Today was a long day. We started with a 6:30am wake-up and left on the bus at 8am. Our first stop was at Oswiecim, famous as Auschwitz. Most of the tour group went through the Concentration Camp for the morning, but I’ve been through a couple of Concentration Camps before and remember those vividly and didn’t want to do it to myself yet again. I wasn’t the only one though, so CT and Sau Wan and I got together and checked out Oswiecim after Tamas had everyone else dropped off at the Camp.
Oswiecim is a small town, very old – mentioned in records in 1179, but known to the world because of Auschwitz (which is the German version of the name that was used for 5 years).
There really isn’t very much to see here. There’s a bit of a manor house at the top of the hill. It is now a museum. We mainly went there because we needed a toilet and thought there’d be a cafe. Which there was, but it was still closed. The nice guard at the Museum allowed us to use the toilet there, though. We had a bit of a look down to the river on which this was set:
and then wandered around the town looking for a cafe anyway. We found one and I had a coffee while CT and Sau Wan had a selection of cakes. I’d been having trouble with my camera lenses – lens flare in dark situations due to a dirty lens/filter – and CT had cleaned them for me that morning on the bus, so we’d been talking ‘shop’. We decided that since there was really not much to see here, we’d have a look at each other’s photos. They had some really nice photos from their trip to China which CT showed me on the MacBook he’d been lugging around all morning.
It was getting on in the morning, so we went in search of lunch because when we met the bus, everyone else would’ve already eaten. We walked all around and ended up back in the street with the cafe – it’s such a small town! We had lunch in what seemed like a typical snack bar here in Aus, except that you could sit down to eat. I had Souvlaki (typical German take-away!) with chips. Naughty me.
We walked back to the park and looked for a shady spot (it was a hot day) to await the bus. The bus didn’t take too long past the appointed time and then it was onwards to Jasna Gora Monastery.
Jasna Gora (“Bright Mountain”) Monastery is the home of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. It’s a pilgrimage site for lots of Polish Catholics. Unlike other pilgrimage sites like this, the Madonna has not actually appeared here, though miracles have been attributed to the painting. A priest took us through the Monastery and the Basilica, which was full of people attending a mass (there’s a mass every hour!). Strangely enough, photos were allowed without an extra charge even!
We also went through the museum showing off some of the treasures that have been given by people over the ages. Though these weren’t allowed to be photographed, these ones in the Basilica were:
The actual Black Madonna painting, which is in a side-chapel filled with priests, has been dressed up with jewel-encrusted ‘gowns and crowns’ that are changed yearly at Easter time. Apparently there’s 12 or so of them. As part of the tour, we were allowed to walk along the sides of the chapel, while all the pilgrims sat outside, looking through the bars. It made me feel bad for them, really.
They hold open air masses here too. Apparently, sometimes, people congregate in the streets for miles around:
After leaving here around 4pm, we drove to Warsaw. We didn’t get to the hotel til around 8pm, so Tamas hadn’t been joking when he said it would be a long day! Our hotel in Warsaw was another Holiday Inn, but I didn’t like this one so much. It seemed to me to be deliberately imposing in the public areas but the rooms weren’t great. And the Internet access was only free in the public areas and only for an hour at a time (you had to ask at reception for a voucher), which was quite inconvenient. Ah well. I may have managed to upload a blog entry anyway…
