I'll start off with my study tour from last week and we'll see how long it gets before I split it up. This study tour was for our history class on the rise and fall of the Third Reich and Hitler. We went to Prague (Czech Republic), Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and Krakow (Poland). But before all that, we had to fly through Milan to save some money and when we stayed in a hotel near the airport we got some real good Italian food. Unfortunately, the dinner also ran late (Italy, not surprised) and we ended up only getting about 3 hours of sleep that night before we were up at 4 for our 8am flight (wait, WHAT!? yeah, we were all puzzled too). Needless to say, I took a little nap in the terminal. Then we were on our way to Prague! This was my first experience with WizzAir, a budget airline like Ryanair and I liked it better for some reason.
Anyways, once we got to Prague, we were immediately carted off on a EIGHT HOUR WALKING TOUR. This did not go over well, not least because on top of the fact none of us could sleep, the tour guide practically whispered into his microphone and the speaker didn't work. And it was freezing. By the time lunch rolled around, if he had pointed out one more building demonstrating baroque architecture, I might have keeled over. Aaand then lunch wasn't much better because he took us to a medieval themed restaurant underground (aka, still had to wear my winter coat to keep warm) where you couldn't see more than a foot in front of your face, the ambiance music included sound clips of a woman screaming, and they served us lackluster food. Don't worry though, there is food redemption later on in the trip. Needless to say, by 6pm we were ecstatic to get back to our hotel.
And then the best part of Prague happened. Remember how I was reading Harry Potter? Report: I finished all 7 books before I saw the movie. IN PRAGUE. With Czech subtitles. We had bought tickets online before we left and I was so excited to see the movie! For about five minutes leading up to the movie starting I was sitting in my seat just PRAYING I hadn't accidentally bought us tickets for a Czech voiceover (even though I had checked and double checked this multiple times online). And for once, I wasn't disappointed by it, which is a borderline miracle since I had just read all the books. So that was excellent. After Harry, we went back to the hotel and crashed, ready for a day of traveling the next day.
:: Deathly Hallows in Prague ::
We finally got to sleep in on Sunday before we boarded the bus for our ride to Oswiecim (Auschwitz). We watched Schindler's List on the way, which was interesting because I had never seen that movie before. In fact, I didn't even know what it was about and I wasn't paying attention when our professor introduced the movie, so I was moderately surprised when Schindler turned out to be a good guy. That night we stayed at a beautiful hotel in the town where we had a great dinner. Since we were missing Thanksgiving last week, I was pretty sad about not getting my aunt's amazing mashed potatoes. HOWEVER. This Polish restaurant had mashed potatoes just like homemade ones at home. I don't think I have any Polish in my family (and I'm about to feel really silly if I do), but all of the food I had in Poland was like comfort food from home. It was weird.
The next day we went to two of the three Auschwitz camps, Auschwitz I (a concentration camp) and Auschwitz II - Birkenau (the death camp). It's hard to really describe what was there… I mean, I could describe it but I don't think it would really encompass being there, so maybe I'll just show people pictures when I get home. Needless to say, it was a pretty devastating place to be, especially after reading a very in-depth book about the Auschwitz camps. The plaque on the memorial in Birkenau said "For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe." We had another long bus drive to Krakow after that and I remember thinking about the stories they told us in Auschwitz and some of the interviews with SS guards in our book and thinking that the people who did this were normal people who, yes, were inundated with propaganda, but made the choices themselves. I just sat on the bus and thought, I have never seen a clearer picture of the capacity humanity has to do evil. How can anyone look at that and not think that there's something wrong in the world - that something is broken? I was just hit again with our need, humanity's need - my need - for God and was overwhelmed with his undeserved grace for us.
:: Tracks in Birkenau ::
:: Memorial in Birkenau ::
I could do a whole post on Auschwitz itself, I think, but those were just my basic thoughts.
