Pictures, Part Three

Continuing the Poland Photo Tour, here’s part three. As mentioned before, it covers Lublin, Majandek, and Kazmierz Dolny—and the coldest part of the trip...

...Like in this picture. I felt like a snow prince or something, it was so cold that the snow didn’t even melt in your hair, just froze. The girls looked like they had white streaks in their hair where the snow froze together in clumps.

Lublin:

This is the main street in Lublin’s old town. We arrived at night and spent a bit of time poking about and looking for a hostel, or someone who spoke English well enough to tell us where to find one. We finally gave up and settled on a hotel, and it was quite nice, and not terribly expensive.

Another view of Lublin at night, this is the road that divided the old and new towns.

The next day we walked around the town, and explored the cool side streets and alleys there.

This is in Lublin’s old town again. There were no stairs to the right of the railing, so you could slide down the icey ramps, kinda like skiing. Actually not really, but it was fun anyway.

A gate at the edge of the old town. It was snowing sooo hard here.

A corner of the main square. It was really like stepping back in time there; this picture could have been taken anytime in the last 50 years.

The main street in the old town in daylight.

Majdanek:
It took us forever to find this camp. We only got there through the help of a Polish guy that escorted us right to the gates. Once we got there, it was getting darker, colder, and more windy…and we were the only people there.

Like all things, we were very serious about going to the concentration camp.

This thing was not screwing around though. It was so surreal to see this come out of the fog as we were driving up to it, like being in weird sci-fi thriller. It was used to store the ashes of the victims, which were thrown into a pit inside.

This is the crematorium and gas chambers. Again I can’t tell you how weird it was to see all this in real life.

These are the barracks. We couldn't go in them as the place was technically closed for the night, but we learned later that most were originally meant to store about 50 horses, and were retrofitted to house over 400 prisoners.

Ok, off down the road to happier things. After spending a night in the strangest hostel ever (it was very cheap, but huge, completely deserted, and waayyy off the beaten track.), we woke up the next morning to -13F weather and bright sunshine. We were told to go to Kazmierz by some of the people at the Krakow hostel, so we decided to check it out on the way home the next day. I have to say it was one of the highlights of the trip—it was quite small and very quaint, classic fairytale European. We walked around a bit, then found a tearoom and ducked in to get out of the cold. It was sooo cool, just like being in someone’s living room. We found a couch by the fire and relaxed for a bit. It was so nice that we didn’t want to leave. Anyway, back to photos:

Ana and Carmela heading into town…

Stairs heading up towards the town center.

The view from the church, this looked out over the north side of the village.

Another church just outside the town center.


Ok, that concludes the penultimate installment. For the last entry, we go back to Krakow…stay tuned.

P.S. You can click on any picture to see the original, large size. Just FYI...