Mike Packwood

Continuing our autumn tour of interesting places we have never been to before - which so far has taken in Vilnius and Berlin, this November we find ourselves in Krakow. Well, it was ok. Grey, cold, never really light. The city centre is old, well looked after and if your're interested in medieval stuff, probably riveting. But i'm not unfortunately. We went Oskar Schindlers factory which was fascinating - it's now a museum dedicated to telling the story of the city and its Jewish population under the Germans in the second war - and had a good walk around, but honestly, unless we missed something, it's probably not a place wed go back to again. One huge disappointment for me - considering my interest in all buildings concrete - was that the magnificent  Soviet era Forum hotel has been mostly covered up with a hoarding for mobile phones. So - I took pictures of the bits you can still see and pinched one from the internet to illustrate what it looked like in its heyda

Here we are at one of Polands premier tourist attractions. In fact our guide told us it was THE most popular Polish tourist attraction. And it's easy to see why. There will be at least four occasions on this trip where you look up and say 'wow' out loud. Lets face it, a visit to an old salt mine doesn't sound that appealing does it, but you'll have to trust me here - if you're ever nearby, you really should go. The only slight problem with these pics isn't so much the quality - I was doing my best 150 metres under ground in the dark - it's capturing the scale of the place. Some of the caverns - the church for example - are enormous. Oh - and everything you see carved is carved out of rock salt including the chandeliers. Makes sprinkling it on your chips seem a bit dull! A vast underground fully functioning church Here you can get some idea of the scale of the caverns by following the line of the stairs

Difficult to know what to say about our visit to Auschwitz really. We were in Krakow, which is only an hour away, so really thought we should visit. For us it was a grey miserable damp day in November. But we were wrapped up warm, well fed and a cup of coffee was only a few minutes away. God knows what it was like for the inmates.  There is a corridor in one of the blocks with photographs of some of the inmates - the Germans were very good at accurate record keeping - which showed that typically, unless you were killed immediately on arrival, you would last about 6 months...whilst being worked to death at the IG Farben chemical works nearby, where one of the products you would be making was the Zyklon-B cyanide based pesticide that would ultimately be used to kill you when it was dropped through the hole in the roof of a gas chamber. The piles of glasses, mountains of hair - used to make felt boots amongst other things - baby clothes, suitcases, shoes, electrified fences, barbed wi