Poland

My first stop in Poland was Krakow. It was quite strange visiting Poland. It is one of those places that seemed very distant and "exotic". Krakow is the most popular tourist destination in Poland. Unlike many other Polish cities Krakow escaped destruction in World War 2 and is now a World Heritage Site. Krakow was the seat of Polish royalty for hundreds of years. I visited the Cathedral, which contains the tombs of royalty dating back hundreds of years. The central square of Krakow is huge and contains many spectacular buildings:

Not far from Krakow is Auschwitz/Birkenou, the complex of Nazi death camps. I spent the afternoon on a tour of the sites, which still contain many of the original buildings. It was very sobering seeing for real a place that I had only before seen in documentaries and movies. It is hard to comprehend that more than a million Jews were killed in that one area. But seeing the sites brought home to me that those events really happened, that the perpetrators and victims were real people and that the Holocaust really only happened relatively recently.

From Krakow I travelled to Wroclaw, a pleasant city with many Gothic and Baroque buildings. I had a day off in Wroclaw and took it easy. From Wroclaw it was a relatively short drive to Germany and the end of my travels in eastern Europe.