Krakow_Poland_Auschwitz& Salt Mines

Okay so here is the rest of my travels in Poland. We woke up super early on Saturday and boarded a train to go to Auswitz, which is a little erie seeing is that is how all the victims traveled there. We had a long tour of the first camp by an amazing tour guide. The weather was apporpriate for the occasion, dreary and cold. I got chills several times going through the displays of human hair, shoes, luggage, and artificial limbs. It was very humbling. We saw beds, and cells and execution courtyards. We also saw the gallows, and the crematoriums. It was all really strange to know that these humans had little clue to what they were going to, they would pack up everything including shoe polish not knowing that it wouldnt matter. They had mug shots of a lot of the victims inside one of the buildings and it was just bewildering to see the dates of tehir arrivals and deaths. I dont know it is definitely something that has to be done in alifetime and make sure that nothing like that is ever done agian.

Okay well anyways, I did enjoy it tremendously and i bought a few recommended books on it...so I will be reading those shortly and I will let you know how that goes! But we were there all day and headed back on the train around dinner. Basically everybody passed out and we got back to our "Stranger Hostel" just in time for pizza! Yum! The girls all hung around the hostel and read american magazines and our new books! It was relaxing after a mind numbing day.

The next day we got up around 10 and headed by 20 minute bus ride to the salt mines. Which surprisingly was quite entertaining I thought. It was a cave basically made completely out of salt. The walls, ceilings, and floors were all salt, and our tour guide was again quite entertaining. She told us it was perfectly fine to lick anything we saw and it would be salt.....i took her word for it. But there was a cathedral completley made of salt with carvings, statues, and altar all of salt. 400 some feet under the ground too! We all decided we could live down there, they had restaruants and restrooms too! Anyways that trip was shorter so we spent the rest of the day gift shopping and wandering around Krakow before our train left back to Prague at 1030 pm.

Oh train rides.....this time there was 7 of us in an 8 person cabin. Landon, Ben, MacKenzie, Annie, a korean american, and I. So my first all nighter in Europe and it wasnt to do school work, it was on a freaking train...uhhhh! I slept porbably a total of 45 minutes, mostly Ben taught me the tricks and trades of Sudoku. You know that new trend of number boxes thingy. I hope you know what I mean. Anyways I had bought a book of them, and I did a bunch of those to keep me preoccupied...OOOOh and I think we got our identities stolen. No Lie. We had already gotten our passports and tickets checked , and three guys came into our cabin, asked if we were american, and took our passports one by one..entered them into a machine and wrote our info down. (ps when they check passports, they dont need to write anything down.) They werent wearing uniforms and ben asked for an id and they did nothing. Umm so If i disappear off the face of the earth..look for me in Poland! Ill be with 6 other Americans. Thanks! Im coutning on you!

Anyways...this is a long blog, but we got back Monday morning around 7 and annie and i for sure passed out....we skipped our first classes...oops! But we caught up on our sleep, and took Larry Bowne, our professor from kstate to dinner.

Okay enough for now! I will blog tomorrow probably or later this week for sure! Tomorrow night is party time! Get excited! Leave a comment please...i have had a shortage of comments and it isnt making me happy! So feel free! Love you! Ciao!