Moving too fast! Catching up with Krakow.

Ok, I'm falling behind in posts again... I almost feel it's more difficult to write when I have free internet, because there's always someone waiting for me to get off.

So I'm now in Vilnius for a few days, after four days in Krakow, a day in Warsaw, and a truly stupendous night bus experience (Surprisingly, it wasn't actually as bad as I'd imagined, but I still prefer, say, a good ice cream cone, for example).

Krakow was a few days of drunken madness, mostly. Most notable was Flamingo hostel, the best hostel I've stayed in, and incidentally, rated the best hostel in the world in 2007 by HostelWorld. The rooms were clean, beds comfortable, and everyone there was really fun. They had a British guy with crazy long red hair whose job title was "party guide". And having the entire rest of the staff consist of incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and gorgeous women probably doesn't hurt their reviews.

I also saw a real live fire breathing dragon! Ok, would you believe a mechanical fire-breathing dragon? No? How about a motorcycle with a headlight shining? Tin can with a hole in it on a sunny day?

Sorry bout that. Saw Get Smart somewhat recently, and well, it just came out. No, but seriously I did see a mechinzaed fire-spouting dragon. Legend has it that a shoemaker named Krak killed a dragon, won the hand of the princess, became King and founded Krakow. So they like dragons now, I guess. I saw the dragon at Wawel Hill - there's a castle and a cathedral, which has tombs and a bell tower. The bell tower was tiny and fun to climb, and I could not figure what drove the language choices on the plaques of the royal tombs. All had Polish, and some French, some English, none both, seemingly at random. The sign asking for donations just had English - no Polish. Go figure.

The rest of Krakow's sightseeing was mostly accomplished via a bike tour. It was interesting, but about halfway through we started getting into the WWII history, and then I realized that the next trhee weeks of tourism will all be incredibly depressing. We saw the ghetto and heard the real story of Oscar Schindler outside his factory. Most poignant to me was the Jewish cemetery. It was completely overgrown, with gravestones spilled every which way. Before the war, there were 60,000 Jews out of 250,000 people in Krakow. After, 1500 survived, and they all immediately fled to America, Australia, and after a couple years, Israel. The reason the Jewish cemetery is in such disrepair is that the people buried there either have no descendants or have none in Europe. There's just no one left to look after it.

To continue the Jewish theme, we watched Everything Is Illuminated that night. Fantastic movie - I highly recommend it. Just maybe not right before a party. Though as we proved, enough alcohol can overcome anything.

Finally, the next day, I went to Aushwitz-Birkenau. Got roped into a kinda ripoff tour, but whatever. So the Nazis blew up most of the "evidence" at all the camps before the war ended, so most of what's at Birkenau is rubble. There was a barrack. Orignaly sleeping 52 horses, it managed to fit 400 people. Yeah... Aushwitz had one intact gas chamber/crematorium, and collections of all the things that were found whan the Russians got there.

It was roughly as miserable an experience as you'd imagine it to be. Talking to people after, they all cracked at different points. For some it was the collection of human hair, and some it was the shoes. For me, the photo of child medical experiments was pretty bad, but I sorta flipped when I saw all the tallitot (prayer shawls, for the non-Jews reading this). I just remember picking one out, and that everyone's in really a personal thing. And this is especially strange considering I haven't prayed, well in a really long time, but at that point, I just kept repeating the Mourner's Kaddish in my head for the rest of the tour. Couldn't stop myself. Kinda freaked myself out even more.