Poland - Krakow and Auschwitz

This weekend we took another trip to Poland, this time to visit Krakow and Auschwitz. There are some spectacular views of the north side of the High Tatras and the border crossing is another one-lane affair. There just doesn't seem to be much Polish-Slovak traffic in these parts.

We blundered through Krakow without a good map and finally found our hotel. We took a cab back downtown - what a shock!


This isn't Presov - the whole downtown area is packed with restaurants, bars, clubs, bookstores, shops of all kinds, and also with tourists. Half the people in the square seem to be speaking English, and all the staff in restaurants and stores speak it too. Prices are not bad by US standards, but pretty expensive by Slovak standards.A simple cup of coffee would set you back about $3 (and apparently it's lousy). Beer is no bargain either - 2 to 3 times the Slovak price, and it's nothing special. They burn a lot of coal around here, and Saturday night there was enough of a fog and inversion to make things look like London in the 1800s. Our eyes were burning.

Most of Saturday was devoted to a trip to Auschwitz, about 60 km from Krakow. I won't say too much about it - it's one of those places you have to visit for yourself.

But the size of the place is amazing - it goes on and on. Most of the buildings at Birkenau (the larger section of the Auschwitz complex) were destroyed (a few have been reconstructed), but some of the buildings you may have seen in "Schindler's List" are still there.