I figure I might as well write about Auschwitz while I'm already feeling blah. In Prague at the mo and seem to have a bit of a cold or something. Feeling pretty worn out and my face is sore. I think the Prague and me combination has a hex on it, last time I was here I was in bed sick for three days and hardly saw anything.
Anyway.
I wasn't as affected by Auschwitz as I thought I would be. Maybe because I went to Dachau (outside of Munich) last time I was in Europe, so I'd been through the whole concentration camp thing before. Auschwitz is worse in a way, because they have such a huge quantity of personal effects from the people who died there, and because so many people were sent there with the intention of them being put to death as soon as they arrived. But it was really hard to picture what it would've been like when it was full of people. And it was impossible to imagine having to live there.
The other reason I wasn't as affected as I imagined was that museum we went to in Lithuania. There wasn't anything at Auschwitz that was as graphic as that. I'd already heard about a lot of the stuff they do have, like a room with tonnes of human hair and another one with thousands of shoes and another one with hundreds of prosthetic limbs. That was pretty confronting, but still not as bad as seeing someone shot through the back of the head in full colour.
The original gas chamber at Auschwitz is still there, and we could go inside it and then walk through into the room with the ovens. They have a sign up asking for silence but of course there were two Asian boys talking loudly even though everyone else was being quiet, and there was a group of nuns praying. Which kinda bugged me. But I wasn't sure why, when I thought about it.
There were nuns EVERYWHERE in Poland. I've never seen so many. Every time we went into the streets, every train and bus station, etc etc etc.
I don't quite know what else to say. It was a sad place. We went over to Birkenau too, but there's not much left there. They've left one row of the wooden buildings they made people live in (I can't remember the word right now sorry) and all of the brick ones, and when you drive towards Birkenau it stretches as far as you can see in both directions. You only know the camp stops because you can see the tops of the line of trees at the far end. They also left the railway lines there, which go straight through the main entrance and down the middle of the camp and finish by the gas chambers. And they've left the gas chambers as they found them, in a pile of rubble with the roof caved in.
This might be my shortest blog post so far. Maybe when I write the next one I'll have more to say.
Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Poland - Krakow
I bought a new camera. Dad told me to. The lens on my old one is having a ‘mare, the autofocus doesn’t work and it does this funny clunking thing when you turn the focus ring manually. I went in to look at lenses for my camera, but a lens alone was going to cost me about NZ$600, and I came across a beautiful new Nikon D3100 in the same shop which was NZ$830. I told Dad my lens had sort of carked it but does actually still work, and that I was trying to talk myself out of buying this camera. He said buy the Nikon. My camera was originally his, and he’d already had it repaired once, and he said it’s not worth fixing again. So while we were waiting for our train out of Krakow I went to the electronics shop, which had the same Nikon but with a much better range lens, and it was only about $100 more. So I bought it. I got the camera, the lens, a camera bag, and a memory card, all for about $1000, and I can claim about $160 tax back when I leave the EU. That is SO MUCH less than I’d expect to pay in NZ. I’m so excited!! I’ve always wanted a Nikon.
Other than that, Krakow was like this mad dash the entire time we were there. We arrived by train at lunchtime, that afternoon most of us went on an optional excursion (a trip that Tucan will organise for you but which is not included in the cost of the tour) to the Krakow Salt Mine, then we took a city tour by golf cart the next morning, saw Schinder’s factory at lunchtime, went to Auschwitz that afternoon (which is included in our tour), and took the overnight train to the Czech Republic that night. I would’ve really liked at least one more day in Krakow, I feel like we missed a lot.
The Salt Mine was interesting. Not overwhelmingly so though. We walked down 380 stairs underground, and spent about 2hrs walking through passages and room after room that'd been carved out of the salt.... as you might expect in a mine I suppose. A lot of the rooms had statues in them that had been carved out of the salt. You have to excuse my photos, I hate flashes so everything's at least like 2.5sec exposures.
I am Oz! Being photographed by a million or so other people while my shutter was open!
