So over the last 10 days, I spent time traveling with our history class to Prague, Auschwitz, and Krakow before splitting off and going to Budapest and Salzburg. These are a few of the stories from my crazy adventure in Eastern Europe.
Chapter 1 - An Italian Feast
Friday, after classes, we hung around the Chateau before meeting at the train station at 3:30 pm. We boarded the Flibco bus to Frankfurt-Hahn. It was a slow bus ride. We got on a plane at 7:00. It was on time. We had to first fly to Milan before flying to Prague the next morning. Ryanair plays a little musical jingle when the plane gets there on time. It made me laugh. We stayed the night at very swag hotel near the airport. That's when the fun started...
So we had dinner scheduled at the hotel for us. Turns out they had a giant long table for our entire class to sit at. We had water, house wine, and bread on the table for us. Oh, and I got to sit at one of the heads of the table (Dr. Haag sat at the other one). We then proceeded to enjoy a wonderful three course meal. The highlight of which was the delicious stuffed ravioli that the waiter just kept bringing us. I mean, we had seconds, and then thirds. Funniest thing was that when Jeeves didn't finish his third helping of ravioli, as the waiter was coming around to collect plates, Brad and I muttered, "pssh, rookie." The waiter, hilarious in his own right, asked us (referring to Jeeves), "First year at university?" and we just nodded and cracked up. The meal was topped off by a delicious chocolatey light cake. Oh, and the hotel itself was legit as heck. We had like fancy lights and a real nice bathroom (yeah, I stole some shampoo and stuff, so what?).
Chapter 2 - A Long Day in Prague
To make our 8:00 flight to Prague, it was deemed necessary by our esteemed faculty that we needed to leave the hotel (just 5 minutes from the airport) at freakin' 5:00 am! So, as you might imagine, we got to the airport at oh, say around 5:07 am. Then, we literally just sat there because we couldn't check in until two hours before our flight.
The WizzAir flight was much cooler than the Ryanair flight (as in, they didn't try to sell us crap and smokeless cigarettes the entire flight). We arrived in Prague at 9:30 and were met at the airport by our guide, George. Now, George was not the most interesting or enthusiastic character ever, and the wonders of our 8 hour long walking tour of the city of Prague was mitigated by the high levels of fatigue felt by every single student. Anyway, here's what I learned from George:
1. The guy Wenceslas from that christmas song basically founded the Czech country.
2. The Old Town is actually newer than the New Town
3. Charles IV - the guy for whom the Charles Bridge is named after, was the son of John the Blind (some Luxembourgish ruler or something like that).
4. The Charles Bridge was the site of the famous scenes from Mission Impossible I (a highly underrated film)
5. 2/3 of the Jewish population of (then) Czechoslovakia were killed during the Holocaust.
Other highlights included eating lunch in a dungeon (with medieval style food), seeing the changing of the guard at a sweet palace, and almost seeing some sort of fight break out between some guys outside a synagogue. There were plenty of pretty sights though, such as this picture I took looking out over the river from the Charles Bridge:
Exhaustion set in. Starbucks fixed it. After all the class work was done with, we walked back from the hotel to the movie theatre to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Yeah, it was in English, with Czech subtitles. It was awesome. After that, we just walked back to the hotel, and conked out right quick.
Chapter 3 - Travel Day
All we did on Sunday was get up, walk back to the Charles Bridge in the morning, get on a bus, ride for six and a half hours, and eat dinner at our hotel in Auschwitz. (Sidenote: I'm really tired right now, since I've been typing up notes for econ and history for literally the last three and a half hours, so excuse my Hemingway-esque brevity). Here are more details of the day that are cool:
1. We watched Schindler's List on the bus ride. I hadn't seen it before; it is a really solid movie.
2. We stayed at the same hotel as the French President Jacque Chirac when he went to visit Auschwitz (i.e. It was a nice hotel).
Chapter 4 - A Warning to Humanity
On Monday, we got up, and drove to Auschwitz. As you can imagine, it was a pretty intense day: I'll try to go through all we saw and do it justice, but in all honesty, I doubt it possible. It was cold and cloudy when we arrived at Auschwitz I, the first establishment of the three separate camps that make up Auschwitz. From class and one of the books we read, I've learned that Auschwitz was unique in that it was both a concentration (or forced labor) camp and an extermination camp.
