The trip to Krakow was my first experience with international train travel, and there’s something to be said for having such an experience in Eastern Europe. The trains are all Soviet relics, and the lack of organization is at turns charming and frustrating. Our train from Budapest was packed, and we were unable to get seats for the first leg of our journey. Instead we had to stand awkwardly at the end of one of the cars near the rather fragrant bathroom. Luckily the train began to empty out after about two hours, and the four of us (Adam, Don, Jenn, and myself) were able to secure a cabin for the remaining eight hours of the trip. I still didn’t sleep very well, but it was certainly an improvement over standing.

We arrived in Krakow at 5:30 am, and we couldn’t check into the hostel until later, so we dropped our stuff off and went walking around the city. It was striking to see the town in the early morning while everything was still deserted. The bustling tourist square took on an almost surreal character in the pre-dawn gray. It felt like we had the entire city to ourselves. Unfortunately it was bitterly cold and none of us were prepared for it. It had been in the 60s when we left Budapest, and even those of us used to Minnesota winters were a bit shocked by the 20s and 30s we found in Krakow that morning. Since nothing was open we decided to walk up to Wawel castle to watch the sunrise (and to keep moving for warmth). Wawel castle and cathedral are the most visible monuments in the city they’re both the seat of Catholicism in Krakow and its most popular attractions. As with everything else, they were deserted at 6:30 am, and we got some great views of the wakening city.

Eventually things started to open and we stopped by a café to warm up and plan our day. Our first stop was the National Gallery – or at least part of it. The collections are distributed throughout several museums around the city. The one we went to included most of the paintings in the collection and was housed in what looked like an old house near the center of town. I’ve grown to appreciate art museums, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. The star of the collection was Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, which had a room (and quite a bit of protective glass) to itself. The museum was a nice size, and it was small enough that we could get through the whole thing without completely exhausting ourselves.

After eating lunch and checking in to the hostel we went back to Wawel Castle and Cathedral in the hopes of going inside. Krakow is definitely the most overtly Catholic place I’ve ever been, and it has a pretty impressive cathedral. It is extraordinarily ornate, containing an impressive number of elaborate chapels and some striking statues.

Unfortunately the castle didn’t work out so well. It turns out that you needed to buy tickets in a building by the entrance of the complex. We did not realize this, and so went into the castle in the hopes of buying tickets there. Instead of a ticket office, however, we found a menacing looking security guard who promptly showed us the door and who didn’t speak enough English to explain to us the problem. Eventually we figured it out, but by the time we found the ticket booth it was getting late and part of the castle was closed, so we decided not to pay the rather high entrance fee.

On Sunday we visited Auschwitz. We bought a tour package in Krakow that included transportation and a guided tour of the two main camps that make up the Auschwitz complex: Auschwitz I and Birkenau. I was really glad we did this because our tour guide was excellent. He knew his facts cold, but it was also obvious that he cared a great deal about the place and he gave a tour that was both informative and respectful.

We visited the Birkenau camp first. Though there has apparently been some debate as to how much it should be renovated, currently it has been left largely untouched since the end of the war. The Nazi’s destroyed parts of the camp before liberation to hide evidence of their crimes, and some of the barracks have collapsed in the following since, but those that remain look much as they did 60-some years ago. Both of the crematoriums were reduced to rubble by the Nazis, and now there is a memorial in between them proclaiming in over a dozen languages “For ever let this place a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.”

Unlike in Birkenau, most of the barracks in Auschwitz I have been converted into a museum. The exhibits are almost entirely comprised of the personal belongings that prisoners brought with them to the camps. There were literally thousands of shoes, suitcases, glasses, and even 3 tons of human hair shaved off prisoners before they were executed for use in the German textile industry. These exhibits were effective in showing the scale of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and an eerie reminder of how many individual lives were cut short in the camps.

