Today was a rather busy day. We had slept well in the centrum hostel, so there was lots of energy to do things 🙂 As an experienced visitor of Wroclaw, I showed the old town to Larisa. We slept in the centrum hostel in the Świętego Mikołaja which is a very good location to start from. We started the tour at the Saint Elizabeth church. Unfortunately the tower was closed. Actually it is quite simple to see the important things here, just follow the dwarfs. Yes that’s right, if you look well, you will see them at many locations around the stare miasto.

The rynek and the ratusz are the next place to see. I think the rynek is together with the one in Krakow one of the biggest in Europe.

After going to the market to buy some food, we wanted to see where the city was founded almost 1000 years ago. This should have been on the Ostrow Tumski, aka cathedral island, which is a small island on the river Oder.

We went back to the stare miasto to look for more dwarfs and we found them…One of them was sitting behind bars. This was the old prison of Wroclaw.
It is interesting to know that later on, in Kiev in the national war museum, we saw a guillotine which has been used in this museum.

OK, by now it was getting time to checkout from the hostel and ride to the KL in Auschwitz.

After a nice ride we arrived in the afternoon at camp 1. There are many tourists here. We secured the bike and checked in for a guided tour. This tour takes about 3.5 hours but is a must do if you are interested in this history. We had a very good polish guide. He told us all the facts but made the impact very clear also, and most importantly made you contemplate about it.

After camp 1, which is the smaller camp, we went to camp 2 Birkenau, which is a really large camp. You can compare it to a small town. Most of the barracks here are gone. Looking from the watchtower you get a very good overview of its size. For me it was one of the most appealing afternoons so far.

It was getting late, I think we were the last visitors of the camp that day. We didn’t have a sleeping place for the night yet. The plan was normally go to Zakopane from here. But the weather was too bad for the mountains. We knew Krakow is an interesting place to see so the decision was easily made. We have booked a hostel in the center and off we went again. One small detail here, we didn’t take the highway but the local smaller road of about 60km to Krakow. This was a bit more difficult than expected. It was a really small road, with quite some lorries on it, it went up and down with a lot of bends having small stones. The darkness was falling and it was still a bit rainy. Coming from the E40 highway, I had to work a bit here, but we arrived all well in Krakow!

When you stroll around the rynek in the stare miasto and the streets around, you will hear the music play. It goes from classical to jazz and rock. The first night in Krakow, after our Auschwitz visit, we had dinner in a restaurant called Koko. The kitchen was polish and the prices very economic.

When we came out and walked along, all of a sudden I was surprised by some nice piano tunes. As a player myself I have a good ear for piano music and the player. It appeared to come from a restaurant so we entered to have a look. We sat at the bar. The restaurant was already closing, it was after 10pm but we stayed until the last guests. The artist was Vitaly, and he was from Kiev. He was a sax and piano player and had a very big repertoire. We really enjoyed listening to him and were invited by him to come back the next evening.

The day ended very nice in this way and we were pretty tired by now. I was already forward what tomorrow would bring. Cheers everybody…