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Czech Castles, Sausage Dogs and Polish Movies

18/9/2010

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Street Theatre, Krakow, Poland
We arrived into Vienna on a Friday afternoon and after a few drinks at the Yacht Club and dumping our main bags in Julia’s sister’s flat, we loaded up a hire car with Tracy and Troy and headed for Krakow, Poland.

Troy has lived in Vienna for 16 years and Tracy for 4 but without their own car experience to draw on, there was no definite plan as to how to easily get to Krakow. We all figured that heading to Brno in the Czech Republic was the best bet so off we went.

Things change pretty quickly when you cross from Austria to Czech Rep. Suddenly the roadside services include casinos and dancing girls (I assume they also dance?!) so we were a bit cautious as to where we would stop for the night. We clearly weren’t going to make Krakow so somewhere past Brno seemed like a good option.

Leaving the freeway we were soon driving through 1970’s Czechoslovakia. Small, drab towns with a sense of grim dread that made you lock the doors and hope you didn’t end up in a one way alley with less than 3 exits. No doubt by day these towns are great but without any obvious signs for hotels we tried to burn through one after the other as quickly as possible without injuring any local children – or worse still, prize livestock.

When we did encounter something that looked like accommodation we sent Julia and Troy in to request rooms for us. At the point they walked into a pub, got the same reaction as the American backpackers at the start of American Werewolf in London (for all we know the Czech pub may have been called the “Slaughtered Lamb”?) and then had to endure 10 minutes of Czech disco meets Achy Breaky Heart line dancing – and still came out empty handed, we did a teams change and sent in the pretty one, with Tracy as her Guardian!

First try and Molly and Tracy excelled themselves – a remote hotel approaching Castle status in both appearance and features, with an open restaurant happy to serve us at 10.00pm, a wine cellar well stocked and all sorts of other attractions – ping-pong, terrace, tennis. By next morning we were thinking that we weren’t that keen on Krakow after all. But we had a city to see so off we went.

After visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau on route to Krakow, we met some very bad weather by the time we started looking for a hotel. A little lost and unsure of how we would go looking in the city, we decided to try out a roadside hotel on the outskirts and thus sent in our “A-Team” room searchers.

Despite the gloom and rain, the team came back with very positive results. Rooms were fine, reasonably priced, and whilst there was a wedding in the adjoining function room, the restaurant near the foyer could still serve us some meals from the menu. And the menu looked good!

So we un-packed, freshened up and sat down for some (basically) home cooked Polish food. And then we tried to order…….

“Ah, no, there is no menu tonight, only wedding food.”

“Um, what?! You said you could feed us from the menu?”

“Yes, is possible, from the wedding menu……..there is salad, beef and chicken.”

“OK then, what does it come with?

“You can choose Beef or Chicken. The beef is actually quite large, the chicken tasty. All get salad and choose some sauce, potato and melon.”

Right, easy choice really. 3 of us went with chicken and then Julia and Troy didn’t – they went for the beef, complete with mushroom sauce.

The salad arrived, looking reasonably normal although I can still here the fizz from the grated carrot concoction that was obviously a little old for food and a little young to be a new type of Polish cider.

Then came the chicken meals, complete with a White Peach sauce, best described as a tub of peach yoghurt tipped onto what had been a warm ¼ of a chicken breast, sliced thin and dried out in an oven for several hours. The accompaniments were spot on for a wedding so we did feel privileged. Alongside the chicken was half a plate of frozen potato balls, perfectly re-heated in the oven, and finally a slice of water-melon – we had lucked upon a posh wedding party!

But at least we chicken eaters didn’t order the beef. Actually it may not have been beef. It could have been bread-crumbs mixed with egg and beef stock powder – but then that wouldn’t explain the gristle. Perhaps it was just poorly minced parts from a cheap cut of beef – but that wouldn’t explain the taste of 10 month old French sausage. Clearly it was a very Polish burger patty, fresh from the freezer, into a grill and served with the perfect accompaniment – a mushroom sauce dark enough to disguise what was underneath it.