It’s very difficult to know how to communicate the experience of something like Auschwitz. It was much less gruesome than I expected. There were relatively few images of the conditions suffered by the prisoners, and certainly nothing that any teenager would see in history class. Instead, the place was so terrible in part because it wasn’t gruesome. Auschwitz I was actually quite attractive from the outside, with stately brick buildings and lots of beautiful trees, and the hard part was understanding how such a “nice” place could be used for such horrible atrocities. Ultimately I think there are a lot of different ways to react to Auschwitz. Some people were there for historical facts, others for personal remembrances, and still others to try and understand just what went so wrong. I don’t think that last question can be answered in a day, or even a century, but the more people who ask it the better off we’ll be in the years to come.

Monday morning began as most mornings do, with a quest for breakfast. We intended to take a walking tour of the Jagiellonian University, so we headed in that direction to find food. Unfortunately, despite Krakow’s supposedly vibrant café culture, there don’t seem to be any eating establishments open before 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. Eventually we decided to just do the university tour and eat afterwards. Even that did not go as planned. We stopped in this sort of pub-looking place that had a picture of a luscious sausage on the front. Since Poland is known for its sausage, I ordered that. After an interminably long wait, they finally brought me… two hot dogs with garnish. Talk about authentic.

The university tour was one of these self-guided things in our tour book. Unfortunately it was the Monday before a holiday (All Saints day), so most of the buildings we were supposed to be able to go into were closed. I guess I can say that I’ve now seen the university where Copernicus studied, but I didn’t see much more than the outside.

After the disappointment of breakfast we found chocolate-covered solace in a pastry shop and went to find the poster museum that was mentioned in the guidebook. Regrettably this ended up being another flop when we discovered that the “museum” was just a tiny shop that sold posters and wasn’t even open.

Fortunately our luck improved substantially in the afternoon when we visited the Wieliczka salt mine just outside of town. I would not have guessed that a salt mine would make a particularly good tourist attraction, but apparently visitors have gone to Wieliczka for centuries. It’s actually not hard to see why. The mine is similar to a cave system but over the years miners have carved elaborate statues into the salt. We saw everything from gnomes to life-size depictions of Goethe and Copernicus, who were said to have visited the mines. There were even several artificial underground lakes reflecting eerily off the white salt-covered walls.

The most spectacular room was an underground chapel carved by three workers over the course of 67 years. Whereas most of churches have biblical stories pained on the walls, here they were carved directly into the salt. Even the floor and staircases were made from giant slabs of polished salt.

We finished the tour and got back to Krakow at about dinnertime. Tired and hungry, we decided to forgo searching for authentic Polish cuisine and stopped by a sushi restaurant near Old Town instead. It wasn’t the best sushi I’ve had, but it was the first Japanese food I’ve eaten since leaving the states, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Adam and I had graph theory early on Wednesday morning, so we left that night, while Jennifer and Don stayed an extra day. The train ride back to Budapest was a bit better than the train ride to Krakow had been because we got seats right away, but I was still very pleased to have Tuesday to catch up on sleep. Overall the trip was excellent, and I thoroughly the city, the sights, and the company of my traveling companions.

Saturday began with a trip to the Egyptian Museum. I was particularly excited because they have probably the best collection of Egyptian artifacts in the world, and I never quite grew out of my mummy phase. Before we saw the museum, however, we had to get there, and this is as good a time as any to describe the utter insanity that is Egyptian driving. I had been under the impression that Budapest’s traffic was bad, but a few days in Cairo quickly dispelled me of that notion. Somewhere along the line it seems that Cairo’s city planners decided that lanes really aren’t essential for the safe operation of motor vehicles. They were wrong. Rather than driving in lines, citizens of Cairo (Cairoers? Cairoites?) seem to move in perpetual traffic jams, weaving in between each other in a bewildering fashion. Traffic lights do exist, but they seem to be universally ignored except at the largest intersections, and even then a police officer usually is around to make sure that tourists get to cross the street every once and a while. Egyptian locals, on the other hand, seem to walk into traffic with reckless abandon, and more than one avoided an accident only by leaping out of the way at the last minute.

In any case, we took our lives into our hands and made our way the few blocks to the museum, tailing locals whenever we had to cross a major thoroughfare. Once we reached the museum, we had to pass through an elaborate security system before being allowed to enter. In order to get onto the museum grounds we had to show our passports at a security checkpoint and then go through an airport style metal detector while a troop of police with exceedingly large guns stood in formation nearby. After buying tickets we had to go through another security checkpoint before entering the museum proper. I am glad to see that the Egyptian government values its history, but the constant presence of so much security was a sobering reminder of the realities in the Middle East.

