Krakow and Budapest

Staying in Krakow I was couchsurfing, www.couchsurfing.org where people put there couches on line and you can crash on them. I might have already mentioned I was staying with Nathalie and Vojtek (sorry about the spelling), and here is a breakfast that she made!



This is a shopping mall in krakow...

We went to a veggie restaurant in Krakow and on the posterboard there are two special people! Always nice to run into swami Sivananda and Swami Vishnu just like that! www.sivananda.org

Here is Natalie outside the restaurant! Thanks for the 'couch'!!!!!

Castle in Poland, I never pictured Poland having castles and being as magnificent as it is! I want to go back and explore more. Krakow is just incredible, and the poeple were great. There are also lots of good mountains to climb!

They sell giant bagels on the street, felt like home!

From this church a trumpeter plays a song every hour, it is the warning song when enemioes are cmoing, and the story goes that once the mongolians came and while he was playing he was shot with an arrow right through the trumpet. So the guy plays until the very note where the old lookout was shot. he does this 4 times on the hour, once in each dirstion, and then just stops in midnote in the middle...

For Natalie!

To go to Budapest I had a sleeping train! This is the best way to travel! Lying down! I would opt for this on day trains too, but in this case you save a hotel and a day as you ride and sleep at once. I hade this whole room to myself, and when I woke up in Budapestit turned out we were no where near budapest. We missed a conncection in the night and then the 2 other passengers got off andI had the entire car to myself..I was like a king the rest of the way, with the train attendant as my guy that helps the king. Too bad we could barely communicate!

So I arrived 5 hours late...

Budapest! a Synogogue....

Cool building...

Cool Graffiti

I am such an artist!

The main Cathedral.... none compared to France for me with all the stained glass there...

Here is the coolest vegetable I have ever seen! Click on the picture to get a good look!

Metro in Budapest...Very noisy

I stayed with Denes a freind of Leslie's who I had met before in Montreal. I actually stayed at his siter Roni's. The follwoing day we went to a Turkish bath, there are lots of them in Budapest...who would have guessed! It was underground, one big bath, then some smaller hotter ones... a stem room that got crazier as oyou went deeper, same as the sauna...Denes was able to do it, I was staying in the childs room...still a humid 50 degrees celssisu and more than enough for me... there was also some super cold water that was more to my liking...EH!

To fly to Rome I too Wizz air, a low cost airline. The flight was super cheap and the plane bright pink...the funniest part is that the seats are not given. A shuttle with doors on both sides took us to the plane and it was a free for all! The people around me were planning strategies to get the best seats... what side the shuttle would pull up on..who to trip to get there first etc. Somehow I ended up with a whole row to myself while most others were full... This is one advantage to not showering!! (Just kidding, I was fresh from the sulfur bath! Maybe that is worse!)

Finding my Roots

Irving (Usher) Dym was an interesting man. He came to Canada at an unknown age before world war 2. He believed strongly in drinking a dozen raw eggs a day for optimum health and that hockey was fixed. He lived to almost 100 and I have just heard rumors from a friend who went to an anti corruption seminar that hockey is very possible fixed. So here is a man who knew what he was talking about. (usually :)... side note: He convinced me to drink an egg once... Im going to stick to yoga.

So Zeidi taught himself English reading newspapers on the mountain and started a company in Montreal that is still in the family today and fathered 5 children, one of whom being my mother.
But where did he come from?

The answer took me to south eastern Poland to the town of Lesko.

It is not a large town, and it was my first experience where I was just about the only English speaker. After a 5 and a half hour bus ride I hiked up a hill into the center of the town and through hand signs got a hotel room. All I knew about the place is that there is an old synagogue and a Jewish cemetary. And Zeidi came from there...
First I headed to the synagogue...

It is now an art gallery which I believe was a great way to preserve the building. A friendly lady let me in for free and gave me a pamphlet with some history.

She also showed me that there is a little dungeon where Jews were kept prisoner.

The ark and other artifacts are now gone but it looked pretty swanky in the photos.

Lesko used to have a large Jewish community, dating back to around 1600! Being here is what made the holocaust feel more real to me than even Auschwitz. The current Jewish poulation of Lesko is ZERO. Except for those who fled before the war they were all killed.

There was a list on the wall of Jews from the town that were killed.

