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On Monday morning, July 19th, we got up, went and availed ourselves of our free breakfast at our hotel, and got our stuff packed to head to the train station.

At this point in time, we have packing down to a science. We LONG ago dispensed with the “his and hers” bags and went to a more practical system. My backpack (the big orange one) contains everything we don’t really use on a regular basis. This includes our cooler weather clothes (since I still haven’t convinced John to get ditch the TWO pairs of jeans and TWO hooded sweatshirts he brought with him), souvenirs, the small food bag we have, and the small toolkit we have. One of his bags contains all of the clothes we typically wear and the toiletries bag, and his smaller backpack has our laptops. When we pack, I’m responsible for packing my clothes and everything that lives in the big orange pack, and he’s responsible for his clothes and everything that lives in his packs. It works out really well, and there’s none of the usual scrambling of “did you remember to check the shower” or something like that.

Anyway, so we got on our train, which wasn’t one of the ICE trains (Germany’s high-speed network), just a little regional one. So I was expecting it to behave like a little regional train, puttering along at around 55mph. Then about 10 minutes into our trip, I glanced at the GPS readout on my phone, and about fell over. We were puttering along at the quite glorious speed of 102 miles per hour. OMG SWEET.

I’m SO all over this high-speed travel kind of thing. I love trains so much.

The other nice thing? Because I’m (sigh) over 26 and John and I are traveling on a saver pass (two or more people) we were required to buy a first-class pass. We haven’t had much opportunity to use it until now, as most trains we’ve been on have been second-class only. But German trains always seem to have both classes–SWEET. Heck, yesterday a… train attendant? (like a flight attendant, I guess?) came around and offered us newspapers and snacks!! Oh yeah!! First class also usually means air conditioning, bigger tables, and more seat room and leg room. I’m all over that.

So yeah, it’s nice to actually use the first-class passes we paid for. Why can’t air travel be that comfortable and comparatively inexpensive?

When we got to Nuremberg, it was only about 11:30 AM, but, continuing with the good luck we’ve had so far this trip, our hotel let us check in and leave our stuff in our room. I LOVE the feeling of taking off my backpack and leaving it somewhere so I can go explore — sooooo nice! We headed back to the metro from whence we’d come to go into the Old Town part of the city. When I got there I realized I’d somehow managed to leave my camera in the room. I’m thinking my shoulder was tring to sabotage me or something — it’s tired of lugging that camera around. But at least I had my phone camera, as always.

On our way into town, we stopped at a McDonald’s to see what their local offerings were (since the only other German town we were in, Neusorg, was too small to have a McDonald’s, or any sort of fast food place, for that matter.)

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All hail the pun. I had to smile when I saw this. :-) Although, if you think about it, we have the hamburger, and Hamburg is a city in Germany... so why not the Nuremburger?

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Old Town Nuremberg is really pretty — it’s its old European feel that is one of the reasons Hitler chose to hold the Nuremberg rallies there. He was apparently all for the traditional feel. The old town itself is centered around a large market square (Hauptmarkt) and a number of neat churches. I think we went into almost all of them. ;-)

My favorite church was St. Sebaldus, the only Lutheran Gothic church I’ve been in this entire trip. It started out as a Catholic church when it was constructed in the mid-1200s, but when the Reformation happened, it converted to a Lutheran church. However, with an eye toward preserving the “medieval piety” (according to the brochure I picked up at the church) they saved the icons, wall paintings, and shrine to to St. Sebald. I looked him up, and had to laugh. First, apparently no one’s really sure who St. Sebald actually was, or when he even lived. He was some hermit who came out of the forest somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries to evangelize to some townspeople, and then died. Second, they built the church and the shrine to him before he’d officially been canonized by the Catholic church (which didn’t happen until 1425.) Heck of a risk there. I can just imagine it now — “O hai, we know you built a church for this dude, but FOOLED YA! we’re not actually going to make him a saint.” Heh.

For some reason, St. Sebaldus's shrine is held up by large snails. I have no idea why, but I grinned and had to force myself to walk (instead of run) over there to check it out when I saw it. :-)

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Anyway, you all know by now that I’m a huge sucker for the Gothic churches, but even by normal Gothic church standards, this one was one of my favorites because it still had a lot of its original paint job inside, and hadn’t been Baroqued almost at all. I don’t know why, but seeing the original medieval paint job is one of my favorite things about Gothic churches. A lot of places would paint almost the whole inside with not just religious art, but different designs and patterns almost like wallpaper. They’d go straight up the pillars and over the archways with really vivid colors. I would LOVE to see a Gothic church that’s been completely restored to what it would have looked like in the 14th century — not just by removing any design elements from later time periods, but with the original paint job restored to new.

I am so lucky that John is as patient with me as he is about seeing pretty much every single church we’ve come across on this trip. :-)

The door of the church had that kind of scary looking guy hanging above it, and it was supposed to represent a soul descending into hell. The top of the door handle is actually a skull. Kinda creepy, kinda cool.

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Sorry about only having cameraphone pics on here. I did go back right the day we left Nuremberg and take pictures with my real camera, but those will have to wait until later when I get around to posting them. :-)

Original medieval statue with original pattern painted on the wall around it.

