Poland... the trip.

Our third day in Poland was a bit quieter: we woke up at 8am, had the standard buffet breakfast, then headed back to Zakopane to have a look at the markets. Amanda and I have tended to find that the bigger markets that we've been to (such as the Vienna Christmas market) are nowhere near as fun as the smaller local markets. The bigger ones tend to be co-ops, where every stall basically has the same goods at basically the same price, everything is production made and nothing that you couldn't find anywhere else. At the smaller local markets you tend to get hand-made stuff sold by the people who made them.

Today, it seemed that the Zakopane market was a combination of both, there was the standard collection of fuzzy hats, pop guns and shot glasses, but on the other hand we did find a little old lady sitting in the snow selling clumps of cheese. How can you not buy clumps of cheese from a snow sitting old lady? The other "locally made produce" was the basket of puppies that was on proud display between two stalls. They were /sooooo/ cute. Iago would love to have a little puppy to play with, and I'm sure they wouldn't get so big... would they?

At the back of the market there was a fernicular taking people up the mountain. The ride up gave a great view of the surrounding mountains and led us up to even more stalls. I'm not really one for a lot of shopping but some of these stalls are really quite neat. The other thing that we saw at the top of the mountain was exactly how big those little puppies will get. At that moment, methinks Iago just lost the opportunity to gain a friend.

After our Hungarian friends had sated their lust for souvenirs, we boarded the bus once more and headed off for Niedzica Castle, on the border between Poland and Slovakia. Another thing that Amanda and I have learned is that every castle seems to have its own cool legend. In this particular case, it seems that 18th Century owner Sebastián Berzeviczy traveled to the new world and fell in love with an Incan princess, the resulting daughter then married someone with particularly blue Incan blood and although it all went badly at the end the rumour says that somewhere in Niedzica castle a map still exists that might lead to Incan treasure. This might explain why there was a sign of a chained up ghost farting out the front of the main gate. Or maybe not. Regardless, as you can see below, Amanda is channeling all her Incan powers to divine the location of the map - unfortunately with no success.

 

Once leaving the castle, we headed home which passed quickly with a combination of catching up on some sleep and doing uni work.

- Daniel.