We decided to do Kazimiertz, the Jewish quarter today, the camps the day after and old town the next. We picked up a map and walked down the busy street. Our apartment wasn´t at any of these places,but was right in the middle of all of them, making walking everywhere very easy.
We found the first synagogue, called the old synagogue. It had been converted into a museum of jewish culture. The museum itsef was the large room that made up the shule. The shule was first made somewhere in the 1500s. It has beed altered and added to since by rennaissance and other styles of archetecture. I have never seen that it a shule (synagogue) before. I´ve seen many churches that are a mixture of old styles on top of each other. Most shules had long ago been destroyed or converted into churches. We often miss out on the old history, old relics. Not much tends to survive. It was a nice experience to see a siddur (prayer book) that was over 300 years old and still in good condition. The exhibit had so many old pieces of Jewish culture. Beautiful, intricate menorahs and candlesticks. Ornate scroll pointer. All these things.
There is a Krakow Jewish culture festival in July/August. So the old synagogue was full of workmen in blue overalls, doing work on speakers for some event to come. We picked up a brochure for the festival. Just our luck that it starts the day we leave. It would be cool to do a workshop on Yiddish,or Jewish paper cutting.
We walked along the remainder of the Jewish heritage trail. It was made up of other smaller shules. They were not as impressive as the first. They were just pretty temples really. You got a sort of sense of an old community being there, but it was faint. There was too much on the modern secular Polish culture grown on top of it.
We saw posters around the walls. One was for a 80s themed dance night called Lubu-Dubu. It looked interesting. It looked exactly like a club night I would enjoy. We decided to try it some time while we were here. I´d been missing the indie dance thing. All of Greece was a wave of bad R&B and trance. I really needed a good club night.
We wondred around the streets of Kazimiertz. We came apon Plac Nowy, a square with a small fruit market. There were 3 or 4 small fruit and veg smalls with small, sad looking produce. The shops around the square were funky cafes and trendy bars and clubs. This was one of Krakow´s night life hubs. I wanted to try them all out.
We decided on a funky jazz cafe-bar-club called Alchemia. It was decorated with posters and paint on the outside. The atmosphere inside lovely. Old heavy furniture and old paintings of noble people filled the many small rooms. It dark but cosy. Around the rooms floated the recorded sounds of a woman doing chilled covers of the Buzzcocks and Blondie.
We sat in a small empty room with a window to the square. We drank pints of hard to pronounce Polish beer.
As we drank, I flipped through the Krakow section of the Lonely Planet book we have. Under ¨Drinking¨, I was surprised to see Alchemia and Lubu-Dubu, both of which got good reviews. We drank to having good taste. We found them on our own.
We left the café slightly tipsy and very hungry. In the centre of the square was a stall selling some Polish snack food called zapekanky. It was a foot long half baggeutte, grilled with cheese and mushrooms, with tomato sauce on top. It was the perfect food in our current state.
We made our way home. I fell asleep across the beds. Later we found the apartment´s wi-fi and did internet housekeeping. Then we found a supermarket. We picked up provisions for dinner and strawberry flavoured water for later. And haribo gummies, which they also have here.
I enjoyed dinner. We made use of our kitchen to self cater hot food. We cooked up 2 minute style noodles with a mushroom soup flavour (we assume as it had pictures of mushrooms on it, while the others had pictures of meat). Then we added tuna that had bean, corn and tomato salad in it. It was good.
We set out for Lubu-Dubu. We forgot our map, but had a general idea of where it was. It was raining and we had no umbrellas. We walked in the rain until we found the right street. Then walked straight past it for a while and had to turn back. We were just about to give up and declared another failed attempt at foreign clubbing, when I spied a colourfully lit alley across the street that said Lubu-Dubu on it. We ran to take shelter from the rain. Up the red stair case to the large wooden door.
Like most indie style clubs, it was dimly lit with crazy wall deco and neon lights. Like most indie clubs it looked dodgy, but was filled with hipster kids drinking and thrashing about on the dance floor. Dance floor!! We had found our dance club at last.
For the first time since London, we had
1- Known where to go, and
2-Actually found the place, that
3-was still around (not been shut down), and
4-was open, and
5-let us in, and
6-was full of good people and good music.
I was so excited. We grabbed pints of foreign and beers and sat in one of the small rooms. There were some guys smoking in there which was bad for Josh´s Asthma, so we went to dance floor area. Then we dance to great school disco classics and some newer stuff. It was such a release, dancing my own way to my own music. We danced and danced.
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