Krakow

After sleeping the first morning away due to my lack of sleep on the overnight train - whoops. we headed out of the house around 1pm to get food and walk around the city. Jacek, one of the flatmates of Pawel's that is also on CS and became our co-host for the week took us around. He's a little shy with his English skills so the first hour or so was pretty silent but as the week went on and he got more comfortable with us he spoke a lot more. His English is really good, he just doesn't have very much confidence in his language skills. Hopefully CS will help him become more comfortable because he did great this week with us and as much as we tried to convince him of this he wasn't convinced unfortunately. But once he did start to open up more and we got to talking he definitely became one of my favorite people so far. He is so sweet. Most of the Polish boys we came across were actually. They kept saying it's "Polish Hospitality" at first I wasn't sure if this was true or not, but there is something about the Polish boys here that is different from all of the other countries we've been to so far. The biggest example of this is that they would literally run in front of us in order to open the door for us. And once the door was open by one of them, the rest would stop and make sure that we went through the door first. I guess it was a ladies first mentality. It was sort of ridiculous how often this happened and every time I was thrown off by it. The boys in America I know are not like this. Not that they aren't polite, it's just that the boys here were so aggressive about it. It almost became comical by the end of it, but it was a lot of fun being treated like a 'lady' haha.

Anyways, the first day was just a lot of walking around, seeing the local Castle and center square. Then we made dinner and planned out what we wanted to do the rest of the week. The weather wasn't great and we wanted to do a couple big trips to the salt mines and Aucshwitz Concentration Camps so we had to do a little more planning than necessary. After this we were both tired and had a long week ahead of us (little did we know how long it was going to be...) so we headed to bed.

The next day Pawel was our own personal tour guide and took us around the Jewish Quarter, which included a Synagogue and cemetary plus just the general area where everyone lived, worked and drank. For lunch we headed for some street food called zanipanki. It was essentially their version of a french bread pizza. But with weird toppings cause everything in other countries has bizarre toppings compared to what we are used to, ha. Throughout the week we found out that Poland is in love with mushrooms and cabbage. This had it's positive and negative sides. The negative: I don't like cabbage at all so I had to find things without cabbage or look like a child and not eat it. Hilary had the same problem with mushrooms. Every time there were mushrooms on something (and they often didn't tell us when it was on something, it was just assumed it was going to be) she had to pick each mushroom off. She got made fun of a couple of times for it, I felt bad for her. Cabbage was easier to not seem picky about cause I just didn't order things with cabbage on the side. The positive of this was that I have never been a huge fan of mushrooms either. It's not so much the taste that gets me, but the texture. But here, it was on so much and I didn't want to go through the process of picking them off that I just ate them. I think I've trained myself to eat them now. Not sure if I could do it plain still, but I can successfully eat them in pasta, pizza, omelettes and anything else they are included in. Yay. Go me for slowly but surely becoming an adult... ew, actually I don't know if I like that now that I've written it down. :/

That afternoon was pretty bad weather so we ended up just going back to the boys' place and hanging out for awhile. We haven't had that much downtime during the day the whole trip. It was weird cause I was so used to going and it felt like there was a whole city out there waiting to be explored and we were just chillen inside. On the other hand, Poland was our halfway point so it was sort of nice taking things slow and relaxing a bit. It was especially a good idea with the night we had. It started with a couple beers at home. Then we went to a bar to meet some of their friends and had another. The bar was karaoke that night though so we moved on the a club. The club was pretty empty when we first got there, but a couple of more beers later we were all on the dance floor having a blast. We even got Hilary to dance...thanks to the help of alcohol. The boys were really fun to dance with. Especially Jacek. He seemed to end up to be my partner that night and he spent the night spinning me around the dance floor. So much fun. By the end of the night we had even made up a secret handshake that somehow  included an awkward turtle, haha. Love that guy. At the club we somehow ended up having four more rounds of beer in addition to everything else. The end of the night was sort of a mess. We got everyone home...although some dragging was involved. Not by me though :) I held up nicely thank god. But I was definitely more drunk than usual at 7 beers. I guess I probably shouldn't admit this, but I've have my fair share of beer filled nights and usually 7 over a course of an entire night does not affect me the way it did that night.

The next morning (or should I say afternoon) we woke up not feeling our usual 100%. I was still confused by how drunk we had gotten. After doing a little more investigative work it turns out Polish beers are on average TWICE as strong as American beers. Awesome. So instead of having 7 I pretty much had an equivalent alcohol amount of 14 beers! Well, that explains that. I guess alcohol content is something we should start noticing before we start drinking. You live, you learn...

Our plan was to go to Aucshwitz today (it is now Thursday) but we wanted a full day there and it was noon by the time we got out of bed so we decided on the salt mines instead. We took a bus there and made it in time for the last tour of the day. Tour guides were required to enter. The tour itself was pretty cool. It's like an entire underground city down there. Salt lined the walls, obviously, and throughout the years the miners had carved out figures going as far as creating an entire snow white and seven doors theme. There were also several chapels and even a huge church in the middle of the mine. This church was seriously the size of a normal gigantic church, but hundreds of meters in the ground and made entirely out of salt. Ridiculously cool. It is one of the most unique and breathtaking things I've seen so far. There were carvings along all the walls, statues of all the normal religious figures and even gigantic chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Apparently a lot of people get married there as well. I can see why, it is gorgeous.

