And so the journey begins....

The ferry across to Poland was sweet as, I had booked a cabin, so that I could get some sleep. You wouldn't haven't even known you were on a ferry except for the humming of the engines. This ferry was huge, it had a restaurant, a cafe, a night club, two shops, a jacuzzi and three bars. What more do you want for a 12 hour boat ride? I got into Poland at 08:00 in the morning. I managed to follow the wrong crowd of people and ended up outside the terminal building with out having gone through customs, I managed with a couple of other people to get back inside to where we needed to be and went through customs. The custom guys looked over my passport photo, and then me and then the photo, me, photo, me, photo. Eventually he let me through, I guess I look nothing like my photo anymore, in the photo I have short blonde blonde hair (it is over 6 years old) and now I have shoulder length blonde brown hair. Any way I had a look a my stamp and that is when I noticed that the custom guy on the Copenhagen side had stamped my passport with the wrong date, according to the stamp I had left 2 days ago. opps. Glad that wasn't picked up by the friendly Polish customs guy. From here I was able to catch a train to Warsaw. It ended up being an 8 hour marathon trip down there, so by the time I was there, I had had enough of the slow trains. Warsaw is a cool place. That evening a whole buch of us from the hostel headed out to an ice bar, yes a bar made of ice, everything there was made of Ice, it was wicked, one of the guys was convinced that the seats were plastic, that was till one of the girls took a bite out of it. Proved him wrong. The next day I headed to the History Museum with a couple from the hostel, they have a great film at 12pm daily in English about life in Warsaw before, during and after the war. WOW!!! That movie was well worth going and seeing, it was amazing what the Germans did to that city and how amazing the Polish were to come back and rebuild their lives from the rubble that was now their city. The rest of the museum was great as well, it was huge!! From outside it looks small, but it isn't! The old town, well it isn't really old, it was all rebuilt after the war, is just amazing. I am so glad I came here. While I was here I tried finding where my Dad's father came from, we know that he was born in place just outside of Warsaw called Galomin. I found out that it has a population of less than 200 people. Trying to get out there was proving to be too difficult without a car, and even if I had a car, it wasn't on any of the maps. This journey will have to be saved for another time here. I ended up spending another night in Warsaw, a friend of mine that I met on my trip to Antarctica was going to be there the next night. We caught it, it was great seeing her again. We hope to catch up again later on, hopefully Croatia. From Warsaw I headed to Wroclaw. Another slow train there, only 400 kms and it took 8 hours, and it was late to boot! I found the hostel after walking past it 3 times. Once I got there, I found out I wasn't the only person that missed it. I headed for something to eat with a couple of guys in my dorm, one was from Ireland and the other from South Africa. The next day the South Africa, and I headed out to see the sites Wroclaw by day. After spending a couple of days here I headed to Krakow, the South African was heading the same way, so we travelled there together. Krakow, well I don't know what all the hype is about, I thought Warsaw was better. Krokow is nice and there is a fair amount to see, while I was here I headed to see Auschwitz, that is worth going to see, just to see how big the place was is mind blowing. From Krakow we headed to Zakopane.
Zakopane is just beautiful, the forest, the mountains and the village. I could have spent a week here, there are heaps of hikes to do, we did just one, and did a traditional raft down the gorge the other day. Hindsight I would have prefered to go and do more hiking then the rafting. If anyone is coming to Poland, make sure you headed to Zakopane for a few days. Next stop Slovakia.