We started our guided tour by walking through the infamous gates, which in iron read "Arbeit macht frei" which in German means "Work makes you free." We walked around the brick Polish army barracks that were converted into the concentration camp. We saw the horrible conditions in which prisoners lived. There was barbed wire everywhere. I'll be honest, the entire place felt like death. I don't know how else to describe it, but I swear I could feel some sort of terrible depression haunting the place.
We saw some of the exhibitions in the buildings. We saw the thousands of suitcases that were stripped from the Jews when they were being deported from the Jewish ghettos. The suitcases still had names on them; the Jews were being told they would get their bags back. We saw the thousands of empty canisters of Zyklon B, the chemical that was used to exterminate millions of people. We saw 40,000 pairs of shoes, all taken from prisoners upon arrival.
We saw Block 11, where sentences were handed-down for badly-behaved prisoners. We saw the "Wall of Death" where the Nazis used to exterminate people by firing squad. We saw prison cells so small that prisoners would be forced to stand for days without food. We walked through the gas chamber where thousands of people were killed. I remember thinking at the time, I just did something thousands of people never did - I walked back out of the gas chamber. It was hard to walk through all of this and not be so weighed down by the echoes of brutality and genocide that occurred.
It really doesn't seem all that real when you read about it, or when you see movies about it, but being there changes things. I was constantly reminded of the fact that this atrocity did actually happen and that real people were capable of systematically attempting to exterminate millions of people and succeeding. As we were walking around the camp, I remember not wanting to touch anything, because touching it would have made it real. We also saw the place where Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz who oversaw the camp, was hanged in 1946. Fittingly, he died at Auschwitz.
Strangely, we then ate lunch at Auschwitz, which again made me think, I'm doing something else thousands of people never did - eating a hot meal at Auschwitz. We had chicken and soup. We boarded the bus, and drove about five minutes to Auschwitz II - Birkenau, a much larger facility that encompassed 400 acres of barracks, crematoria, and gas chambers.
It's a vast wasteland. I hate to say the weather was perfect, but it seemed to fit the occasion: it was cold, windy, dark, and rather gray. Birkenau was pretty shocking because of its size. I mean, we walked around for several hours there and didn't see the entire camp. We did see the remains of the crematoria - where the Nazis burned the bodies. Birkenau was not nearly as well preserved as Auschwitz I, because as the war was winding down, the Nazis attempted to hide their genocide by destroying parts of the camp at Birkenau. One of the most moving parts of Birkenau was the official monument. It read, "For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews of various countries of Europe."
We boarded the buses and drove two hours to Krakow. We got into the hotel, and then Brad, Tiffany, Aunna and I walked to the train station to buy our tickets to Budapest. Unfortunately, even with our Eurail passes, tickets were rather expensive, since we had to travel through both Poland and Slovakia, two countries which are not participating in the Eurail program. Anyhow, we had dinner that night as a class in a traditional Jewish restaurant, with traditional Jewish music accompanying our meal. It was fantastic.
Chapter 5 - Krakow
Tuesday morning we got up, had breakfast, and began our walking tour of Krakow. Here, the class was split into two groups; one group went with Filip, our swag Polish guide who had been with us since we left Prague. I was not in that group. I was in the other group with "Margaret" whose actual Polish name sounded something like "Gula" so I just referred to her as "Gulag." Anyway, so Gulag was not exactly the most enthusiastic or interesting tour guide, and it was rather chilly that day, so my experience was not ideal. But, that being said, it was cool to see some real historic places. We walked through the main deportation square where they took Jews before shipping them off to concentration camps. We walked through much of the former Jewish Ghetto and saw how the Nazis built walls that were shaped like the tombstones in Jewish cemeteries, just to remind them how close they were to death.
