Krakow, Poland - Part II

Most of our day was spent ambling through Krakow's Old Town, Main Market Square and Wawel Castle. Wawel Castle sits atop a hill and contains a complex of building in addition to the castle. The other features include a cathedral, museums, crypts and a courtyard which supposedly has a "chakra" in it. This chakra is described as a vortex of positive energy, one of only a handful in the world. We did not find the chakra and the Polish people just roll their eyes at it and try not to encourage such outlandish things. Anyhow, Wawel Castle is like the Westminster Abbey of Poland, with a good number of their ruling
and historical figures buried here.

Before he became Pope, John Paul II was archbishop here in Krakow. His home church was St. Francis' Basilica. This lovely Gothic church contains a replica of the Shroud of Turin. Across the street is the Archbishop's Palace. The room above the arched entryway is where Pope John Paul II resided while he was archbishop.

We got talked out of a trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. It was a tough decision for us. We agonized over it for several hours. Our Polish friends feel the site is quite historically important and worth seeing yet they also did not want it to put a damper on the rest of our trip. As it turned out, the day we were to go it was raining, cold and dreary which would only have added to the somber mood of the place.

We booked a sleeper car on the night train to Budapest. We got on board at about 10:30 pm. About an hour and a half later, the train split off the carriages going to Prague at the town of Oswiecim, Poland which is very close Auschwitz although nothing could be seen from the train. The couple in the cabin next to ours had toured the camp that morning. They told us all about it and showed us the pictures they took. The female half of the couple is a pediatric ICU nurse so the most difficult exhibit for her to see was the one which was a towering pile of thousands of children's shoes. Another disturbing
display was a gigantic mountain of hair, shorn from the heads of camp arrivals. Another thing that struck our new friends is its close proximity to a fairly large town. Doesn't it bother people to have such an awful place right in their back yard? We wondered about that too. After some more trading of travel stories, we finally decided to get some sleep so we could tackle a new city in a new country in the new light of day.

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