Krakow is Wonderful

I really love this city. It's beautiful, walkable, and has a laid back hip night life (centered in none other than Kazimierz, the Old Jewish Quarter). This would be a great place to be a student, or an ex-pat. Don't have all that much to say except that it's a really pleasant place so here's a little photo essay.

1. Food: I've mostly stayed away from meat and grease-heavy Polish fare since this city has a fair amount of tasty vegetarian restaurants and pubs with lots of good food. But at the outdoor market on Good Friday I did discover an amazing Polish snack. They smoke young cheese (its the squeeky curd-like kind) and form it into these cool shapes and you can get the little ones grilled and warm and eat them right there or take the massive shapes home (yup, those are all cheese) and I don't know what they do with them but I assume they slice and eat them tasty things. I don't know how anyone could ever eat more than one in a sitting though. Fried cheese is some serious stuff and they seem to love it in all sorts of variations in this central-eastern part of Europe (Budapest and Prague had a lot of breaded and fried cheese). Serious artery clogging potential.

2. The Jewish quarter: deserted synogogues and yuppy cafes by day, hipster (loosely defined) hang out by night. The terrace pubs in the first photo face the old Jewish market square where you could pick up your freshly killed chickens and such items in the 1930s (the museum in one of the 5 or so synogogues in the neghborhood has a lot of awesome documentary footage). Below: Three pubs in a row facing what's probably the most beautiful synagogue in Poland (after renovations were completed in 2001), the Tempel synogogue.Below: The gate to the Old Synagogue. There's only 100 Jews left living in the district, which was clearly one of the largest communities in Eastern Europe before the war.

3. The Old Town Square and Wawel Castle. Thankfully most of these building survived WWII.