Wrapping up Krakow

So now we are finishing up with our four days in Krakow and I’ve seen a lot of things I don’t particularly want to write about but I am glad I have come all this way so that whatever essence of human spirit or human hope that remains at Auschwitz and Birkenau knows that I have at least come to bear witness. It is the saddest place I have been.

We’ve seen the Wawel Castle State Rooms, a Jewish photography exhibit, the Wieliczka Salt Mine (2 hours at 390 feet below ground and I did not have a panic attack down there!), the Schindler Museum and more.

Mostly we’ve enjoyed just walking around Krakow. It doesn’t have any of the chaos of Cairo or even Paris – the drivers are so quiet and polite and even the city trams will stop and let you cross in front of them.

Ron is enjoying his daily doughnut, along with our daily ice cream. We somehow also managed to eat chocolate covered strawberries and pineapple and some more of those potatoes I posted a picture of the other day. Melisa, can you FitnessPal up that total for me, please? That’s just lunch and I need to know how many calories I have left for dinner.

Here’s Ron, excited about walking by another doughnut store:

And here’s me, excited about walking by this snail merry-go-round:

Another highlight of Krakow is that we had a driver named Tomaz, who picked us up at Auschwitz and drove us the hour to the Salt Mine. Ron promptly fell asleep, leaving me alone to make conversation with Tomaz, which is always a bit awkward at first. We covered the usual – Polish soccer, the Polish government’s plan to give you 500 zloty ($125) per month for each child you have, in an effort to repopulate the country. I was, in fact, just about to start discussing traffic tickets when Tomaz said something about the configuration of the license plate on the car in front of us. Some immediate follow up questioning by me revealed that Tomaz shares my love of license plate numbering systems and has hours of information in his head about what the numbering on Polish (and Latvian, just for added fun!) license plates means about where you live and when you bought your car. He also shared tons of detail about how much the registration costs are and I was able to tell Tomaz about our YEARLY renewals, which pretty much blew him out of the water. And Ron slept through all of this…can you imagine? Oh please oh please oh please send Tomaz back again tomorrow when we embark on our 7 hour drive to Budapest.

I’ll leave you with a few more pictures of Krakow.