We walked through the museum at the site of Schindler's factory, which focused on the entire city of Krakow during WWII. It was interactive and interesting. We had lunch on our own (so we went to the first place we found near the city center - Taco Mexicano). After a warm lunch, we started back up on our tour and headed to several church type places. We saw the Collegium Maius, the old university in Krakow, where a bunch of professors and intellectuals were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. We then walked to Wawel, the castle slash old home of the Polish kings. It was a huge complex, and the church inside was amazing. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take picture inside. One cool thing I remember is they have a huge altar in the center of the church called, "the Altar of Poland" and they would lay the banners of conquered peoples on the altar as a sign of victory. We climbed the top of the bell tower there, and then I was able to get some pictures looking back over Krakow:
From there, we went down into the crypt of Wawel to see the tombs of several Polish kings, the President who died in a plane crash last year, and some famous Polish poets. One thing I remember learning was that this one Polish King, Kazimierz the Great, lived a long time ago and had like 100 lovers, so the Polish joke is that everyone is really just one big happy family.
We then walked to St. Mary's, another church in the city center. Sidenote: Krakow is often referred to as a second Rome because of the huge presence of the catholic church. Unsidenote: St. Mary's was a really cool church, and had an altarpiece that was 500 years old.
Next, we took a tram back to the hotel, gathered ourselves, and got ready to go to our chamber music concert that evening. Yeah, that's right - we had a swag little Chopin piano concert at a really chill little place. It was really nice, and I rather enjoyed the music. After that, we went back to the hotel and had dinner at the little bar there. I had half a hamburger and half a club sandwich. Oh, and I tried some Zywiec, a polish beer. It was dece, but nothing to write home about (even though that's exactly what I'm doing).
Chapter 6 - Where is Břeclav?
Wednesday morning we got up, had breakfast, and headed out for a tour of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow. Filip was our guide now, and he was so much more shred than Gulag, my guide from the day before. Filip was also obsessed with Schindler's list, and pointed out pretty much every single place where they had filmed for the movie, which was cool. The most fascinating part of the tour, for me, was going into the Remuh Synagogue and then seeing the Jewish cemetery behind it. Fun contrasting cultures fact: in a synagogue, men have to wear a hat or have their head covered, in a christian church, men have to take off or remove their hats. Fascinating, no? Anyway, the cemetery was again rather interesting, here's a picture of it:
I wanted to put this picture here to showcase something else also. You can (hopefully) see that there are small stones and rocks on many of the tombstones. This is a Jewish tradition where, instead of putting something as delicate and temporal as flowers on a grave, you put a stone out of respect.
And thus ended our study tour, but our adventures were just beginning...
So we left the group, and Tiffany, Brad, Aunna, and I headed to the train station. Well, first we stopped at the Krakow Mall right by the train station because we had some time to kill, then we went to the train station and got on the 12:36 train from Krakow to Katowice. On that train (which can only be described as a relic of communism and all its failures), we met a guy who "almost" worked for Google. Yeah, I didn't really understand it either, but he spoke good english and listened to my stories about camping, so whatevs, he was chill. So we got to Katowice in plenty of time to make our train from there to Břeclav.
But then it all went wrong.
So our train was delayed 20 minutes leaving out of Katowice, which was gonna be a problem since we only had 9 minutes between our next connection in Břeclav to make our final train to Budapest. Once we finally got on the train to Břeclav, en route, we became delayed another 20 minutes somehow. (Darn you Eastern European train systems!). Anyway, so we talked to the conductor and he told us that yeah, there was almost no chance we were making our connection. Also, he told us that the next train from Břeclav to Budapest wasn't leaving until 4:47 am the next morning.
Problem: What do you do when you're stuck in Břeclav at 8:00 pm, with no cash (in the Czech currency), nowhere to stay, and don't speak a lick of Czech?
Here's how we solved it: the train conductor told us to meet him when we got off in Břeclav, and he would take us to a hostel that was right by the train station. So we got off the train, met the conductor, and we met Cole and Amy - two Canadian teens who were also trying to get to Budapest and had missed their connection (we just called them "Canada"). They were skateboarders. Yeah, so this "hostel" the conductor was telling us about? Turns out it's like a run-down crack house. It was all closed and boarded up. Bummer. So he took us into the train station headquarters building, and printed off a Google map to another hostel 25 minutes across town.
