The end of our trip

So here is my final log entry.

In addition to the sites Karl mentioned today on our city tour, we stopped by the Schindler factory.  This is a tourist attraction that is famous because of the 1993 Spielberg movie "Schindler's List" about a Pole who saved many Jews by having them work in his factory in Krakow.  The museum, however, was basically another WWII museum chronicling the terrible things that happened during the war, with relatively little info about Schindler.  I must say that I was ready for a break from holocaust tourism, and wanted to just get through the place. We had a few extra minutes afterward, so Lenny and I stopped next door into a small museum of contemporary art that had an interesting exhibit showing new artists' versions of old masters. 

I've enjoyed this eastern (central?) European trip, which has been educational.  I really had limited knowledge about the history, so I learned a lot.  I expected this area to be more run down and Soviet feeling, but it all felt quite booming.  Since the Soviets left in the early 1990s they have done a lot of renovation and improvement in infrastructure -- much of it with the help of the European community.  Everything feels quite prosperous, and tourism is thriving.  The cities have nearly full employment, although I understand that the rural areas still are not as well off.  From a tourist perspective, there is quite a bit of somber stuff, so it's not a very lighthearted journey.

Len and I flew to Vienna this evening where I have a business meeting tomorrow, and then will head home on Saturday.  I must say, Vienna feels so much more grand than the other cities we visited.  We took an evening stroll, and I particularly was impressed with very well-designated bicycle lanes on the major ring road, and a giant outdoor screen outside the opera house showing the live opera for free to the assembled crowd. We should do that in San Francisco.

Thanks for following along!

Donna 

The final day in Krakow

Today was the last day in Krakow.  After visiting a fortress that was constructed from the 12th –16th centuries, we visited the main Church.  We arrived at noon, and the place was packed. It turns out everyone was waiting for the ceremonial opening of the “Triptych of the Virgin Mary”, and we just happened to walk in at the right time.  Soon a nun from the parish opened two large doors well above the main altar.  As she did, you could hear the crowd go “AAAAHHH.”  The doors revealed a very large wood carving that was elaborately painted. It was original to the church, and is a prized icon.  

It has an interesting story as well, as do many important religious icons in Poland. As the Germans were approaching during WWII, it was removed and crated up in 200 boxes.  It was hidden for years during of the German occupation, then during the Soviet occupation.  It wasn't reinstalled until recently.    

Speaking of the fortress in Krakow, there are HUGE tapestries made 400 years ago throughout the rooms.  They are fantastic, and they have their own story to tell.  They were removed when the Nazis were approaching in 1939 --  all 350 of them.   They were trucked to Slovakia, then to Paris, then put on ships to England, then transported to Canada. This way they were safe during the war. They stayed in Canada till 1960, since the Poles were afraid that the Russians would confiscate them and not hang them back in the fortress.  During this process about 100 of them did disappear, but the rest were eventually reinstalled.  If you see 400-year-old tapestries at a garage sale, some folks in Poland would like to hear from you….  

Karl 

Thoughts on visiting Auschwitz

I am frightened by the specter of German Nazi cruelty.

I am disappointed that there wasn’t more resistance.

I am angry that the world knew, and didn’t intervene.

I am depressed by, but numb to, the ceaseless violence that humans inflict on humans.

At US parks, take only photographs and leave only footprints. At Auschwitz, take only anguish and leave only tears.

Donna and I both lost family members in the holocaust, probably there. We walked away from the group to say Kaddish privately. I couldn’t get to the end.

Lenny

The second full day in Krakow

This morning we had a few hours to stroll around Krakow, so Len and I went over to the Jewish quarter and wandered into a few synagogues.  Of course, there are very few Jews now, but they amazingly were able to save some of the old synagogues, and there is a current effort to revitalize the area.  We seemed to be swimming in a sea of Israeli groups for a while.  Several groups were clearly from the army as they were mainly young men .... it was a bit of a surprise to me that the army does tourism.