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After we finished checking out the churches, we wandered up through the old castle and down around the other side, then headed back home in search of someplace to eat dinner before crashing for the evening. It was a nice, relaxing day. :-)

There is a statue of a rabid, deranged rabbit at Nuremberg Castle. Apparently it's a modern artist's tribute to German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, who lived right next to the castle and who painted a painting called "Young Hare". The rabbit in his painting didn't look happy, but it wasn't nearly this deranged. It was quite amusing.

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Me at Nuremberg Castle.

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I long ago gave up on trying to get him to shave.

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Changing light at the Cologne Cathedral, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie. Click on the picture to view a larger version.

I’m playing catchup right now, writing blog posts offline and going through pictures to figure out which ones to use. I have WAY too many pictures, and that’s just my cameraphone pictures!

We’re heading home the day after tomorrow — I’m not very enthused about this, but all good things must come to an end. I have to admit that my own bed will feel pretty good… but there’s also something really neat about waking up in a different place every few mornings and listening to the new sounds of the morning where I am.

Anyway, in the meantime until I catch up, here’s a fun picture. Last Thursday night we were waiting for our Couchsurfing host to pick us up at the train station in Cologne, and so I pulled out my cameraphone and took these pictures of the Cologne Cathedral picking up the last rays of the sunlight. I timestamped them so you can see not only how late it was, but also how quickly the light changed as we waited.

I love catching golden light like this.

On Friday (Day 42) we left Prague and headed to Neusorg, Germany. I had no idea where this was when I booked a place to stay — all I knew was that it was in the mountains and therefore cooler than the miserable, humid heat wave that had enveloped most of the continent. And it was, thankfully! In fact, we got a fair amount of rain, meaning we didn’t even do some of the hiking we’d planned to do. Neither of us were complaining though — it’s been a lovely chance to have some downtime and do a lot of reading and napping.

Anyway, before we left Prague, I got up at dawn and headed over to Prague Castle at 6 to make the 7AM service at St. Vitus Cathedral. Back in Ireland, I decided I was going to try to go to church in every country we went to, and so far, the only one I’ve missed was Bosnia.

I love being out at sunrise. I love being up when so few people are, and the only people who are out are out for a purpose, so they’re going somewhere quickly and generally not paying too much attention. I don’t know how someone could not pay attention to that sunrise, though — it was absolutely amazing. At the service, there were a total of eight people, including two nuns. The priest was old and wore Ecco sandals under his robe. I’m not sure why I found that amusing, but I did.

Yes, it is good to be alive.

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East end of St. Vitus, facing the morning sun.

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Facing east and the altar, with the morning sun coming through the front windows.

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After church, I wandered around town for a bit longer, enjoying the early morning peace, and then I headed back to rouse John so we could pack and catch our first of three trains of the day.

This is the last of our three trains, in Marktredwitz, Germany. They had to plug it in and charge it before we could leave. I for some reason found that amusing.

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We got to Neusorg, Germany around 6:30 PM. We checked into our hotel and went wandering around the very very small town for a bit before dinner. I found some wild raspberries -- this made me very happy. Well, that, and the 25-degrees-cooler weather.

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Our first night in Germany, we were woken up at 4AM by an INCREDIBLE electrical storm. I tried to get pictures with my big camera, as well as video with my cell phone, but for some reason neither one came out. Bummer. So you’ll just have to imagine a huge, booming storm. It was fantastic. :-)

You can't tell from this picture from our room window, but it's POURING outside. It poured most of Saturday, off and on. So I took three naps and read in between naps. It was heavenly.

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Today it threatened rain off and on, but eventually cleared up. I was going to go to church in the morning, but I found out that the local church only has services once a month (the pastor rotates through several villages in the area) so there was no church in town this morning. Oh well. So we had breakfast and took a short hike into the forest, then came back and read for a while and took a nap, then headed out for a walk to find a lake I'd seen on Google Earth, only we couldn't find it, so we headed back and parked it under a tree in the backyard to read. I can't complain. :-)

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To be fair, we did make it on the train at a reasonable hour… and then we proceeded to not only miss our stop, but overshoot it by about a half hour. Then we had to sit and wait at some train station in the boonies for the next train to show up, and then we had to go a half hour back. As a result, it was almost 1PM by the time we finally got to Kutna Hora. WHOOPS.

The #1 reason we wanted to go to Kutna Hora was to see the bone church (Sedlec Ossuary) there. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you might remember that we went to a bone church in Rome last fall, and since I heard about this one, I’ve wanted to see it, since it’s supposed to be much bigger than the one in Rome. It was… but it had a different feel, for some reason. I really liked how the one in Rome had murals, whereas this one mostly had nicely arranged piles. Still, there was some really neat stuff, and I totally enjoyed it. Here are all of the pictures I took with my phone, if you’re curious… eventually I’ll get the ones from my “real” camera put up, as I’m sure they came out much better.

Bone church

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Bird on the shoulder

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Crown of, well, crowns.

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Afterwards we walked across the street to the Cathedral of Our Lady, a medieval Gothic cathedral that got Baroqued and then mostly un-Baroqued. It’s really interesting because of its style — it’s VERY plain and simple, but instead of having plain stone walls inside like most Gothic cathedrals, it has pale yellow plastered walls. It’s a very light, airy, open, beautiful church, and the light that streamed in through the mostly plain glass windows was absolutely gorgeous. I can’t wait to process the pics I took with my regular camera, and I had a ton of fun just using the cameraphone.