So we schlepped our stuff through the city of Břeclav. The city was dead. I mean absolutely lifeless. I mean, we saw like maybe two cars. Anyways, about 25 minutes later, we walked into what we thought was the hostel, but turned out to actually be an ice hockey rink. So we walked around the sketchy ice hockey rink to where the hostel was. We walked in, walked upstairs to the lobby, still hadn't seen a soul, and found no one at the reception desk (at 8:00 pm). Confused, we just considered sleeping on the couches in the lobby if we couldn't find anyone. Then, Tiffany went downstairs to the bar and found the guy who was running the place. Turns out he didn't speak any english but spoke a little German. Ergo, Brad and I (the two German scholars of the group) were called in. Yeah, I probably didn't use total correct grammar, and yeah, I probably didn't say everything with the correct pronunciation, but I got the message across that we did not know where to sleep, and that we wanted to sleep there. I got the six of us two rooms for the night, for 10 euros each. Piece. Of. Cake.
So we slept for a few hours in the sketchy beds (complete with ants!). Got up, rolled out of there at like 3:45 to make it back to the train station for our 4:47 am train to Budapest with Canada. Funny thing - we saw a TON more people out in Břeclav at 4:00 am than we did at 8:00 pm, it was a strange, strange town.
Chapter 7 - a "Hungary" Thanksgiving
We arrived in Budapest at around 8:30 am on Thanksgiving Day. After snagging some forint (the Hungarian currency) we figured out the public transportation situation, and (thought) we figured out which bus to take. Unfortunately, we took the bus in the wrong direction a stop or two before we realized it and got off. Then, we headed in the right direction, but Brad and Cole got separated from us and accidently got off a few stops early. We rendezvoused at the correct stop shortly thereafter.
We walked to our hostel, which was really nice. We also explained to them what had happened the night before, and they waived our fee from that night (score!). So we chilled there for a bit, got ourselves cleaned up, and headed out into the city. We walked to a big indoor market place that reminded me of the North Market in Columbus. We then had a legit Hungarian meal of goulache at this sweet little restaurant. It was damn good.
After lunch we walked across the bridge into the Buda side of the city. You see, Budapest is really made up of two cities along the Danube, Buda and Pest; they merged together to form Budapest. Anyway, we pretty much walked up all along the Buda side of the river up to this sweet castle or palace thing on top of a huge hill. It was a long walk, but provided us with awesome views of the river and the city, such as this one:
We continued our stroll and saw Fisherman's Bastion, and some really cool church from the outside. Then, we hiked back down the hill and got on a tram back to our Green Bridge. We stopped into our hostel and got some dinner recommendations before heading back out into the city. We had already gotten tickets to the opera that night at 8:00 pm, so we had a quick, albeit delicious, meal of hamburgers and french fries (how American is that for a Thanksgiving meal?) at a fancy little cafe by the opera house. I had some Tokaji wine at dinner, it was sweet, literally.
The opera was real fancy. Like, they had water or drinks for us at the door. Like, we HAD to check our coats to get in. It was a real nice place too, very swanky. Our seats (which cost 2 euro each) were up in the nosebleeds, so we couldn't really even see the stage. That's ok though, because the whole opera was in German, which Hungarian subtitles. It was also rather confusing, as there were several scenes referencing Jesus, but then there was also some communist secret police and some girls who appeared to have been vomited on by the 80's. All in all, we decided at intermission that we'd had enough culture and headed back to the hostel. After having a few shots of palinka (Hungarian fruit brandy), speaking to my parents at home, and watching a little bit of Elf, fighting over some chocolate ice cream, finally called it a night.
Chapter 8 - Ugh, Christmas
On Friday, we slept in (finally) and then went and had some nice coffee and crap for breakfast. Then, we headed over to the big Christmas Market. Short introduction to the idea of a Christmas Market: in Europe, especially northern and central Europe, for the month leading up to Christmas, almost every city has a Christmas Market where they set up semi-permanent booths and hawk all sorts of ornaments, handmade trinkets, and a variety of other doodads and zipzorps. So, Budapest had a huge Christmas Market, and we walked around there for a while. We got some krampampuli, which was hot white wine with christmas spices in it. It was delicious.
After hanging out at the Christmas market for a while, we walked up the big street to Hero's Square, a huge plaza with columns and statues (every city in Europe has one of these, I think). Anyway, that was cool. Then, we walked to a big castle behind there. The castle was sweet. We then took a subway back to the Christmas Market. Now, I need to make a confession here: I have inherited, from my father, the "Scrooge Gene." That is, if I experience Christmas overdose, I shut down and start acting like the Grinch. Such was the case in Budapest. I mean, there was just SO MUCH Christmas crap. Trees everywhere, old Hungarian ladies singing, people dressed like elves - it disgusted me. But I survived.