After dinner we enjoyed a wine in the lounge, which would have actually been very nice had the fire been lit – and drunk wedding party people didn’t keep stumbling past. Whilst Molly, Troy and Tracy sat with us the highlight was the guy who looked like a groupie from a bad ‘70’s East German Satanic Rock band who each time he walked past the back of Troy did a little “get down!” dance, complete with a Michael Jacksonish shuffle.

After Molly, Troy and Tracy went to bed, the same guy lost his groove but not his eagerness to communicate – every passing was complete with a “hallooooo”, heelllllooooo” or a “halooouuww”. Come on, mate, we would do that to a Polish couple sat in the foyer of our local hotel! How long has this wedding been going on for?

The next guy to walk past, well into his 50’s and sporting a real Arfur Donga beer gut, gave us the answer to that question – we think he was indicating 4 days! That was how many times he walked past us in different directions, firstly toward reception, then towards the foyer toilets, then other guest rooms, then towards the restaurant, only to stumble back from where he came. Not quite a definitive answer until he came back armed with a friend – someone he could trust who actually knew where the front door was!! Apparently the exit signs, large double doors opposite reception and garish fluoro’ lighting didn’t give it away on his first recce!

His return to his room was followed by much laughter from that direction and then………..accordion playing! At least his room was in the same direction as ours!

Of course that is not to say that our room didn’t have a few surprises waiting for us. As we walked past our neighbour the noise of modern Polish pop music was quite literally deafening – and sure enough, the walls were paper thin. The fact that it was radio and thus music interspersed with a late Saturday night Polish DJ jibbering crap, didn’t make it better. But it could have been worse…….

The guy across the hall told our neighbour (or was it neighbours….?) to turn the music down – so off it went. It was heading on towards 1am after all. Too late for loud music………..not too late for any visitors to earn their money though.

It was truly like a (really) bad 1970’s Swedish blue movie, without the picture, complete with a (really) over the top actress! In fact for a while we wondered if they were making a really bad 2010’s Polish blue movie………

The next day things got better. The accordion player was almost sober so had brought his weapon of choice to the breakfast table – things were better because he had just finished by the time I sat down for a coffee.

And Krakow was a great city. Plus we were there for their world famous Dachshund Parade. That’s right, more sausage dogs than you could poke onto a stick in a week, all dressed up and looking very, very cute (or very ridiculous, depending on your opinion of animals dressed as Knights Templars, brides and oil paintings!).

Somehow, the drive home through Slovakia was uneventful, except to say that I did see the best looking castles of the trip so far, perched up on high rocky outcrops overlooking valleys and gorges. Ah, now that would be a weekend to remember, a wedding party in a castle in Slovakia, where the bride looked like a dachshund and the caterer was known locally as Mr McCain has done it again!
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More Street Theatre in Krakow, this time with Aunty Tracy
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Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Germany, and Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camps, Poland

8/9/2010

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'Work brings Freedom' - Sachsenhausen main gate
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Main gate, Sachsenhausen, above which sits the SS HQ, specially designed to dominate the entire camp from all perspectives
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Whilst we visited these camps more than two weeks apart it seemed appropriate to enter them in the blog together and more importantly separate from the country entries for Germany and Poland.

Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp – in simple terms a place for the Nazi regime to “concentrate” all of the people that they saw as undesirable. The aim was to then use the inmates for work details or as time went on, relocate them. In the most part the concentration camps were poorly administered by often sadistic Nazi’s on frightening power trips. Sadly, the result was starvation, disease and exhaustion that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, inmates due to their political, religious or cultural beliefs. There were also thousands of Russian prisoners of war who were treated by the Nazi regime as being less than human.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was an Extermination camp. People were brought from all over Europe to the South of Poland, where they were divided into those who could work and those who would die, the majority fell into the latter category.