After the salt mines the boys had already eaten dinner so Hilary and I set out on our own. We eventually found a restaurant that looked good and walked in. The whole trip we have been eating pretty cheaply and good food but not anything like steaks and whatnot. Well we decided to change that here. Poland is the cheapest country we've been to and since it was our halfway point (this was our excuse for splurging on things) we decided to treat ourselves. Oh. My. God. I am so lucky we did. I had garlic cream soup, Gypsy steak which was a cut of pork wrapped in bacon and topped with fried onions and garlic butter -- hello heart attack on a plate -- and we shared the 7 colors of the rainbow desert which was 7 scoops of ice cream with fruit and chocolate and caramel toppings. Talk about a mouth orgasm. Each course was so amazing. I'm really sad we couldn't go back there. Definitely the best 2 eating hours of my life. My mouth is watering again right now just thinking about it.

That night Jacek went to a bbq and invited us along but we were getting up early to go to Auschwitz and were still trying to recover from the night before so we passed and went to bed instead.

Friday morning we successfully got up early and made our bus to Auschwitz thanks to some frantic walking through town with a map while it was raining on us. The comical part was we realized the bus stopped at the stop right next to the boys' house after we had walked about 30min to get to the main station. It wasn't so comical at the time, unfortunate. Oh well. All part of traveling. The bus ride was about an hour and a half and we also were required to have a tour guide here so we made it in time for the 10:30 English tour.

Auschwitz was something both of us had been preparing for most of the trip. Hilary has Jewish heritage and I've always been really interested in WWII so this was something we both really wanted to experience. The camp itself is now a museum for people to visit and learn about how it was run and the affect it had on the lives (and deaths) of millions of people during WWII. During their operation, the camps were split into 3 different subcamps. Two of them are set up for visiting now. Our tour guide was really good and gave a lot of interesting information. It is the once place I really wanted a guide for that reason. The 'museum' itself was packed though. A ton of people were visiting and all being hurded along having to follow their respective guide. Because there were so many people we didn't really get to look at all the artifacts and read the information as thoroughly as I would have liked.

It is a draining day hearing about all the awful things the people at this camp were put through. All the torture, starvation, experimentation, punishment and death that took place is overwhelming. Especially because of the petty reasons these people were put through all of this. We heard all of the statistics, saw the pictures of people being led to the gas chambers, children and mothers being convinced they were just taking a shower and a half an hour later 2,000 dead people were being checked for gold teeth, their jewelry being removed, their hair shaved to sell and their bodies thrown in to crematories and their ashes spread in the local lake. Awful. The most surreal part of it was being inside of the gas chambers. They actually take you through it and you see where the holes were that they'd drop the poison in and where they then took the bodies to be burned. Standing in this room made of bricks underground and looking up at the little holes of light and realizing that this is where hundreds of thousands of people were killed over a span of 4 years.

I could talk about this more but it really just continues to be depressing and hopefully most of you know the basics of the Holocaust. Anyone that wants to know more though can definitely email me or I will tell you about it in person in a few weeks.

That night the boys were going to a concert which they bought us tickets for and then to some parties for Juwenalia, which is a student's week in Poland where everyone pretty much just parties for an entire week every year. I think the closest equivalent we have is Spring Break, but Juwenalia happens while they still have classes. Except they all get Friday off to celebrate the annual 'holiday'. The concert was fun and there were a ton of people there. We got there during the first band, which was actually really awful, but the second band was a lot better and fun to listen to. Of course it was in Polish so I couldn't understand anything that was going on. We successfully pushed our way up to the stage though and then ended up in a Polish mosh pit - sweet. I felt like Hilary's boyfriend though trying to keep her from getting hurt, haha. I love being the man in our traveling relationship. Once the second band was over with the boys wanted to leave to go to a "bar-b-que" at the dorms. Now I quote this because this is the loosest form of the word BBQ I have ever heard.

We leave the concert, pick up alcohol and head to the dorms. I figured this was just going to be a bunch of college kids hanging out on a porch or something grilling some sausages. Oh. My. God. Was I wrong. We walk up on to the front lawn and through the passage way between the dorms and walk into a huge open grass area that is filled with thousands of students. Literally thousands. I think the estimate was around 4,000 total. Amazing. People were drinking, dancing, singing, grilling and generally just having the time of their lives. It was around 11 or midnight at this point so it was pretty dark out, there was music and lights coming from a stage someone on the grass area that we never made it to and people had been drinking all day so this was essentially a huge Polish shit-show. I loved it. I met a TON of people there, most of them drunk boys. I even got proposed to twice, so that's cool, haha. I tried some genuine delicious polish vodka and learned how to drink it correctly. The night was a great success.

The next morning was full of more walking around and souvenir shopping. We had sunshine though so it was really nice to see the city with some light finally. Poland is apparently known for their Amber so Hilary and I both got some jewelry in addition to our normal souvenirs. I got a ring which I really like and am excited for. It needs to be resized when I get home but I hardly ever find jewelry that I can see myself wearing constantly and I'm hoping this will be one of those rare finds!

That night we went to a house party of Pawel's friends. This was a huge contrast to the "BBQ" we were at the night before as there were 10ish of us total. It was a ton of fun though getting to know everyone and actually being able to have real conversations. We also drank the traditional Polish way where there is only 1 shot glass and everyone takes turns drinking in a circle until all the alcohol was gone. It was great. We literally sat in a circle, got a bunch of snack foods and put them in the middle for everyone to eat and then just passed around the shot glass for a couple of hours. Once in a while people would get lost in conversation and it'd go 20 minutes or so without a shot being taken and then finally someone would take it and pass it on. I love this way of drinking and am in full support of bringing it back to the states. It's a great way to just have a bunch of people get together for a fun night of drinking without getting overly trashed.

The next morning was Sunday and we randomly decided to go to another city in Poland called Wroclaw for the night so we caught an early train there which meant we had to get up at 7:30 - ouch. The boys escorted us to the train station and we caught a 9am train to a new city in Poland. The train ride was much less eventful than the last one. I pretty much just slept uncomfortably the whole way.