Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick
Kraków’s excellent Rynek Underground Museum — situated directly below the Main Market Square — offers an intimate look at the city 500 years ago. In this clip, I stroll with my local guide, Anna, down a medieval street, past the remains of a series of shops.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
One of many great new museums in Kraków is the excellent Rynek Underground Museum. When the Main Market Square was renovated, they found so much of archaeological value that they opened a major museum right on the site. In this video clip, my guide explains that even though we’re 12 feet underground, this was the street level of medieval Kraków.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
I’m wrapping up my summer travels in Poland. And my first stop is Kraków.
Kraków is easily Poland’s best destination: a beautiful, old-fashioned city buzzing with history, enjoyable sights, tourists, and college students. Even though the country’s capital moved from here to Warsaw 400 years ago, Kraków remains Poland’s cultural and intellectual center. Of all of the Eastern European cities laying claim to the boast “the next Prague,” Kraków is for real.
The Old Town, within Krakow’s medieval walls, converges on one of the most charismatic squares in Europe: the Main Market Square.
Kazimierz is the historic Jewish Quarter of Kraków. Once upon a time, the majority of all Jewish people lived in Poland. And Kraków was their cultural capital. While tourists come to see the historic synagogues and cemeteries of the Jewish Quarter during the day, throngs of young clubbers clog the Kazimierz streets after dark. The Kazimierz market square retains the gritty flavor of the town before tourism and gentrification. And countless bohemian-chic restaurants make Kazimierz a destination for dinner.
For a vodka education in Kraków — complete with as much tasting as you’d like — drop by Staropolskie Trunki (“Old Polish Drinks,” right along the main drag at Florianska 20). It’s a friendly little place with a long bar and countless local vodkas and liquors — all open and ready to be tasted with a cheery local barista to talk you through the experience. You’ll get five different tastes for about $3, with a fun explanation that amounts to a private tour.
Every time I decide to get out and see a great city after dark, I’m impressed by how different it is after hours. And Berlin is no exception.
After a long day of filming our new TV episode on Berlin, I decided to take my own audio tour — the newest self-guided tour on our free Rick Steves’ Audio Europe app. It’s fun to actually give these tours a whirl after we produce them. (The tour works great. But I took notes on the gaps where I needed to pause my iPhone. Now I’ll go home and edit the tour so that it can be done in real time, without pausing. If you have our app, remember to update the tours periodically so you don’t miss the fixes we make.)
Berlin is a city with a dark history and many memorials. In about an hour, you can visit 8 or 10 powerful memorials across the old center of Berlin. Experiencing them at night on this trip, I realized this is a great way to see the city.
I enjoyed standing before the Brandenburg Gate, gloriously floodlit and without all the commercial commotion that surrounds it throughout the day. I pondered the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe with only the security guard sharing the moment with me. And I stood over the spot where the Nazis ceremonially burned the booked that didn’t fit their ideology.
It was on this square (now called Bebelplatz) in 1933 that staff and students from the university threw 20,000 newly forbidden books (authored by Einstein, Hemmingway, Freud, and T.S. Elliot, among others) into a huge bonfire on the orders of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. In fact, Goebbels himself tossed books onto the fire, condemning writers to the flames. He declared, “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the German revolution has again opened the way for the true essence of being German.”
The “burning of the books memorial” on Bebelplatz is a glass pane in the cobbles with a room of shelves under the square. During the day, it’s full of glare and commotion, so the experience never quite works. But after dark, it’s quiet, and the empty shelves are hauntingly bare and beautifully lit. The contrast between that and the nighttime cityscape above is quite evocative. I’ve stood over this memorial many times in broad daylight and never really been moved. Finally, tonight, it grabbed me.
Get out at night and just be in a great city. Have you noticed that difference I’m clueing into in other great cities?
The historic Brandenburg Gate (1791) was the grandest — and is the last survivor — of 14 gates in Berlin’s old city wall. The gate was the symbol of Prussian Berlin, and later the symbol of a divided Berlin. Today, it’s once again the centerpiece of a great and united capital.
Being alone with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe after dark, I thought perhaps this is the way the architect who designed it wanted it to be experienced.
Standing on Bebelplatz, you look down through a glass panel and see a room of empty bookshelves.
Hiking around and around up the long ramp inside the glass dome of Germany’s striking Reichstag, I was heading for the summit. Along the way I enjoyed 360 degrees of Berlin. Here’s a little tour.