We spent the night in Krakow and got dinner at a traditional Jewish restaurant that was very good. They also had some Jewish musicians playing and I got a cd because I liked them so much! Then on Tuesday morning we went on a walking tour of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. It was pretty small for the amount of people they forced to live there. They had a monument in the main square where people would be selected for camps that was just a bunch of empty chairs, reminiscent of how, when the ghetto was entirely cleared, only chairs and furniture remained littered on the streets. After that we visited Schindler's factory, which had been converted into an amazing WW2 interactive museum. I honestly could have spent hours in there, but we had one hour to rush through. After that we visited a lot of churches (honestly, they're really starting to run together by this point) and a palace. We attended a Chopin concert in the evening as well. In the morning we woke up and visited the old Jewish Quarter where many Jews lived before being moved to the ghetto. Many scenes of Schindler's list were filmed here instead of the real ghetto because it better suited the filmmakers. We also got to see the last practicing synagogue in Krakow and walk through their cemetery. They had a wall in the cemetery made entirely out of tombstones that they Nazis had broken and used to pave roads.
After that, the rest of our class was moving on to a salt mine outside of Krakow, but Aunna, Brad, Jimmy, and I had to catch a train to Budapest.
And thus began our misadventures with the eastern european train system. First of all, our Eurail passes didn't work in Poland so we had to pay for our train tickets to the border of the country (go look at a map; Krakow is CLOSE TO THE BORDER) for a whopping 294 zloty (or roughly $100). To put this in perspective, Aunna and Brad bought tickets all the way to Budapest for something like $20 more than we paid. But it gets better. We get on our first train, which would put us in for our next connection with 30 minutes to spare, and it looked like a leftover from Communism. Seriously, we were concerned about it making it to the next station at all. But it chugged along and we got there on time, killed some time trying to spend our leftover Polish currency, and told funny stories. Then our train was 20 minutes delayed. No big deal yet; we could still potentially catch our connection to Budapest. Then while en route, our train became FORTY minutes late. Yeah, definitely missed that connection. We were stuck in Breclav, Czech Republic. The conductor of the train told us the next train that went to Budapest was at 4:47am and said there was a hostel next to the train station where we could get rooms. It looked more like a crack house than a hostel, which would have been fine except it was closed. So we got directions for another hostel 25 minutes away and were joined by Amy and Cole, from Canada, who were backpacking around Europe and were in the same conundrum we were in. They will henceforth be referred to as Canada. It should also be mentioned that at 8 o'clock at night, Breclav is already a ghost town. So we rolled up to our hostel, which turned out to be a hockey stadium, and were confusedly shunted around to the back of the stadium where there was a sign that said hotel. We followed the signs upstairs to find a locked and dark reception desk (at 8pm!). I wandered into the bar downstairs, and tried to ask for rooms to sleep in (pointing up and saying hotel, sleep, ect) but he definitely didn't speak any English. But he did speak German, so I ran to grab Jimmy and Brad, our resident conversation German students, who managed with broken German to get us some rooms. We woke up around 3:30 to leave for our train and, get this, the receptionist was back again. Seriously!? We also noticed on our walk back that there were more cars driving around at 4am than at 8pm. What was this place? Thankfully on the train I found a compartment with three open seats and was able to stretch out and use my coat as a pillow, so in the end I got a lot of sleep.
:: even though they were all late, at least they had compartments like the Hogwarts Express! ::
We got to Budapest, took out new currency (Again! I used three new currencies on this trip and when we finally got back to the Eurozone it was beautiful), and then went to find our hostel. There was a few transportation blips, once when Canada got us on the wrong bus and then again when Brad followed Canada off the bus at the wrong stop - just goes to show you should never listen to Canada - but we finally got back to our hostel. There were the nicest people and it was so ridiculously cheap - only about 6 euro a night! Plus they didn't make us pay for missing the night because of our train problems. They were so great. Once we had rested up a bit and taken showers, we ventured off into Budapest. This was Thanksgiving, so we were determined to find some good food, even if it couldn't be like at home. Hungary did NOT disappoint. We got some amazing goulash for lunch and then walked through the food market across the street that had some of everything. After that we walked over to the Buda side of the river and climbed up to see the castle and St Matthias church and various other tourist attractions. The Parliament building is absolutely beautiful, but we never did get to see it up close.