My experience with the Egyptian museum strikes me as a good metaphor for my experience with Cairo as a whole. It was massive, chaotic, frustrating, completely foreign, and filled with unbelievable treasures. Any one of hundreds of artifacts on display would have been the crown jewel in most museums’ Egyptian collection, but in Cairo they were strewn about with almost no contextual information. A few of the more famous pieces (like Tutankhamen’s mask) were described in Arabic, French, and English, but most of the other artifacts, if they were identified at all, were labeled as “wooden implement” or something equally vague. Don’t get me wrong, the museum was amazing, it was just sad to see so many treasures left unorganized and unexplained. Maybe someday they will find the money and the space to give their massive collection its due.

Once again we ate and napped for a couple of hours before heading out for the evening. Bart had heard about a Sufi dancing performance that was supposed to be worth checking out, so the nine of us squeezed into two cabs and set forth. The thing about being in a taxi with a driver who doesn’t speak much English is that you have absolutely no control over the speed or direction of the vehicle. Despite nearly colliding with several vehicles and a few pedestrians, once I got over my survival instinct it was actually great way to see Cairo. Once again we went from the modern downtown past a dizzying array of slums, mosques, clogged market streets, and ancient monuments before reaching the “Citadel,” where the performance was to take place. The citadel is an old fortress that now houses several museums and perhaps a mosque. All of that was closed by the time we got there, so I don’t know anything else about it. We ended up having to wait over an hour before the performance actually started, but in the end it was well worth it.

It’s a bit difficult to describe the music in any detail because the instruments were all unfamiliar to me, but it was very exiting and percussive. After about thirty minutes of music, a dancer came out and began to spin. He was wearing several skirts made of a very thick material that he was able to twirl expertly in a variety of increasingly intricate patterns around his body and head. I am not quite sure the precise religious significance of such a dance, but I believe that by spinning around the dancer enters a trancelike state and has some sort of religious experience or communication with God. In any case, the physical endurance of the dancer was amazing. He must have been spinning non-stop for 45 minutes, and he was able to stop and walk away without falling over or missing a beat. I expected that to be the end of the performance, but there was another section of music and then three dancers came out and performed simultaneously. I have no idea how authentic the performance was, but it was a wonderful spectacle nevertheless.

Another exciting cab ride through nighttime Cairo and a stop back at the café we discovered on Friday concluded my evening. Some of the others went out to a club with some locals, but I was sick and tired and looking forward to my bed.

In an attempt to try and better understand and capture my experiences in Egypt, I’ve decided to write up my experiences at length. This may or may not turn out to be interesting or helpful, but if nothing else it will provide a record of my activities to look back on. What follows is “day 1.” Hopefully days 2 and 3 will follow in the near future, but I do not know when.

The one problem with “weekend trips” is that they invariably involve traveling at some ridiculous hour of the night. Our flight to Cairo left at 11:40 pm, putting us into Egypt at like 3:00 in the morning. To add to the confusion, we unknowingly arrived on the night that daylight savings time ends in Egypt, so nobody knew exactly what time it was. It turns out that Egypt is usually one hour ahead of Hungary, but for a few months they are on the same time since Hungary hasn’t “fallen back” yet. I suppose it was indicative of what was to come that as soon as we passed through customs we were approached by official looking people trying to offer us hostels and taxis. They really try to hook tourists early. At least two of the people in our group were told, independently, that they had “Egyptian looking faces,” for instance. Since I don’t think that blond hair is a traditional Egyptian trait, I think they were going for gullible instead. Luckily our hostel was awesome, and not only did they put up with a bunch of exhausted, adrenaline-fueled Americans, they were there to meet us at the airport at three in the morning. That’s service for eight dollars a night!

The hostel also provided a free shuttle to the Pyramids. We had originally been planning to go on Saturday, but during the trip to the hostel the driver convinced us that Friday would be less crowded. It was 4:00 am, so we just smiled and nodded and agreed to meet five hours later to embark for Giza.

