What A Wonderful Week

Mikela’s visit was definitely a highlight of the summer! We laughed our way through Poland and the Czech Republic. Walked a whopping 62 miles in 6 days. Had a moving day at Auschwitz. Ate some really good food. Drank too much beer and wine. Enjoyed the incredibly odd experience of a beer bath. And made countless memories. The week flew by but we really packed in the activities.

Thank you, thank you, Miklea for coming to visit – it was an incredible week!

Kraków Part III – A Ride On The Night Train

After such a powerful, moving day, we came back to Kraków and decompressed at a café on the main square.

It’s incredible how different the city felt from the grey, drizzly, cold weather of Tuesday and the bright, sunny, warm weather of Wednesday. It almost felt like a different place.

We shopped around a bit before having a rather extravagant dinner. The exchange rate in Poland is about 4 Polish Zloty to 1 US Dollar and everything is comically cheap. I took out $100 in cash my first night. After getting breakfast in the morning, I quickly texted Mikela to not pull out any extra cash; I wasn’t sure if we could spend what I had between the two of us! And since we still had a pretty significant amount of cash left, we went all out for dinner.

Still trying to spend our remaining cash, we stocked up on snacks and wine before heading to the train station. While Westely thankfully saved me from taking the night train from Prague to Kraków, Mikela and I decided to go for it on the way home. Taking the Reggio Jet bus would have meant we lost a full day and since we only had a week, we figured we would opt for an uncomfortable night so we could take full advantage of our days. Plus, there were two of us, so we could ward off any gypsies that might try to pickpocket us (that’s a real thing on these night trains).

A quick aside, getting these train tickets was quite the process. Czech Railways doesn’t let you book a sleeper car through their website. However, Polrail Service (the Polish equivalent) does. Czech Railways is technically the operator, but since the train originates in Poland, apparently they share ticketing rights.

Not feeling uber confident, I booked our sleeper car tickets and hoped for the best. While checking out, I was given the option to mail my tickets to my billing address or have them couriered to my hotel. Slightly confused by this, I chose to courier them seeing as I definitely didn’t have time to send them to the US then back to Europe. I emailed Polrail to confirm that they would in fact be delivered to our hotel, not really expecting a response but figuring I should at least try. Shortly thereafter, I received a personalized email from Polrail informing me that my tickets would be waiting for me at my hotel when I checked in. And surprise, when I checked in Monday night, I was handed a package containing our train tickets.

Please note the handwritten sleeper bed reservations.

Apparently printing tickets at home and/or mobile train tickets have not yet made it to Poland. But to be honest, it was kind of nice having a package waiting for you upon check in.

Suffice it to say that as Mikela and I walked to the train station, we were not convinced that we’d a) be let on the train or b) actually have a bed reserved. We found our carriage, showed our (handwritten) tickets to the train steward and happily stepped on when he pointed us to our berth – they worked!

Our happiness quickly diminished when we poked our heads inside our sleeper car and saw what we were dealing with. This was no old-timey, glamorous train travel. This was a compact, 6-person sleeper car with two rather large elderly women already inside. We all four looked at each other and immediately started laughing.

Our roommates were two 70+ year old New Zealand ladies who were traveling through Europe together for 10 weeks. We all started chatting as we somehow managed to get the four of us and our bags into the sleeper car and onto our individual beds. And that’s when Mikela and I came down with an extreme case of the giggles.

Our beds were hardly long enough for us to stretch out and we had about 18” between the bed and the ceiling. The aisle between was hardly wide enough for someone to fit, I could easily hold touch Mikela across the way if I wanted.

Luckily, there was no one in the middle two beds and our Kiwi roommates were on the bottom bunks. To say it was a tight squeeze would be the understatement of the year.

Every time I’d look over at Mikela trying to make her bed, I’d completely lose it. Hell, I’m completely losing it right now – I keep bursting out laughing trying to write this.

Clearly the most flattering picture of me ever.

We somehow managed to successfully make our beds, although I’m still not quite sure how. Our hopes of enjoying our bottle of wine were quickly diminished when we realized we were pretty much confined to lying flat. Although quite remarkably, one of the New Zealand ladies downed a mini bottle of wine in about 4 gulps – this clearly wasn’t her first rodeo. We did, however, pull out our wafer cookies and enjoy a few.

But because of how we were all shoved in there, we realized every time we’d take a bite, some crumbs would fall into our roommate’s cleavage.

