Pork Knuckle, baked in Beer, with fried potatoes, sauerkraut and horseradish

Best meal. Nuff said.

I like beer bubbles

And the rest of the stuff in this glass too.

Pretty picture in Warsaw, Poland

The Poles are proud of this building. I think it is super cool, and
looks a bit like the university of moscow building.

http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~gorinsky/anna/2005-08-04_MGU.jpg

Cracow, Poland. A great city

So,

After Warsaw, we took a train to Cracow, (or Krakov, or Krakow). The
train was a bit odd, as it took a fair amount of time to go not so
far, we had to change trains, as well as we had a long wait in a
trainyard (not at a platform).

We arrived at our transfer point (Breklov, Czech Republic) 15 minutes
late. (a bit irked about that). However, the connecting train coming
from whereever, was 35 minutes late, so wait 20 minutes we did, and on
the way to Cracow we were.

Like many European cities, the train station is right in the middle of
town. This was true in Crakov as well. They have a tram system (which
we decifered) and took down to the Jewish area, where our hotel was.
The ticket system is a bit on the honor system, and if you don't have
the coins, you are stuck (the driver doesn't sell tickets). The way
they do the honor system is at timest hey have a guy walking through
checking the time stamps on the tickets. We saw the tickets checked
once. We rode for free at least 3 times, as the machine was broken, we
got there before we could pay, or we just decided to stick it to the
man, and take the risk.

Crakow has a very nice center city, big church, big plaza with lots of
restaurants and booths, and more. Sort of your typical European city.
It is very nice, and we had some rain, but on the whole great.

We were in Crakov for like 3 full days, and did a couple of tours.
Before the tours, we did walk up to the castle on the river, and get
some good food in town. The first tour we did was to Auschwitz. I
wasn't super keen on going, as I've done Dachau twice (outside of
München), but Nicci surprised me and wanted to go. We got a big smack
of Nazi and Soviet history in Warsaw, and it continued in Cracov.

Much was been written about Nazi concentration camps (or more
correctly, Nazi death camps). I'll write a post just on it. We took
many pictures.

We also took a trip to a famous Salt Mine (which my father should be
glad about). This mine was in production for 750 years, and was pretty
incredible. I'll probably post just about that too.

One coinkidink (coh, ink, eey, dink) was that in the Crakow cathedral
tower (the taller of the two) there is a trumpter/bugler every hour on
the our, for the last several hundred years. The reason for this, was
back in the day, the Tarters attacked Cracov, and the lookout up there
saw it and played the alarm. In doing so, he took an arrow in the
throat. He saved the town, but lost his life. They have their own
version of "Never Forget" and this is it.

We left on another crack of dawn train, and headed to Bratislava.

Working at the Salt Mine

Cracow's been around for a while.

Salt was super valuable a long time ago, and even before the spice
trade (remember that?). Food tasted bad back in the day, water was
dirty, and people were stinky.

Salt is sal in Spanish. Sal can become salorio for a person who works
with salt, or is a miner of salt (not an exact translation) Lots of
Poles worked in this mine, which was found by drilling into a salty
pool on the surface. Suddenly, Polish food was the best in the world
(not really). But, the king in the area took full advantage of this,
and made tons of money, and influence by doling out this salt to
miners and controlling the sale of salt.

The 2 kilo stipend that he allowed the miners to take from the mine
(in addition to his wage) was called his salorio also. From this we
get the word Salary.

Cool, eh?

We went a couple of hundred meters into the earth, through a huge
ballroom (see the pictures) and tons of passages.

No slaves worked this mine. No prisoners worked this mine. Miners here
were happy and rich. The Poles are proud of this, rightfully.

Amazingly, I got an email from Patrick McDonough of Braintree, MA
telling about how he also has hit this mine (back in 2006). You are
right Pat, it was super cool.

It was 14 degrees down there. Nice and cool and we were sad to get
back up to the surface and the hot weather up there.