South (I think) aisle of the cathedral. I'm pretty sure it's the south aisle because the altar is at my back, and most cathedrals were built with the altar at the east end and the main door at the west end. Clearly I've spent way too long reading about cathedral architecture. Maybe it's time to go reread "Pillars of the Earth".

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Music stand in a stairwell on the south side of the cathedral.

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As I was upstairs in the balcony, checking out the view from up there, I heard chanting start… apparently there are still monks there. COOL.

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After that, we wandered around town for a while and eventually made our way to St. Barbara Church, yet another Gothic church, this one of the super ornate classical Gothic variety. It was really neat, not only because of the architecture, but because a fair amount of the 14th century paint on the stone pillars and frescoes were still intact. SO NEAT.

The ceiling of the crossing and the apse (area over the altar) was covered with crests of various guilds and noble families from the town. Neat!

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520-year-old choir stalls. I didn't get to sit in them, but I did get to sit in 400-year-old pews.

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View of Kutna Hora from St. Barbara Church.

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We're finally getting the hang of this -- it only took us three takes to get this one right! :-)

Incidentally, notice those arch things on the church behind us? Those are flying buttresses, and every time I think of the term “flying buttresses”, I think of Cogsworth in the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, where he’s showing Belle around the castle and talking about architecture and makes the “if it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it” joke. Anyway, go rewatch the movie if you can’t remember what I’m talking about. Flying buttresses.

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As it crept toward sunset, we hopped a train back home, and had a nice Chinese food dinner before crashing for the night.

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On Wednesday we headed up to Prague Castle to check out St. Vitus Cathedral, a HUGE Gothic cathedral. Now, I’ve known since my freshman year of high school in Spanish class, when we learned about Santiago de Compostela in Spain, that I’ve been fascinated by cathedral architecture. But if I’ve learned one thing about the dozens of churches I’ve seen in the past three years since I got my last passport, it’s that not only do I have a thing for Gothic architecture, but I don’t really care all that much about Renaissance, I like Romanesque, and I can’t stand Baroque.  Sorry, but there it is. As I commented to John a couple of days ago, if it ain’t Baroque… DON’T. Just don’t. Unfortunately, some really really neat churches got Baroqued over time. Fortunately, in the late 19th century there was a huge classical architecture revival all over Europe, and so some dilapidated and Baroqued churches got restored to their Gothic glory (and in some cases, completed. Heh.)

Ok, so back in an entry about Budapest, I mentioned that Matyas Church (on Buda Castle hill) is one of my all-time favorite churches. Well, I’ve decided that St. Vitus Cathedral is now in my top five. It’s absolutely flipping AMAZING. I honestly think that, no matter how many Gothic churches I’m fortunate to see in my lifetime, I’ll never get sick of them. Ever.

Cathedral from the outside. This thing is at the absolute tip of the hill that Prague Castle is on, so an already huge church looks even bigger. It's just AMAZING.

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Be still, my Gothic-architecture-loving heart...

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St. Albrecht!

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St. Wenceslas chapel in St. Vitus Cathedral. The walls are inlaid with semiprecious stones, and the whole thing dates back to the mid-1300s. It's INCREDIBLE.

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The rose window.

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Front of the cathedral.

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John, being the wonderful man that he is, didn’t drag me out of the cathedral, but after almost an hour, he started strongly hinting that maybe we should let the other tourists enjoy it too, so we left, but not until after I’d found out when the daily church service times were so that I could come back and go to a service here. :-)

On our way out of the castle hill area, we decided to walk through the castle gardens. This was a GREAT idea, because we got to see BIRDS! LARGE ONES! And we got to HOLD THEM!!

If I thought the church was going to be the highlight of my day, I was sorely mistaken. I think this was the highlight of my WEEK. Can you tell by the grin on my face? That's a peregrine falcon, by the way. And why the heck am I wearing the same shirt in every picture?

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John holding an eagle owl. He really was thrilled about this, we were just having a hard time getting Mr. E. Owl to look at the camera. :-)

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Apparently it’s a tradition at Czech castles to keep birds of prey, so Prague Castle has turned theirs into a demonstration kind of thing. For about $5, you get to hold the bird of your choice. AWESOME.

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After John pulled me off the ceiling, we headed down to the National Museum of Natural History to see what there was to see.

Main hall at the museum.

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Being the nerd that I am, I made a beeline for their geology exhibit when I saw the sign. I can’t help it — I like rocks. Maybe it’s because I have plenty in my head. Anyway, since I’m a bit of a geology nerd, I generally judge a museum’s geology exhibit (however fair/unfair this may be) by if they have a sample of benitoite, California’s state gemstone, which is found only in San Benito County in central California. Picky, I know. Usually when a museum has a sample of benitoite, it’s a very small sample, and it’s usually polished to look like the lovely blue gemstone it is. Prague’s Natural History Museum didn’t have a very pretty, polished sample, but darned if it isn’t the LARGEST sample I’ve seen… it’s just a trip to see it all the way over here. So cool!!! And to be fair, they did have quite a nice display of other rocks too, including some really neat meteors.

California's state gemstone.

