Stephen’s Travels

We spent about 3 hours on the bus today riding from Krakow to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I cannot explain everything we saw there. I have several pictures, but there were so many things that I do not comprehend. Piles and piles of shoes, hair, glasses, brushes, suitcases. How could this happen. We also stood inside the gas chambers that murdered so many people only 60 years ago.

I will of course, provide more details when I return, I am not at my computer now and all of my pictures and notes are not with me.

Unfortunately, I am sitting in an internet cafe in Brno, Czech Republic after a nice hike through a city I have never been to at night. Luckily I am fairly good with a map and was able to get the six of us there safely. The keyboard and everything on it are goofy and switched around, hopefully I can get us all back to the hotel alright too

Tomorrow we will be heading to Prague, which from what I hear is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, If not the most beautiful. We will be spending a couple days there, so it will give a good amount of time to look around on our own, as we have been somewhat rushed to date.

Another interesting thing about tonight is that there is evidently a hockey game going on that is fairly important because the whole city is our where we are and cheering for their team.

I will write again later, if I can find an internet cafe in Brno, Czech Republic. But today has been a dark dreary day. Hopefully you all understand my briefness, I do have more pictures but my time is limited and all I have time to upload was from yesterday.

Hopefully everything is going good back at home.

-Steve

have to hurry and write about this day. We walked around the Jewish quarter and in the largest town square in Poland here. I have a lot of stories to tell about but, I have to type quickly as I am at a cafe outside Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is a movie starting in a couple minutes so I must get going.

All I can say is that Krakow was a short trip and we didn’t do much there.

Edit: I should include that we took some time at the memorial that stands just outside of the city. The particular memorial is located where the camp Plaszov used to stand.

After I woke up at 7:30am, which is 10:30pm in California we had breakfast in the hotel. If you look at the hotel listings below, you can see just how nice it actually is. Breakfast was very delicious and had most things one would find in a hotel breakfast; eggs, bacon, rolls, juice. It also had some meats, fish, and of course, sausage.

After that, Chris, Roxi, Robin, and I went out on a morning stroll around Warsaw. I didn’t bring my camera for that but I think you can take my word for it. We went to the local supermarket and looked around at Polish groceries for a little bit. We needed to be back at 10:00am because we were having a guide show us around where the Jewish Ghetto was during WWII. Obviously, there was not much to see now except a few walls and a couple original buildings. It is hard to believe that there were 450,000 people crammed into 2ish square miles. We also went to the Jewish Historical Museum and looked around a bit. Here are several pictures.

What used to be the largest Jewish synagogue in the world was next door to the building that contained the Jewish museum, but it’s space is now occupied by a large office building. Sigh.

We looked at a few more monuments then headed back to the hotel so Chris and I could find a cafe.