so I’ve spent the last 5 days in krakow. Five days is probably a couple more than necessary but two of them were more or less spent sleeping off my cold from Oktoberfest so I figure it evens out.
On my first day I checked out the historic old town. It’s a world heritage site and its definitely old. I definitely doesn’t look as pretty or quaint as some of the other cities I’ve visited, it was still kinda neat. One thing I’ve noticed I’ve liked about Europe is the prevalence of town squares, they are great places for monuments and shops, buskers, etc… Krakóws old town has a large square with a tourist market in the middle. I checked it out, Poland had a few different tourist Nick-nacks than I’ve seen elsewhere, but nothing really stood out. My hostel was nice, except they don’t have an age limit, so school groups like to go there. As a result, they shut down the common room at 10:00pm and force everyone to be in bed or outside the hostel. It’s pretty lame that the youth hostel caters to 15 year olds, I definitely wouldn’t stay there again.
my second day was spent pretty much just sleeping and eating. Polish perogies are amazing, I would definitely reccomend them
my third day I visited the salt mind an hour outside the city. It’s quite old, and used to be actively mined for salt. Now it’s mostly a tourist attraction, but they still employ miners for upkeep and to deal with the salt that results from water seeping into the mine. So technically it’s an active salt mine, but it doesn’t produce much compared to others around the world.
4th day was spent walking around the city. I took a free walking tour to the Jewish quarter, where schindler’s list was filmed, it was neat. It’s hard to comprehend the history that happened in some places. Like I always think of the people, who occupied the spaces I’m looking at or taking up. We passed a lot of places where I knew Jewish prisoners were herded, or nazi officers stood, but I struggle to really see it sometimes.
Today was my last day in Krakow. I got a chance to see auschwitz and berkenau. I didn’t realize that they were two different places at first. Auschwitz I was the concentration camp and Auschwitz II berkenau was the much larger death camp. It was pretty harrowing obviously. They have sections in Auschwitz where they show you the mass amounts of human hair the nazis collected, aswell as the mass amounts of shoes. It really is staggering how big each pile is, but I knew about those before hand. What really got me was seeing the electric fence along the perimeter. I’d seen so many photos of the fences, it was so… It is hard to describe how I felt seeing them in person. I’ve worked in jails and seen barbed wire fences, but they seemed like a pretty neutral piece of construction. These fences just looked evil. It’s pretty hard to explain unless you’ve seen it. It was definitely an eye opening experience.
I spent some time today figuring out where to go next. I considered a lot, i almost decided on Kiev, but I decided against leaving the EU just to avoid any potential border troubles. So, next stop is Bratislava! I’m headed there tomorrow.
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