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Krakow

I never cease to be amazed at how popular some bands are in places that you wouldn't expect, For example on the train trip from Wroclaw to Krakow a lot of young people got of at a place called Katowice. At little suprising as Katowice looked like the worse side of Elizabeth (my apologies to the people who have actually been and\or lived there, I wait to be corrected) turns out Tool and Chris Cornell were playing there. My loss, or not, I'm not sure these days.
I was told Krakow is a beautiful town and it has a lot of history. But its really hard to confirm these things whens it bucketing down with rain. You virtually have to put the proverbal gun to your head to force yourself to leave to confines of the hostel and make the most of it. In the process of getting soaked I checked out the Castle (overrated), the Jewish quarter (under rated) and the old Jewish Getto from WW2 (by this time I was sick of the rain so sat in a cafe for 3 hours waiting for the rain to stop).
I went to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Oświęcim. The first thing that really hits you is that the place is way too pretty. I think that every photo i've ever seen of the place was taken in black and white and after a healthy snow storm. Its really hard to get a grasp of the horror that occured here when everything looks so darn.... nice. The thing that really disturbed me wasn't that so many people were murdered here, it was the place was run like a business. How can we speed up the process? How can we made more profit? What can we learn from it? How can we be more efficent? Wankers.
Although I only stayed in Krakow an extra day because all the museums were closed on the first day i was there, by luck it happened to be a National Holiday, so the museums were closed anyway, but there was a lot of other stuff going on. For one there was a Pierogi (A bit like ravioli) festival. I more or less went to every stall and said I'll have one of each. Secondly the Red Bull Formula 1 team had a demo to promote the upcoming Hungarian Grand prix. They closed off a street (same street as my hostel as luck would have it) and had the car race up and back and few time with a few go arounds thrown in for good measure. Otherwise the weather was good everyone was happy. Nice.



cheers,
Schuey.


-icecream, americans, swede, food.
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