We had a real awesome dinner though - we ate these things that were just bread, sour cream, onion, bacon, and garlic. It was legit. Then, we headed back to the hostel since we had an early train (6:00 am) the next morning to head to Salzburg Austria.
Chapter 9 - The Hills Are Alive...
We woke up rather early on Saturday morning, but we were used to it by then. We were not used to the snow and slush that had fallen the night before, however. That's right, although we had had real swag weather in Budapest until then, it was snowing and there was slushfest '10 going on all over. So we got to the train on time, we even had enough time for Brad to snag a kebab for breakfast.
We got on our train, and...you guessed it, the train was late getting to Vienna, where we had our one connection. So we missed our train to Salzburg. Luckily, there was another one right away, so we got on that and arrived in Salzburg. We had to make it to our bed and breakfast by 1:30 to get picked up for our Sound of Music tour. Now, we had to seriously hustle, we couldn't figure out the suburban train system, so we took two buses out of the city up to where our place was. We then had a rather strenuous hike up a steep hill, but we finally arrived at Haus Christine at about 1:35. The proprietor, Christine, was so nice - she even hooked us up with some sandwiches since we told her we hadn't eaten anything. We put our stuff down and got on the little shuttle bus back to the city.
There, we got aboard the huge bus for the official Sound of Music tour. We met Erin and Jerica, our MUDEC friends, on the bus. Our tour guide was pretty funny, despite his plethora of corny one-liners (the pot calling the kettle black?). The tour itself was a lot cooler than I thought it would be, and I really only was doing it because Aunna really wanted to. Brad and I had even "joked" about skipping out and trying to go on the Bavarian Mountain tour instead. But, we did get to see a bunch of places from the musical, and some pretty lakes and mountains outside of Salzburg. Here is a picture of Wolfgangsee, one of the lakes up in the hills:
Yeah, it was pretty majestic. So our tour also took us to the small town of Mondsee, where they just let us roam for a while. We had some sweet apfelstrudel and chilled near the Christmas market before we got back on the bus. The bus then took us back to Salzburg.
We rolled out into the city, and thanks to our guides Erin and Jerica, headed toward where some restaurants were. We got into this real legit place, and with the help of our waiter, got a table for 6. I had some nice schnitzel, and it was a good meal, complete with a visit from St. Nicholas and some guys dressed up as demons.
We took our buses back up to our place and crashed, hard. We had real comfy beds there.
Chapter 10 - Getting Home
Well we got up, had a swag breakfast and headed back into town to get our train at 11:52. We figured we had had enough bad luck with trains, so nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong, could it? If you answered, "No," you'd be wrong. So we only had one connection to make, in Koblenz, and we had a 42 minute buffer before our next train was supposed to leave Koblenz.
So, we began our trip with our train already being delayed 5 minutes. No big deal, it was only 5 minutes, so what? But then, we got stopped on the tracks at one point, just in the middle of nowhere, because of the snowy weather. Then, in Gunzburg or something like that, the train stopped and the conductor came on over the PA and said something in German that made everyone groan. I did not understand, so I asked the people sitting across from us, and they told me that, "the locomotive has a defect." Then, the guy across from me was like, "Das ist einen Saftladen!" which is a German expression of frustration, and literally means, "this is a juice-shop!" It was hilarious. Everybody laughed.
So our train was delayed exactly 42 minutes. However, as we were pulling up to the station before Koblenz, it seemed as though we would make it, our train now was only 35 minutes late. We pulled into Koblenz at 7:20 pm, and our next train was scheduled to leave at 7:23 pm. We sprinted through the station and hopped aboard our train just in time. So much for a 42 minute buffer. But we made it, and got back to Luxembourg City at 9:30 on Sunday night, exhausted after a crazy week of travel, trains, and history.
Epilogue
Sorry it took so long to write all this, it's been a long week, and I was rather sick after returning from all this. But I'm better now, and have finally had time to sit down and crank this out. I want to write at least 3 more blog posts: one about skiing last weekend, one about everyday life in Luxembourg, and one about reflecting on everything I've learned in the four months I've been here. But, now I must return to studying and classes.
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