Trip to Krakow

At the beginning of March the Erasmus organisation (ESN) put on a trip for its students to the famous city of Krakow in Southern Poland. Having missed a similar trip due to having a flight booked to return home for the weekend at the beginning of the first semester I was really excited to attend this one. After the scariest five hour bus journey -we nicknamed the driver “Kamikaze”, as he was determined to overtake anything regardless of whether there was traffic coming in the other direction or not - we started our trip with a visit to the world famous salt mines, which was both interesting and dare I say salty. I had so much fun in the mine as I was determined to make a salt related joke at each stage of the tour (and after 5 minutes these had very tenuous links to salt). I have to say that the underground cathedral made entirely of salt 330ft below ground was absolutely amazing.

I have to say that Krakow then welcomed us to the city centre with Manchester style weather that lasted all weekend, near constant wind and rain. After finding our hostel and sorting out rooms we went for some food in a local restaurant which was pretty average and I keep getting told that English food is bad! .

After the meal there was some time to get ready and “warm up” ready to hit the clubs, the “warming up” parties (where you have a few pre-club drinks) were great fun and usually consisted of us getting funny looks in the supermarket on the booze run buying beer, vodka, apple juice, Redbull and a range of other mixers.

I really enjoyed Krakow which is a very different city to Warsaw although there still a fair number of concrete buildings around the city, the city centre was not bombed like Warsaw, so there are many old buildings and what seems to be more churches, chapels and cathedrals than people! The main square is really beautiful with old buildings all around although when we went it was amazingly windy which let to the highly amusing picture below, see how many umbrellas are in the bin.

The last day of the trip was a visit to the former Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Berkenau this wasn’t something I was particularly looking forward to although it was an opportunity I was not going to miss and after visiting I would recommend to anyone if you are near. The camp at Aushwitz is actually a work camp based in a former Polish military barracks hence the buildings look actually quite nice being built out of smart red bricks although the place is so empty it is really eerie. The interiors of the buildings are now used to house exhibits telling the story of the camp from 1939 to 1945 some exhibits are rather horrific such as a room about the size of my living room full - floor to near ceiling - of human hair saved from the victims of the camp, there are four rooms of shoes and a glass exhibition case of spectacles and a display of absolutely hundreds of empty Kyklon B gas canisters. I learnt a lot over the 3 hours we were there, although there were some things I didn’t really want to know and some things that I didn’t realise such as the fact that Auschwitz, the original camp was a work camp with hardly any Jews being held there, mostly local resistance fighters. It was at Berkenau; the second camp that the holocaust, where millions of Jews where murdered. Below are a few photos of Auschwitz and Berkenau including a picture of the famous gate “Arbeit Macht Frei” which means “Work Sets (one) Free” the other pictures are of Berkenau and the view from the control room above the main gate. Berkenau is mainly empty as the Nazis destroyed what they could to hide evidence of what took place there but the scale of the camp is evident.

Overall the whole trip was amazing and was a good bonding experience for all the new international students that have been here just a few weeks now. But its back to studying now as the classes get going and more and more work is to be done.