Even trying to recount the trip as it happened, it’s really hard to describe how overwhelming Cairo was. It’s so huge, so chaotic, and so radically different from anything else I have ever seen. I guess I had naively assumed that since Egypt is so touristy, Cairo would be just like any big European city, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The racial and religious makeup made us very visibly outsiders, and the relative poverty of most Egyptians was occasionally striking. Giza is on the outskirts of Cairo, so we a saw a lot of the city on the drive. The high rises and luxury hotels of the downtown gave way to rows of crumbling apartment buildings broken by the occasional mosque. Towards Giza we even shared the road with a few donkey carts that looked like they hadn’t changed much in the last few millennia. I’m trying not to draw any grand conclusions from a three-day trip, but visiting Cairo was a powerful experience and I’m still trying to sort out my reaction to it.

I know it was the most predictable part of the trip, but seeing the Pyramids was still pretty much the coolest thing in the world. The hostel set us up with a tour guide that took us out on camels. We were undoubtedly supposed to haggle more than we did, so I’m sure we were ripped off, but I think everybody was having too much fun to notice. Our first stop was the Sphinx, which was a lot smaller than pictures had led me to believe. They have it set up so that you enter through the temple at the base of the statue and then go up a hill next to the Sphinx. The whole area was swarming with peddlers trying to sell us things. They technically weren’t allowed inside the walled off area near the monument (where we had to pay admission), but that didn’t deter them from conducting transactions under the fence around the complex. Every so often we would also little kids crawl under the fence to sell trinkets, only to be chased off by police officers. Almost all of the goods on offer were touristy junk (plastic pyramids, fake statues, etc.), but I did cave in and buy some ridiculously overpriced water to help fend off the desert heat.

After the Sphinx, we headed up to the Pyramids. They have one pyramid open to tourists at a time, and on Friday it was the Pyramid of Khafre, the second of the three great Pyramids. It’s cool to have been in a pyramid, but there’s really not that much inside. You have to walk bent-double down this tiny tunnel, which eventually opens up into a rather empty chamber. There was an empty stone sarcophagus, but everything else had been looted or carried off to a museum long ago. There was some graffiti (or a message of some sort) dated 1813, which was kind of cool to see. The Pyramids were still unbelievably ancient decades before the civil war. Anyhow, we next rode up a nearby hill for a photo op and then headed back towards town.

The afternoon and evening consisted of eating, napping, and wandering around downtown. A few people in our group had some friends studying abroad in Cario, so we met up with them for a while and just generally hung out.

The most interesting experience of the night came when a few of us were walking around some of the shops near the hostel. We were approached by a couple of Egyptian guys who started talking with us in English. That would not be a particularly notable occurrence, except that they did not appear to be trying to sell us anything or to heckle the women in our group. Instead they talked about the need to improve Egyptian/American relations and invited to go a cafe for a while. The whole thing seemed pretty sketchy to me, especially when the aforementioned cafe ended up being down an alley, but things ended up turning out all right. The cafe was an outdoor affair patronized almost entirely by locals. We sipped mango juice and tea while our “host” told us an elaborate story about how he had lived in Japan for several years and traveled throughout Europe and to the United States. It was probably mostly made up, but I can’t complain too much since we told him that we were Hungarian!

Anyway, it ended up being a fun evening, and the mango juice was pretty delicious. I felt a bit awkward because I never knew whom to trust. We met a lot of very nice people in Egypt, but we could have very easily been taken advantage of. Cairo is the only place I’ve been where it was immediately obvious that I was a foreign tourist, and I was pretty much completely reliant on the goodwill of others. It definitely makes me appreciate Budapest – I may not know the language, but I can pass for Hungarian if I just keep my mouth shut.

To be continued…

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Originally uploaded by bsowell.

back from Egypt. Cairo is the largest and most chaotic city I have ever been in, and this trip was certainly one of the most unique experiences I have ever had. At the moment I’m still trying to frantically finish catch up on homework and get over a cold, but there is a lot I want to share. Give me a few days.