Krakow

We arrived in Krakow too late to really go out and see anything, so Kate, Marie, Natalie and I played Fluxx for a while and then called it an early night. The next morning we had a walking tour of the city where we saw the Cathedral where Pope John Paul II gave his first mass, saw a dragon cave (Krakow is named after a guy [Krak] who slayed a dragon that lived under the castle), the castle, the main square which has a cloth market and a torture chamber, and a beautiful church. Every hour on the hour a man (as our tour guide said "a real man, who is handsome") comes out and plays part of a song to the four directions. He only plays part because this tradition has been going on so long that at one point the trumpeter was shot mid-song by a Mongol warrior I think. They now stop mid-song to recognize his death.


The Square:



That afternoon we went to Auschwitz. There isn't really a way to describe it without sounding either too emotional or too detached. It was incredible to see where everything actually took place, it made it much more real. I don't understand how anyone can deny that it happened or how the people who carried out the acts could have done it in the first place. Being in a group of 60 with a tour guide took away from the emotional experience, but greatly added to the learning experience. I'm not sure which I should have valued more. The most touching displays were definitely the piles of children's shoes and the mountain of hair. It had a shock value that you can only experience if you're there.



I found a great Pierogi place for dinner (I was determined to continue my cultural food adventure). Afterward we wanted to find a coffee shop or dessert place, but as it was Sunday and a very Catholic country nothing was open past 9:30. We finally settled on Nescafé (oh chain stores...) that was open till 10 and shared some ice cream and cake.

The cloth market:



Our meetings the next day were decent. We had a good four hours for lunch to wander around the city. Kate and I decided on shopping at the cloth market (which is now just tourist shops and no actual cloth). I purchased a really pretty amber necklace. We had crepes for lunch and then ran to see the dragon statue and cave. On our way back we saw a man dressed up as a dragon and got our pictures taken with him. He was fairly creepy, asking where we were from and then shaking our hands for way too long. I think the pictures really express how we were feeling about it.






That night for dinner I went out with Adam, Alyssa and Kori. We arrived at the restaurant around 7 and the waitress told us they had a big reservation and it would be about 40 minutes for our meal which we decided was fine. We had some nice white wine from Chile (the only kind they had left) and enjoyed conversation. About an hour later the lady at the next table (who we think had some connection to the restaurant) brought us a tray of appetizers and told us that we had been waiting too long. We gratefully accepted and kept waiting. Finally around 9 or so we got our soup that we ordered. Half an hour late we got our food which was very good, but we had waited a long time and so we might have just been hungry.

The next morning was another epic bus ride from Krakow to Prague--we left at 8:45 and arrived in Prague around 5.