Day Fifteen - Krakow and Auschwitz

Today we went to Krakow and that meant an early start, a really early start and another train trip. I hate to say but im a little bit over train trips. Everyone runs for the doors, fights for seats and its only 5 in the morning, imagine the craziness of peak hour.

Before I go on about Krakow let me just say, yesterday the weather was lovely, 23 degrees, sunshine and just beautiful. Today its 11degrees and raining and although we don't mind the rain in the least I will say that I had expected it to slowly drop in temperature not such a sudden movement so bear in mind when you read this its rather cold and wet.

Anyways in the rain with a guide we walked around the Jewish Quarter which was rather dark and dismal partly due to the weather. We then went into old town and here the architecture took my breath away. Their walls are actually sloaped out which is just so interesting to walk around, the colours are bright and the centre square is huge. There are lots of little pizza and sandwich shops with lovely big fires and seeing as my husband is always hungry we took refuge in quite a few of these over the period of the morning. Overall I quite liked Krakow and this is a place I would definately return to.

We then met up with a driver who took us out to Auschwitz. Im not going to say too much about the place except that even though going can be upsetting and sometimes unpleasant I dont think we can ignore our past, even the really bad stuff. We went and looked at the camps, we went through this exhibit about the people who were brought to Auschwitz and we even walked through a gas chamber and crematorium but the moment that really got to me was to see a room full floor to ceiling with human hair. A huge amount of bad happened at Auschwitz but when we walked through the long stretched of barracks and living quarters it was almost peaceful, the grass was green and the air still and quiet, even with a huge amount of tourists. I am hoping that all those people who endured what they did are finally at peace.

Finally a very late train brought us back to Warsaw just after midnight... fine we think, we will just sleep in the next day.... you can almost the bell signing Baa Boowww. Tomorrow morning we have a 6.30am pick up for Prague. Yay ... 4 hours sleep. Just what I always wanted.