I went to Krakow with 7 other teachers from school. It's an 11 hour train ride so we left at about 8 am and arrived after 7 pm. That is a lot of train riding! We passed the time with a special game that Florian and I made up. We name a letter and take turns saying countries of the world that start with that letter. Once there is only one left, the first person who names that country wins a point. We have played the game before and were both looking forward to it. So to make things official, we printed off a list of independent countries as recognized by the United Nations. I printed off study guides and then an official list for our "moderator." What makes things even better is that he is just a competitive as I am. We probably played the game for 4 or 5 hours on the way there and back. Joe joined our game, but was at a disadvantage as he did not have a study guide. Yes, we are NERDS, but it is a super fun game. Btw, we tied, but I never lost a point. (You lose a point by not being able to think of a country when there are still countries left.)
On to more interesting things, Krakow is truly lovely. Here's a picture of the main square. The basilica is on the left and the town market is on the right. There are a lot of carriage rides for tourists which is why you see all the horses.
I have more pics of Krakow on my flickr account. We stayed at a hostel in the center of town and went exploring the first night. We decided to get up and go to Auschwitz on Friday.
Auschwitz and Birkenau are only about a 90 minute bus ride away from Krakow. We needed to be on the 9:00 bus in order to go on the English speaking tour at 11:00. We arrived late and thought that we would miss the bus because all the seats were taken. However, in Poland, you can stand in the aisle of what basically amounted to a church bus. It was not fun. I tried not to complain though because of where we were going. 1.5 million people were killed there; I can stand up for less than two hours.
There were a lot of tourists there so we started at Birkenau which is usually the second part of the tour. Our guide was really good. I think he was probably a grad student because he knew a lot. One man had a female relative at Auschwtiz and our guide was able to figure out where she stayed and worked even though her account seemed to contradict what the maps and signs said. We were asked not to take pictures, but this is not enforced at all. I only took one of the train tracks into Birkenau.
They told us about the select prisoners who worked in the gas chambers. They were usually selected because they spoke the same language as the victims who would soon be arriving. After the people were killed, these men had to remove any fillings from their teeth and shave the women's hair, which was used in the German textile industry. They even had hair that had not been shipped to factories when the camp was liberated by the Red Army. After a few months, our guide said that these prisoners were "liquidated."
Overall, it was fascinating and very somber, but it wasn't emotional for me like I thought that it would be. I am very glad that we went.
