We are on our third day in Krakow and I absolutely adore it. ('Three days,' you say? 'I thought you were only going to be there for two.' Yeah, yeah, we missed our morning train to Prague by about a minute and a half. Bye bye train. But it's okay because by taking a night train tonight we'll save money on a hostel anyway. Plus, Krakow turned out to be awesome. So we can pretend like it was all intentional.)
We arrived on Wednesday morning after taking a night train from Berlin. Night trains are totally rad. It's funny though, the people who come through the trains to check tickets and passports nearly give us heart attacks. On the train from Hamburg to Berlin we had a burly German woman barge in, and on the last train we had some train-men-dudes burst through the door around midnight when we went over the border. haha. Nothing like a good start to get the adrenaline going. (As a side note, every time we get on a train we talk about how we feel like we are in Harry Potter. The day trains feel like the Hogwarts Express because of the compartments, and the night trains feel like the Knight Bus because of the beds. So fun. Yeah, we're nerds.)
Anyway, Krakow turned out to be very pretty. We spent the first day exploring the castle and the church around the corner from the hostel. According to legend, a dragon ate a goat at the castle's dungeon and then drank itself to death, or something similarly exciting, so we took touristy pictures with the dragon statue. I had a kind of neat moment walking around the crypt of the church. There was this tiny stained window at the top corner of this one room, so that a bit of light came in, and I was like, "Wow, back in California, I had no idea that there was a little tiny stained glass window in the basement of a pretty church in Krakow. And now I do know." And...you all do too, now. I'm not sure why that struck me so but I thought I'd share.
Our second day here, yesterday, was a big day. We visited the Auschwitz concentration camp. I'm not sure I really want to go into detail on what it was like- you all can certainly read about it yourself but I'm not sure if anything will quite explain it. I had read about it myself and been to the Museum of Tolerance and read Elie Weisel's memoir Night and it still caught me off guard. Honestly, it was just very intense.
It makes you wonder, really, how something like that could happen. There are a thousand explanations, of course- ignorance, hate, apathy, doing horrible things because you somehow feel you're doing something right- but it's just so hard to grasp.
Well, I gotta go...the hostel has communist internet, by which I mean we all get a half hour free and but can't buy extra time, so now I've got this big lineup behind me for their half hour of free Internet time. Talk to you all soon!
Love,
Sara
P.S. Someone please forward this to Jimmy and Nancy Follmer, since I haven't had a chance to fix their email address in my mailing list yet. Thank you!
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