For the afternoon, we went to Auschwitz/Birkenau.  I've decided not to blog about it or to post photos.  The enormity of the evil is just too vast for a blog.  Both Len and I lost branches of our family here, so it was an opportunity to say Kaddish for them.

In the evening, Len and I went back to one of the synagogues where Chabad was supposed to have an evening service.  However, it was difficult to get a minyan and when they finally did, they kicked me out, rather unceremoniously, as I was not the appropriate gender to be in the room!  I managed to say Kaddish from the doorway instead.  They zoomed along in Hebrew (they were all Israeli's) so fast that it was absolutely impossible to keep up.  I have to say that they were not the least bit welcoming to us so it was an unfulfilling finish to a draining day.

Tomorrow is our last day in Krakow so check back later for more.

Donna 

A home-cooked meal in Krakow

We had dinner last night with our guide Agnes and her family.  This is an extra offered by the tour company, and since we've really enjoyed meeting people in their homes we decided to give it a try. 

Agnes lives in a pretty suburb just outside of Krakow, where the homes were modern and comfortable. It seemed as if we could have been in our own neighborhood at home.  The meal was very good, full of Polish specialties, and Agnes had clearly gone out of her way to make everything herself. 

 I particularly enjoyed meeting their two teenage children who told us about the school system in Poland.  It is amazing how early they have to decide their careers.  The daughter is two years away from finishing high school and already has decided on law, although she didn't seem very happy about it because her real passion is running. The son, just finishing high school now, really wants to be an airline pilot, but has computer technology as a backup plan.

 It was a nice break from restaurants every night.

I should mention that it is very cold here - unseasonably so. All the locals are complaining.  We are all wearing every layer that we brought with us!

Donna 

The Crazy Commie Tour

This afternoon we began a great adventure in Krakow as we headed out on the “Crazy Commie Tour”.  First we met our guides at the hotel, who were two bright and smiling young women. After brief introductions, they proceeded to take us around the corner and introduce us to the cars we were going to use on our tour: a 1966 Black Trabant, and a 1989 Green Trabant.    

Trabants were introduced in 1957, and did not change at all through the end of production in 1989. When introduced they were thought of as bad cars, and at the end of production they were still bad cars.  

We climbed into our respective Communist cars and headed out to an area of Krakow called Nova Huta ("new factory"), built by Stalin to showcase his idea of the perfect home/work place.  

This newly constructed area consisted of a set of apartment buildings that housed 100,000 people. The apartments had hardwood floors and tall ceilings, and were very nice for post-war Poland. There are parks and green spaces, restaurants, and everything needed for a comfortable life, style including a trolley stop that went to the city center of Krakow in about 30 minutes.   The streets were all named after Communist leaders and important Communist events of the day.  

The people living there needed a job as well, so they built a HUGE steel mill a short 15 minute walk away.  As steel plants do, it smoked and polluted the air so badly that the buildings all turned black.   But the black skies were airbrushed out of the pictures that were included in the many propaganda articles showing how this was better than anything else (including in the US), and it would be the model for all future construction.  There are even bomb shelters… hey, you never know; this was cold war Poland. To top it all off, there was a HUGE statue of Lenin in the middle.

Fast forward to today.  After the fall of communism in 1989 the area went through a series of ups and downs.. Currently it is on the way up.  The apartments are considered large and affordable, and there are new restaurants on the bottom floors.  The transportation is convenient, so it is easy to get to anywhere, and the parks are very pretty.  It is getting to be the “Brooklyn” of Krakow.  The steel mill is still in operation, but has been sold to an Indian company and is much smaller and pollutes less. The Lenin statue is gone, and all the streets with Commie names now are things like “Ronald Reagan Place”.

It was fun to see this area and learn about its past.  It's interesting to note that this was a “one off”, and other communist apartment complexes were not as nice, nor well built..  

