British bachelors not welcome in Krakow
By Jen Cutts - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 0 Comments
Unimpressed with the conduct of past visitors, the Polish city is cracking down on stag parties
Katja Hoffmann/Redux
It’ll soon be stag season in Krakow, and this year, police are vowing to control the herds—not of deer, but of boorish British bachelors and their mates as they descend on the Polish city. Krakow is a popular getaway for raucous, weekend-long bashes for soon-to-be-married Brits, thanks to no-frills flights, cheap beer and numerous strip clubs. But, unimpressed with the conduct of past visitors, Krakow police are increasing patrols and threatening unruly partiers with fines and stints in the drunk tank.
While the income is a boon for the city’s hotels and nightclubs, many locals are losing patience. “We recently had one man who just stood up and took off his trousers, and then others did it,” a restaurant manager told Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper. “We had to ask the entire group to leave.” Bar owners aren’t confident the fines will deter the wild behaviour—at $15, most tourists can afford to pay up and carry on. Past efforts by proprietors to curb the rowdiness have included a ban on kilts, after a rash of flashing incidents. In 2008, a Brit partying in Riga, Latvia, another popular party spot, spent five days in jail after urinating on a public monument.
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Awful food, commie cars and the bad old days
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments
German consumers are hearkening back to a simpler time, a time before capitalism. Sound familiar to anyone?
Travelling through Eastern Europe a few years ago, my companion and I took a tour of Nova Huta, the Krakow suburb that had been designed by Stalin as the ideal proletarian city. Our guide was Mike, an excitable 30-year-old in camo pants and a flat-top who had ditched his law career when he realized the old ladies selling potatoes in the market made more than he would.
Mike drove us around Nova Huta in a rickety old Trabant, pointing out various totalitarian sites, then took us to his rented apartment, which he had tricked out with all manner of Soviet-era furnishings, artwork and appliances. It was all very authentic. It was all very crappy.
This was my first experience with Ostalgie, a neologism that is a mash-up of the German words for east and nostalgia, meaning nostalgia for life in the GDR and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Ostalgie is a phenomenon driven by the conviction that while socialism was often difficult, life was in many ways better. Fear and suspicion may have been the background radiation of daily life, this view goes, but the old Communist societies were more egalitarian and had a greater sense of solidarity and common purpose.
