Poland :-)

hey everyone!
update on my latest travels: I went to Poland last weekend! It was a sorta last minute thing: we'd been thinking about it for a while but didn't actually book anything until Thursday (and we left on Friday...). So that was pretty cool!!!
We took a bus to Krakow on Friday afternoon..it left Budapest at 2 and was supposed to get there at 9:30. well, things don't always go quite as planned: there was a snowstorm. so we went wicked slowly, got stuck at least once, stopped a couple times (i made my 1st snowball of the winter!!) and finally reached Krakow at about 3:00am. yeah. so that was a looong bus ride!
The next day, we got up and took the 1 1/2 hour bus ride from Krakow to Auschwich. we took a tour in the freezing cold (it was snowing again) which was very...i dunno...interesting, depressing, neat but sad. it was crazy to actually be in the place where all of the disturbing, terrible things happened: we saw the prison cells, the tiny shoes of all the kids that they killed, the luggage of the Jews who thought they were just moving to a new place, the room full of hair that they shaved off because it could be used to make clothe...we walked under the gate stating "work makes you free" into the compound surrounded by barbed wire...we stood in the gas chambers and saw the ovens they used to burn bodies after murdering people.
yeah. so needless to say, there was a lot to think about on saturday.
after that, we went out and had a nice dinner (it was SO CHEAP! i love conversion rates in countries that aren't on the euro!) and then saw a couple bars before turning in for the night. (oh--forgot to mention: the kids sitting in front of us on the bus also happened to be american college students studying abroad in Budapest--one at Corvinus another at a different school--and they were staying at the same hostel as us! so they joined us for dinner & stuff. that was fun!)
On sunday, we checked out of our hostel and then braved the cold and snow for a little while so we could see the old city. it was really pretty!! we stopped in a couple stores to warm up in between seeing old churches and castle-type buildings. (i'm not really sure what some of the buildings were, but they were pretty!!) after we were sufficiently frozen, we went to the mall that was right near the bus station. we ate lunch there (which turned out to be a bad idea: no one really liked the food they got...oh well...) and then bought a few snacks for the return bus trip.
At 2:30 we got on the bus and settled in for what turned out to be only the 7 1/2 hour bus ride that it was supposed to be! (on both bus trips they played movies almost the whole time, which was nice!!)
yeah, so that was my weekend! It was awesome! very relaxing and very, very pretty!! the snow reminded me of home and Christmas...it was probably one of my favorite trips this semester!
I only took a few pictures, but i'll post some once I've uploaded them to my computer!
see you all soon!!! :-)