As the girls had read about Anne Frank so recently, Bergen-Belsin seemed an appropriate concentration camp to visit. The German couple we had met in Sonderburg suggested that as we were going towards Berlin, we would find it easier to visit the camp at Sachsenhausen.

So getting away late again, this time due to the incredible breakfast – honest, we headed towards Berlin. The motorways were less crowded and given our late start, we were happy to arrive at Sachsenhausen by 3.30pm. We quickly realised this was a good choice in regard to visiting a concentration camp (if there can be any “good” relating to that phrase?). It was incredibly educational for us.

Sachsenhausen wasn’t the first concentration camp established but it was considered the “model” camp on which subsequent camps were designed. It was next door to the Headquarters of the Camp Agency, from where all German Concentration and Extermination camps were managed.

Built in 1936 whilst the Olympic Games were being held just down the road in Berlin, the labour came from early concentration camp inmates, mostly political opponents of the Nazi Regime, as well as homosexuals and other citizens deemed undesirable by the regime. Sachsenhausen was a frightening look at the Western world of not long ago.

 Sachsenhausen has the dubious honour of being the camp that developed the most efficient form of execution for the murder of Russian prisoners of war, although this was eventually superceded by the horrors of the gas chambers.

Whilst it was over two weeks since we visited Sachsenhausen, arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau it was difficult to not think about paying our respects at the front gate and continuing on – the enormity of the horrors carried out in these camps is overwhelming. However we had teamed up with Julia’s sister Tracy and her boyfriend Troy to have a weekend in Poland so a visit to Auschwitz seemed essential. It had been one of our “want to visit” places from before we left Australia.

It is a very different camp to Sachsenhausen. Indeed it is 3 main camps with tens of satellite camps, each with different purposes. There was a large labour force housed between the camps to work in the local factories producing munitions and accessories for the German war effort.

Sadly, the notoriety achieved by Auschwitz was due to the gas chambers. It is estimated that between 1 and 1.3 million people were put to death (murdered) at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau. The calculating, measured and meticulous efforts taken by the Nazi’s to achieve this is staggering. The rail lines here at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau have a truly sinister air. The conditions on the trains were terrible, but the prospects for those who got off at Auschwitz were much worse.

Unlike Sachsenhausen, some of the gas chambers and crematoriums remain as they were in 1945. The engineering and logistics that went into the wanton disposal of human life is frightening.

We found both sites to be incredibly educational, very thought provoking and respectful memorials. Sadly there cannot be a fitting memorial for so much loss of life though the complete loss of humanity.
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The notorious rail line entering Auschwitz II-Birkenau
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Main Square, Auschwitz I. The scene of daily roll-calls, public humiliations and hangings.
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Moscow to Bradford via Vienna

21/7/2010

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Julia’s Grandma, Molly’s Great-Grandma – we were all fortunate to know Gladys. Born in 1913 she lived her life in West Yorkshire and raised 4 children, one of which was Julia’s Dad. Julia kept regular contact and Gladys was our host on each trip to Yorkshire to visit her and other relatives.

For me I enjoyed breakfasts with Gladys – she would cook me bacon sandwiches, fried in lard and tastier for it! She always claimed to be happy to have someone to cook for and someone to talk to in the early hours of the day. We were all looking forward to seeing Gladys when we got to the UK so there was no question as to whether we would attend her funeral. There was however a question for us to answer in regard to getting to it…………would we have to fly?

Knowing that we had about 7 days, we figured we could get a night train from St Petersburg and then take opportunity transport from Lithuania onwards and see how we went. Of course if we got close to the date and still had many miles to go, we could fly but we were confident we could stay out of the air.

So in preparation of our exit from Russia, we rested in our Hotel restaurant after a busy day walking around St Petersburg. 1 bottle of wine became 2 and then we were off to the station. At the station we got our bags on and then found some cool beers to keep us hydrated through the night. We had no idea what time we would clear Russian immigration but we did know that it could be painful, particularly if they wanted to do a full customs check of currencies and packs. Best to have a clear head for these things…………..

