Krakaow is an amazing city, full of buildings from medieval times upwards. Every street has more buildings to marvel at.
We got there to a cold evening on Friday, and went to find our way round, going to the main square where this fantastic church is. This is the famous church where every night on the hour a bugler plays half a tune out of the topmost window.
In the middle of the square is the cloth hall, currently under scaffolding as it's been restored. And at the other side of the square is the town hall. A fantastically wonderful building that looks as if it's out of a fairy story.
Many years ago the city took down it's stone walls and planted trees all around the city instead, so to get anywhere you have to walk under the Planty.
At the edge of these wonderful streets is Wawel Castle this is also where the Cathedral is, the gold roof is part of the cathedral.
So that was Friday evening, Saturday is another post completely. And on Saturday evening it started raining. The ground was already sodden from a week of rain previously.
This is the view out of our hotel room of the rain, the river Wistula and Wawel Castle on Sunday morning.
We managed a walk out, but got completely drenched, at the that time although the river was rising some of the paths on the river bank were passable and some were not!
Monday was extremely stressful dealing with getting new flights booked, and a hotel room for another two nights. It was also torrential rain and impossible to go out in, other than literally a 20 minute walk in the evening when it got to just a heavy drizzle.
Come Tuesday the river was very high indeed, it had risen 2.5 metres in 24 hours. It was running very fast and the banks were under threat of collapsing.
This is the view upstream from the fortification walls around the castle. The river when we arrived was halve this width.
This is the bridge nearest the hotel,by this time the flood defences were up around the banks of the river. This bridge which had boats going under it when we arrived was almost breached. As you can see it made the Polish national news. People were just standing anywhere just to watch the water. The bridge was closed and either end fortified with sandbags. There were police sirens going off all over the place.And very efficient police men stopping people from going on the bridge itself.
The rumour was that we in the Sheraton would have to be evacuated. Which fortunately didn't happen. Although further down stream many hundreds of people did.
So not only have we had volcanic ash to deal with but the biggest flood Poland has seen since 1997.
It's been a very difficult and stressful visit for all sorts of reasons. But despite all the things we have experienced we couldn't have done it in a friendlier place. All the Polish people we met have been without fail delightful. They made us feel welcome everywhere we went. And the staff in the hotel were just fantastic at helping us all the time, but particularly Monday. I highly recommend if you are going to get stressed on holiday then Krakow is a great place to be stressed in!