We got back in our Trabants and headed a few blocks away to where a cold war era Russian Tank was sitting.  After some quick pictures, we visited the steel mill entrance for more pictures, and then it was back to our hotel.   Our guides let us know that we had been “brainwashed” by them in Communist style, and then they were off on their way in a puff of smoke.  

Donna, Joan, Lenny and I were pleased that we did not have to push either of the Trabants during our trip.  The company owns seven of them, and barely keep three running at a time. 

Karl

The Wieliczka salt mines in Krakow

 Today our guide Agnes took us to the salt mines about 1/2 hour outside of Krakow.  I had never heard of it, but this place is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Poland, with over a million visitors a year.  The salt mine itself was quite interesting, but equally interesting was to observe how they took a liability (an old mine) and turned it into an asset (major tourist attraction and large employer).

The mine was dug out -- mainly by hand -- over the course of centuries.  The miners built room after cavernous room, with an elaborate log support system.  They had to create pulley systems and transportation. Small horses even lived permanently underground to do some of the hardest work.  

We went down to level 3 below ground, but there apparently were 6 more levels not available to tourists.  Many men died in these mines - nearly 1 out of 4.  We went down in reconstructed elevator shafts which had two-story elevators loaded simultaneously above and below, with about 9 people smashed into each cage.  The height was 6 feet, so gents over that had to stoop. 

As a tourist site, the place was amazing.  There were little multi-media shows in several of the rooms, for example, simulating a mine explosion.  There were rooms with crystal chandeliers, which can be rented out for functions and weddings.  There were silly things, like Snow White's dwarves (didn't they work in a diamond mine not a salt mine?) and serious things, like chapels.  There also were multiple souvenir booths, deep in the cave, along with cafes, restrooms, and some handicap accessibility.  Indeed, it is a whole city underground. They employ 400 miners who keep the place safe (but there is no mining there any more) and 500 guides who give tours in all languages.  The guides were choreographed to get you moving out of one location into the next just as the next group was upon you.  They were super well organized, such as having queueing areas for the return lifts.  We wonder if they had consultants from Disney who helped them put it together!  I've often thought that tourism will be the manufacturing of the future from an employment perspective, and this place seemed to represent that vision.

Donna

The party room in the salt mine

From Warsaw to Krakow

Sunday dinner was at a casual Polish restaurant near our hotel, accompanied by accordion music.  The unexpected repertoire ranged from Carmen to Moon River to Polish folk songs.

Monday we continued our tour of Warsaw.  We started with a drive to the other side of the Vistula River where there are many pre-war buildings that survived.  We then walked through the Jewish cemetery, which was enormous.  It had been in use for hundreds of years and is still in use today for the very small Jewish population remaining in Warsaw.  There were tombstones in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian.  Although outside of the ghetto walls, the cemetery was used by a special corps of Jews who were allowed to bury Jews who died in the ghetto.  There are two open fields with a single marker that were mass graves of the ghetto Jews who died in great number from disease, starvation and murder.

We had requested an opportunity to visit the contemporary art scene in Warsaw, but that didn't really work out.  Either there really isn't a contemporary art scene -- which seems unlikely to me -- or our tour company was just not often requested to do this so had no idea what to do.  We went to a poster/framing shop, which wasn't much of anything, and then to a gallery whose display was about the history of the gallery, with no art whatsoever.

We thought we'd check out the technology museum, much to our guide's chagrin, since he wanted to stick to his standard itinerary. Happily for him, but unfortunately for us, it was closed on Monday.  So instead we checked out the lovely summer palace of the former king.  There was some excitement going on there because  the Portuguese foreign minister was meeting with the Polish foreign minister.  There was a very cool outdoor amphitheater, and a bunch of peacocks wandering around.

We then took the high speed train to Krakow.  This worked out well - very comfortable, with table service and everything.  It was just a bit over 2 hours.