So turning in just after midnight, all beers finished and a vague headache from the earlier bottles of wine already present, I was kind of hoping that things would go smoothly……….and they did for the next 3 hours as we traveled South and then West through Russia. And then a nice Russian lady wanted our passports, disappearing with them with barely a glance at Molly and Julia sleeping in their bunks.

Before the passports were returned, a customs lady came knocking at the door and wanted to know where our luggage was. I pointed at the under bed trunk under Molly’s bed – clearly the little sleeping angel was too beautiful to disturb so the customs officer just waved her hand and left. It was only the next morning that I realised I was supposed to surrender our entry declarations – despite many warnings online and in books, it appears that nice families like us are not subject to rigorous border checks and customs formalities!

The Latvian lady queried where Molly and my visas were and was then told by her friend that we Aussies don’t need them and before you could say “Welcome to Latvia, a former Baltic state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics but now a card carrying member of the European Union” – we were in the EU.

So back to sleep and wake up in Lithuania, arriving in Vilnius at about 9.00am local time.

At Vilnius station the first thing we noticed were signs in English – lots of them. They were ably supported by several information booths with English speaking staff and a very orderly system of ordering onward train tickets, including tickets to international destinations.

We chose Warsaw where we hoped to get an onward train to Vienna. The train would leave at midday and we would have to change to a bus then another train during the afternoon, arriving in Poland’s capital at about 8.00pm.

With 3 hours to fill we wandered around the old town of Vilnius. Cobblestone streets, beautiful churches and community buildings, and a very relaxed pace of life. We grabbed some Euro currency, had a morning snack at McDonalds and just enjoyed being a little bit closer to what we consider normalcy.

Of course we ran a little late to get back to the train, particularly as Julia had to buy some travel snacks at the station market and managed to get held up in the queue…………….so we didn’t get to sit together at first but after a couple of small stops we were together and on our way!

Our first train was more of a commuter carriage but after a change to a bus and then rejoining the line an hour later, we found a carriage with cabins, each with 8 seats. So we jumped in, closed up and made the cabin look full and busy, before enjoying the evening run to Warsaw.

Warsaw at dusk wasn’t too pretty but we quickly realised that with luck we could get a train out of there within 30 minutes of arriving. First hurdle was the currency – the Polish decided to keep their own so we had nothing to buy tickets with except plastic – bless it! So I queued at the wrong window, waited for ever for some guy to ask 20 questions about trains to anywhere and then I managed to get tickets to Vienna with about 4 minutes to spare. As it turned out, our mad rush onto the train was fortuitous as we scored a fairly empty carriage at the bottom of the stairwell we ran down and then walked straight into a private compartment.

The compartments are a bit disappointing compared to Asian and Russian trains and as we would further discover in Germany, there are various options classes, seating arrangements and for reserving seats. We were told that our seats converted to beds and that you could book the whole compartment of 6 seats by paying the on-board conductor. We chose to just take our chances and Julia and Molly converted their seats to beds whilst I sat next to the compartment door looking unfriendly to discourage other passengers from joining us! Actually I was by now quite accepting of the idea of having to share but as it turned out we didn’t have to as the train never got that full.

We left Warsaw within a couple of minutes of getting on and had a quiet ride through the Czech Republic to Austria. At about 4am it was getting light and we all ended up watching the sun rise over the fields whilst Austrian police came through and did random checks of passengers – well, random if you consider targeting Muslims and dark skinned people random! It must be the EU way……….

We arrived at Vienna before anything was open and after struggling to get change for the left luggage lockers we found a McDonalds so that we could do some more internet research on our next options. We were tired and knew we could catch up with Julia’s sister in Vienna so decided we had enough time to stay a day and night in Vienna.

 
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Downtown Vilnius - We are all keen to get back there next month
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On the way to Warsaw - train number three for the day
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Overnight, Warsaw - Vienna. These seats are clever but certainly not comfortable compared to Russian sleepers.
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