There were a couple of pretty impressive rooms. The cathedral was the best. It's absolutely ginormous. (That's totally a word and totally how you spell it.)
It has some pretty impressive statues, and carvings on the walls.
This was my favourite thing in the whole mine. The perspective is perfect. It's flat, but when you stand in front of it, it looks like it's been carved right into the wall.
The lights are behind her, not inside. The statue I mean.
Another interesting example of the fact that you can see through pure salt.
I'm not as verbose as usual unfortunately... Bit tired at the moment. Luckily a picture paints a thousand words so I'm already at five thousand and something.
The golf cart city tour was good because it covered everything in the near vicinity. Our hotel was in the coolest street, it was full of little cafes and restaurants and bars, and it was in the old Jewish Quarter. Krakow was pretty beaten-up looking, but I really liked it.
I found out that the reason there are buildings falling down around the place, or at least it's the reason in Krakow, is that there are so many people who they couldn't account for after the war who owned property, and because they didn't know if or when these people or their decendants would show up again they didn't sell the buildings on. I like that the government did that.
Fortifications in the city wall.
This was at... maybe a church I think...
Amanda being very cheeky with someone else's hat. "Quick, take my photo!"
We finished the city tour at Schindler's factory (as in Schindler's List). They made it into a museum, which has only been open for a year. It's an excellent museum. We had to be back at the hotel fed and watered at 130pm, so we only had an hour to get through, and it took that long just to walk from one end to the other. It's more about the war and the persecution of Jewish people than it is particularly about Oscar Schindler, but it was very well done.
Left: Floor tiles
Right: Pots and pans which form the outer walls of a room. Inside it's perfectly round and has the names of the people on Schindler's List all over the walls.
Fantastic museum. Really sorry we didn't have another few hours to spend there.
Lunch. Open baguettes from the best shop in town.
It was in a pagoda in the middle of the market square, along with four other baguette shops.
Monday, 29 August 2011
Poland - Warsaw
The ten hour train trip into Poland wasn’t actually too bad, just really damn boring. Amanda asked if she could read my blog, which I’d just finished writing, and then it somehow turned into her reading it out loud to the other six of us. What I write is more personal than what I would normally say out loud. I’m totally fine with knowing that everybody’s going to read it, but having it read aloud in front of me was quite a strange feeling. I was trying to hide behind Steve.
We got to our hotel at something like 930pm, and the seven of us had decided while we were still on the train to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a proper dinner. While we were en route to the restaurant it started absolutely pouring. I could hardly see out of the car. And there was sheet lightening all around the sky, all evening, but no thunder. It was Ian and Julie’s last night with us, so I’m really glad we went out and did something, but as soon as we finished eating all we wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. Adrian just about had one foot in a taxi by the time we finished paying the bill.
We had a 9am or 930am orientation walk the next day, so Pancakes and Julie came downstairs and checked out at the same time, so we could all say goodbye. It was sad!! Kat cried. Then Julie cried. It’s amazing how quickly you form relationships with people when you travel together, we’d all only known each other for 2 weeks.
Warsaw was so hot!! We walked from the hotel into the old town, and on the way we saw a bear.
When we left, we walked outside and hailed a taxi, and asked to go to Organza. The driver thought we were taking the piss because it was literally right around the corner. We must’ve walked right past it. He took us to a club that he recommended, the Opera Club. They let us straight in, even though they’d turned away the group that were right in front of us, and as soon as we got in the door we knew we were in the right place. It was underground, through these red brick tunnels with arched ceilings and wooden floors, and then you walk into a bigger room with a bar, a DJ, and a dance floor. It was, without any exaggeration, the best club I’ve been to. Everyone was there to dance, not to get wasted, the DJ was amazing, and there was a great atmosphere. Even the bar staff were having a great time. We got there a little after midnight and left at 3am, and Kat and I danced for most of the night. We got Adrian out on the dance floor when Kat went to the bar, and he was a bit of a hit – I got totally elbowed out, every tall girl in the room gravitated toward him (and there were plenty of tall girls there), and I found myself right at the edge of the dance floor. However, it didn’t last long. We need to work on his dance moves.
