Busy week in Eastern Europe

G'day all,

Well the good news is that I haven't been mugged yet, the bad news…that would have made a cool story hey. The blog almost came to a grizzly end the day after my last update as I slipped over and threw my laptop down a whole flight of stairs and watched it bounce on every step. I was lucky it didn't follow my travel adaptor which fell down 3 stories and almost killed someone sitting on a couch at the hostel. I've been flat strap traveling for the past week and have gone from Vilnius in Lithuania to Warsaw and Krakow in Poland and now I'm currently in Bratislava in Slovakia. Vilnius was a pretty cool town in the end and I felt pretty safe during the day and stayed indoors at night. It's quite a medieval town and has some really nice buildings and streets and this crazy area called Uzupis. Uzupis is a small area of only a few streets wide which sees itself as a separate country from Lithuania. It even has its own constitution, police uniforms, and passport stamps and is run by a bunch of nutty artists. On April 1st each year (which happened to be the day I was there) they have a celebration as their Republican day which is a bit of a joke but they guard the bridges and put stamps in your passport that day and it turns into a bit of a party. I really wanted one of these passport stamps but I heard some bad stories about people getting caught out on it explaining it at the Russian boarder so I decided to keep my butt safe and not get one. One cool thing I did was head out to this beautiful town called Trakai about an hour out of Vilnius for a day trip. The weather was nice and warm with blue skies and the town was so amazing to walk around in and had this great castle on an island which you can go out to. It was a nice change to be out of the snow and into some sun but this pretty town will still blow anyone way no matter what time of the year it is. My next stop was Warsaw in Poland but I only had one night there before heading to Krakow. Warsaw is a very big and spaced out dirty city which was pretty much completely rebuilt after WW2. It was quiet exhausting walking these long, straight, and endless roads but once I got myself a tram pass it made things a bit nicer. The old town in Warsaw was rebuilt quite well but the rest of the city is quite plain. I went to this amazing museum all about the Polish resistance to the Nazi invasion and ended up spending hours there being blown away by the sheer scale of the War and how much was involved in it. Krakow was my next stop and it was a much nicer smaller city and has a nice character about it. On my second day in Krakow I did an all day long trip out to the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. Auschwitz was the biggest and toughest mother of all the concentration camps where 1.5 million people (mainly Jews) were exterminated and worked to death during WW2. I've been to Dachau concentration camp in Germany 6 years ago but that was nothing compared to the magnitude of Auschwitz. This place blew me away at how large and how brutal it was and the mass production gas chambers they used put shivers up my spine. Just walking around the place you could still smell the death in the air and it had the eeriest feeling. The whole concentration camp has been made into an amazing museum where everything has been kept original but they added some gripping massive displays of the prisoners' shoes, clothes, hair, toothbrushes, prosthetic arms and legs, shaving brushes, and suitcases before they were executed. This was only a small selection of what they had left but every article including the hair took up a huge room each from the floor to the ceiling. I did a 3 hour tour which was the only way to see this huge place without getting lost and I thought it was brilliant in a sad way. I'd have to say that it is a must do for any Europe trip and really shouldn't be missed because it really is simply mind blowing. Although parts were destroyed by the Nazis, it is generally in really good condition and you can see almost exactly how it was during the war. Yesterday I went to see something that was also very interesting which was the "salt mine" in Krakow. This mine has been running since the 13th century and is 125 meters underground and has 300km of underground tunnels and stairways and 40 underground chapels. It's been made into a bit of a tourist attraction over the past 40 years but is still really interesting. They have many statues carved out of hardened salt and the most amazing thing is the huge chapel they have about 90 meters underground and everything there is carved into and out of the salt. There was even a bar down the bottom at 125 meters and a big sports hall. This morning I had to run around Krakow and see all the city sights before catching my 10am bus to Bratislava in Slovakia. I'm staying at a really nice hostel tonight so if you don't hear from me again you know why. (yes I'm talking about the horror movies Hostel 1 and 2.)

Keep your comments coming,

Woodsy