Saturday, July 18
The style of driving in Poland is quite interesting. On two-lane highways drivers consistently pass, forcing oncoming drivers to drive on the shoulder. It always seemed as though a head-on crashes were imminent and last-millisecond swerving keep most people alive, though I saw more bad accidents on Polish highways than I ever had on the same length of road in the U.S.
Four of us traveled to the Sobibor death camp and visited a small town nearby.
Sunday, July 19
We visit the former Warsaw Ghetto and see a small remnant of its wall, undistinguished in the center of an apartment complex.
I really don't enjoy the food in Poland.
Monday, July 20
We leave early in the morning and take a bus ride to Krakow but stop at the Majdanek concentration camp along the way. We arrive at Krakow's only air-conditioned hotel in the late evening. There's a heat wave in progress so this is quite fortunate.
During Communism, buildings were not built with air conditioning. Since the early 1990s, some buildings have added air conditioning but unfortunately, most of the restaurants we ate in as a group were not air conditioned and were extremely uncomfortable.
The Forum Hotel in Krakow has other interesting aspects:
- Since it's a hotel built during the Communist era, it's style and furnishings are very plain. The rooms and hallways are not well-lit and are quite dark.
- The "mattress" is a thin foam pad atop a box spring so it was more like camping than a hotel. Throughout all of Eastern Europe, hotels generally have two twin beds instead of a queen or king bed.
- Upon leaving the hotel for the day, we were requested to leave our key at the front desk. Others in our group relay stories of staying in hotels during Communism and being forced to leave their key with a guard on the floor, who monitored comings and goings of the guests.
- The phone is rotary.
- Our ceiling leaked profusely any time we turned on the air conditioning, despite repairs by hotel maintenance staff.
- The bread served at breakfast and by room service was an the verge of being stale. It was quite hard.
Smoking is very, very popular in Eastern Europe so smoke-free restaurants are impossible to find. After enjoying the heavy anti-smoking legislation of California (and especially Davis, where smoking is prohibited outside buildings), it was difficult to breathe.
Tuesday, July 21
Tour of Krakow. We found a great bookstore where Jen loaded up on books about the Holocaust not available in the U.S.
Wednesday, July 22 In the morning, we visited Auschwitz in one day.
Thursday, July 23
We took a long bus ride from Krakow to Budapest, Hungary. We drove through Slovakia, the eastern country of what was once Czechoslovakia, and passed through two border-control points. I got out of the bus at the Poland-Slovakia border to take photos, which did not meet with the approval of the border guards. They warned me and I scurried back on the bus.
Trucks wait at the border for in-depth inspection of their contents. The line of trucks extends for about a mile in each direction from the border and trucks may wait for over a day to cross.
We eat at McDonalds (Yipee!) and buy our lunch with dollars but receive change in Slovak Kronas. We arrive at our hotel in cosmopolitan Budapest.
Friday, July 24
A short tour of the city.
Throughout this part of the world, traffic signal lights change from green to yellow to red and then to red and yellow before turning green.
Saturday, July 25
Boring day; we visit the Museum of Ethnography.
Throughout the trip, we have used an ATM much more than the travelers checks we had brought. Two of our hotels have adjacent bank ATMs which make it easy to withdrawl local currency.
Sunday, July 26
Another boring day. The tour guide cons us into taking a trip to a "artist's colony" outside of Budapest which turns out to be one big flea market of junk. We pass Roman ruins along the way but don't stop. Budapest was definitely the only disappointing part of the trip. Those things we would have liked to have seen, we were unable to and those things which we saw were, for the most part, not worth it. Our tour guide says that there's not much scheduled for Budapest because they want us to be able to "wind down." I feel that I can "wind down" once I arrive home.
Monday, July 27
We leave Budapest early in the morning and begin our flight back to California. This entails three flights: 1) Budapest to Prague, 2) Prague to Newark, and 3) Newark to Los Angeles. In Newark we have a short layover but a problem occurs after customs, apparently our suitcases were tagged for the wrong airline upon re-check-in. When we arrive in L.A., our bags are missing. Our bags finally show up 24 hours later at LAX.