Our hotel is in the old town part of Krakow.  It's an old building remade into a boutique hotel, and is quite lovely.  However, one aspect of the quaintness didn't appeal to me: a bathtub only, with no shower. I managed to change rooms today, because I felt like a beached whale trying to get out of that tub!

We figured we would have a simple casual dinner at the hotel, since we were tired from a day of travel.  Well, we arrived in the hotel restaurant to find that only a deluxe fixed-course menu was offered, with a choice of 5, 7 or 12 courses!  Since we were the only people in the restaurant and felt some compassion for the restaurateur, we decided to go for it; our "simple meal" turned into a 5 course gourmet dinner.  It actually was more like 8 or 9 courses since they kept bringing us extra things in between.  But the presentation was spectacular,  and everything was delicious.  Karl asked to meet the chef, and when he came out we gave him a hearty round of applause

-- Donna

Day two in Warsaw

We spent a rainy and cold day touring Warsaw today.  Most of Warsaw was destroyed in WWII, so much of what you see today is reconstructed.  Our guide Edvard often showed us old photos of rubble in places where now the buildings have been reconstructed as exact replicas of what stood before the war.  The resulting buildings are slightly Disney-like given their uniform construction time and style.

The Chopin theme continued with benches scattered throughout the city where you press a button, and Chopin music comes out.  Very nice exhibit idea!

We toured the area of the Warsaw ghetto, where the Germans had constrained almost a half million Jews at the start of the war.  Several parts of the wall are still standing and there are multiple places with memorials.  I thought the most impressive was near the place where the Jews were gathered before being sent by train to Treblinka to be murdered.  Here, the large wall contains only first names, allowing each David or Sarah to stand for tens of thousands of David's and Sarah's.  Between disease, starvation, murder and rebellion, very few of those half million Jews survived.

We then went to the POLIN museum, the museum of the Jews of Poland.  This stunning new museum was one of our main reasons to come to Warsaw.  Visually it is very well done, with clever multimedia displays using a variety of artifacts.  I enjoyed getting to read about Polish Jewish life before the holocaust, particularly since a large part of my family emigrated from here.  (I believe I may have found a quote from one of my Dolinsky/Darling relatives on the wall!).  There is a long history of antisemitism in Poland, but also periods of acceptance and prosperity.  

We had seen the movie Raise the Roof at the Jewish film festival, where some professors at University of Massachusetts had worked with their students over a long period of time to recreate the colorful roof of a Polish synagogue.  This is one of the central exhibits in the museum.  There is so much here, we could have spent hours more.

After a traditional pierogi lunch, we continued on to see the (reconstructed) old town and a monument to the Warsaw uprising.

I should mention that yesterday we saw a protest demonstration, which Joan and Karl were trapped in trying to get to the museum.  The demonstrations were against the current government and for the European Common Market.  This tension has become a theme of the trip; we heard it in the Czech Republic and Hungary as well.  It seems familiar, given our recent election, Brexit, and the French election.  Simply put, it seems that all these Western societies have a portion of the population that feels left behind by technology and globalization and that are in favor of a more closed and protectionist society.  On the other side are those who want to be part of Europe and the world, with an open, inclusive society.  Both Hungary and Poland currently have governments more inclined to the traditionalist, closed model, and clearly the younger and more affluent parts of the population oppose them.  

On the one hand, this realization made my feel better in that the US is not alone in this phenomenon.  On the other hand, it makes clear how hard the problem is, and that the solution is not obvious.

Donna 

From Budapest to Warsaw

For our last night in Budapest we went to a folk dance and music show.  We thought it might be too touristy, but in the end it was quite nice.  The dancers were very energetic and well choreographed ... I just loved that business where they bend their legs and whack at their feet.  It all reminds me a bit of Fiddler on the Roof.  

After a nightcap in the bar, we said farewell to Guy and Pascale, Cathy and Sandy.  We're going to miss having them along for our second week.

Yesterday morning we flew to Warsaw with Joan and Karl.  We're staying at the Hotel Bristol, which is one of the few buildings that survived the war.  Warsaw was 85% destroyed during WWII. 

