Krakow, Poland 05-07-2017

 

Hello Everyone,

So this post will be about my travel times in Krakow, Poland. This trip was part of my Eastern European travels during May/June 2017. This trip took place in the middle of finals period and it started in Poland and went to Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Ukraine was already talked about in the previous post so I recommend you to read. With the Red Brick Universities in England we started in the end of September and ended in late March. After that we would have an Easter break for a month and return in May and take finals from early May- the end of June. I remember having my 2 hardest finals on May 5th and 6th which were my Concrete/Steel Structures, and German finals. My railway research papers were done and submitted. The last two finals were in the End of June which I did not care to put much time to study for. I was like the hell with studying for a whole month when I can be travelling to other places and the weather in Europe was getting nicer at this time.

The travel path that I took started from Birmingham, UK to Krakow, Poland taking the terrible Ryan air flight. The flight was only 19.99 Pounds-Sterling or Quid for short. Pretty much you can fly anywhere within the EU for under 30 quid one way through Ryan Air or Easy Jet. The picture below shows Krakow structures which have the very old European look.

 

I decided to visit Auschwitz and the Salt Mines while I was in Poland because I only had two days there. I stayed in this really hostel also that feed us breakfast and dinner! I was shocked that a hostel was willing to feed us. On the first day I decided to visit the Salt Mines which about an hour train ride outside of the city.  When I got there I had to wait for the guide to take us down the shaft which was like a mile underground there were so many damn stairs I had to walk up and down to get to the bottom which had to be about 1 Km underground. These mines are over 6,000 years old in the old days salt was extracted from here and traded across the world. These mines were built and reinforced with only wood structures because metal does not react well in the present of Na (Salt for my non science people). It has something to due with the ions of salt that gives out and bonds with steel which makes it corrode faster. With wood this is not an issue and to make the wood stronger they coat the wood with Na (Salt) which turns the wood white and preserves the wood even better.

There were so many chambers in this mine to where you could have easily gotten lost and separated from the group. Also there are holes drilled to the surface to allow for fresh air to enter the mines to the worker will not suffocate since the mines are so deep that air does not usually flow down there. It was a very interesting experience and we were able to lick the walls to taste the salt. We were also able to collect our own salt. One of the chambers had a full out cathedral in it that is still being used for prayers which is really cool. Imagine travelling underground into a mine every Sunday for church service. The floors were also made of salt which made the floor very slippery and they wanted to keep everything dry since salt easily dissolves in water. I even bought some blue mineral filled rocks and some salt from the mines and brought it back home with me.

 

After the Salt mines I decided to travel to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.  For people who do not know Auschwitz it was the largest death camp in the Nazi regime it was open up until the end of WWII. When I got there we had to go in tours in the camp and some reason they put me in a French speaking group by the time I realized it was too late the tour started. So I was walking around with the group and everyone speaking French and I am looking confused. Being physically in this place gave you a bloodless feeling. At the entrance there is a sign that says, “Arbeit Mach Frei” which means work will set you free which we all know was all a lie. It got worse the deeper you went inside the camp because there was posters that showed that 1.3 million people were in Auschwitz and about 1.1 million people were murdered there. There is a network map of all of the camps around Europe.

There were rooms filled with the shoes of all of the people that were murdered at the camp. There were their dishes also that were piled up and also their hair and hair brushes. Also I went into the different buildings and would see gas chambers, oven rooms, and other death rooms which were horrifying to look at.  You can see from the picture below that they used these poison pellets to gas people to death which I believe were originally used for killing rats. It is difficult to put much in words about this experience here but, it is scary and horrific of the evil capability that humans have. There are a lot of horrific things that human have done to each other and it always seem to start with this extreme sense of nationalism or some type of target hate propaganda against vulnerable groups of people. The sad thing about today it seems that we still have not learned our lesson about this type of hateful speeches and actions and the consequences of dividing people will lead to.

 

 

The last night of me in Krakow I decided to bar crawl with the hostel and the hostel provided us all with jello shots which are the worse! I have not learned my lesson about messing with jello shots after my years of undergraduate in Arizona. I made quite a few Polish friends here and they wanted to show me a good time by having a drinking contest with me which turned out terrible for me. I will never compete to drink with eastern European people again.  I was so drunk that I do not even remember most of the night.  I knew that I destroyed that hostel bed and they were pissed off at me and I felt bad about it. This was the probably the most drunk I have ever been since ASU freshman year and boy I felt it the next day with a wicked hangover and I had to catch a train to Prague. This train ride was a nightmare with me feeling sick and the motion of the train and I stopped drinking for awhile after Poland. What made it worse was I had a whole compartment to myself and was recovering well and then this woman got on the train with her fetid 3 dogs and ended up in same room as me. The dogs were not supposed to be in the room but I didn’t really care I had other problems to worry about at that moment trying to recover. Those dogs’ rancid smell triggered me to feel more sick than before and I warned her that I might vomit everywhere with dogs in there and she was like it can’t be that bad and sure enough it all came out and her dogs were laying right under my feet and I accidentally vomited on them.  I was so embarrassed that train ride.

 

Poland was definitely an interesting place to visit and also to learn about history. I was shocked that they did not use Euros since they are in the EU.

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