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We closed down the museum and headed across the street to McDonald’s for dinner. I know I know… McDonald’s. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here on my blog or just on Facebook, but we’ve been going to McDonald’s on this trip for several reasons. #1, McDonald’s in Europe almost ALWAYS have free wifi and free bathrooms. If we have time to kill while waiting for a train, it sure as heck beats waiting at the train station, and there’s almost always a McDonald’s near a train station. Second, their local menu is somewhat interesting. In  Krakow, I had a chicken curry burger, and I swear I’m starting a petition to bring these to the US. Who’s in? I promise they’re really good! I mean, it’s not like having real chicken curry, but to me it was quite an acceptable substitute!

So anyway, I’d been seeing ads in the metro stations for a tzatziki beef burger. I had no idea what this was, but the picture looked interesting, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. And it had these really interesting seasoned potatoes that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

The potatoes were good, but the burger… not so much. The burger had feta cheese and fresh cucumbers in it, as well as some sort of pinkish sauce that wasn’t Thousand Island, and I think that’s dried dill as the seasoning on the bun. I kind of liked the feta and the sauce, but the cucumbers and the dill… notsomuch. To be fair, I’m not a cucumber fan anyway, but even after I took them off the burger, it was still really cucumber-y. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well, I tried. I’m now 1 for 3 in liking foreign McD’s burgers (the chicken curry was great, but I had a McCountry in Zagreb that I couldn’t finish either. Oh well — you win some, you lose some. Even at McDonald’s.)

Seriously. Fresh cucumbers. The fries in the background are John's, by the way. He's not quite as adventurous when it comes to McDonald's as I am... which makes sense given that he's always been happy with and able to finish his meal. :-)

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After dinner, we headed to a DVD store to amuse ourselves with the cheap Czech offerings (I still think they’re pirated, but John doesn’t think so) and then we headed home. It was the perfect relaxed day. :-)

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On Day 39 we slept in… I think travel fatigue is really starting to get to us, because we both wanted to see Prague, but neither of us was enthused about going anywhere. So we opted to stay an extra night. Good idea.

We finally dragged ourselves out of the room and wandered the city for a bit. It was SO FLIPPING HOT. I know it’s not as hot as Sacramento, but at least at home pretty much everywhere has a/c. In Prague, not so much.

Want to know the best place to hang out? Near one of the vents for the subway. It was like a gigantic outdoor air conditioner. Greatest thing EVER.

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Anyone notice anything interesting about this street? There are NO STREETLIGHTS. OR STOP SIGNS. And this is a fairly large street in the middle of downtown Prague. I'm really not sure how more accidents don't happen here -- maybe they just pay more attention? CRAZY.

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See if you can guess why I took a picture of this. Hint: I'm amused by it. Give up? Well, the little devil that constantly resides on one of my shoulders wanted me to relocate this guy's bike to somewhere nearby just to give him an object lesson in what not to lock one's bike to. I didn't though... my nice side (the part of me that doesn't want to get arrested for bike thievery) won out.

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Around mid-afternoon, we met up with a tour guide for a free walking tour of the city — the guides work for tips, and we tipped quite well after enjoying the tour quite a bit. Our guide was an Irish college student, and she was flipping hilarious. I think she needs to be a high school teacher — she’s got the energy level down!

Our awesome tour guide standing in front of composer Antonin Dvorak's statue and reenacting the story of how the Nazis wanted to push the statue of composer Felix Mendelssohn off of the national music hall, only they didn't know what he looked like, so they figured that since he was Jewish he must have a big nose. So they went to push the statue with the biggest nose off, only to find out right at the last minute that it was really Wagner. Wagner, incidentally, happened to be Hitler's favorite composer. HA!

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See that small dried thing hanging up there? That's an arm, and it's hanging from high up a wall in the Church of St. James in Prague. As the legend goes, it belonged to a thief who tried to steal jewels from the statue of the Virgin Mary on the altar one night. But the statue miraculously came to life, grabbed his hand, and wouldn't let go. The thief had to wait until the next morning when the monks showed up. The monks tried to separate the thief from the Madonna, but they couldn't, and they weren't about to break the statue. So they cut his arm off instead. Right as they finished cutting it, the statue came back to life and released his arm, and then turned back into a statue again. The monks hung the arm to remember this event and as a warning for other thieves, and there it still hangs, some 400 years later.

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Rather kafkaesque statue of Franz Kafka (he's the one sitting on the headless dude's shoulders.)

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After the tour, John headed home and I headed to a classical music concert at an old church. It was by far the most expensive event ticket I bought this trip, and I hate to say it, but I was kind of disappointed. The music was a treat, and it was at an 800-year-old church with great acoustics, but (a) there was an American woman behind me who talked incessantly through almost the whole concert, and (b) the musicians kind of rushed through everything. They played the most popular parts of things, rather than the entire piece, and they went fast for a lot of stuff. The flier said they’d play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but they only played Spring, Die Moldau was TOTALLY cut short, and that was the absolute fastest rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon I think I’ve ever heard.

Don’t get me wrong — I definitely enjoyed it, but I don’t know that I would have spent that much money twice. Oh well. (I actually almost cornered the talking woman after the concert and told her that I didn’t know how much she was spending on her trip, but my ticket that night represented a significant portion of my daily budget, and I really didn’t appreciate listening to her talk throughout the concert. But I chickened out.)