Queue another fit of giggles.

As we started the trek towards Prague, our train steward came by to remind us to lock our door, that we didn’t want any gypsies coming in to steal our things. See, it is a real thing! Good thing we were protected by our Kiwi roommates.

With nothing really to do, we figured we’d try to get some sleep. And shockingly, we both slept pretty well! Before we knew it, our train steward was coming by to wake us up, we were 15 minutes away from Prague.

So no, it wasn’t glamorous. And it probably wasn’t very clean. And it wasn’t at all what we expected. But we didn’t have to waste a full day getting to Prague and my cheeks hurt from laughing so hard. So I think it was totally worth it.

Kraków Part II – Visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau

After a full day of walking around Kraków the previous day, we started day 2 with a very early wake up call to catch the bus to Auschwitz. We clearly started our day long before any café or restaurant, so we purchased what appeared to be gigantic, stale, skinny bagels from some elderly woman manning a cart by the bus station. We had very low expectations but turns out, the bagel-esque bread rings are delicious!

I just did a bit of research and apparently these are a typical Kraków street food. “Obwarzanek krakowski” are braided, ring-shaped bread that’s boiled and sprinkled with salt, poppy seeds and sesame seeds before being baked. They also cost roughly $0.25.

With a bit of directional help from a bus driver, we found our bus and settled in for the 2-hour drive to Auschwitz.

We arrived in enough time to grab some coffee before joining our study tour. Visitors to Auschwitz have two options: the general 3.5-hour tour or the 6-hour guided study tour, which takes you around quite a bit more of the camp. We opted for the longer version as we are both interested in the holocaust and figured we probably wouldn’t be back and I’m so glad we did.

Our guide was Polish and has given tours for 15 years. She was really great. She gave a lot of history and described what we were seeing around the camps but with very few personal anecdotes, she let the facts speak for themselves. She also took a very non-PC approach to everything, which both Mikela and I really appreciated; what happened at Auschwitz is atrocious and shouldn’t be sugarcoated.

I’ve been struggling with how to write about our time at the camps because it’s really indescribable. To see the living conditions and hear about the barbaric treatment of the prisoners is almost unreal, it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that this actually happened. And the massive scale of everything is hard to depict. So rather than try to describe it, I’ll simply share some of the things that made the biggest impact:

• Auschwitz sits right outside the town of Oswiecim. In 1939, there were 14,000 Jews living in Oswiecim. Today, there are 0.
• You expect Auschwitz to be grey, gloomy and ugly. Although our first day in Poland was pretty dreary weather, today was a beautiful fall day with bright blue skies. There are trees lining the “streets” of the camp with green grass and wild flowers growing. It’s very off-putting to witness the dichotomy of the rather pretty scenery and the atrocities that happened there.
• Along those same lines, Auschwitz’s director built a house on the edge of the camp, where he lived with his wife and five children. Reportedly, his wife loved living there, calling it “idyllic and beautiful”.
• After walking through Auschwitz, you are bused over to Birkenau, about 1.5 miles away. The Auschwitz prisoners built Birkenau and I cannot imagine them having to walk to and from the camp every day, in winter, with no shoes, after doing manual labor for 12+ hours, with almost no food.
• While Auschwitz is rather compact, Birkenau is massive. The Nazi’s burned the majority of the camp before fleeing so all you see are line after line of chimneys. With 600+ prisoners in each barrack, you start to understand the scale of the holocaust and it makes you feel sick.
• There are train tracks that run through the gates of Birkenau and simply end right before the forest. Prisoners de-boarded the trains and were immediately sorted with the elderly, women and children taken directly to the gas chambers and the men taken to the work camp. The end of the tracks are haunting, it feels so final.
• At the end of our tour, our guide said, “People say Germany lost the war, but I think Poland did. We went from being occupied by the German to 40 years occupied by the Russians.”
• In one of the buildings, there was an art installation where an artist took pictures found in the camp drawn by children and inscribed them on the walls. There were some of flowers and children, but also men holding machine guns, women with their hands up in the forest at gun point, people hanging from a noose. These children, even if they did survive, were completely robbed of their innocence and childhood.
• There was another exhibit where they had books hanging with three-foot pages filled with the names of every person killed during the holocaust. Seeing 6 million names typed out is again, a reminder of the massive scale of this.
• Yet another exhibit finished with a quote saying, “It happened, and therefore it could happen again” which may have actually been what moved me the most.