The next day, to be honest, Kat and I didn’t really get moving until midday. We wandered into town, past the rather naked lady who was sunbathing in the park, Kat went to the post office, we had some lunch, Kat went to sleep at the table, we wandered over to the university library and had a look at the rooftop garden and our second view of naked sunbathing girls for the day, and then we went home again. Hard day. We’d planned to go out for a meal, but the other three had done a tour during the day and been shown a whole lot of great bars, a block away from our hotel, so it was decided we needed to go out again. We had some new people joining our tour that day, so we invited two of them to come with us. Meet Cameron (28) and Marsha (22), mates who are travelling together, who are both Aussies. Dammit! We now have 6 Aussies and me.
We went to three bars along this one street, and by ourselves we would never have found any of them. The last one was around the back of a big industrial looking building, where we sat outside in the courtyard between the buildings and watched Kat and Steve compete at badminton, until someone lost the shuttlecock. There was also some hula hoop action from Kat and Adrian, and a group of boys who were break dancing. Not what we expected to find in the middle of Warsaw. Still, it was a much quieter night than the one before. For most of us anyway, I believe Adrian ended up at the strip club and only got back this morning in time to pick up his backpack before we had to meet at 810am to get on the train to Krakow!
We got to our hotel at something like 930pm, and the seven of us had decided while we were still on the train to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a proper dinner. While we were en route to the restaurant it started absolutely pouring. I could hardly see out of the car. And there was sheet lightening all around the sky, all evening, but no thunder. It was Ian and Julie’s last night with us, so I’m really glad we went out and did something, but as soon as we finished eating all we wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. Adrian just about had one foot in a taxi by the time we finished paying the bill.
We had a 9am or 930am orientation walk the next day, so Pancakes and Julie came downstairs and checked out at the same time, so we could all say goodbye. It was sad!! Kat cried. Then Julie cried. It’s amazing how quickly you form relationships with people when you travel together, we’d all only known each other for 2 weeks.
Warsaw was so hot!! We walked from the hotel into the old town, and on the way we saw a bear.
Adrian does an excellent impression. Rawr...
He did have a friend in there with him, but the friend was far brighter than Fluffy here, and was off under the trees having a snooze. They’re part of the zoo, but their enclosure is outside the entrance, alongside the public footpath. We found out that Adrian does a very funny impression of a bear when he asked a Polish taxi driver if he could feed the bear a rabbit. He was getting a bit obsessive about feeding the bear a rabbit.
Orientation walks are good because we stop at the major churches, castles, and town squares, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t go back to them. Churches do tend to all look the same to me after a while. The old town in Warsaw was very pretty though.
Orientation walks are good because we stop at the major churches, castles, and town squares, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t go back to them. Churches do tend to all look the same to me after a while. The old town in Warsaw was very pretty though.
The first photo shows what was left of the square (shown in the second and fourth photos) after WWII.
It was basically rubble, and they've rebuilt it to look the same as it did before the war.
The third photo is of the old town wall.
After the orientation walk, I went to the Gestapo museum with Amanda, Steve, Adrian, and Kat, which was along the same lines as the KGB building in Vilnius but not quite as graphic. When you walk in the front door, there’s a film playing. We all know how I felt about the last one, so I was a bit nervous. The only visual was portraits of people who’d been victimised in that building, with a voiceover about what had happened. The thing I remember most clearly is that when the war was over and the building was vacated, there was 5,500 kilos of human ash in there. After the film finished, we walked along the corridor and had a look in the cells. A couple of them had been preserved exactly the way they’d been at the end of the war, with bullet holes in the wall opposite the door.
We ended up spending the afternoon shopping. All the women in Warsaw were really beautifully dressed, so I was feeling pretty mangey in my travel clothes and I was dying for something pretty to wear. I got a new dress, and I was really hoping for high heels but couldn’t find any that I liked enough to buy. I’ve failed as a woman.
