Kraków, Poland

I am behind on trip updates. So here are some bits from the group trip to Kraków a few weeks late.

The entire group loaded into a bus pre-7am on Thursday with a slightly creepy, sometimes nice, mostly unstable and directionally challenged driver. About halfway to Kraków (and after a solid 5 hour nap for me), we stopped in Slovenia to tour a castle with a charming local guide, who only spoke Slovene. We understood very little of her historical spiel, but enjoyed climbing the ancient steps and the view from the top. The trees had begun changing their colors and spotted the green hills with yellow and orange. 

After a walking tour of the city, we had the rest of the afternoon free. We spent some time looking at the amber, wooden chess sets, tapestries, and beads in the market off of the main square. Ali and I got some cotton candy to share while we watched a couple didgeridoo players sitting cross-legged in the square playing their giant, b.a. trumpets.

 

Me, Ali, Lyd and the dudes walked around the old Jewish district, went inside St. Mary's Basilica, which is magnificent and real tall, and eventually ended up getting Indian food for dinner. 

The following morning we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The place of Auschwitz and feeling of walking into the gates and standing in the barracks still flash in my daily thoughts. It is a haunted place. The darkness of the dank barracks, the unsettling greenness of the grass and beauty of the trees, the burnt crematorium rubble, the train tracks all remain as disturbing reminders of the one and half million men, women, and children who were murdered by the Nazis.

The experience was oddly touristy, a busy, chaotic museum full of chatter and complete with a gift shop. It struck me as disrespectful, slightly frustrating, at least off-putting that this was the nature of such a heavy, pained place.

Blogs and the internet dont feel like the best place to talk about that experience, but I felt a mixture of overwhelming sadness and anger. Ali, Jordan, and I went to the Budapest Holocaust museum earlier this week and were struck by the photos of the victims on the grounds of the camp, the grounds that we had walked across a few weeks ago. Being there makes it feel very real. But how can you believe it?

Before we loaded back into the bus on Sunday, we toured the salt mines. Many, many flights of stairs below ground (Susie, you would no likey this), we walked around the ex-mines filled with salt sculptures, old tracks, funny smells, some chapels, and pools of salt water.

I enjoyed seeing the Polish countryside from the bus, when I wasn't napping hard. We took a detour on the way home to stop by a ski-resort town, which was highly touristy, but the backdrop was still beautiful.