Chelle’s Travels

We whooshed to Warsaw, Poland, where we were meeting Beccie YAY! We had to catch an overnight bus which was AWFUL because it was packed and we couldn’t even spread over two seats. We arrived in Warsaw and just slept for the first day, as did Beccie who had just spent 16 hours in a London airport. In Warsaw we spent most of our time looking at stuff to do with the Jewish population that once lived there. We visited a museum, cemetary and Nazi prison. It’s insane to see how much the Warsaw Jews were forced to suffer - of the 300,000 who lived there before the war, only about 3,000 survived. The architecture was quite grey slab like in Warsaw as well - mainly because the whole city was levelled by the end of the war and everything had to be rebuilt - for every 20 buildings, only 3 were left standing by 1945.

We continued on to Krakow, the old royal capital of Poland. Unlike Warsaw, Krakow was not bombed as badly in the war and thus stil had the pretty architecture, colourful baroque buildings a a pretty old town. On one of our days there we took a day trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest concentration and death camp in Poland, which I cannot even put into words. We saw the gas chambers and incinerators, the cramped living conditions and the warehouses of items that the Nazis kept to reuse - spectacles, shoes and gold teeth but also the hair of the victims to be made into cloth and mounds of baby’s clothes. It was unbelievably haunting. The odd thing was that the outside was very pretty - cobblestoned streets lined with trees and all the houses were cute red brick barn like barracks. But the atrocities that occured inside were just dizzying to even think about. We also visited Schindler’s factory and walked around the Jewish Quarter where we were staying.

We’ve now entered Prague and have been looking around. It is by far the prettiest city we’ve seen, with all of it’s church spires piercing the skies, but also the most touristy, in some places you can barely walk because of all the tour groups. We also popped to Kutna Hora to see a bone church, but more about that later.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Olomouc, also in the czech republic, a nice university town that was recommended to us.

Speak soon x x x