It was a suitably grey and rainy Tuesday that we set out for Auschwitz (or Oswiecim as it's known in Polish) from Krakow.

I'd been told by other backpackers that Auschwitz is definitely worth going to, for shock value alone. But it's not something you should casually just walk into as though you were going into a chocolate factory. Last time I was in Krakow, my brother and I wanted to go there, but our parents said no. It's too depressing, too intense, they said. They didn't want to see it again.

Having been there now I tend to agree. It was one of those haunting experiences, walking the paths the prisoners walked. Going through the hallways of the barracks, their photos and dates of death were hung up on the walls by the hundreds and you feel as though they're all just watching you go by.

There were, as expected, whole rooms filled with suitcases and one with just childrens' shoes stacked up to the ceiling. Then there was the one with adult shoes. And the one which gave me shivers down my spine - the room of human hair, shaved off after extermination to be sold as a material to make cloth. They even showed you a sample of cloth made with hair.

The most disturbing things for me were probably the firing wall, where people were shot in the back of the head with silenced guns right next to one of the womens' barracks, and the crematorium. Here, people were herded into the gas chamber, gassed 700 at a time and slid into the furnace, 3 bodies at a time.
As I stood in the gas chamber, I barely even listened to the tour guide, I just stared at the holes in the ceiling where the poison gas was dropped through. Apparently the crematorium we were in was the small one, only capable of cremating 340 people per day. The "better" ones at the Birkenau camp could go through 2000 bodies a day.

I can't get over the echo in the gas chamber, either, especially when you imagine the sudden realisation of the hundreds of people in there that they are not going to be bathed, they are going to be murdered in a matter of minutes. The screams would have been deafening and only magnified by the echoes.

According to my tour guide, the unlucky sods who had to put the bodies into the furnaces were prisoners, too. I can't even begin to think about the trauma those poor people went through, shovelling the bodies of innocents, friends and family all day long.

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The tour guide was really nice and stayed back to describe a few extra things at the end, but this meant that I very nearly got stranded in Auschwitz for the night. To the point that the man at the bus station said that the last bus and minibus to Krakow had already left for the evening, and that my only chance was to catch a train.

The last train was in 15 minutes at the time, and the walk from the station had taken about 30-40 minutes earlier that day. Not surprisingly, I didn't feel like spending the night in this little town, even though it is green and lovely and has just had a horrible history. So I bolted all the way to the train station, getting there a minute before the train.

I much preferred sleeping in my youth hostel than in a town with the world's biggest cemetery with the ashes over a million people left in the soil.

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I am going to put some photos up now. But as my facilities are very limited, I appear to be unable to resize them to a moderately sensible size (eg 500 pixels wide). Instead, they are huge and throw my formatting out of whack.

Please take this into consideration.

Does anyone know of a good program I can get online/use online/in internet cafes to resize my photos? Most programs like Paint only let me crop.
Also, if anyone can advise me on how to fix up my blogspot template to accommodate photos larger than 500 pixels wide without it looking stupid as it does now, I'd really appreciate it. Email me if you're willing to help this poor little traveller with icky html.

Come on all you programmers who I know read this blog... there's a scary number of you all...

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I love trains. It's just so much more fun as a form of transport than buses or planes. You hop on one and mere hours later, you're in another ciy or country, even. At least it's that way in Europe.
Not only do you change location so quickly, it's so much more comfortable than in a plane or bus. You can get up and walk around. You can gaze as the changing countryside. Also, since the long distance trains in Eastern Europe tend to have 6-8 person compartments, you often get to chat with fellow travellers going your way, and swap stories. It's all good.

Anyway, the last week or so has been crazily busy. I caught a train from Prague to Wroclaw in Poland where I visited my other uncle's family. My train got there at 1:30AM and after a day of sightseeing I was on another train to Gdansk by 11PM of the same day.

Wroclaw:



Gdansk is a beautiful town in the far north of Poland, 20 minutes to the beach. Here, my cousin and I had a quick nap first thing in the morning when we arrived, then spent the afternoon lazing about on the beach with her boyfriend keeping us company. Golden sand, warm sun, gentle water in the Baltic sea, near-naked people to look at - what more could you ask for? We even managed to get sunburnt in the time we where there.

