Heading east...

The Euro-tour continued this past weekend with my first visit behind the former ‘iron curtain’ to Krakow, Poland. Joining me on this trip was my traveling pal Timmy, and needless to say we were both excited at Krakow’s reputation for being a city with a lot to see during the day, and ah, a lot to do at night. A few of the sites near the Old Town Square where we stayed:

Well our first difficulty, other than figuring out what was the best way to get into the center of town where we were staying (we settled on a not particularly clean or warm bus and took a meandering journey of about 1 hour to cover 10 miles), was to get over the language barrier. Timmy had the scoop on how to say beer, piwo (pronounced ‘pevo’), but as for the most common Polish brand that we drank all weekend, well your guess is as good as mine….

After a great night out taking in what has to be one of the coolest and most affordable nightlife’s I have seen so far in Europe, we set out on Saturday to visit maybe the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Having previously visited Dachau, one of the original concentration camps outside Munich, I had already seen some of this before…but that was nothing to what we saw here.

Timmy actually has already put up a great post on his blog summarizing what we saw (CLICK HERE), and the only thing I really wanted to reiterate was how chilling it was to see how Birkenau was set-up to be as efficient as possible in exterminating people. It was set up with 4 killing factories capable of cremating up to 20,000 people per day, and even had the train tracks moved into the camp to make the inmates walk to death only 200 meters. It really blows your mind to see what mankind is capable of doing. Visiting a place like this is something everyone should try to do in their lifetime.

The visit to Auschwitz was clearly worth it, but due to its location about 1.5 hours out of the city it took up most of our Saturday and we did not have much time to see any more of the city. However we were able to regroup and enjoy another night out enjoying Krakow. The best part was meeting a group of Polish kids out at a bar, and upon hearing I am from Seattle, he proclaimed ‘I love the Sonics. Sean Kemp, Gary Payton…I love them. My favorite team.’ Good times. We even managed to have a pint at an Irish pub (there truely is one in every city):

It was another amazing trip…lots of fun and an amazing chance to connect with some extremely important times in our history. I was disappointed that I did not get to see much of the city during our short stay, but I am positive I will be heading back to Krakow (although to be fair I think I have said that about every city I have visited so far, so I guess we will see how that goes). Until next time...

cheers!