Krakow, Poland (Post #35)
Hello from Krakow, Poland! This is Michele…it is Wednesday night, August10th, and it is cold in Krakow! Mike and I have been wearing our fleece here.
In the last blog I said I would tell the story of buying the Krakow train tickets at the Warsaw train station. The thing is that it is well known here that none of the women working in the train station speak any English. Because of this, the hostel staff have type written on a piece of paper the following message in Polish. “I would like second class train tickets to _______ city on _______ (date) at ______ (time) for ______ adults in a nonsmoking carriage/car.” All we are supposed to do is fill in the blanks, which we did. We did this and the staff person at the hotel checked it and said it was perfectly clear. However, when we went to the train station, the woman there did not understand what we wanted. She tried to talk to us in Polish. We just stood there. She got someone else. That person did not understand the type written note either. She tried to speak to us in Polish. Again, we stood there saying “sorry” in English (which I don’t think they understood). They both left together. Five minutes later they came back after consulting a third person. This time, the woman printed out the tickets we needed. We still don’t understand what happened but I guess it doesn’t matter now.
Along these same lines…I found a pretty good air fare price on a Hungarian airline from Budapest, Hungary to Instanbul, Turkey. The problem was that to get this price you couldn’t “do” an e-ticket. You had to get a paper ticket. I saw one of the options was to have the paper tickets sent to an office in the Budapest airport. So, I checked that box and we are now planning on flying from Budapest to Instanbul after we pick up these tickets at some office in the airport. I have a feeling I could be writing a little travel story about this but we’ll see….
Anyway, we arrived in Krakow on Monday night and saw that the hostel had laundry. Awesome! The girl told us there was one washer and 3 dryers. Hmm..that seemed weird because European washers wash your clothes for about 2 hours so we wondered why there would be only 1 washer but 3 dryers. Well, we soon found out. After we washed our clothes we took them up to the 4th floor to the “dryers” and found 3 drying racks! Good thing we have our own clothes line!
On Tuesday, August 9th we visited the Wieliczka Salt Mines. I have to say that I was warned by my former co-worker, Liz, not to go to this but Mike and were told by two other people that we really should see these salt mines. We decided to take a local train from the Krakow train station. We paid for a guided English tour, which took about 2 hours. While the salt mine was interesting due to the many salt carved statues, salt lakes, and a small underground city that included a chapel, it was also a small city of souviner shops. Every time you turned a corner, the guide would say, “…and here you can buy some souviners”. In the end one of the most interesting things was the elevator ride out of the mine, which was similar to a scary amusement park ride.
Today we spent the day in Oswiecim – never heard of it, you say? This is the Polish name for Auschwitz. We took a 2 hour bus to Auschwitz, and the much larger, Birkenau (“Auschwitz II”). These camps killed between 1.5 and 2 million people of 27 nationalities, about 90% whom were Jewish. Although partially destroyed by the Nazis, there are still several surviving buildings in both camps and a mound of evidence of the crimes that took place there. We took a 3.5 hour guided tour after seeing a short documentary about the liberation of the camp (Birkenau) by Soviet troops in 1945. Some of the surviving buildings included prison blocks in Auschwitz that now house a museum of photos and exhibits including massive amounts of (i.e., rooms filled with) human hair, shoes, artificial limbs, eye glasses, cookware, brushes and suitcases from the victims. Around the two camps we also saw gas chambers, crematoriums, creamatoria pits, barracks, and toilet facilities that still remain. Mike and I both agreed that no book, movie or photo can describe what this is like. You really have to see it to fully grasp the magnitude of it all. Needless to say, another emotional day for me.
Here are a couple of pictures from Warsaw and Auschwitz with each labeled.
Warsaw Old Town Square
Warsaw Uprising Monument
Auschwitz (60km west of Krakow)
Birkenau (“Auschwitz II”)
We love blog comments but if for some reason you want to say something to us more directly, please email us — mikeandmichelertw at hotmail dot com (appropriate punctuation changes will be required of course).
Tags: Category #10: Poland
Michele Harmon
I was totally going to make some smart comment about not beliving you guys went to those stupid salt mines! ;), but since you ended the post describing your trip to the concentration camps a smart comment seemed very out-of-place. I only made it to Auschwitz I, but I heard II was also intensely brutal – it looks like it from the picture you posted! I remember no one said one word the entire tour (except the tour guide) and they didn’t let kids tour the camp. It was the most somber place I’ve ever been.
Very awesome that you’re going to Istanbul – I hope you get your tickets all right! I’m sure this is in your guide books, but do make sure you check out the Yerebatan Sarayi – an underground cistern in Istanbul.
Hello!
Here Piotrek from hostel in Warsaw. Funny story with buing the tickets, well I ‘ve had a lot of troubles buing train tickets too (I know polish perfectly…) but this one is the best.
By the way – you can seemsome of my pictures from iceland on
http://www.koloroweru.pl/strony/isl04_4.html
Have a nice trip!
Piotrek
greeting from poland