Gdansk:







The evening was spent walking around the town markets, eating the biggest ball of fairy floss I have ever seen, (it was at least half a metre in diametre) and drinking. Polish teenager style. That is, take a bottle of vodka, and pass it around. Everyone takes the biggest swig they can followed by a swig of juice to wash it down. It's thoroughly disgusting. There's also a version where the person who drinks the most gets money from the others.
Suffice it to say, I have never gotten drunk so quickly before in my life, and I still didn't win. It appears I need practice with this style of drinking.

The next day, heads still spinning, we did some more sightseeing before hopping on a 6 hour train to Warsaw to visit more relatives.

Visiting relatives is an odd experience for me. Having grown up so far away from them means I've only visited some of them a few times before, some none at all. The aunt we visited in Warsaw is one of my favourites, though. You can rest assured that once you step into her household you will be stuffed to the gills with excessive amounts of delicious polish foods until you're begging for mercy. This happens at every meal.

Other relatives are a more sobering experience, especially when you can see grandparents slipping away into senility. It's such a waste of precious memories and wisdom. I found it quite confronting that not only did my grandmothers not recognise me, but when told that I am their grandchild, they did not remember that they had grandchildren at all. They would promptly forget my name several seconds later, and my relation to them shortly afterwards. The scariest thing is that this has happened in both grandmothers at once in the last 2 years or so.

Poland is a strange country. The main thing that strikes me about it is that people don't seem to be nearly as friendly and nice as Australians. They don't smile at you as you pass them in your building or on the street, and won't say hello unless you say it first.

In fact, the first morning after I arrived in the country, the first interaction I had with a non-family member was having my arse slapped - hard- by one of a group of guys I had to pass on the footpath. I've been told to take it as a compliment, but dammit, it was annoying. Why can't they me normal and wolf whistle instead or something?
I also know that in Australia, at least, if you see someone trip and fall over you ask if they're ok,
Being the eternal clutz that I am, I tripped and fell on my face while passing a group of teenagers outside a Maccas in Lublin.
Far from asking if I was ok, they laughed audibly and made some comment about walking not being that hard. I don't know if I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I'm not taking the greatest liking to the youth of Poland. I've also been informed that these are standard behaviours in most Eastern European countries.

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The Hostel I was staying at wasn't in the centre of the city, but because it whad a metro station a minute away, it turned out to be really convenient to get to and from. Man, I sound like a travel brochure. It was a basic room and the most striking thing abou it was the view through the window - directly out onto a graveyard. Think spit-and-you'll-hit-it close.

See? This was my room and you can see the gravestones through the window:



Anyway, I found the concept of the graveyard quite hilarious, actually, but I'm sure other people woudn't think of it the same way.

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Catching the train to Prague was fun. I was expecting to have 4 and a half hours to read my new book, but ended up spending 4 and a half hours chatting to two Americans and two Brits.
We swapped travel stories, as you do, and marvelled at the number of freaks in Europe who follow you around.
I found I barely noticed the changing countryside because i was so caught up in the conversation, or busy being amused at the guys with Eurail passes who didn't realise their passes didn't cover the Czech Republic until the ticket pointed at the passes and said so.

Everyone keeps giving me funny looks and tends to go "wow, aren't you sick of travelling yet?" when i tell them i'm two months through a six month trip. But then they all seem to be travelling for several weeks, or two months at most. And to some degree, I am. I'm kind of getting sick of getting to know new people over a few days or weeks, only to then be on my own all over again with just a few email addresses to keep me company. It's that first day of being alone after having company for a while which bugs me. I'm fine after that. On the upside, at least i can say i haven't been bored and all on my own for the whole time. :) And from time to time i get to meet up with friends again, which is great fun.

