POLAND - DAY 7 - AUSCHWITZ

April 3, 2014

We woke up at 530am since we had breakfast at 7am.

We had a 4 hour drive to Auschwitz and our tour started at 11am.

Today is Nathan’s birthday! Stephania and a couple of the ladies sang Happy Birthday at breakfast and they had two small plates of orange sherbert cookies. 

All you hear Jeff say (once he finds out that it’s orange sherbert) is, “Orange sherbert? Ohhh, maybe I’ll take one here in a little bit.”

This was Jeff messaging Lisa every morning.

PS - We ALL were on our cell phones when whenever we ate because we didn't get wifi in our cabins.

Then all you hear is the face time ring tone because a few people are face timing.

We head out of the castle to go to the van and I’m first then Taryn then Jeff. I kind of trip and say, “oh ohhh” and Taryn is behind me laughing. Just as she’s laughing, SHE FALLS FACE FIRST AND EATS THE CEMENT, and Jeff and I are both looking at her and laughing hysterically. 

As we’re driving to Krakow, Margaret told us how her straightener broke this morning. Nathan (her husband) decides to chime in and share that, that morning he was laying in bed and farted and coincidentally the straightener started burning around that same time so he thought that the straightener smell was his fart then got really worried that something was wrong.

FANTASTIC story. We applaud Nathan for sharing.

I then stated, “if this is what I have to look forward to getting married, I’m good.”

We arrived at Auschwitz at 11am and our tour began. We watched a 20 minute video to start the tour and then we had a tour guide that spoke for the next hour and a half and took us around the camps. There’s A LOT of history/information that I can’t even type but I’ll share a couple points. There were actually 50 camps total and 3 parts to Auschwitz. Part 1 and 3 were smaller and part 2 was the biggest and mainly where everyone went. 

BESTIES

600 prisoners were in each one of these buildings

Mainly Jewish people and Gypsies were taken because of their ethnicity and then the rest of the Europeans from all over were mainly because of their politics.

There really just never a good day to go to Auschwitz. Whether we went earlier in the trip or later, or just anytime . . . it’s just rough.

It was a day of reflection.

Jamie was a ridiculously good photographer. I was walking towards the entrance (since we were leaving) and as I turned back, she had taken the picture and I'm directly center. Crazy.

We then drove an hour to Krakow to see a Cathedral inside of the Castle. The cathedral is free to look at and we went there. I’m not much of a buildings/cathedral kind of gal. I’m more into the local area homes and castles, as far as buildings go.

This was me done walking for the day.

After that, we walked to Sphinx Restaurant and had dinner. I ate the Australian Steak with vegetables which I was very much looking forward to but it wasn’t as good as I’d expected. But still, steak is better than no steak. Amen to that.

 It was about 6:20pm when we finished eating so we walked around Krakow for another 30 minutes and left around 7pm . . . well, as I’m typing this, I’m noticing that it’s 8:50pm soooo I’m not quite sure what we did from 7pm to now because we’re just now getting on the road home to the village. We did have to walk some and then make a pit stop to the gas station in order to use the restrooms. We have about a 2 to 3 hour drive right now back to the village so we expect to get in around midnight at the latest.

We get to sleep in tomorrow a little since we don’t have breakfast until 830am. We leave at 9am and get to Tomy around 10:30am.

Today was a day of history and building relationships with each other. We’ve definitely grown on each other as a group and made friends with our Polish friends. We laughed A LOT in the van today. . . I hope so since most of our traveling time is done in the van!