Kat had booked a single room for that night (before she met me, obviously), so I had a great big twin room to myself. Excellent. Although we were only home for a couple of hours before we met up again to go out for the evening.
It was kind of a strange night all round. I’m not quite sure how else to sum it up. Amanda and Steve had done some homework for us and found out where we should go, so we got a taxi to the Hard Rock Café and walked from there. The idea was that there was plenty in the area, but in the end we walked for something like half an hour before we found a bar. It was called “Players”, as in football, and there was no music and almost nobody there. We decided that since there was nothing else in sight that looked like a bar, we might as well have a drink and see if we could figure out where we should go from there, so we sat outside and watched which direction the girls in short skirts and high heels were walking. Then we got up and walked in the opposite direction. That wasn’t really intentional. Amanda wanted to go to a place called Organza, which was meant to be the best place in town, so we were trying to head for that.
We ended up standing on a street corner, and we could see one place which was called “Bollywood”. So we figured we’d give it a thrash, since we couldn’t seem to pin down anything else. It was certainly very interesting. There were a lot of tables of Indian men. There were five guys at the next table, and they took it in shifts staring at us for most of the time we were there. There were a few other women there, but not a huge number, and quite a high proportion of them appeared to be hookers. There was a DJ too, who was playing Indian music, which was a lot of fun. He wasn’t so good at merging from one song to another though, every now and then there’d be two different rhythms going on at the same time. All part of the fun. We had a couple of drinks and the others shared a shisha, and we played with Adrian’s new camera, and Kat and Amanda even braved up and had a dance. The guys at the next table were absolutely agape.
Mum: He's got a girlfriend.
I had to have this photo in here because it's just so cute.
The girls
Every time we go to have a group photo, Steve stands right in front of me.
The hallway into the club, featuring Kat.
We went to three bars along this one street, and by ourselves we would never have found any of them. The last one was around the back of a big industrial looking building, where we sat outside in the courtyard between the buildings and watched Kat and Steve compete at badminton, until someone lost the shuttlecock. There was also some hula hoop action from Kat and Adrian, and a group of boys who were break dancing. Not what we expected to find in the middle of Warsaw. Still, it was a much quieter night than the one before. For most of us anyway, I believe Adrian ended up at the strip club and only got back this morning in time to pick up his backpack before we had to meet at 810am to get on the train to Krakow!
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Lithuania
So I ended up only taking 12 photos in Lithuania. It was weird and kind of a shame. Also 10 of the photos are of my friends, not of the town itself. The old town was lovely, just like the last two old towns. (Sorry… starting to look forward to a modern city again already! I am such a city girl.) I still should’ve taken photos though. We arrived in Vilnius by public bus and did our usual orientation walk in the afternoon, but I was a bit tired and in a bit of a fog and wanted to be in bed, so didn’t take any photos even though I had my camera around my neck. In fact when Tony suggested that we walk up to the tower to see the view over the town, Adrian, Julie, Kat, Janette and I went for a coffee instead. And spent the time talking about kiddie porn and prostitutes. As you do. Getting a little too familiar maybe… At least we were all of the same opinion on both subjects, that could’ve got awkward fast.
After our walk, the entire group went out for dinner. Our entire group numbers 16, not including Tony, so for everybody to go together is quite an undertaking, and this was only the second time we’ve done it. The first time, we went to Lido restaurant in Riga, Latvia… which turned out to be 20min away by tram, in the middle of a random theme park that I never discovered the name of. It was a bit of a strange experience all round. This time we went to a restaurant in the middle of Vilnius’ old town, so it was easy to get to and easy to get home, which sold it to me straight away. However they led us down to the basement, which smelt weird, and the food was by general consensus not the greatest. We had two tables, and the seven of “us” always grab seats together, and we had Denise and Jason at our table as well, and everyone else at the other. So we didn’t really mix as a group any more than usual, which did sort of defeat the purpose a little. As a tour group we are pretty unusual, we have a 50-year age span between the youngest and the oldest, and the majority are closer to the upper end of the age span. That means that we tend to want to do very different things and have very different budgets, and it has very much become two separate groups. It’s a shame.