:: Parliament building we only even saw from across the river. oops ::
That night we were planning to see an opera, which we had found $2 tickets for in the nosebleeds. We found a restaurant nearby and ate hamburgers (Amurica!) for Thanksgiving dinner. Actually, it was probably one of the best hamburgers I've ever had, so that was a phenomenal success. The opera was… interesting. It was Fidelio by Beethoven and I knew the basic synopsis of the story but they took some straaaange liberties with staging and costuming. Plus it was a German opera and the subtitles (or supertitles, since they were above the stage) were in Hungarian. We had enough culture by intermission and peaced out. It did make me want to see an opera with English subtitles though because I think if I knew what they were saying I would have really enjoyed it. After that we went to a 24hour Match grocery store (take note, Luxembourg!) and bought a tub of ice cream that we shared for Thanksgiving dessert. It sort of turned into a lawless free-for-all in which Brad attacked me with his spoon. No lie.
The next day we went to the CHRISTMAS MARKET. It was GLORIOUS! It was like getting hit in the face with Christmas. It was set up in a square with tons of stands selling everything and there was all sorts of good food there. We wandered all over for awhile, taking it in, and then started buying things. I got a beautiful new journal, an ornament for our Christmas tree, and lots of food including some sort of cinnamon sugar fried dough and spiced hot white wine. Ohh man. I am going to have to learn to make spiced wine for my 21st. Tres delicieux.
:: enjoying the Christmas market with my friend Aunna ::
After we spend a VERY long time in Christmas land, we decided we should probably see the rest of Budapest. This time we stayed on the Pest side of the River and saw another church (I REALLY liked this church but couldn't get my camera to take a good picture), and then up the main street to see Hero's square and another castle. Then… we went back to the Christmas market. There was a famous cafe near the market called Gerbeaud, so we darted in there for a quick cup of coffee and some of their famous cakes. They were okay. Then CHRISTMAS MARKET again, where we got delicious dinner for cheap. It was even more exciting at night because there were musicians and people everywhere. One thing that I did like about Budapest was that it had cool things to see, but it was not very touristy and everything was cheap. I charged one of my more "expensive" meals to my credit card and was only charged $10!
Then, once again, we had to get up early for a train. It was like we weren't even on vacation. When we woke up in the morning, it was rain-snowing and we had to slosh our way through not just puddles, but entire sidewalks submerged in three inches of melty snow water.
Guess what happened to our train. It came on time but was slowed down by the snowstorm. We were on our way to Salzburg, where we were booked to go on the Sound of Music tour, and had a connection through Vienna. We were on the edge of our seats as we pulled into Vienna because it was far past the time our next train was supposed to leave, but thankfully there was another train leaving just as we got there. We had to RUN up a mountain (ok, hill) to our hotel, but we made it to the tour. I wasn't super excited about the tour, but my friend Aunna had been looking forward to it all week. It ended up being really cool. We saw where many of the scenes from the movie were filmed and the bus took us our into the mountains to some smaller towns that were very nice. We also randomly ran into some friends from Miami on the tour and ended up getting dinner with them later that night after exploring some more Christmas markets. It was a fun day after the initial train stress.
Sunday morning we slept in and then got on our train home to Luxembourg. We thought this time, for sure, there would be no problems. We were going to be on German trains. We only had one connection. There was a forty minute buffer of time that the train could be late and we could still make it. No. Our train STOPPED ON THE TRACKS. At least twice. I sat there thinking you have GOT to be kidding me. Eventually our train pulled into the station 40 minutes late and we sprinted for our train to Luxembourg. Thank GOD we made it, or it would have been a long night.
And that was my last long week of travel! It was very fun and I really enjoyed seeing another side of Europe in the east, even if their trains could be an epic fail. I'll go through and put pictures in this at some point. It's kinda long and I'm exhausted just from writing it.
ps. SNOWBOARDING IN FRANCE TOMORROW.
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