Birthday Bash in Krakow!

A good friend of ours, Paula, celebrated her birthday this weekend and so as a suprise we booked a trip to Poland for a long weekend... this ended up being fraught with disaster when we had to leave the birthday girl in London and head to Krakow without her! The UK Home Office had kept her passport for visa issuing and despite all of our best efforts we couldnt get it back in time for the trip!
So we headed of to the airport one down already, by the time we got to Gatwick we were missing a second person as well - Jase! He had had a big night out the night before and woke up late.... he made a mad dash from central London to Gatwick and onto the plane with less than a minute to spare! Possibly the quickest trip to and through the airport ever - 1hr 15mins in total - (an hour of that was on transport getting to the airport!) - so we had Jase join us with only his wallet, passport and the clothes he was wearing from the night before! Talk about travelling light!

We arrived in Krakow finally and meet up with Linda and Layla (friends from Holland). After settling into our hotel we headed out to explore. Krakow is cold... so so cold! We were all bundled up and had a great time wandering around the square in the old town which was done up for the xmas markets and was decorated with lights everywhere. People were milling around drinking mulled wine and buying all sorts of xmas items, it was great! We headed on and ended up in a bar just off the square which marked the start of a polish bar crawl. The bars were all quite loungey and there was plenty of live music which made for a festive first night!

The next day I had everyone up at the crack of 8am to head of to the train station... we were off to Auschwitz! Now not exactly the most upbeat tourist destination but an absolute must to appreciate the history and horror that was experienced in this region during the Nazi occupation. This was a very sobering day - I cant think of the words to describe such a powerful experience. The Auschwitz and Birkeneau camps have been preserved and turned into museums, they are very well done and you really get a feel for what happened there. The fact that it was so miserably cold and misty added to the depressive air of the place. Auschwitz I, II & III were labour and death concentration camps on the southern border of Poland - during the second world war it is thought that over 1.5 million people were killed on these sites, a high proportion of these people were Jews.

One thing that stunned our whole group during the tour was the efficiency of the Nazi regime, we had a tour guide who talked us through a number of aspects of what we were seeing and the more information we got the more horrific was the realisation of what happened in these camps and the brutality that these people were subjected too. I was bought to tears a few times as we walked through both camps. One of the eeriest moments was when we stopped near one of the gas chambers and there was a section that they used to distribute the ashes from the ovens, in the soil you can still see particles of bone on the ground. Our tour guide had told us that when some escavation was done there was literally layers of ash and bone to be seen.

Once we finished our tour we jumped on a bus back to Krakow and slept most of the way. That night we headed out to for dinner at an indian/italian place... an interesting combo it has to be said! The restaurant was underground in the cellar of an old church so it had ambience to boot! Saturday night was a fairly quiet one with everyone pretty exhausted from the days excursion.

Sunday we had a bit of a sleep in and then headed out to Wieliczka to the Salt Mines. These salt mines have been in operation for over 700 years and only just stopped producing about 5 years ago. The whole tour through the mine was very slick and we definitely felt like we were herded through like sheep! What is so facinating about these mines was that people lived in them their whole lives and there are numerous carvings, underground lakes and fully carved chapels that the miners used. Some of these chapels are still used for mass and on occasion weddings.

We finished the tour with lunch, 200m below the surface and then headed back up the lift and back to Krakow. We had a bit more time than anticipated in the afternoon so this provided the girls with opportunity to hit the shops and for the boys to return to the mulled wine stands and hang out with the locals. I managed to come away with a couple of purchases... a pair of leather boots, a wooden clock, a jewellery box, earrings and quite a few xmas decorations. Quite a successful trip!

Monday saw us flying back to London in the morning and then heading out to dinner to celebrate with the birthday girl and us telling her all about what we done and seen on her behalf! Not to mention delivering the pressies that we had collected while over there for her!