The only thing I actually actively went and did in Vilnius was to visit the KGB museum. It’s in an old building that was used by the KGB and various other related agencies during the war and the Soviet reign, which they’ve turned into a museum. It has a prison in the basement and all that kind of thing. My god, it was horrific. The two upper floors were fine, they were about the history of Lithuanians over that period of time, and had all the usual, lots of reading and lots of personal items and weapons that they’d recovered from various places over the years. The worst part was a video about the activities of the KGB etc, which had old photos, including one of five men facing a firing squad of fifteen or twenty, the instant before they opened fire. The prison was ok too, although they kept a lot people in a very small space in some of those cells. There was a sign outside one particular cell, which was about 4x2m, which said that at some points there were 15 to 20 people being kept in that cell at one time. They still had water cells too, which I’d never heard of, where as a punishment you’d have to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room and they’d cover the rest of the floor with about four inches of ice cold water. So if you went to sleep or fell over for whatever reason you’d land in the water.
What was truly terrible was the execution chamber. When you walk in, you come around a corner and through a doorway, and right in front of you is a screen with a short DVD playing on it, which shows how they executed people in very graphic, full colour detail. You might want to skip this bit. They dragged them into the room, gave them a good look at the wall in front of them which was covered in everyone else’s blood, the executioner walked in behind them and shot them point blank through the back of the head, and then they shoved them through a chute and onto the back of a truck, and brought in the next one. Around the edges of the monitor, there are bullet marks all over the wall. By the time I got there I’d dropped off from the rest of the group, and I really wish I’d had someone with me. I will never forget that place. I was so upset and angry and in such shock that I felt physically ill. My heart was pounding and my stomach was burning. What I really needed was someone to grab onto, but me being me I’m too shy to grab someone I’ve known for a week. It took me probably an hour to calm down properly.
We sat outside for a few minutes while we all caught up with each other. Adrian was sitting next to me, and he kept asking “why did they do it?” over and over. Steve’s the war buff so he was fielding all the questions, but he didn’t have any answer. There is no answer.
We decided after that to have a pretty quiet afternoon, and to just wander back into town and find some lunch and a drink. So that was what we did. We looked in shop windows and found a pharmacy while we filled in an hour (we left the museum at 11am and we kinda figured that even on holiday we couldn’t really justify beer at that time of day). Then we found a café where we could sit outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. We got there at midday and left at 5pm. I really needed some time to just sit and relax and listen to the others talk and wait for Amanda’s laxatives to take effect (she’d been blocked up since we had that medieval feast in Estonia, and in the end she took three laxatives and it still took 8 or 9 hours to work, which we then heard about in detail… Adrian really wanted me to put this story on my blog. I would not usually write about other people’s bowel movements). We also all got involved in a big argument, which is still going on, because Julie decided that Ian can have another dog if he buys her a Jag. He’s now offering to take her to the Galapagos Islands instead. She really wants a Jag. He really doesn’t think he should have to fork out $50k just to get a dog. They already have three dogs but Ian wants another so they can have one of each colour. Apparently he doesn’t have a black and white one yet.
We’re all with Julie. Happy wife, happy life, Pancakes.
These are my favourites of the photos I did take:
By the way, what does Snoop Dogg use his umbrella for??.... For drizzle.
After our walk, the entire group went out for dinner. Our entire group numbers 16, not including Tony, so for everybody to go together is quite an undertaking, and this was only the second time we’ve done it. The first time, we went to Lido restaurant in Riga, Latvia… which turned out to be 20min away by tram, in the middle of a random theme park that I never discovered the name of. It was a bit of a strange experience all round. This time we went to a restaurant in the middle of Vilnius’ old town, so it was easy to get to and easy to get home, which sold it to me straight away. However they led us down to the basement, which smelt weird, and the food was by general consensus not the greatest. We had two tables, and the seven of “us” always grab seats together, and we had Denise and Jason at our table as well, and everyone else at the other. So we didn’t really mix as a group any more than usual, which did sort of defeat the purpose a little. As a tour group we are pretty unusual, we have a 50-year age span between the youngest and the oldest, and the majority are closer to the upper end of the age span. That means that we tend to want to do very different things and have very different budgets, and it has very much become two separate groups. It’s a shame.
