krickitty kracow_

last week, bec, who just graduated from ksu, came and visited me in prague while she was on her post school/pre work tour of europe. we decided it would be cool to go to krakow, poland, so we did. we took the night train from prague thursday night, which was as usual, intersting. got a few hours of sleep before we arrived in krakow at 5:30 in the morning. that day we went to auschwitz-birkenau which is about an hour and a half from krakow. it was really busy, but still surreal nonetheless. our first stop was auschwitz 1, which was a converted army barracks (above). it was initially used to imprison so called dangerous polish citizens, aka educated people that might not agree with the nazis. they were used for slave labor during the days and brought back to the camp at nights. it was not until a couple years later that the decision was made to bring all of the jews there. that is when the nazis decided to build birkenau or auschwitz 2 essentially from the ground up (above). there are too many other details to mention about these places, but i suggest if you are anywhere near there, go. it is quite a powerful experience.
after returning to krakow, we wandered around the old town and old town square (below). the town is really gorgeous, prices are even a little cheaper than prague for most things, and the people were very nice. much of it was reminiscent of prague, for me, but on a smaller scale. also, we read some statistic that said there were 750,000 residents of the city and almost 100,000 students, so there was a very young and hip vibe about, not to mention lots of cool clubs and bars.
saturday we visited the salt mines outside of the city, which are really famous in poland because of there extroidinary extensiveness. i couldnt tell you how many hundreds of miles of mines there are or how many huge carved out spaces there are, but i can tell you that they have a church about 80 meters underground, that is used regularly for sunday mass and often weddings, as well (below).
we returned to prague on sunday during some rainy weather, and for a couple hours with some creepy guy in our train cabin that was a white chevy astro van short of being a child molester. we made it back just in time for me to work on my studio project some more. speaking of which......