Krakow

After our week in Switzerland, we spent two weeks in Krakow. Once again, I went to work every day while Erica enjoyed the culture and cuisine. She even learned to speak some polish and made some friends.

We visited Wawel Castle. It is more than 1000 years old, but it has received constant renovations so some of it is quite nice and modern. We took a tour of some of the castle's rooms, climbed to the top of the bell tower, took a tour of the Cathedral which is full of tombs of various kings and other famous figures. We also got to walk through the caves beneath the castle.


We spent a lot of our time walking around the old town. It is full of basilicas, cathedrals, churches and all kinds of old religious structures. Not surprisingly there are also lots of nuns and monks roving the streets like gangs (they all had their own distinct gang colors). Of course, the old town was also full of tourists, gypsies, prostitutes and euro trash. The sidewalks were often too narrow to handle the number of people walking around. The food was good and cheap.
We spent a lot of time in the old Jewish quarter. It had as high a density of Synagogues as the rest of the city had churches. We ate several meals there since the restaurants were quite good. One place was exactly like eating dinner at my grandparents house.


We spent one day at the Wieliczka salt mine. It had an amazing network of underground tunnels and caverns with intricate artwork carved into the walls. They were charging $10 to allow people to take photographs so you'll have to enjoy the Wikipedia photos instead of one of my awesome slideshows.

We visited the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The scale of Birkenau was really shocking.