The Baltic’s are nice little countries, well at lease what I saw of them I like, I saw a lot via the busses I took and their capitals. Riga in Latvia is the nicest and the biggest of the capitals, modern and old at the same time, about a pound for a beer so that was good, you could defiantly live well there on not much money, well on not much money our standards. The Baltic countries are all very similar, beautiful old buildings with the scars of the USSR still visible, I believe they all switch over to the Euro next year, so it was good to get there before that.
Poland was really what I expected of it, Warsaw was an ok city, a nice old town but still mostly just a big city. They have a skyscraper that was a gift from Stalin there, he said he would give them that or a metro, the city leaders chose that because you can’t put a metro on a post card. All the poles I talked to about that seem to hate it and would have much rather had a metro (they have one now). It was mostly destroyed in WW2 so that’s why it has lost a lot of its charm, but they rebuilt the old town well. Krakow on the other hand was very beautiful, that city is just a pleasure to walk around. It still has an old town charm, a gorgeous castle and is a big contrast to Warsaw. I took a day trip to Auschwitz from there which was a sombre experience, it was raining when I was there which really drove how horrible it was home, everything leaked and was smelly and cold. It was a very eerie there, they have displaced of a portion of the shoes taken of the prisoners, it just goes on and on. They also have one room filled with 2 tons of hair cut of females after they were killed, that was only a portion of what was originally found there.
I am in Germany now and having a blast, Germany was really the last main country I wanted to visit in my trip, one of the big ones I had to get to, so I am glad I’m here. I started in Berlin which is a great city, I checked out checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin wall. It’s amazing all the memorials and information there about it, there is even a “scar” running along the road where the wall was, it’s done in cobble stones, so it makes it easy to see and it makes you know how big it was and how much of the city was divided. They have reminders to the World Wars as well and the former Gestapo headquarters shows all the main people involved in WW2 and how they were sentenced.
I really am enjoying Germany it is clean, and everything is easy to get to and efficient. I have spent the last couple days in Hamburg, it is a much more beautiful city in terms of nature, more trees, parks and old buildings as well. There have been a couple festivals on, like world Astra day (a Hamburg beer) which I question how worldly it is. I have had a great time in Germany and will defiantly be coming back. I’m going to spend the next couple days finishing up in Germany before I fly to Iceland from Frankfurt on the 22nd.
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