I do have to say that my favorite part was hearing them play (a piece of) Smetana’s “Die Moldau”, since Smetana was Czech and the Moldau is another name for the Vltava River that runs through Prague. It was better than hearing “Blue Danube Waltz” when I was on the island in the middle of the Danube in Budapest, since this was live and that was a recording. (Although that was still pretty freaking awesome.) :-)

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Here’s a playlist to most of the rest of the concert. And Mom, before you get worried about copyright, there were a number of people in the (very small) audience openly recording this, and no one stopped them… so I guess it’s kosher. :-)

Hmmm, apparently I can embed the playlist into this blog post. Click on the arrows on the right or left sides of the video below to scroll through all of the videos. Fun!

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After the concert, I still had daylight and energy left, so I walked over to Old Town and climbed up the Old Town City Hall tower to get a view of the city. I was hoping to get some decent sunset shots, but it was really hazy, so I just enjoyed the views for about 30 minutes before heading down.

View of the Old Town Square from on top of the Old Town City Hall. I went to that church (Church of Our Lady Before Tyn) three different times, trying to go in and see it, but it was closed every single time. GRRRRRRR. I hate being deprived of a good Gothic church, darn it! :frownyface: Not like I haven't seen enough churches this trip. :-p

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View looking down.

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At the top of the tower, there were a bunch of informational signs about things you could see from the tower. Read the English translation of this one -- the last two lines are pretty funny. :-)

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As the sun set, I hopped a metro and then a tram to get back home, where John was waiting for me at the tram stop. I had a fun day, but I think getting off of that tram and seeing him there waiting for me was the best part. :-)

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We got into Prague around 7:30 AM, got our bearings, and hopped a tram to our night’s lodgings, a guest house about a mile from the train station. We knew we wouldn’t be able to check in until that afternoon, but we were hoping to at least drop our bags there. We rang the bell, but even though it was after 8 at that point, no one answered, so we lugged our stuff to a coffee shop down the hill and hung out there drinking tea and reading for an hour. I left John there with the luggage and hiked back up the hill to try ringing the bell again. Not only did the owner answer this time, but she said the room was ready and that we could check in right then. FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC. OMG. We hadn’t showered since the previous morning, so we were both sweaty and sticky from spending the previous day in the sun and in an un-airconditioned bus and train. And, even though it was barely 9AM, it was already 90+F in Prague.

I went back and got John, and we checked in, took the aforementioned GREATEST SHOWERS EVER, and crashed for a nap in the most comfortable bed we’ve slept in the entire trip so far. OMG HEAVEN. Neither of us had slept much or well on the train, so the nap was absolutely wonderful.

After a few hours, we woke up and headed out to see what there was to see. Mostly this consisted of trying to figure out how to get places and instead getting lost, despite both a map and a GPS. Street signage here is like it was in the Balkans — fairly non-existent. I found out yesterday that during the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, when the citizens tried to replace the Communist government and the Soviets came in to quash the rebellion, one of the ways the people of Prague tried to mess with the Soviets was to take down all the street signs. I think they still haven’t put them back up, or something. Gah.

But at least in our wandering we figured out where things were and what we wanted to see. We wandered down to Charles Bridge and watched the view for a while.

John on Charles Bridge, with the Vltava (Moldau) River in the background.

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Then we hung out cooling our heels in a fountain with a lot of other people. Aaaahhhhhh. Relief from the heat.

As evening turned to night, we headed back to our guest house, stopping by a grocery store to get some food for dinner, breakfast, and lunch the next day. Easy, relaxed day. :-)

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Sunday July 11th, we got up early and got our bags packed, then took them to the train station and stuffed them in a locker so that we could pick up our train reservation and tickets for Prague, and then hop a train to Oscwiecim (the town where Auschwitz is) before taking the night train to Prague.

We hadn’t looked at the train schedules in advance, because we’d looked before, and there was always a train an hour to Oscwiecim. Well, for some reason there wasn’t today (maybe because it was Sunday?) so we ended up at the bus station behind the train station, to take a bus. While the bus was on the highway, we encountered a very recent traffic accident blocking the road (and “highway” is being generous–there wasn’t even a single line dividing the two halves of the road.) The bus couldn’t squeeze by, and the cops on the scene didn’t have any word as to when it’d be cleared, so the bus driver decided to backtrack and take a different route. And I discovered something. The frustrating part about having GPS is that when the bus driver is going THE WRONG WAY and he doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Polish, there’s really nothing you can do except for sit and watch him go the wrong way. At one point we were going down a farm road in the middle of a bunch of fields and NOTHING ELSE, and the road was so narrow that branches from trees were hitting us on both sides as well as the top of the bus. The driver pulled over four different times to ask for directions (including one time on that farm road, much to the farmer’s bemusement from which the driver got directions.)

So we ended up getting to Auschwitz over an hour late. This kind of screwed our schedule up, unfortunately, as we had to leave by 6 to catch our train to Prague, and we ended up cutting our visit short, which I was kind of bummed about. But at the same time, we kind of saw enough, you know?

I took almost no pictures. Two with my phone, and maybe four or five more with my regular camera (I’ll post those later, of course.)

