Zakopane and Last Night in Poland (Post #37)
[I wrote this on Monday, Aug 15th but am just posting this today, Thurs, Aug. 18th]
Michele here….we are back in Krakow for our last night in Poland. As I mentioned in our last post, we spent the weekend hiking in the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland.
This is a picture of the Tatra Mountains.
We hiked most of the day both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday we hiked to the Poland-Slovakia border where I took this picture of Mike:
On Sunday we began our day by hiking to a cave that was open to the public (oooowwww spooky!) then we decided to try to hike a trail labeled “medium difficulty”. Hmmm…we were curious about this because we hiked up to Mt. Kasprowy Wierch on Saturday and we were sweating, breathing hard, and our legs were burning. And that was labeled as an “Easy” trail! It turns out that the trail we hiked on Sunday was extremely steep, rocky, and right on the edge of the mountain. If you took a wrong step you would go down a sheer cliff. We got a lot of good pictures both day that I will post on web shots. One thing worth mentioning was the fact that many people were hiking and drinking. One man even had a beer bottle holder attached to his hiking pole (and it had a bottle of beer in it!) We stopped at one point on the side of the mountain where people were taking a break and again, we saw people drinking beer and liquor. Some young people even had beers in the side of their backpacks where you would normally put your water bottle. And then there were the smokers….it was never good to be hiking behind a smoker (but at least they were easy to pass).
Oh yea, and another thing I wanted to write briefly about. Before we left for Zakopane, Mike and I went to a few bars in Kazimierz, the home to many Jews just before WWII. (Nazis later relocated the Jews to a walled ghetto south of there before they were exterminated in the nearby Plaszow Concentration Camp. Kazimierz is also very close to Schindler’s factory – you do remember the movie Schindler’s List, right?!)
As I was saying, we went to a couple of bars in Kazimierz and at one we met several people including a very interesting man from Germany (Albert) who had traveled around the world for a year 2 times. While Mike was talking to him, I was talking to the bartender who gave me some communism money (bills) from not that long ago. They are worthless now of course. (Poland was a communist country until 1989.) We started talking about how money changes over the years and I wanted to show him the U.S. quarters representing some of the different U.S. states. I knew I had some in my wallet so I went to get my wallet out of my purse. Then I felt that sickening feeling…oh @#&*! My wallet was not there. I pulled everything out of my purse but it definitely wasn’t there. I thought I was going to throw up. I mean, I was really feeling hot and sweaty and sick. O.k., calm down Michele. I had only drank 2 beers and this was only our second bar so I had to have lost it at the previous bar. We went back there at 12:30am and they were closing up. I ran in there and said in English, “I think I left my wallet here. Have you seen a black wallet?” One of the three people there understood me and said, “Oh yes, it is here. We found it in the bathroom.” Dziekuje! Dziekuje! Dziekuje! (Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!) Although there was no money in it, the money stolen was equivalent to only about $35 and everything else was there. I still do not know how I lost the wallet. My best guess is that I kept leaning over to look at some brochures on a nearby table and it’s possible my purse was not closed all the way and the wallet fell out. I hope I don’t have any more adventures like this one!
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Tags: Category #10: Poland
Michele Harmon
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