Speaking of meeting up with friends, I did meet up with some guys from Amsterdam when in Prague. One from the States, one from Canada. And both proceeded to poke fun at my Aussie accent, attempting to teach me "proper" english. Heh. Good thing we didn't go into spellings. Apparently I seriously mispronounce the word "no" and thus I'd hear this echo of 'noooo' from the two of them every time I said it in conversation to them or even to other people.

The three of us went out on a day trip to the town of Kutna Hora (about an hour away from Prague by train) where there is a church with the bones of 40 000 skeletons, used as decorations. This, let me tell you, is both weird and creepy to see. They have strings of bones hanging like streamers and even a coat of arms fashioned out of them. The central massive chandelier is made using every type of bone from the human body.

Look for yourself:




So yeah, twas a fun excursion to a little town where food was blissfully cheap (i think i paid the equivalent of AU$7 for a very filling meal, including an additional side dish, tea and a coke).

Last night we went on the Worst Guided Tour Ever (TM). It was so bad it was hilarious. Imagine, if you will, that you have just paid decent money for a tour and when you get on it, the tour ends up being primarily in Czech, with the occasional translation into English by the guide. But what she says consists of "on your right is the national theatre", "on your left is the Jewish Quarter" said in the most monotone of voices. Not a funny anecdote in sight, and you get the impression that she'd rather be pulling her nose hairs out with a spoon than be working there. Then, midway through the tour (which was 420 Crown - roughly $20AU), she suddenly says that the next part of the tour costs 50 additional Crown. Surely they should have included this in the price, or at least warned us that there may be additional costs. Grr. I didn't have any cash left for this and had to rely on the goodness of one of my companions to get me into that section of the tour.

Needless to say, don't go on the Prague -" Getting Acquainted" tour if you're ever in this city. In fact avoid the tours put on by the company that runs that in general. Unless you enjoy wasting your money, that is. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

And now I'm just hanging out in Prague for another day on my own due to a brief (I hope) case of extreme idiocy on my part.

This way I get to see more of the seedy underbelly of Prague all on my own. Today's fun adventures involved going down to an internet cafe underneath the main train station, but turning back halfway down the stairs because a bunch of people were sitting across the entire width of the stairs snorting something which didn't look legal. They didn't move across to let me pass, and even yelled at me when i turned back and went back up the stairs. I was later bugged for money and cigarettes by passing bums and had to step over someone sleeping outside the station.

Good fun, huh?

Interestingly, many of the beggars seem to have given up on traditional methods of begging by asking people for money, and kneel on the ground, even putting their heads on the ground, just leaving their hands cupped and outstretched. They just look really tired and frustrated, i guess. But at least they're less intrusive than the ones in Vienna.

I suppose wandering around recently at night has shown me some of the more beautiful aspects of Prague. The buildings are all lit up and make stunning reflections in the water. In the time I've been travelling, Prague is the city where I've most cursed not having a tripod for my camera because the evening shots would just be incredible. I've taken a few and damn, I needed a tripod:





Torture chamber:

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Anyway, back to tales of cultural oddities.

I spent a few days wandering around Munich with my cousin. She was my tour guide and showed me the town halls, and the main town squares, which were covered in school children enjoying their holidays which had only just begun a few days earlier. Too many children running about, I say. I prefer cities filled with backpackers, waiting to be met and asked many random questions.


Munich isn't the most beautiful city. But it is quaint and European in terms of all the buildings everywhere with their palace-esque styles. Compared with Australia and the states, it looks old and dignified.



As far as I can tell, it's quite typically German in terms of being run to the second in terms of promptness and exactness. The metro system has trains coming pretty much every 20 minutes on the dot on our line, not like Sydney at all, where trains being 20 minutes late is not uncommon. I also love the buy-one-ticket-get-travel-on-all-forms-of-transport-all-day-long philosophy. It's great for tourists such as myself.
Even my cousin is so cute and German. She tells me about her usual day right down to the exact minute. She's meant to leave the house at 7:20am, she says, but she's often running late and instead of having 5 minutes to walk to the bus which comes at 7:25, she runs the distance in 2 minutes. Don't these people have traffic jams? How can it all be so predictable? When I leave the house aiming for a 7:25 bus, i leave at 7:15, in case it comes early, and don't leave in disgust until 7:50 because some buses are genuinely 15 or 20 minutes late in Sydney. In my area, at least.

