May 16th

Hi friend,

Today after a super long train ride we ended up in Krakow, Poland at 7am. With minimal sleep... this is exciting! It was so cold, like cardigan, hoodie, and jacket type cold. I was so ill prepared. We boarded another intercity train for Auschwitz, I personally thought it was maybe a 15 minute ride, but it turned into a 2 hour odyssey. Bringing the grand total of travel time to around 12 hours on some sort of train. Now journal, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining , I'm just explaining that it took a really long time, but what was about to happen next is pretty life-changing. Experiencing Auschwitz is extreme.

We got off the shuttle and walked into the concentration camp, right on the train tracks that delivered all the prisoners. We walked through the barbed wire fencing and passed guard towers that surrounds the entire camp. If that sentence enough didn't give you chills we proceeded to walk around through the living quarters of the prisoners and eventually made our way to the ruins of the crematories.

It's a hard concept to wrap your head around the fact that 1.5 MILLION people lived and died in this specific spot for no reason at all.

There were a lot of memorials with candles surrounding them, in a lot of different languages. While I was walking around I thought about how interesting it would be to interview a survivor and know their story.  Walking around, there was a lot of Polish high school students in group tours not really paying attention fully to what was happening around them. I know growing up for me I was always interested in WWII type things, I hope younger generations still appreciate everything past generations have shown us.

After we finished touring we ate some lunch (I ate a hot dog, and I will have to say Prague and Poland have the best bread ever!) and headed back to the train station. We have an appointment with Munich tomorrow that we can't miss. Our train didn't leave until 9pm and we got back to the station at 5pm, so we sat in the station and played some 10,000 when a little Polish girl named Elena approached us with words and phrases her dad was telling her to say to us.

She would run around in circles and then stop in front of Jeff and say "I'm an alien" and giggle and run off. She didn't know what she was saying because she couldn't speak English, but it was so funny!!

We boarded the train to Munich and met our train car mate named Peter from Argentina, he gave us candy and  a story about his life and his travels and then we all went to sleep. IN OUR FIRST SLEEPER CAR..WITH BEDS!! Peter was awesome, and sleeping while lying down is always a plus...

Until tomorrow,
 -JEN