Auschwitz is actually three sites–Auschwitz I (the original camp that was mostly used for political prisoners), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) which is the most notorious one where most of the atrocities occurred, and Auschwitz III, a labor camp that we didn’t see (and I don’t think is on display.) We actually went to Auschwitz II first, since between the hours of 10AM and 3PM the only way you can access Auschwitz I is via a guided tour, which is not only expensive, but not something either of us was interested in. Seriously, who wants to be rushed through something like that?

Auschwitz II is outside the town a couple of miles, so we had to take a free shuttle bus over there. There’s really not much left–the main building where the main gates were, a few of the barracks, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria (ruins because the Nazis blew them up when it became clear that the Soviets were going to come in and liberate the camps.)

I had a really hard time grasping things at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think partly it’s because so little remains, but also partly because we’re so used to seeing everything as black-and-white pictures, and here we were in full-color on a 90+ degree summer day, with everything around us green and leafy. In my head, concentration camps are always in black and white and it’s always winter, because that seems to be how it is in the pictures I’ve seen. Heck, even in the pictures where there’s no snow, since they’re in black and white, it’s hard to get a sense of the vibrancy and reality of things.

So I decided to turn the two pictures I took into black and white shots… maybe you can see what I mean.

Remains of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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Same picture, turned grayscale and some other tinkering done to it. This is how I picture it, ya know?

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The blue sky, puffy white clouds, and green trees just don't jive with this infamous sign over the gate at Auschwitz I.

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Yeah, this picture is about how it should look. Incidentally, did you know that some indescribably stupid people stole this sign last winter with the intention of selling it to a collector? When it was recovered, they'd cut it into three pieces, ostensibly to smuggle it out of the country. Wow. Just... yeah.

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After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was after 3, so we headed back to Auschwitz I. That camp is MUCH better-preserved. The majority of the buildings were brick rather than wood, and they’d turned a lot of them into museums on different topics, so we wandered through them with the time we had remaining. Again, looking at the buildings themselves, I had a really hard time grasping what went on there… but looking at some of the exhibits made some things come alive. They have one room that’s full of nothing but hair the Nazis cut off of the women. It’s dusty and all looks gray and clumped and matted together, but here and there you can see braids, and that caught me. It was hard to look at the buildings and see what’d happened there, but for some reason, all I had to do was look at a braid and envision the woman braiding it for the last time. There was another room just full of shoes, including a large display of just thousands of children’s shoes. That was another really really difficult one for me. There was another one full of clothes. One full of brushes — hair brushes, toothbrushes, clothing brushes, shaving brushes. One of suitcases, suitcases plastered with the name and address label of the owner, and in many cases also covered in stickers from exotic locations to which the owner had traveled. New York City. Paris. Istanbul.

Ya know, I’ve been to the Holcaust Museums in LA and Washington DC. I’ve seen similar displays of personal artifacts, and those definitely affected me. But there was something about seeing the ones at Auschwitz and knowing that this was where they were brought originally — that they were brought there for their intended purposes, and not shipped there after the fact for the purpose of a museum exhibit… something about that hit me pretty hard.

We saw other places where horrible atrocities occurred (the camp prison, the excecution yard) but nothing came to life like room after room of personal belongings. That’s what resonated with me, and is lodged in my brain.

Like I said earlier, we had to leave an hour before the museum closed, so we didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to see… but at the same time it was enough.

***HERE ENDS THE SERIOUS PART OF THE POST. ENOUGH ALREADY.***

We hopped a (very very crowded) bus home (we got the last two seats on the bus — the 15 or so people who boarded after us ended up standing for the almost two-hour ride back.) Once we got back, we retrieved our bags from the locker and headed to the mall next to the train station so we could eat dinner and I could finish postcards. It was here that I discovered something quite amazing.

McDonald’s in Poland serves CHICKEN CURRY BURGERS.

DUDE. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THESE AT HOME. SERIOUSLY.

Ok, granted it’s not as good as actual chicken curry, but for a chicken burger, it was PRETTY GOOD. Just spicy enough without being so spicy that it’d scare people off, and that lovely curry flavor… mmmmmm. Where can I start a petition to get these at home???

Oh, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about McDonald’s here or just on Facebook, so I’ll explain here for posterity. While I’m all about eating local food while traveling, McD’s in foreign countries are good for two reasons. First, as you saw with my previous example, it’s fun to see what the local menu contains that the American menu doesn’t. So far I’ve had a raspberry “summer shake” (quite good!) and a burger that I tried in Zagreb called a McCountry, which was like a Big Mac only with this very mustardy dijon sauce. I didn’t realize what it was before I bought it, I just wanted to try it. I like mustard, but this was too much mustard for me. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well. I’ve seen this same burger in Poland and in Hungary (where it was called the McFarm… I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why it’d be called the “McCountry” either.)

The second reason McDonald’s in foreign countries are great? They ALL have FREE WIFI. And they’re huge — much bigger (more seating) than pretty much any American McD’s I’ve seen. So they’ve become, for John and I on this trip, a meeting spot for when we split up to do our own thing, and also a waiting room when we’re waiting for a train. Heck, it’s a lot nicer than the train station, and you can get a soda and sit there for two hours and no one will hassle you (unlike at a cafe.)

