My vacation in May (caution – it's long)

In Poland we have the three holidays in May. The 1st (International Workers' Day), 2nd (day of our national flag) and 3rd (anniversary of our construction) of May. Those days are days off for school, universities and many jobs. Because of three days in a row being holidays, we call this "Majówka" from "Maj" (May). This year, I've decided to go on vacation with my bf during those days..

1st of May 

I've meet with my bf in Katowice. We live in a long-distance relationship so we needed to meet in halfway to our destination. We take a train from there and go to our main location for this trip – Racibórz. 

Racibórz is a really old city. It was created in XI century! It have a really rich history and was an important place for Silesia (the voivodeship of Poland) in the past. Now, the city isn't very popular. A lot of people know this place only a little from the history in schools. When we came there, we noticed how peaceful is there. No big crowds, tons of cheap souvenirs and loud tourists. People probably start to forgetting about such places and visit only big cities... 

During our first day we didn't do much. We come to Racibórz around 14:30 (2:30 PM) and after we found our hotel, we take some rest and then, we'll go and look around. We didn't have any specific plan for this day – we just wanted to see what this city looks like and rest after long journey. 

We found some pretty murals and sculptures! There's a lot of them!

2nd of May

On the second day, we had an entire plan, what we want to visit. We woke up at 6:30 and go to the train station. There's a really good connection via trains between Racibórz and Ostrava in Czech. And that was the place where we decided to go...

Ostrava is a really beautiful place! I love the old types of architecture and you can find a lot of them there! The only thing about buildings that was annoying me, was a whole, modern shopping mall standing in-between old buildings in the Old Market Square. Like... why?

We came here after around 40 minutes of traveling by train and immediately decided to go to the centre of the old part of the town. When we came there, we start looking for a currency exchange office to get some Czech crowns. It was the first time when we needed to talk with Czechs. It was... awkward, lol. But we got the money! And after that we're ready to go and visit some museums.

Our first choice was a really old church. Cathedral of the Divine Saviour (Czech: Katedrála Božského Spasitele), located in the center of Ostrava, is the second largest Roman Catholic cathedral in Moravia and Silesia. The cathedral was built in 1889! It was really majestic place. It was so quiet there and almost no one was inside. To be honest, despite of amazing architecture on the outside, inside the church was a little empty and minimalistic. Personally, I prefer the ones with tons of sculptures, paintings etc. inside. But we found relics of the Polish Pope John Paul II there! (pls, let me escape him. he's everywhere. no wonder why he's a meme)

After that, we decided to go to a museum that was placed inside the old city ​​hall. Ostravské muzeum was really good! There even was a woman who known our language, so we hadn't had any problems with buying tickets!

Inside we found a lot of different themed rooms and floors. For example, in the basement was an exhibition dedicated to archaeological excavations in this area. One of the floors was about flora and fauna of Ostrava. They even had a real mammoth tusk! There was also a room with really really old, ancient weapons and fossils and two rooms only for gems, stones and rocks! I could even touch some of them! The other floor was about culture and history of Ostrava. We could listen to some of their folk music there! And the highest floor was dedicated to WWII, so it was the most depressing place in the whole museum. On the highest floor we could also look through the small windows and see the Old Market Square from the high! It was really nice! Unfortunately the entry to the top of clock tower was locked so we couldn't go higher. 

The best thing is this museum, in my opinion, was an really old clock! The clock was showing not only the time, but also the date, planets rotation, phases of the Moon and zodiacs! That's insane! 

After that we made a short break for a snack. We sat at the Old Square in the shadow of a tree and listened to a woman who was playing there on some instrument. It was really relaxing ♡

Our next destination was Slezskoostravský hrad (Castle in Silesian Ostrava). The first written mention of the castle dates back to August 2 1297, so this place have a huge history! It had less things to see than the first museum but it was still really good. We had fun there and even dressed up as a knight and queen with some accessories (for kids) that were in the one of the rooms and take some photos in it, haha. 

After that, we hadn't had much time to our train back to Racibórz, so we decided to go to a restaurant to eat something and (finally) try some real Czech beer. I picked the pomelo & grape flavoured one and it was really good! After that we go back to Poland and ended our second day with some ice-creams that we found near our hotel. We made something around 27k of steps that day... my legs were dying...

3rd of May

For the third day we planned to look for some interesting places in Racibórz. Unfortunately one of the museums was closed. They had a mummy over there so I was sad that I couldn't see it irl. We spent the first half of the day  walking around, looking for nice murals, sculptures etc. The weather was changing every half hour or some, so we decided to go to café. And when the rain stopped (for more than just few minutes), we continued our little journey and ended in the castle.

Another mural that we found! ^

Racibórz Castle were probably built in the mid-13th century. The stronghold of Racibórz was mentioned in the Chronicle of Gallus Anonymus in an entry dated 1108 but it probably existed since around 845! That's really long ago! 

The museum that they made inside the castle was probably one of the best that I've visited! For the first 50 minutes we toured the old chambers of the castle with a guide. The guide showed us all the monuments and explained what it was, where and how it was used in the Middle Ages. We could walk freely between the monuments and even take replica weapons in our hands! They were heavy!

My favorite room in the museum was the alchemist's workshop and the witch's room. There were many vials, bones and drawings with funny captions. For example, the hoof of some animal was signed as the leg of a demon. You could also find a potion of pigletification or baldness there!

And the best part of the museum was... the multimedia building! Right after watching a funny, 20-minute film about the history of Racibórz, we had free time in the numerous multimedia rooms. We were there for almost two hours, and we would have spent even more time there, if not for the fact that we got hungry! There were games, fun and logical puzzles teaching us about history and culture, videos etc. We could shoot a cannon to destroy a castle or produce our own coins! The guide told us that the record holder spent 8 hours in this building and they had to ask him to leave because the museum was already closing!

4th of May – the end

On the Sunday, we needed to leave our hotel before 11AM. My boyfriend decided that he don't want to end our vacations yet, so he proposed me to go to Wrocław from where we both had a good connection via trains to our cities. And we did that.

We arrived to Wrocław around 13:30 (1:30PM) and immediately go to the place that we wanted to visit for a long time... The museum of games and consoles! It was really fun experience! We could play on some old consoles and machines. Try old games... Some of the computers looked funny! Like the one which was Hot Wheels themed. We spent there around 1,5h and then we need to leave because our tour ends. After that we still had a lot of time so we just go to eat pierogi, haha. 

After we had eaten our pierogi, we took a walk along the boulevard. We even found a few dwarves along the way! (Wroclaw have a little sculptures of dwarves hidden all over the city). That was the end of our trip.

By the way, the main station in Wroclaw is beautiful! It looks just like a castle!

Bonus:

I've bought 2 litres of cheap beer in a plastic bottle while visiting Ostrava. I found it funny but now I need to drink it. Help. I'll give it to my dad probably, lol.

Czechs... why