Recognize any names? Click the lower photo! A friend in Krakow said that Dym means the smoke that comes out of a chimney.

After the synagogue I went to the cemetary, thinking maybe I could find a gravestone with a familiar name... This proved impossible, partially because being one of the oldest cemetaries in Poland there were ltos of stones, and many were illegible.

There was a castle in the town... I got to it just before dark...

Any town that sells Star Wars magazines is cool by me :)

Here is the town center

And a view of the church as I headed back to the bus station

One more story from Zeidi is that He was once out in a field at night and suddenly the sky opened up and he saw God.

I thought maybe I could have a similar experience so i walked out of the town into a field at night and saw the sky. There was no supernatural force that showed up but it was fun to think that while even though the town is surrounded by fields it is possible that this could have been the very same one Zeidi walked in.

The town is on the edge of some nice looking mountains that I did not have the tme to explore and the smell was very similar to two dear places to me. One was the nature smell of the Laurentians, the trees and streams brought me right back there. The other was Guatemala as many people are burning wood to heat there homes and some of the street vendors brought me to central America.

I wandered back through the town which has surely been built up a lot since the war and wondered what was there before...

If any relatives have any stories about Zeidi in Lesko add them in the comments... you need a gmail account to comment but it is easy to sign up if you dont have one. (Or just email it to Jess or me and we can post it.)

Poland - 1 Auschwitz

I wanted to visit Poland as that is where one set of grandparents come from, and to see a concentration camp. What I didnt think is that I would love the country so much, and hopefully there will be time to return another day.

I arrived late at night and began myfriest couch surfing experience, staying with a couple, sleeping ontheir floor... They were super kind and helped me planand replan several trips.

The next morning I headed to Auschwitz and saw some of the worst things man is capable of doing.

work makes you free.... hmmmm.....

This was an assassination wall
This was where they sent the prisoners for extra punishment... horrible things happened inside

The end of the line...the train comes in full at Birkenau and leaves empty... People thought they were going for showers...
They were going to die. You can now walk right into a gas chamber. You can see empty canisters of gas. It is still impossible to imagine how the people felt inside. I tried to picture people I know going in to die. The people were you, me, your cousin, the man who sold you breakfast yesterday, the child in the green sweater. We went to summer camp. They went to death camp.

1 million Jews were killed here. Over 1 million people died on one small square of land.

The Israeli national anthem had always been just a song to me that I had to sing in school, and I am not a huge fan of Israel, but there was a group of Israeli students at Birkenau and hearing them sing Hatikva did move me alot. It showed that the final solution was not as final as it was planned to be. This made for a bit of positive emotion at the end of my journey.

Prague

I was hopping to visit Prague, and Mareike has a freind there. So we headed off together with a rideshare to visit Martin... Here is a view of the trip form Germany...

Coming into Prague I thought someone had slipped something into my water...the buildings seemd to be dripping!

Here is Mareike and Martin enjoying the view (or they were before they turned around for a picture)

And here I am... After missing the Eifel tower in Paris I got to go to it in Prague...which is really called Praha.

We got a guided tour from our host and visited the castle where there were guards whose job it is to stay still. I think this is a great job for anyone trying to go deep into meditation, but maybe they have to be alert...

We went out to Martin's roomates' bar and had a fine ol time!

We had a little tea party outside to get out of the smoke... It seems people in Prague prefer breathing through tubes of dried plants lit on fire than without them... On the coke machine is the bar kit for another kind of dried plant...This church lights up very well at night with orange lights in the towers... Very magical

There is nothing that is not better deepfried! Like bread...mmm fried bread...with garlic butter...

Famous streetcars
Rowboat...Beata in the back...
Our little group and the theatre...A synogogue...

Some cars on the road...

One last story from Prague... a friend had given me the address of his friend who happened to live near where I was walking around... So after ringing a doorbell, making unexpected introductions and chilling a bit I had another tour guide, Kat, who had a really cute cat. She showed me aroundand took me to a great veggie restaurant that also was quite beautiful... Thanks so much!
Pretty restaurant

My veggiefied authentic Czech meal... Dumpling, beet patties and cabbage....Thanks to my Czech hosts, Martin and Beata! Czech hospitality is top notch!

It was also interesting to learn what it was like to live behind the Iron curtain, to see communist era buildings and try to imagine how life was... Lots of interesting history in Praha!