European Wrap-Up

So the camera came in the mail today, so we can finally wrap up our what-we-did blogs.

The last blog was from Krakow, in Poland, but it was pretty much a rant on how much we hate transportation in Eastern Europe. We didn't mention much about Prague or Krakow.

After Budapest we made our way to Prague, which is a cute wedding-cake of a town. The Old Town is picture-postcard Europe, where all the buildings are impossibly picturesque. The downside is that it doesn't really feel like a city. We felt this way in a few European places - they are so overrun with tourists that no one lives there any more. All the shops are souvenir stores and all the cafes are more expensive than they need to be. It doesn't take a long walk from the tourist center to get into the real town, which we preferred.

Most people who visit Prague rave about it, and if you wanted to pick one European city to visit to see what the Continent might have looked like 200 years ago, Prague is it. For us, one day was sufficient, and we moved on to Krakow.

The purpose of visiting Krakow was solely to visit the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The magnitude of the place should be self-explanatory and we'll publish just this one photo, which shows the platform at Birkenau where the new arrivals disembarked the train and were sorted.

The thing that really got our goat at Auschwitz was how blatantly disrespectful the visitors were. For example, in the gas chamber, you enter and there is a marble sign that says in English, Polish and Hebrew (paraphrasing) - "You are entering a place where tens of thousands of people were murdered. Please show respect and refrain from taking photos."

You guessed it, people were inside snapping away. We saw this kind of behavior all through the trip, including people taking flash photographs of priceless Egyptian and Pompeian relics. At least Auschwitz was relatively free of names carved into wood, which was alarmingly common throughout the sites we saw along the way.

In Eastern Europe, there are some interesting relics of the not-so-distant Communist past. We visited a statue park outside Budapest, where they have collected a few flamboyant and/or bizarre statues left over from the days behind the Iron Curtain.


You can see concrete-block housing just outside the historic city centers of many Eastern European cities. This example is in Prague.

Not to mention Communist-era cars.

From Krakow, we flew on SkyEurope (worst. airline. ever.) to Dublin, Ireland, where we were set to meet our friends Sean and Ann as they started their own round-the-world trip.

We beat Sean and Ann to Ireland by a day, so we rented the world's smallest car (as necessary in Ireland, they have the scariest roads on Earth) and drove to the boonies for a night.

The roads are small, but it sure is fun to drive!
We stayed in a nice B&B and visited the ruins of a place called Kells Priory, an old monastery.

Back in Dublin, once Sean and Ann arrived, we struggled to find things to do other than drink. Dublin is a serious party town and there isn't much to do there otherwise. We took one day and drove to Northern Ireland, where we visited a unique geological formation called the Giants Causeway. It is made up of hexagonal rocks that look like pilings.

The Causeway is set amongst some idyllic scenery, but the most interesting thing was the lengths that Sean would go to in order to get the best photo possible.

We're home, but the blog isn't quite done. Coming up.. superlatives, updates on the re-immersion process, and a photo extravaganza!