We headed to the train about 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave and found our train car. Have I mentioned yet how night trains work in Europe? It’s really very cool! You board a car that’s going to your destination, but the other cars on the train may be going to different destinations. In the middle of the night, you make one or more stops where your car (or the other cars) is unlinked from the train and hooked to a different train that’s going where you want to go. It’s really nifty!

Anyway, so I hand the conductor our reservation, tickets, and rail passes. Let me explain how that works. We have railpasses, but for some trains (including overnight trains) you also have to purchase a reservation (fairly cheap on day trains, more expensive on night trains) so that you’re guaranteed somewhere to sit. Also, our rail passes weren’t valid for Poland, so we had to purchase tickets from Krakow to the Polish border, and then our passes would be good once we crossed into the Czech Republic. So we had four pieces of paper total — the reservation slip, two tickets, and the railpass. I hand all of this over to the conductor for our car, and he shakes his head and says no, that the reservation and tickets aren’t valid until the NEXT night.

WHAT.THE.HECK.

I looked closely at them for the first time, and sure enough, he was right — they were printed for July 12th. I thought back to that morning, and how the woman who’d printed them had JUST gotten to work — we were her first customers of the day, in fact.

I looked at John, and looked at the time. We had less than 15 minutes before the train was going to leave, and the international ticket counter was on the far opposite end of the station (pretty much as far opposite from where we were standing as we could get) and down and up a couple of sets of stairs (since you have to go underneath the tracks to get to the platforms.) I’m glad I chose to wear my shoes that day rather than my sandals! I left John with all of the bags and took off running, clutching the tickets and the passes.

I got to the counter, completely winded, and was shocked to see that, almost 12 hours later, it was the same woman who’d sold me the passes that morning!! I managed to gasp out our dilemma, and her response was, “Yes, I remember you. Did I really put that as the date? I know you wanted them for tonight.” No apology. She got a new reservation printed out, but handed me back cash and told me we’d need to buy the tickets on board the train. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it and ran, literally. I sprinted back to the train and we grabbed our bags and got back in line and handed everything to the conductor outside the train door with less than five minutes to spare.

Right before the train left, the conductor came into our compartment looking for us — he wanted our rail passes, and he needed 5 more Euros, since it costs more to buy tickets on the train than in the station (which seemed really unfair to me, since the ticket woman was the one who screwed up in the first place anyway!) He said he’d take payment in Euro or Zloty (Polish currency.) We were out of both currencies — we haven’t been anywhere on the Euro since Montenegro (FIVE COUNTRIES AGO) and we’d tried to use up all of our Zloty so we didn’t have extra left. After dumping out all the small pockets of John’s and my backpacks, we located a 5 Euro bill that had somehow escaped detection. This, however, left our rail passes. The problem was that I’d already given them to him, and he insisted I hadn’t.

At this point I was TOTALLY freaking out. I’d already sprinted across the train station and back to get the reservation changed, it was hotter than hell outside and inside the station, and now he was telling me we never gave him our rail passes (which I KNOW we did, and which are NOT replaceable if we lose them.) John’s yelling at me to calm down and think about where I might have put the passes, I’m yelling back that I know I gave them to him, he’s yelling back that the conductor doesn’t have them, and our compartment companions are watching this in bewilderment.

Finally I go into the conductor’s berth and refuse to leave until he goes through the pile of tickets and railpasses. Lo and behold, there are our passes!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH.

I go back into our compartment and want to just curl into a little ball and cry out of sheer relief. We’re on the train, and I didn’t lose our passes. As I go to empty my pockets so that I can stretch out on the bed, I realize that the postcards are still in them. I’d meant to put them in the mailbox on the platform, and in the chaos, I TOTALLY forgot. GAH. Every time we stop for the rest of Poland, I hang my head out the train window to look at the platform and see if I see a mailbox… Nope. Sigh.

So some of you will be getting postcards from Poland when I get home and can stuff them into envelopes. Oh well, at least they have stamps on them. :-p

The other two guys in our compartment were pretty cool. They were two Swedish architecture students who were spending a couple of weeks traveling around Europe, and we talked for several hours, until the Spanish gals in the compartment next door banged on our wall for the third or fourth time (since it was around 1:30 AM and they probably wanted us to go to sleep, even though we were talking fairly quietly.)

Sonne and their traveling mascot. Apparently they put him into pictures at random. I SOOO love that idea -- I wish I'd done something similar on this trip!

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I was miserably hot, and of course at this point our train was stopped in a station waiting for another train for something like 45 minutes, so there was no airflow and no lovely white noise to put me to sleep, so I didn’t fall asleep until well after 2. Ugh. I still like night trains, though, even though it was A THOUSAND DEGREES IN THERE.

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July 10th John wasn’t feeling well, so he relaxed and I wandered around Krakow, seeing more of the historical things to see. First I headed over to Oskar Schindler’s factory (yeah, the Oscar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame.) There wasn’t anything left to see of the factory, but there was a quite good museum on the Nazi occupation of Krakow, and on Schindler and his workers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsbluff/4781699309/

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One of the things the museum has on display is pieces of firsthand accounts of life in the Krakow ghetto that were written by the children who lived there. Director Roman Polanski (yeah, the sleazeball) actually grew up in the Krakow ghetto. Whatever his sleaziness now, it’s hard not to be struck by what he wrote when he was 8 years old:

Roman Polanski, on the building of the wall of the Krakow ghetto: "I suddenly realized we were going to be walled in. I got so scared that I eventually burst into tears."

