Kristy goes to Krakow

I just got back from my final adventure of the semester. I'm quite sad about this fact, but I'm glad that this was my final trip. Krakow is a wonderful city. It's quaint and old looking like Prague, but it hasn't been discovered by tourists. I would recommend flying there rather than taking the train from somewhere else. It's ten hours away from Budapest. That is a very long time to be sitting in an uncomfortable train seat.

I arrived in Krakow around seven-ish on Friday morning after taking the night train. My one friend was exhauasted, so that morning we hung around the hostel and showered etc. while she napped. That afternoon, we headed into the Old town, which was lovely. We ate perogies and stopped at a little chocolate place where we gorged on pralines and hot chocolate that was literally nothing but melted chocolate. The check in guy at our hostel had told us the Wawel castle was the most important thing to see, so we somehow managed to find it, and wandered around for a while before catching a quick catnap on a grassy hill by the river.

Entering the Old Town

The Cloth Market

Spire of the Wawel Cathedral

Krakow's famous Dragon

After waking up from our little catnap, we decided to leave the Old Town and explore Kazimierz, the former Jewish Quarter. It apparently had fallen into a state of disrepair after the Holocaust, but now, it's an amazingly lively neighborhood. There were all these great little cafes and art galleries in beautiful historic buildings. I would kill to live in a neighborhood like that in the states.  Our main goal was to visit a synagogue and restored cemetery. We found the cemetery easily, but it took us a little while to actually find a way into the complex.

I made a friend!

Hard to tell, but the animals are composed of Hebrew letters

Destroyed gravestones were added to the wall surrounding the cemetery.

My last full day in Poland was spent at Auschwitz. Before the war, 80% of the world's Jewish population lived in Poland. There are only 200 Jewish people living in Krakow today. I read this in a guidebook on the way there. I wish I could explain what being there is like, but that's really not possible. I started out taking pictures in Birkenau, but after seeing the ruined gas chambers and crematoria, and the memorial pond over one of the ash dump sites, I couldn't bring myself to take many more pictures. Auschwitz 1 was even more intense. The bunkers contains museum exhibits showing photos and diagrams and piles of the things left behind by the inmates. Possibly the two most disturbing things to see were the rooms filled to the top with  victims shoes and the room of  their cooking pots that were never used. Nothing of course quite compared to the sheer horror provoked by the walls of photos of the dead and the brief walk through of the one standing gas chamber/crematoria.

Entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Guard towers and barbed wire

Morbid math- Two chimenys = 1 bunker, 1 bunker= 400 people

"The Road to Death" prisoner's were forced to walk along this to gas chamber IV

The infamous sign

Dividing platform at Auschwitz 1

I say all this, but at the same time, I'm not sorry that I went.

Terribly sorry to end this post on such a depressing note. Next one will be more along the "fun and fluffy" vein, I promise