Stranded in Krakow

Well I guess I'm not really stranded but stuck... and bored, but that will come later in the story!  I made it to Krakow just fine, the train ride went smoothly found my hostel no problem and I was off and sightseeing within a couple hours.  Krakow seemed to have so much more to offer then Warsaw did, and boy was I ever excited to see it!  So the first thing I did was wander down to this massive castle called Wawel Hill which basically overlooked my hostel.  When I got there I was in sheer amazement!  It was like a real life castle! haha courtyard, guards towers, you name it... it had it!  While I was wandering around the castle I found this statue of a dragon which blew real fire every couple minutes... so sweet!  I guess the story with the castle goes that a dragon used to live on the land that the castle now stands on and because there's such a nice view, (you can literally see the while city), but the king refused to have his castle anywhere else so he had to slay the dragon to take the land.  So now they have the statue there to pay homage to the dead dragon.  After I was done at the castle I wandered to the main city square here and it was just spectacular!  Beer gardens everywhere,  Huge clocktowers,  and plus they were setting up a stage for a big music festival so that was really cool to watch!  When I finally got back to my hostel at the end of the day it was wierd to find that I was pretty much the only person in the whole place... No one else in my room or even on my floor for that matter,  Really wierd considering I've rarely even seen an empty bed but it was awesome to have some time alone!   The next day (yesterday) I woke up and was lucky to meet up with a couple people I met in Warsaw and they were headed to Aushwitz, so I decided to join them.  Aushwitz was insane, it's a giant museum now with very graphic pictures and memories from the holocaust.  My skin was absoltly crawling for the entire three hours I was there.  It's really easy to read about it in books and see pictures just when you standing in front on the execution wall or inside one of the barracks it really opens your eyes and makes you wonder how people could have ever been put though something like this.  There were some shocking exibits there too like one room about 40 feet long and a glass case about 15 feet deep which lined both walls that was entirely filled up with shoes that were revoked from the prisoners.  Absolutly astounding.  After we were done at Aushwitz we decided we were going to try and head to the salt mine here cause we heard it was super interesting.  So we hopped on another bus to get there, when we got there we went to buy our tickets to the mine, but there was like a thousand 10 year kids waiting in line to buy tickets.  So we figured we didn't really want to deal with that mess today. So we just hopped back on the bus and headed home.  We went out that night too to an awesome bar called carpe diem...the wall were lined with motocycle memorablia and had like 10 differnent rooms in the bar.  It was almost like a house.  The only problem was we totally lost track of time there cause we didn't leave until four o clock in the morning and we needed to get on the train at 7:00 am to Prague!  So I hurried home to try and get some sleep for a couple hours and set my alarm clock up next to my bed.  But apparently my body had different intenions and wanted more than a couple hours of sleep cause when I woke up in the morning it was 10 o clock and I was laying on top of my alarm clock.  (must have done it in my sleep to drown out the sound of the alarm).... ridiculous haha.  It's nice though not having a set schedule though cause now I'm just going to catch the overnight train to Prague and tour there all day tomorrow! Too bad it's pourning rain here though and I couldn't really go out even if I wanted to... it's going to be a long day! Hopefully it goes well in Prague though!!

Adam