Krakow part two!

So I left Krakow today after a great five days. Its probably been the best place I've been so far on my travels and I'll miss it very much! On the last day I went with Paul and Scott to see Auschwitz properly. I was a bit hungover from the nights festivities and was horriffied when the bus we paid to take us there turned out to be a tiny, cramped, hot, bouncy minibus. After about 4 minutes I was ready to throw up and it was a miracle I got there without being sick.

This time I got to have a proper look round Auschwitz I and also got to see Auschwitz II for the first time. Auschwitz II is spectacularly gruesome. Its much bigger than the other part and has hundreds of blocks where the prisoners stayed. It is also partitioned by the railway line which cuts through the camp on its deadly path to the gas chambers and crematorium. The retreting SS ended up blowing up the chambers and crematorium and all that remains is a huge pile of rubble. Its hard to belive it but that was the spot where about 1,000,000 people lost their lives.

We knew how bad the journey back was so left about three hours for the trip. However, we had unwittingly stepped onto the SLOWEST train in the world and ended up rolling into the station 25 minutes before our night train to Berlin....unfortunately our bags were located at the hostel which is a 20 minute walk from the station. After the longest and most difficult run of my life we jumped on the train just two minutes before it left!!!

Horray! We thought....

The train wasn't the best but we were so tired we settled down and got to sleep. In the night I kept waking up and noticed that our train kept stopping for ridiculos amounts of time in random places. This conjored up stories I'd heard of Polish trains stopping in the middle of nowhere, the occupants being gassed, and waking up the next day with all your stuff stolen. Luckially that didn't happen and I awoke at 8:50 after a good sleep. It took me about 10 minutes to realise that we should have arrived at 7:15. So we assumed that we had been a bit delayed. After another half hour or so we stopped....still in Poland. After another hour we were still stopped so thought we'd check out the dining car of the train. We walked to the end of our carridge (one of the middle ones) and opened the door to find....that the other half of the train was gone!! After wandering around finding out that no one knew anything, we found someone who spoke English and they told us that we were waiting for another train to come and pick us up and that the other half of the train had gone to some coast on the Baltic Sea! We FINALLY got going again and ended up arriving 7 hours late after an 18 hour train ride! Finally found a hostel and are all good now. Can't post any pics from here but will do soon!