After a couple days of such general wandering around Munich (such as seeing their Olympic Games village from the 70s - which reminds me, they wanted the 2012 games, but would have built an all new village, wouldn't they? Why don't they just reuse the facilities they have, dammit! It seems like such wasted investments. Sorry, mini-rant.), my cousin and I have headed over to Austria.

We spent a day and a half in Salzburg, going around the fortress and basking in the beauty that is the town in which the Sound of Music was filmed. It's old and makes a big fuss about Mozart coming from there. All of Austria seems to, actually. Vienna included, even though it's several hours away from his birthplace and he may have only lived here for a few months.





We also managed to go to a free presentation of one of Mozart's operas. It was probably free because it was presented in the strangest way ever. We missed the first 10 minutes, but I don't think that would have made it any less odd. It was in Italian, and all the performers were dressed in very contemporary clothes, but that wasn't the odd bit. As far as we could tell, two girls and two guys were singing about who-knows-what and obsessing about this tall guy in an orange shirt. They ended up wrapped up in a 5 way hug, where Orange-Shirt-Guy had someone clinging to each leg.

Does this not look odd to everyone else, too? Remember that there's another person attached to his right leg, too, but it's behind the head in the audience.



Another thing that struck me as odd is the sheer number of Australians I've encountered in my travels. We were getting into the Festungbahn (Fortress train that takes you up the hill)



to go into the Fortress, and within our carriage (which takes no more than 10 people) there were 4 Australian guys. At our current youth hostel in Vienna, every evening I've encountered someone else with a familiar accent.
Of course, at the same time I keep hearing such a mix of different languages here that it's been quite impressive. Everything from French to Korean has been audible, and even a few languages I haven't been able to quite place. Extremely common are Italians, not surprisingly. A few I met the other night biked their way up from Italy, which I thought was a decent effort.

At the same time, when you go out into the city, it's hard to find someone who doesn't speak English. I got asked for directions in English several times. This is just another one of those cities filled with tourists.

And again, where there are hoardes of tourists, there are people who try to take advantage of them. Along one of the main streets in Vienna, Mariahilfer Strasse, we have been repeatedly approached by beggars. They try to come up with interesting reasons to give them money, too. Yesterday, one wanted money to buy food for his dog. Another woman asked my cousin gently for money for her child, and when my cousin said she didn't have any money, the woman got furious, called her a liar, and said she shouldn't be a liar at such a young age. When, I wonder, is an appropriate age to become a liar?

Some of the buskers have been interesting, also. There was a violin player who would only play when someone put money into his hat. Like a wind-up toy, he'd play a few bars then slow down and rock back and forth on the last note, freezing until the next coin was placed in his hat. He would play for various amounts of time, depending on how good the coin was. I suspect the only reason it worked for him was because he seemed to be a pretty decent violinist.

One odd thing I've noticed about the Austrians is that sometimes when you ask them for something, they won't respond. They'll just continue whatever it is that they were doing and if you repeat yourself, then they'll get annoyed because they heard you the first time. This is an unusual thing to work with, but I guess I've learnt to speak loudly and clearly the first time and assume I've been heard unless they don't do what I want for ages afterwards.

Other random photos of Salzburg:







And now some of Vienna:

The town hall:


The royal apartments' decorations:


The art gallery which is a stunning building itself:


And an Egyptian display within:


Finally, some pretty bridge photos over the Danube:

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Woo. I'm 24.

My birthday was very different to usual. Firstly, I had it while I was in Munich, which is definitely different to usual. Secondly, it was at my uncle's place with my parents there. I haven't spent my birthday with my parents since '99. And none of my friends were around. But that's ok, because I still received emails and SMSes from them.
The main thing that I found that was strange was that in such a situation where there were a number of really sick individuals, there was a reason for me to focus on myself, and yet it felt so excessive and frivolous for me to think of myself.
It's hard to explain.
Usually, I'm perfectly happy to take the limelight, but I just wasn't there. I think it has to do with the desperate situation that they're in. Each night, they pray for a miracle. Literally - they do a round of the rosary. I've joined in. It's kind of mind-blowing to think of having exhausted all the options and being left with only religion to keep your hopes up. You hear about these situations, but it's odd to be in the midst of one, yourself.