Oh, and a side comment. There are wasps in Central Europe, and they
are all over the food everywhere. They don't look like the cute little
honey bees. They look like yellow jackets or wasps. They are annoying,
and I wish they would buzz off.

Nazi Death Camps - Never Forget

Tours like this are so overwhelming that they almost don't make an
impression.

Nazi's killed lots of people? Sure they did.

They split families up, and sent most of the people off the trains
straight to the Death Showers, and the ovens'? Yeah, I knew that.

They applied German Engineering to the problems of how to kill as many
sick or weak, or Jewish, or gay, or Jehovah's witnesses, or gypsies
(or Roma, or Gitanos), or Soviets, or prisoners of war in the least
amount of time, at the cheapest cost? Sure they did, and they were
very efficient.

They mashed 80-100 people in cattle cars for 3-4 days to ship them all
the away across the continent, in order to steal anything they have
left, strip them naked, shave them bald and then asphyxiate and burn
them? Yep and yep.

They lured some of the murdered on board after selling them their
tickets and promising that they were just being relocated to farms and
other towns in the east? Sure, a bunch of times.

They quickly outgrew their first location (a Polish army camp), and
built another one a few k away, to hold 10x the people. Yep, they did.
Don't forget the third one they built, or the expansion program they
had at the second one.

Being German, they kept incredibly detailed records of people
admitted, took pictures and personal details, and then worked their
prisoners to death. Yep. Thanks for that, now we the victorious have
infinite records to use to remember what you did.

That they only entered people who made the first cut (intended), which
would be the strong, and just obliterated anyone else. Right. If you
went left from the train, you were insta-dead, and all your stuff
would be sent back to the Volk in Germany.

Experiments on men, women and children? Course, they are Nazi's.

Research into twins, so that they could alter German women to give
birth to more twins, which would be good for Germany.

Research into castration and barrenness, so that you could spay and
neuter those that might be infecting those that deserved to live.

Open pit burning of corpses, when your ovens just weren't big enough,
the supply was too high, or one of your oven's was in the shop. Yes

Shaving of heads for the express purpose of turning it into clothe
that could be used in garments or as stuffing or ticking for pillows.
Yes. These products were highly sought after for their high quality.

Express built warehouses to hold all the loot, much of which was
melted down (like their previous owners) and sent to help the Reich.
Yes, and once the allies (in this case, the Soviets) showed up, there
were bags of hair 80 kilo's each stacked to the ceiling, with a total
weight of about a ton. Never mind all the shoes, luggage, pairs of
glasses, cups and glasses, dolls, prosthetic legs, crutches, prayer
shawls, gold teeth and belts.

See what I mean? Hardly even makes a dent.

Warsaw

We flew into Warsaw fairly late. Our flight was an evening flight,
but was delayed still in Copenhagen. When we finally arrived, we were
tired and everything was dark. We (bravely) took the night bus (as
Andy has already blogged about) from the airport to the main train
station. From there, we had no choice but to finally take a cab. Our
first cab of the trip. It was past midnight and we didn't know what
direction the hotel was in or how far away it was, so mainly for
safety and sanity, we caught our cab. We arrived at our hotel,
checked in and crashed.

When we awoke and were finally able to get out into the city, we
discovered we were in a great location. It was very close to the
completely reconstructed old town area. Most of Warsaw was in ruins
by the end of WWII. The city was painstakingly rebuilt it as it had
been before the war. It was very beautiful. We wondered around most
of the day and just enjoyed being there.

The next day, we went to the Warsaw Uprising museum. It was so
fascinating. I would say, after the Jewish people, the Polish people
are the next in line to have been so totally abused and destroyed. I
learned quite a lot that morning. The most important thing I learned
is that at the beginning of the War, Poland was occupied by both the
Nazi's and the Soviet Union. I didn't realize that they were doubly
occupied. There was so much information and pictures and history that
are hard to summarize in any capacity, so I will not even try here.