We went to the "Museum of the Warsaw Rising" for the afternoon.  I never quite figured out the difference between an "uprising" and a "rising", but this museum is basically about a few months in 1944 when the war was drawing to a close and the Poles in Warsaw decided to fight back, unsuccessfully, against the Germans.  The museum had an amazing number of old videos and photos as well as some interesting artifacts. But it was displayed in a bit of a jumble, and it was almost like solving a puzzle to figure out the main messages.  On the one hand, you could be cynical and say that the Poles only started to fight once it was clear Germany was going to lose.  On the other hand, you could see that unlike Hungary, which was occupied first by Germany and then the Soviets, Poland was split between the two and essentially was at the front line of the war for many years.

In the early evening we attended a piano concert of Chopin music in a small hall with an extremely talented pianist.  Chopin is a big deal here in Warsaw, and we've seen him turn up everywhere.  Then we had a tasty dinner featuring a Polish duck specialty.

One other note.  I should have mentioned earlier in the blog that we happily took Ubers while in Prague.  The app worked great, even if it was a bit hard to understand the choices of car types.  But in Hungary, we learned that Uber was banned by the government at the insistence of the taxi drivers!  Our friend Balasz was quite annoyed at this, using it as an example of how out of touch the government is.  When we arrived in Warsaw yesterday we were happy to see that Uber is back in business here!

Donna 

Thousands of people were staging an anti-government demonstration when we arrived in Warsaw yesterday..

Group shots

Lunch at the Art Nouveau museum

In the boxes at the opera house

The guys posing with Ronald Reagan, facing the only surviving Soviet monument.

The second day in Budapest

We did a walking tour of Budapest today, and began by taking public transportation to our starting point.  The streetcar and subway system seems quite modern and efficient.  We visited the Eiffel designed railway station, and then "the most beautiful McDonald's in the world" next door.










We then walked by the magnificent Parliament building and strolled along the Danube.

There are many memorials for the many tragic times in Hungary.
I've decided it was bad geographical luck for them to be located in Central Europe, since they were in the way when just about any bigger power happened to want their land, or to go through it to get to someone else's.






Of course, the greatest tragedy was WWII, when Hungary allied early with the Nazis and spent the war being quite evil.  We saw a moving memorial with sixty bronze reproductions of pairs of shoes positioned along the Danube, representing the six decades since the war.  The Hungarians killed thousands of Jews by chaining groups together on the bank of the Danube and shooting a few so that they would all drown in the river together.

Before going to the next memorial we stopped for a cup of coffee and a tour of an Art Nouveau museum, which looked more like an antique store.  It wasn't clear whether the stuff was available for sale or just to admire.

After that we walked to another memorial that the Hungarian government had recently erected to blame the Germans for killing the Hungarian Jews during WWII.  Directly in front of this memorial was a counter-memorial, making it clear that it was the Hungarian collaborators who did the murdering, not the Nazis.  The counter-memorial was stunning, with photos of murdered families, candles, personal objects, and protest signs.  It was remarkable that the counter-memorial has not been taken down by the government, since it is quite critical of them. But we were told by our guide that such a move would not be well received, at least at the moment.  But we did notice cameras mounted on the street lamps, so everyone knows that Big Brother is watching.

After the memorials we ended up at Cafe Gerbeaud, a well-known hangout.  They make gorgeous chocolates in addition to serving lunch. It was quite an elegant space. 

The last stop with our guide Gabe was the Museum and School of Decorative Arts.  This building had  Islamic influences and a gorgeous ceramic roof, some of which was destroyed in the 1956 revolution.  We also saw examples of many fine ceramics.

Being exhausted, we came back to the hotel to rest while some of our group headed out for a little local shopping before meeting up for our final evening in Budapest.

Donna

PS: Some of the earlier blog entries below have been updated with stories I forgot!