Day 2: Getting started with a 4:59am train ride

During the winter, Auschwitz has very limited hours (8-3, I think), so I knew I had to get started early. Working against me was the cheapest Polish landing spot I found in terms of flights was Łódź, about 250km away from Auschwitz. No problem — the trains, I've heard, are really good here. Working backward, I calculated that I'd have to take...the 4:59am train, which meant waking up at 3:30. But after a fitful night in a too-hot room with a too-hot down blanket and walls thinner than Kleenex, I was more or less awake at that time anyway.

I've been waiting years to see Auschwitz and it wasn't at all how I pictured it in my mind. There were quite a few tour groups around and they were large, giving Auschwitz I a bit of a commercialized, museum-y feel. Even the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign lacked the impact that it has in pictures, and it's supposed to be the other way around. Two of the more sobering places in Auschwitz I were the crematorium and barrack the public were allowed to go into — the former was as solid as a fortress and it was gut-socking to see the iron trolleys on tracks that led right up to the oven where two or three corpses could fit at once. With the latter, it was all brick and wood and stone, and I kept staring at these sleeping places, wondering just how in the heck they didn't all freeze to death in the winter. There was absolutely no insulation in there and save for heat from bodies crushed up against each other, it was a cold, dark, lonely place with zero privacy.

Where Auschwitz I had a bit of the commercial feel to it, Auschwitz II-Birkenau was by far the more haunting of the two. I had to get on a free shuttle bus to reach it and once I got off, I wondered where the camp was, it was that empty-looking. Or perhaps the wrong phrase for it. It was vast and spread out, and the exact opposite of Auschwitz I. And it was eerily quiet, too. There were no birds in the sky, no trees to rustle in the wind, no squirrels scampering and no dogs barking. Even the tour guides' voices seemed to get absorbed into the sheer size of the camp. It's really difficult to give a sense of just how spread out everything is, even the barracks, but I estimate I walked about 3k in total and I didn't come close, by half, to covering the entire camp. But what I found out is those iconic train tracks that lead up to the brick artifice are on the inside of the camp, not on the outside like I'd always thought.

Dunno if it's the jet lag or just getting up early, but I nodded off for almost the entire bus ride into Krakow. And with all the walking I'd done already and how tired I was, I just hopped into a cab to get to my hotel instead of bussing it. I looked up the address and how to say it in Polish, and got by without English for the first time here.

Old Town in Krakow — where I'm staying — is absolutely gorgeous with tons of old, beautiful architecture and car-less streets. I tried to go to Wawel Castle but walked almost 2k to find out it had closed hours earlier, not like what I thought it said on the website. And having not eaten at all today, it definitely worked up my appetite for a meal at U Babcia Maliny. I'd read so much about this underground place that I passed by everything else on the way, even a swanky piano restaurant where I knew an elegant meal there would cost far less than it would in Paris, and eventually found my way to the restaurant.

It was worth it.

Tonight, I'm off to find a jazz bar, whichever is closest by foot.