Poo-land

Haha, real mature, right? Well I am indeed in Poland, in Karkow to be exact. Love it here. I haven't minded our bus aka "coach" rides. We took the coach from Prague to Krakow. We got a new tour guide who is really... energetic. He is British but loves guiding tours. Hes actually really intelligent- used to work for BBC. I guess the real dough is in the tour guiding biz... maybe? We are staying in a hostel which I was pretty nervous about. But seeing how we are the only ones staying here since our large group took all the rooms, its not so bad! The first day here we went to the castle- ABC as our guide says- "Another bloody castle". It was actually the best one so far! Plus there is this amazing legend (which Im finding there are a lot of legends in Poland)that a dragon used to live right under the castle hill. So now they sell little stuffed dragons and all sorts of other dragon paraphernalia in town. They are pretty cute, actually. Then yesterday we went to the "jewish quarter" which is where for hundreds of years Jews lived there before the war. During the holocaust they moved a few blocks away to the "ghetto" and then later a few blocks away a concentration camp was built. We walked there yesterday too, but it had been completely demolished when the Nazis knew they were going to lose the war. Same thing happened at a lot of concentration camps- most notable the complete demolition of the city of Warsaw (which we will go to later this week). Do where the former concentration camp was here in Krakow is now a huge field with three monuments.

Today however, we are going to Auschwitz. I'm kind of nervous but I know it will be an experience that I will value because of everything that has happened there. In case you don't know, Auschwitz is where the largest number of Jewish people were murdered during the war- I'm pretty sure it was a death camp.. well maybe not because I hear they will have barracks which death camps don't usually have since they usually just had gas chambers. Well, Ill let you know which kind of camp is was. Another thing to note is that during the war the highest number of Jewish deaths occurred in Poland. I should saw the deaths occured at the hands of German Nazis in Poland. Man, we are reading this book, War and Genocide, and it talked about how many other people besides the Jews died in the holocaust- Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled, homosexuals, etc.

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