Eye-opening visit to the Jewish Quarter of Kraków, Poland

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(the article below accompanies this video)

An unstructured and long-term trip requires some flexibility and an openness to the whims of the wind. Today was a day when the travel gods pulled us this way and that around Kraków, Poland. Masayo and I just shrugged and happily went along with it. The only really bad part of the day was after dinner, when my blood sugar soared very, very high. Oh well.

After our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau yesterday we had no real plan for Kraków today. Our original idea was to visit a salt mine – there are a couple nearby, an hour or two by minibus.

But we decided that we hadn’t seen enough of Kraków itself. Anyway, the most popular mine, Wieliczka, didn’t seem too promising: although it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the salt carvings are quite extraordinary, it seemed really touristy. A pop-up ad on the official website kept pushing some samba dance show, and there were photos of kids’ slides and things like that. Didn’t sound like our kind of thing.

Another mine seemed better but the website was so broken I couldn’t tell if they were even open. We decided to just stroll around Kraków at our own pace and see what happened.

My blood sugar at 10:00 am (ahem, getting a jump on the day as usual) was 146, a good comedown from the 347 last night. Breakfast was at Castor Coffee Club off the main square in Old Town near our room at Tulip Hostel. An exceptionally good morning meal; I had musli yogurt, a ham and cheese croissant, and aeropressed Ethiopian coffee. I don’t even know what that is, but it was good and only cost 30 cents more than a regular coffee.

We then walked to the Florian Gate and the Barbican, two notable Kraków landmarks on the north edge of Old Town. A pair of guys dressed in full period garb played music under the Gate, and there was a festive if touristy vibe to the morning even though there weren’t that many tourists. The Barbican, a round building from 1498 that once acted as the gate to Kraków, was closed for the season.

Across the street was a big market called Stary Kleparz. where Masayo and I each bought a few pairs of socks. I’ve liked the HeatTech ones I brought from Uniqlo in Japan; they feel good and warm my feet. But they dry super slowly when doing laundry with our Scrubba bag, and they’re very thick and take up a lot of room in my bag. I hope these new Polish ones last at least a few weeks, they were sure cheap (12 złoty, about $3.60).

It supports my theory that, often, nice-seeming and higher-tech products are just a lot of noise and not ultimately ideal. My feet won’t freeze to death with these new thin cotton market socks. And the space I save in my bag – simplicity wins again.

Around this time I checked my post-breakfast blood sugar in the Old Town square: 194. Whew – not great but not over 200!

The main part of the day was spent on the other side of Old Town, in the Old Jewish Quarter. There are a few synagogues here, and Hebrew signs and Stars of David. We ducked into a quaint little bookstore where there were a lot of books about World War II, mostly from a Jewish perspective. Klezmer music played on a stereo in the corner and we looked over the stacks of books on tables and shelves in the spacious, dimly-lit main room.

Masayo got a book about WW2 reminiscences and I got a historical overview of the war by Norman Davies called Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory. I really don’t know much about World War II and this book seems pretty hefty. It cost almost $30, an unheard-of expense for me, but it will be nice to have something topical to read on trains and buses.

On a quiet back street, as a light drizzle began to mist the air, we walked around a big Jewish cemetery that was destroyed in the war and has since been rebuilt, and expanded with new graves.

We had a new plan, too: to visit the site of Oskar Schindler’s ceramics factory which was nearby. But halfway there we decided that it was getting late and dark – and I’ve never seen Schindler’s List anyway and don’t know the story – so we elected to turn around and head back to the heart of Kraków. We hadn’t eaten enough anyway.

As the rain picked up we stopped at a little cafe called Cora and I got a piece of cake and some coffee. My BG was 196, not fantastic but psychologically satisfying because it was under 200. I thought I might be lower after all the walking we’d done, but the cake was tasty and I took a Humalog shot for it at our table through my Bluff Works pants. We watched the pedestrians and traffic struggle through the grey rain through the window of our cheerful cafe, feeling rather pleased with the pace of the day so far.

We took the rest of the afternoon off, returning to the hostel and hanging out in the kitchen area where I updated t1dwanderer.com. For the entire three hours we spent there, someone in a room nearby played an acoustic guitar. But there were no chords, it was just open, unfretted strings, arrhythmically strummed. For three straight hours! It was completely bizarre. Who absent-mindedly plays around on an unfretted guitar for three hours? We couldn’t conceive of any situation where this might make sense. A little kid? A cat? A drug addict? We never found out. Ah, hostel life.

Dinner plans had already been determined — we were going back to the pizza-by-the-slice place we found on our first night in Kraków. My BG was now 156.

The first time we ate pizza here my BG was good afterwards, so I assumed that the carb content wasn’t as high as other pizza we’ve had on this trip. Although my two slices seemed thick, and I wanted to have cookies too, I took a smaller shot than I might otherwise have. All my BGs had been under 200 so far today – would the streak continue through bedtime?

Not at all — at 11 pm I was extremely high, 359. It’s unfortunate that readings this high have become so common for me. In a perfect world they’d be rare and totally surprising. Thick pizza indeed; my Humalog choice at dinner was quite poor, looking back on it. I took some more Humalog, plus a little extra because I wanted more cookies, and discussed tomorrow’s plans with Masayo.

We weren’t sure what we wanted to do – our first choice was to go elsewhere in Poland, a large country that we had seen only a few places in. But our budget for Poland is already exhausted, and time marches on. We decided to head into the Czech Republic tomorrow. We’ll have to figure out when, where, and how tomorrow morning.

That’s traveling by the seat of your pants.

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