I spent my last day in Vienna doing laundry and packing up all of the clothing, books, hygiene materials, etc. that tend to leap from a backpack to the floor over the course of 12 days in the same city. Te sad thing is that, while it looks like I have a lot of stuff when it's spread all over the floor of my tiny hostel room, it can probably fit into one washer if I really wanted it to, and that's sad. I have managed to pick up more clothing as I've gone along, and I'm always thankful I unloaded that bundle at the Boulicault's in England.
So what does Kevin do now that football is over? He spends the rest of his summer wandering Europe with Annie, of course. I was originally planning to spend two weeks in Germany working with a sports research institute there, and then go travel, but my only contact there was going on vacation, and said I probably shouldn't come. Fine by me. On top of that, I was getting quite tired of traveling alone, and like any whiny, needy boyfriend I was missing my girlfriend. Plus, who doesn't want two extra weeks of traveling in Europe instead of working?
So now is the part of the trip that is officially not "research" and that all of you can refer to as gallivanting or traipsing or being a tourist or whatever implies that I'm just on vacation, because I now officially am.
Let's see how it's going:
On Tuesday I caught a train from Vienna to Krakow (well, actually two trains, but that's not really important). And when I got off in Krakow, there was Annie. Yay! We spent two days in Krakow, which is a very old-timey Polish city, and basically the only place in Poland not to get destroyed in World War II. We saw the old market square (each city in Poland has one, and they all kind of look similar), which was nice. There was a giant statue of a head in the main square, which was great for taking funny pictures:
We also wandered around the Wawel (pronounced Va-vel, though I still like to say Wa-wel, because that's more fun), which is the castle that kind of overlooks the city. Not as cool as the Edinburgh castle, I have to admit, but still pretty cool.
Coolest thing about Krackow: when we were wandering around the Wawel, we saw this cool iron statue of a dragons, and decided to take a picture of it. While I was taking the picture, the statute started breathing fire. Yeah, breathing fire. It was awesome. The legend of the city's founding has something to do with someone slaying a dragon, but I'm not really sure how it goes.
On the second full day in Krakow, we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp from World War II. While I wouldn't say that I was "excited" about going, it has always been somewhere I wanted to visit. The Auschwitz camp itself is very much like a museum, which is what I imagined it would be like. It was a lot smaller than I expected, and being there on such a nice day made it hard to imagine that such a terrible atrocity could happen there.
From Auschwitz, you can take a tram to Birkenau, which was the "extermination site," where more than 2 million Jews, Poles, and other groups were murdered in gas chambers. Birkenau has a completely different feel from Auschwitz. The first thing is how massive it is. It stretches forever in every direction, and it's nothing but cabins, which one can imagine being packed with prisoners. There are no trees like there were at Auschwitz, and it's completely flat, so you can see everything. It's so simple when you look at it, with everything made of wood except the main entrance, the railroad track, and the barbed-wire fence. All the information points to 75% of arrivals at Birkenau being murdered as soon as they arrived, and seeing how massive the camp was, gives an incredible feel for how many people passed through the camp. At the back of the camp are the sites of the gas chambers, which were destroyed by the Nazis with dynamite when they fled the camp. The ruins have been preserved, and there is a memorial to the holocaust victims.
I don't really know what to say about visiting the camp. It was a sobering experience, and its so weird to actually see what I've heard so much about. It doesn't make the tragedy any more real to me though. I know it happened, and I've seen how and where it was done, but it's still so impossible to comprehend something like that.
From Krakow we took a bus (a bus? really? I didn't think people took long-distance busses since the 70s, but they do in Poland, which I think says a lot about the country) to Zakopane, a mountain town which is the heart of winter life in Poland.
Side rant: While all signs would make you think that Poland would count on my rail pass, like the fact that its cities are included in the pass' time table book, or that it's routes are clearly indicated on the map, or the fact that the travel agent said that "the Czech Repulic is the only country on this map that isn't included" (and Poland was on that map), it does not, in fact, count on my rail pass.
Zakopane is pretty. It's exactly like all the ski villages, and I can imagine it being really cute during winter, with all sorts of people in ski clothing and carrying skis and poles (poles-Poles, get it! I love Poland puns). As it was summer, it wasn't too busy. They sell cheese in Zakopane. A lot of cheese, and while it's pretty good, I can't begin to comprehend how a cheese shops selling the same exact kind of cheese can exist every five feet.
Our reason for going to Zakopane was to get in some hiking (because let's face it, neither Annie nor I are really city folk), but the weather had other plans. While it was gorgeous in Krakow, Annie managed to jinx the weather into being rainy while we were in Zakopane. Instead of hiking, we wandered around the city, hung around in our hostel and watched movies. We eventually braved the weather and found a trail that got inreasingly smaller and more dangerous until we weren't quite sure that we should be hiking. On top of that everything was wet from the rain (including us), so that was fun. The plus side of the whole adventure was at the top there was a cool rock formation which made for a great picture-taking spot.
Then we almost died like, 14 times each on the way down, and it was impossible not to laugh the whole way.From Zakopane, we caught a bus back Krakow and then a train to Wroclaw (which is pronounced Vrotes-slav, because the Poles are crazy, but I still call it Row-claw), which is a college city with another cool square and random things to see, including a massive painting that I haven't seen yet. But really, the reason we came here is because when Annie was here last summer, she said it had the best strawberry ice cream in the world, and Kevin has a soft spot for strawberry ice cream. What she didn't tell me, however, was that she didn't really remember where it was. So we spent last night wandering around the city in search of some ice cream stand that might spark her memory. We think we found it, but Annie's still not sure. It was definitely good ice cream, but without the assurance that it is, in fact, the world's best that Annie remember, I'm not sure I'm going to believe.
My itinerary has changed for those who are interested. From Wroclaw, we're going to Warsaw for a few nights, and then we're heading to Berlin for like, a week. From Berlin we're going to Munich (though there might be a random stop somewhere else first). After Munich, we're not quite sure where we're heading, though we think it will be some combination of Austrian Alps (yay, more mountains) and then to the north/east of Italy, where we can catch a ferry to Croatia by the 26th. We'll be in Croatia for a little while, and then heading to Frankfurt, Germany, where we both fly out of on August 7th.
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