The only thing I actually actively went and did in Vilnius was to visit the KGB museum. It’s in an old building that was used by the KGB and various other related agencies during the war and the Soviet reign, which they’ve turned into a museum. It has a prison in the basement and all that kind of thing. My god, it was horrific. The two upper floors were fine, they were about the history of Lithuanians over that period of time, and had all the usual, lots of reading and lots of personal items and weapons that they’d recovered from various places over the years. The worst part was a video about the activities of the KGB etc, which had old photos, including one of five men facing a firing squad of fifteen or twenty, the instant before they opened fire. The prison was ok too, although they kept a lot people in a very small space in some of those cells. There was a sign outside one particular cell, which was about 4x2m, which said that at some points there were 15 to 20 people being kept in that cell at one time. They still had water cells too, which I’d never heard of, where as a punishment you’d have to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room and they’d cover the rest of the floor with about four inches of ice cold water. So if you went to sleep or fell over for whatever reason you’d land in the water.
What was truly terrible was the execution chamber. When you walk in, you come around a corner and through a doorway, and right in front of you is a screen with a short DVD playing on it, which shows how they executed people in very graphic, full colour detail. You might want to skip this bit. They dragged them into the room, gave them a good look at the wall in front of them which was covered in everyone else’s blood, the executioner walked in behind them and shot them point blank through the back of the head, and then they shoved them through a chute and onto the back of a truck, and brought in the next one. Around the edges of the monitor, there are bullet marks all over the wall. By the time I got there I’d dropped off from the rest of the group, and I really wish I’d had someone with me. I will never forget that place. I was so upset and angry and in such shock that I felt physically ill. My heart was pounding and my stomach was burning. What I really needed was someone to grab onto, but me being me I’m too shy to grab someone I’ve known for a week. It took me probably an hour to calm down properly.
We sat outside for a few minutes while we all caught up with each other. Adrian was sitting next to me, and he kept asking “why did they do it?” over and over. Steve’s the war buff so he was fielding all the questions, but he didn’t have any answer. There is no answer.
We decided after that to have a pretty quiet afternoon, and to just wander back into town and find some lunch and a drink. So that was what we did. We looked in shop windows and found a pharmacy while we filled in an hour (we left the museum at 11am and we kinda figured that even on holiday we couldn’t really justify beer at that time of day). Then we found a café where we could sit outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. We got there at midday and left at 5pm. I really needed some time to just sit and relax and listen to the others talk and wait for Amanda’s laxatives to take effect (she’d been blocked up since we had that medieval feast in Estonia, and in the end she took three laxatives and it still took 8 or 9 hours to work, which we then heard about in detail… Adrian really wanted me to put this story on my blog. I would not usually write about other people’s bowel movements). We also all got involved in a big argument, which is still going on, because Julie decided that Ian can have another dog if he buys her a Jag. He’s now offering to take her to the Galapagos Islands instead. She really wants a Jag. He really doesn’t think he should have to fork out $50k just to get a dog. They already have three dogs but Ian wants another so they can have one of each colour. Apparently he doesn’t have a black and white one yet.
We’re all with Julie. Happy wife, happy life, Pancakes.
These are my favourites of the photos I did take:
Adrian
Amanda and Steve
Ian and Julie
And these are the photos I took of Vilnius. They’re nothing great unfortunately. You’d think if I was only going to take two I’d at least make them good ones.
Breakfast. The square shit is egg.
Where we had lunch. For five hours.
So today we have something like 10hrs on various trains to get to Poland. Blahhhhh….. Time to go and find someone to talk to!
By the way, what does Snoop Dogg use his umbrella for??.... For drizzle.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)