Marzipan and other good stuff

We made it to Vienna, and its hotter than hec here. There might be a lot of tpos because im using a german keyboard and a fer keys are in differant places.

Auschwitz was a little intense but a lot of it was rebuilt so that made it easier, it was the displays and the pictures (actual pictures taken of people when they arrived) that were hard. The kid's shoes and the human hair were probably the hardest. What was so weird is that the area was quite beautiful, and the buildings that houses prisoners were nice brick buildings with big white windows, grass and large trees! Better than what a lot of people live in! I gues that was part of the disquise so it wasnät obviously a concentration camp. We didn't go to Birkenau, we'd had enough after a few hours.

The town of Krakow was pretty nice, I think it's were Schindler from Schindler's list lived, we saw it advertised. I could be wrong though, it could have been a different town nearby. Virtually nothing in town was in english, pretty challenging. I canät believe we rode a public bus 70km and made it without a problem , that is after we spent an hour looking for the bus station.

Last night I ate peirogis for dinner and james had a cabbage roll, we're not entirely sure what we ate but we left the restaurant very full. Then in the town square we listened to a live band that played many american songs.


The night train was just a little hairy, we had a reservation but the reservation ticket said it wasnät valid with a train ticket. We have Eurail passes but they#re supposedly not valid in Poland. We asked a ticket agent who spoke a little english and she said we were okax, then before boarding the train we asked a train attendant and he seemed to think that was all we needed, then like 5 minutes before departure, he came and demanded a ticket; then we got a ittle nervous, I gave him our eurail passes and he seemed to like that and said something that sounded like yes so in the end we were okay. I didnät sleep well though, we were woken up twice for passport control at the Czeck boarder and again at the austrian border. The Czeck officers were very intimidating looking with huge guns.

We arrived in Vienna at 6 am this morning, it's not the most scenic place but we found a beautiful park with tons of rose gardens. I took a lot of pictures, so as soon as we have access to a USB port we'll post them. We had to kill time until 2, when we could check into our hostel. We explored a little bit and then we ate at a street cafe, the waitress spoke no english but some of the menu had word we recognined; Panini, Proscuitto, salame, paprika...so we had paninis and then some ice cream with a shot of espresso and whipped cream, I guess thatäs popular here, according to the guide book. There's a lot of bakeries around so we went into one and did a lot of pointing until I got a strawberry shaped marzipan, which look much cuter than they taste.

And now we're at the hostel, doing much needed laundry. James only brought 3 pairs of underware so I guess itäs needs to be done a little more frequently. Either that or heäs going to have to buy more becasue the 3 pair thing doesnät really work on our schedule.

We'll probably take the rest of the pretty easy, We've been pounding pavent pretty hard and we've had two nights with little sleep (the hostel in poland was full of drunk people yelling all night). I'm a little worried this hostel might be loud too (we got free drink coupons for thier bar upon arrival) but I'm tired to the point (and most of the people here speak english) that I might get colorful if I can't sleep.

We go to Innsbruck tomorrow, 5 hours on the train, we donät have any specific sights in mind and it's much smaller than Vienna so it should be a little more relaxing. I don't think we'll have internet access there so if you don't hear anything for awhile that why.