still used for sunday services by the locals. The church also has disabled access via lifts so you can still do a part tour taking in some of the highlights even if you can't walk down the stairs that are part of the mine access (if you are interested, the mine has a website that should have more details).

On the lowest level that is accessible by visitors there is a massive ballroom, restaurant, conference facilities. It is absolutely huge. And the whole lot is carved out of the salt.

Once you finish the tour you can stay under the group for as long as you want before catching the lift back to the surface. Luckily, they don't expect you to walk back up the 800 stairs that you came down to get there! There are lots of tourist shops and a post box so that you can send cards to people from under the ground. They are on the way to some of you.

I hung around for a little while but it gets a little boring so I headed back to the surface to find that it had turned into a fantastic day, really sunny and warm (well not 14 degrees!). So I headed back into town on the bus to check out the centre a bit more. I grabbed an icecream and sat in the town hall square for a little while and people watched. It was really nice to sit in the sun again as it had been a while since it had been even vaguely sunny. I then headed to the Museum of History which was interesting but unfortunately most of one floor and all of another were closed so I couldn't see the collection of Nativity sets which I was particularly interested in. It does cover a good section of the history of the town which then makes it easier to work out what other monuments are about. After that, I grabbed some dinner and had an early night. Saturday morning, I met up with Miles and Lauren and had breakfast at their hotel. We uploaded all my photos onto Miles' computer and then burned some DVDs before heading out into the town. There was a big parade coming past which I'm not sure what it was all about. There were lots of men in military uniforms and some police. There were also a couple of marching bands. They ended up in the square and then there were speeches and stuff like that. I assume that it was probably something to do with the war as there have been lots of events in the last couple of weeks. We wandered around the old town and had a look at things before heading down to the Skalka and looking there. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside because there was a wedding on. We then walked back up and around the bottom of the castle to get back into town. We had lunch at a great vegetarian restaurant that does vegetarian versions of traditional polish food. It was really good and really cheap and they even have an english menu for people who aren't up to guessing. I actually did fairly well reading the Polish menu and could have ordered off it if I had had to.

In the afternoon, I spent a couple of hours uploading photos into my blog (so have a look at some of the previous entries, they now have photos as well) while Miles and Lauren had a sleep. We then went out for a glorious meal at Pod Aniolami which is a traditional restaurant. If you go there you have to have the pierogi. They regularly win the award for the best dumplings in Krakow and I can see why. They were melt in your mouth. We also had meat dishes after that and the roast veal was delicious. Miles went on about his wild boar for the rest of the weekend. Dessert was also good. It's not cheap but hey, Miles was paying (Thanks Miles) and it was the best Polish food that I had had during my stay.

Sunday we had an early start to get to the castle to do the tour before the tour buses arrived. You have to go in at set times to each area and they move you through fairly quickly. I wasn't that impressed with the tour of the private apartments. It didn't have any information on the people who had lived in the castle, just on the artwork and the furniture which I'm not so interested in. There was lots of Dutch artwork and it's not very appealing. The castle itself is in a series of styles as it was regularly renovated, burnt down, attacked. Large areas of it are still Gothic on the inside and are the nicest. The walls of several rooms are still covered with wallpaper made of painted leather which was very popular for  while and the ceilings are painted. Much of it is reconstructed from reports and paintings as it was damaged at various points in history. There are a couple of areas which are slightly incomplete as they try to work out what was there originally.

After the private apartments, we went to the Armoury which has a fairly typical collection of swords, armour, pointed sticks, guns etc. It's not bad but nothing impressive compared with the Kremlin armoury in Moscow. It takes the least amount of time of the exhibits.

The final exhibit that we visited was the state rooms which is more impressive than the apartments and you don't have to go on a tour so you can move at your own pace. Unfortunately, there isn't much information on the signs in this section so it would be better if you got a guide book I think. Some of the rooms are massive and fully painted on the walls and the ceiling. They have repaired these rooms much more than some of the ones downstairs.

After the castle we went to the cathedral which is very impressive. It has a huge altar in the middle which is dedicated to St Stanislaw but unfortunately the relics are in a big box so you can't see the box with the bits of his head in it. There are very strict rules in the church about which way you can walk so make sure that you see everything before heading on.

We climbed the bell tower which has great views over the old town and a large collection of old bells. It's quite a difficult climb as the stairs are steep and there isn't much head room and they are narrow. It doesn't help that there are a lot of people climbing them too.

Around the edges of the cathedral are a series of chapels that are mostly memorials to famous bishops and royals. They are in a lot of different styles as they were added over time. Some are really very fancy baroque numbers and others are more plain. In the aisles there are also tombs of famous Poles.

The crypt has lots of fancy graves of royals and is the last place that you visit in the cathedral. Some of them are really small and they must have put the skeletons in them at a later date and others are enough to fit a small car in them. I'm not sure why they needed so much room. There is also what I think is the Krakow war memorial in the bottom as well. There are plaques for several generals from the first and second world wars and then a large unmarked coffin. Unfortunately in the crypt there are no english signs at all. I think that you can buy guide books though.

After the castle we headed back into town and had really good kebabs in a park. We then walked through to the station and I got my ticket to head onto Slovakia and we briefly went shopping at the Galleria Shopping Centre. Miles got a new Samsonite bag and I got some food for the train so we did well. We had trouble with Miles' polar fleece setting off the security checks at one of the stores. It was quite bizarre, the guard made a big thing of checking all our bags before letting Miles leave the store when it was obvious that we had only just walked into the store and therefore couldn't have stolen anything yet.

In the evening we met up with some friends of Miles and Lauren's, Ulla and Will. Ulla is Polish but is living in London at the moment with Will who is a Brit. They are in the process of moving to Krakow at the moment and are in Poland to sort out some paperwork. We had drinks in a local bar in Kazimierz and then had dinner at a little restaurant a couple of streets away. It was a really nice evening. I found out that Ulla's parents live in Bialowieza and she was astounded at some of the places I'd been to given that I don't speak Polish.

Miles and Lauren headed off to the airport after dinner and I headed back to the hostel to pack all my stuff up for my early start. I then got the worst night sleep I've had in ages. Not only did people well and truly flaunt the quiet after 11pm rule (they were still being noisy at 4am!) but one of the new guys in the dorm got really really pissed and snored like a tractor for most of the night. It didn't even help when he rolled over. I couldn't put in ear plugs because I was worried that I was going to miss my alarm for the train so I got very little sleep.

In the end I got up before my alarm and got ready and headed to the station to come to Slovakia.