At this rate, I won’t be done recapping this trip for another few months, but if you’re still reading, that means you’ll likely bear with me. The holidays, binge-watching BBC series on Netflix, and my job (which includes a lot of blogging) might have prevented me from getting these out before the year ended, but get them out I shall!

Let’s move on to my favorite city of the bunch – beautiful Krakow, Poland. I feel a little bad saying I preferred it over Prague, which I also loved, but there was just something about Krakow’s compact quaintness and the Polish people who charmed me to the core, starting with its beautiful main market square.

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Leaving the Czech Republic behind, we crossed into southern Poland and made our way towards Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and perhaps best known of the Nazi concentration and death camps. From its beginnings in 1940 as a detention center for political prisoners, the camp grew from one site to many, where it’s estimated that at least 1.1 million prisoners died — around 90 percent of them Jewish. Today, the Polish government operates the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum at the site.

As you’d imagine, visiting Auschwitz is a powerful, emotional, and thought-provoking experience that feels almost uncomfortable to describe from my 2014 lapsed-Catholic American perch, so I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m just going to share what I saw and learned.

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On my final morning in Prague I met up with the tour group that I’d be with for the remainder of my trip. We were a large group (maybe 35) composed mostly of Australians and New Zealanders, and while I was hoping to find some nice people to chat with on the bus and at our group dinners, I ended up meeting some truly lovely people who I want to keep in touch with thanks to the magic of the internet — just a terrific group! What luck!

Our first stop after leaving Prague was Sedlec Ossuary, a small Roman Catholic chapel located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Hora. It might have looked unassuming from the outside…

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Sometime last spring I decided to stop whining about wanting to go on a “big trip” and booked something. From the moment I chose the beauty and history of Eastern Europe to the moment my flight was booked took about 12 hours. I knew I would have a few days alone in Prague, and then meet up with a tour group that would head east into Krakow, Poland and then down into Budapest, Hungary with plenty of stops along the way, but beyond that, planning was minimal. I bought a few books, because that’s part of the fun, but despite thorough readings and one active Pinterest board I just couldn’t make anything stick in my head. I’d find myself wondering “Which city has the baths again? Which one came out of WWII mostly unscathed? Which one serves a lot of pork knuckle?” (FYI – the answer to that last question is basically “All of them”) but I couldn’t connect the fact with the city. Finally, I just gave up and dedicated myself to assembling a monochromatic wardrobe and researching which pocket point-and-shoot camera to buy. FYI this ended up being a Canon  Powershot S110 — ain’t no way I was going to lug a DSLR around for 2 weeks.

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