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Then I headed over to Zgody Square, now called Bohaterów Ghetta (Ghetto Heroes) Square. It was the main meeting place in the Krakow ghetto, and where all of the selections, deportations, and many violent incidents took place. Now the square has a bunch of empty chair sculptures. The explanation for the chairs was in Polish, but I assume it has something to do with commemorating the people killed there.

I swear I got a better picture of this with my big camera.

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On the square is the old pharmacy Under the Eagle, which was the only pharmacy in the ghetto (and the pharmacist was the only non-Jew permitted to live in the ghetto.) It’s now a museum on the Krakow ghetto. It cost extra to take pictures, and there really wasn’t much to take pictures of, as the only original piece of furniture that remains is a desk. Still, it was a neat place–the pharmacy ended up as a kind of community aid center. People who were being deported would leave messages there, and they’d sell things like hair dye (for people trying to look younger to avoid being declared too old to work and therefore shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz) and sedatives for infants so that they could be smuggled out of the ghetto. The whole place was really, really eye-opening and sobering.

After that I walked back across the river and through the old Jewish quarter of Kasmiriz, and then on to Wawel Castle, the old seat of power in Poland for hundreds of years.

Part of Wawel Castle.

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I wandered around for a while, then headed over to the castle’s cathedral to catch the 5PM church service. Pictures aren’t allowed inside the cathedral, unfortunately, but I took this one outside the cathedral.

Wawel Castle Cathedral.

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This statue is right outside the cathedral door -- Pope John Paul II celebrated his first mass here, and it was his cathedral when he was the bishop of Krakow. In fact, there's pope stuff all over the city. It's kind of crazy.

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After church, I walked through Planty Park from the castle to the old town square. Back in the 1820s, the city decided to tear down the old city wall (which was falling into disrepair and wasn’t being used to protect the city anyway), fill in the moat, and turn that space into a park. Now there’s a lovely green park that rings the entire old town, and it’s a really really nice place to relax on a hot day.

Planty Park.

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I forgot to mention that this entire time we’ve been in Krakow, there’s been a street festival going on, with different performing acts from all over the world (no seriously–there was an Iranian group there.) There was music, drama, performance art, and some just plain fun and silliness.

Bubble makers!

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I went back and watched the accordion players for a while (see the video in my previous post) and finally broke down and bought one of the CDs they had for sale. I couldn’t help it–they were fun!

I also finally managed to get the Hejnal on video. The Hejnal Mariacki is a traditional Polish hymn that was at one time used as a bugle call to signal the opening and closing of Krakow’s city gates. Nowdays it’s played once an hour, 24 hours a day. According to legend, the tune is cut short at the end because back in the 1200s, a bugler played it to announce the Mongol invasion of Poland, and was shot in the throat by an arrow. If you’ve ever read the Newberry-award-winning book The Trumpeter of Krakow, it revolves around this legend.

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I also stuck around until 9PM to watch a French musical group I’d seen rehearse earlier in the day. Now, I’d seen them rehearse in their street clothes, so I really wasn’t prepared for their actual musical act, which involved fire, monk’s robes, and Segways (yeah, those two-wheeled contraptions.) All but one of them were playing brass instruments that had been massively modified from their original shapes (well, except for one guy who had a plain old soprano saxaphone.) The one woman in the band was the only one who didn’t have a musical instrument. Instead, she had two wands with fire coming from them, and periodically in the act she’d light the ground on fire (I have no idea what they prepared it with ahead of time so it’d do so.)

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The whole thing (about 30 minutes) was beyond bizarre, but again, it was fun. :-)

That completed, I headed home… and managed to get really, really lost. It turns out that they closed the tram line for road construction that I’d normally take to get back to our dorms. Well, they didn’t actually CLOSE it — they switched the tram line to another route and street entirely, but called it the same line. And the sign announcing the change was only in Polish. (And yeah, I know I was in Poland, but given the HUGE number of tourists there, having a translation would have been HELPFUL.) And since it was nighttime, I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t the same route — silly me for assuming the same Line 15 tram that we’d been taking the past couple of days was anything but the same as it’d been.

I didn’t get home until after 11, at which point I was really, REALLY grumpy. But at least I made it home.

A side note about English. Both John and I have found the relative ubiquity of English really interesting. Heck, I heard a FRENCH person complaining in Budapest that a museum didn’t have enough English translations, or at least an audioguide in English. And that’s far from the only non-native English speaker we heard complaining about the lack of English. As John pointed out, it’s an issue of practicality, since English is more widely spoken than any other European language. And there’s something neat about listening to two people converse in English, but neither of them speak English as a native language (and in some cases, I’m guessing not even as a second language.) However, as a native speaker, I still felt a bit self-conscious and self-centered about wanting signage in English. Oh well.

…and I’ve now concluded I’m incapable of giving anything resembling a brief rundown. But you knew that. Sigh. :-)

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Where we are now:

View Larger Map

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Watch these kids on the piano (old piano with the keys fused so that it was a public art piece rather than a piano.) HILARIOUS.

These accordion players are a Ukranian group called Harmonia — I bought their CD of classical tunes. LOVE it. :-)