And here I was, in the middle of my 6 month round-the-world trip celebrating a birthday during what will probably be one of the best times of my life. Bit of a contrast, don't you think?

Strange birthday.

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After such a wicked time in Amsterdam, I arrived in Munich to visit some relatives. These particular relatives have an absolutely awful run of luck healthwise which I won't go into, but the upshot is that it's been a rather sobering experience. And again I can't help but feel just how lucky I am to be well and gallivanting around the world as I have been.

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My two days in Amsterdam were a fascinating experience. It was a pleasant contrast to Herrang in a lot of ways.

For example, after two weeks of listening to pretty much exclusively swing music all day every day, hearing regular mainstream music was brilliant. Well, I was transfixed for about 20 minutes even by the most mundane of MTV music when I first turned it on. It was a random U2 song I don't even like, and Coldplay, amongst other things. But that didn't matter. It wasn't swing, and that was good.

Also, unlike Herrang, where a good proportion of the people there were swedish, and relatively local, I've come to the conclusion that there are hardly any Dutch people in Amsterdam. Every time I looked around, somebody was speaking English, or Polish or French or German - the Dutch were in hiding! Either that, or they must have shipped out for the holidays. Can't blame them, really, what with all the silly tourists wandering around the maze of alleyways and canals.



The only thing that suggests that there might still be some Dutch people around is the presence of bicycles everywhere. Crossing the road, you look left for cars, and you look left for bikes before moving. There's also the fact that every bridge over a canal has a million bikes parked on it. I was quite amused at how inventive people were being at finding new bike parking spots for themselves - I saw one attached to some scaffolding which was over a footpath.



The other visible dutch people must be the ladies in the Red Light District windows, many of whom are apparently men, but, to be honest, I can't usually tell which ones are the men.

But the strangest thing for me was that I got hit on quite so many times while in Amsterdam. Twice in pubs (not surprising, I know), once at the youth hostel, once even in an internet cafe? And I had someone offer me dinner while I walked along the street! I didn't even slow down to talk to this person, he just walked along at my pace and offered to buy me dinner. When I declined, he veered off into a side lane. Absolutely bizarre.
I can't help but wonder if the presence of the Red Light District influences things like that.

I had a fun experience chatting with a Moroccan guy, actually. Funnily enough, he spoke 4 languages, none of which are English. It ended up being a rather broken conversation in French, since mine isn't very good. To tell you the truth, I hadn't realised just how much French I'd forgotten till I tried and failed miserably at putting together a sentence longer than 'I like cats'. Nevertheless, we comminicated using a little French, a lot of gestures and a few animal sounds when necessary. We wandered over to one of those lovely "coffee shops" which doesn't sell coffee and although I didn't have a joint, there was probably enough smoke in the air to stone a small elephant. Consequently, his mooing was pretty damn hilarious at the time.

Sidenote: the coffee shop itself was very intriguing - dim lighting, people splayed out on cushions on the floor, obviously stoned. It was an indian-themed coffee shop, with elephants on the walls and carpets and cushions on the floors, so from a stoned perspective it may have been quite surreal.

Anyway. My French isn't that good, but it's good enough to recognise the phrases mon amour "my love", je t'aime "I love you" and ce material ferait une belle robe de mariage which basically translates to "get the hell out of there because the loony who's spent 2 hours with you is smitten and talking about marriage".
As such, my French was enough to tell me to get out of the situation. Unfortunately, I'd given him my number before he seemed quite so crazy and then had to endure two 10 minute phone calls the next day of him literally begging me to meet up with him one last time. Yeah, right, freak. I don't think I've said 'non' that many times in such a short space of time before.

So yes, it was a fun weekend, and there's nothing quite like feeling that you've mangled someone's impression of what girls from Australia are like.

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