Other things we learned while we were in Warsaw was that Chopin is
Polish (well- at least half - his other half is French, but he was
born and raised in Poland). Warsaw has a lot of music, history and
culture there. Perhaps it is not the draw that Vienna is for most
musicians, but they have quite a lot of musicians around and
performing all the time there. We were fortunate to catch a free
concert one of the evenings were were there. It was lovely and it was
outside and the weather was perfect.

Our final full day in Warsaw, we spend at one of the large parks
walking around and sitting and relaxing. In this parks, they have
peacocks, which Andy and I found to be very humorous and beautifully
colored. So, as you go through the pictures, be on the lookout for
the peacocks. Unfortunately, we were not able to see (and therefore
to capture) any peacocks with their tail feathers spread. This left
us to realize that we have both forgotten what makes them spread their
feathers. Our final guess was mating. We also didn't know if they
could fly or what their mode of self-defense is. Any ideas?

Leave a comment if you know why peacocks flair their feathers.

we are near here. on the right side of the picture

Great weather in Poland.

The sweet night bus of Poland - The Buho Harry Potter Style

So, we blew into Warsaw today, via Norwegian Air from Copenhagen.

We had really great (read hot) weather in Kopenhagen. We wandered
around a bit, rented some bikes for a fortune, and had plenty of time
at the airport.

Quick segway (sic). The Kopfenhagen airport has one of those malls in
it, that all the cool airports have these days. They are so "pijo".
The duty free shop has now expanded to an entire floor, and basically
all space that is not an actual boarding area is now a selling floor.

We managed to escape their clutches but still dropped about 45 bucks
on two sandwiches, a coke, a muffin and a bag of chips.

We are glad to be out of that country. Pricey!

Well, back to Harry Potter.

Our flight was delayed, meaning (importantly) that we landed in Warsaw
after the magic 11:00 (23:00) hour. At that hour, normal buses stop
running. I tried to plan ahead, and bought some zloty's in
Køpfenhagen. I got some 20 bills (worth about 10 bucks) and was raring
to go.

So, we land, the busses are stopped, and I ask the info guy what to
do. He says "Night Bus". I say sweet, and am glad to avoid a 50 zloty
cab ride.

We head outside, and find the stop, and wait. Sweet. The bus comes in
5 minutes.

Let's talk about the bus first. Yellow, big, old. Not like a school
bus, but like one of those cars that's gotten dinged up enough, that
the owner goes to the junkyard and buys a whole new door, 'cept the
door is a different color than the rest of the car. Apply that to this
bus. It is mostly yellow, but there is some red, and probably some
brown too.

The driver. Older man, gray party hair (sticking out in cool ways).
Gruffly getting us on the door. Not pleased to see the crumpled 20
zloty bill I hand him. Shakes his head, and just waves me off. I show
him my map from www.hotels.com and hope that this guy shows me some
sign that we are going near our hotel, the Sofitel Victoria Warsaw.
Not so much. He turns the map around, fishes out his glasses, and
takes another gander.

Eventually he just ignores me, I tell Nicci to sit down, and we stuff
ourselves into the front seat.

This guy takes off. Everything is in Polish (duh). We (and actually
another dude got on, same sitch, same response, but still on the bus).

At 11:30 the streets are dead. Did you know there is a Jeff's Steak
House in Poland? On the road to the airport? In full neon (red and
green?) Hmmm.

So there are a bunch of stops, and this guys stops for a total of
about 9 seconds at each one. I didn't even notice the dinger button or
pull cord to indicate "Driver, I'd like to stop at the next stop,
please".

He just seemed to discern when to stop, or caught a clue from the
little old ladies working their way to the door.

We finally get into the central area, after about 30 minutes, and
start seeing large buildings, more neon, and city-ness.
We hope we are not in the wrong place, but relax when we see the
central train/bus/mall/casino that they have in the center of town.

A taxi queue. Yay.

So, we managed to get to Warsaw downtown for free, and had a cab
waiting for us.

Nice. I'm glad to be back on the mainland. Things have gotta be
cheaper here.

Best y'all.