It was a very heavy, very powerful, very moving day, although I’m glad we went. Auschwitz is a place that I feel everyone should go see to truly understand what happens when intolerance goes unchecked. And sadly, it’s something that needs to be reinforced given current events.

Kraków Part I

Moments after I received my acceptance email from The Remote Experience, Mikela and I started planning when and where she was going to come visit. Originally, we were going to be in Istanbul for the month of August and it was a no-brainer that was where she’d meet me. But as the violence escalated in Turkey, the organizers decided against Istanbul and switched our August-city to Barcelona. While I was excited for this, Mikela has been to Barcelona multiple times, so we were back to the drawing board.

We finally netted on an early September visit in Prague and since we’re both WWII nerds, we thought a side trip up to Kraków was fitting. Turns out, it’s really easy to get to Kraków from Chicago; not so easy from Prague. To avoid an all day layover, I opted for the overnight train. I had taken the overnight train when I studied abroad and we had some translation issues and ended up in a regular carriage vs. a sleeper car. It was not at all pleasant and to be honest, a little sketchy. So I can’t say I was super stoked on the idea of going by myself, but it was the easiest way to get up north, so that was my plan.

What you can’t see is that we had 4 other friends in our carriage. And this is how we traveled…for 9 hours.

The only opportunity for any break.

Luckily, Westley, our Prague local ambassador, came to the rescue. He told me about ReggioJet, which is completely changing train and bus travel in the Czech Republic. For a quarter of the cost and less time than the overnight sleeper train, I was able to take a ReggioJet train and bus during the day, straight to Kraków. And unlike the ex-Communist trains that feel like they’re about to break down any moment, ReggioJet has fairly new equipment and outfits everything with a personal TV on each seat, WiFi and free snacks. Sign me up!

I have to take a quick second to give a huge shoutout to how helpful Westely was. When I told him I was having issues booking a sleeper car on the overnight train, he called Czech Railways to talk to them, then researched the ReggioJet options, priced everything out, sent me schedules for all of the available scenarios and called multiple times to confirm that my transfer in Ostrava from train to bus would be at the same station. And after all of that, he offered to go down to the main train station with me if I decided I still wanted to do the overnight train to purchase my tickets to avoid any confusion. Westley – you are a lifesaver!

I successfully made my transfer in Ostrava, which Westley did warn me to make sure I did otherwise I could very likely end up in Ukraine…

I got to Kraków just in time to drift off to sleep and awake to Mikela arriving in Europe! We enjoyed coffee and breakfast in the main square.

Then headed to the hotel room to drop Mikela’s stuff off and let her shower. Our hotel was so great – super cute, comfortable and a block off the main square. If anyone finds themselves in Kraków , I’d highly recommend the Aparthotel Stare Miasto.

Then it was time to explore the city.

For how incredibly hot our summer had been, our first day in Kraków was chilly and grey. But a little drizzle couldn’t stop us. We admired the main square…

…which is one of the largest in Europe, and explored the central market.

We meandered through the park surrounding the main square and all of the side streets, ducking into small shops.

For lunch, I had found a Jewish restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto with great reviews on Yelp – seemed like an appropriate place to try. We walked up and the menu outside didn’t look appetizing at all. As in pickled fish and stuffed gooseneck. Turns out, Jewish food is very different than American Jewish deli food. Mikela was all the wiser the whole time but was nice enough to never question my restaurant choice. But was also A-ok with not eating there. We quickly looked up other options and found a more traditional Polish restaurant where we enjoyed much more normal fare. Suffice it to say that I’m a big pierogi fan now.

Mikela was creeping up to the 24-hour mark of being awake (thanks to a bunch of teenagers going on their birthright trip to Israel, she had a really lovely flight over with absolutely no sleep) so we snagged a coffee at the cutest little café.

Energized by espresso, we continued on to Wawel Castle, on the hill overlooking Kraków.

The castle was built in the 1300s and while many generations of Polish royalty lived there, it’s now home to several museums and other collections. We toured around the elaborate church, looked at ancient Polish artifacts and clothing and climbed to the top of the bell tower.

It was cool to see the bells so close – they are absolutely huge! Although I wouldn’t want to be in there when they are rung.

Our next stop was Oranzeria for a glass of wine with the most beautiful view of the castle.

We had an early dinner and admired the square at night…

…before heading back to our hotel to try and get a good night’s sleep, considering our early, early wake-up call the next morning.