Welcome to another edition of "Foolish Adventures." Please spit out your gum, and keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. Thank you.

Welcome to another edition of "Foolish Adventures." Please spit out your gum, and keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. Thank you.

The excitement started with boarding a train for Warsaw, or Warszawa (Vorshava) as you have to say it when you buy train tickets or they send you to Yalta for being a tourist. The train is marked on the outside in big red letters with the name of Poland's national train company, WARS. Before I go on, I should tell you that buying a train ticket in Russia is challenging. Mostly because, the women who sell the train tickets sit behind these little windows that have tiny doors set beneath them the way a cashiers' window has a little hole you can talk through. The difference being, these women can close and lock these doors any time- if they are busy, or don't want to talk to you, which if you are American and carrying a large backpack means all the time. Fortunately we got help from a Russian woman who knew the correct procedure, which is to step in front of whoever is waiting for the magic door to open, pound on the window and yell, "any seats for Warszawa next train?" in Russian of course. At which point they sigh and look extremely annoyed and sell you a ticket. OK I just had to tell you about that. Diversion diverted. So you are getting on the train. It's best to get on the train in the day, unlike what we did, because the electricity on the trains doesn't work so you have to feel your way to your compartment, especially if you are an idiot tourist who has never done this before, wearing a large backpack bigger than the aisle to the door, which constantly catches on every door handle you go by, this is not so easy. Luckily once we got inside the compartment I found I had my trusty dusty tiny flashlight keychain, thankyou whoever gave that to me, it saved us on the train-- especially in the dark little bathrooms, where it was apparent that not everyone had a flashlight. The rest of the train ride was generally traumatic, although the beds were comfy enough. I will only relate two more train things - that breakfast was a foil wrapped pastry called "7 days mini croissant" which came only in "champagne" flavor - the oddest thing I have tasted on this trip. And, of course, Byelorussia. Once we got to the border at Brest (Yes, that's pronounced Brest) some men with uniforms and pancake-shaped black brimmed caps came on board and asked for our passports. We gave them over. They came back a few minutes later and asked for our visas. We handed them our hard-won Russian visas (which we never saw again) and they left. Then they came back again with a new guy in a different uniform with a bigger pancake who told us to pack up our stuff and follow him. This was bad. What commenced was a three hour tour into bureaucratic hell, punctuated by the only English word Byelorussian border officials know - "Prob-Lem!" We spent a lot of time in a communist-era waiting room in the company of a pacing woman who had obviously been crying. It turned out, you must have a Byelorussian "transit visa" to travel across the country (which is between Russia and Poland) which we did not know about. When we didn't have it they told us we must take another train back to Moscow, get one, and then come back. They kept insisting on this, right up until the point when I handed them a not inconsiderable sum, in crisp American dollars. Then, suddenly everything started moving extremely fast, customs was a breeze, every official was our friend, they personally showed us to our seats on the train (which had somehow waited for us,) and we (our hearts still pounding uneasily) went our merry way. Phew. My very first bribe. Aside from that the train ride was rather glum, as you can imagine. I don't remember much about the scenery except there were a lot of goats.

Fortunately, once we arrived in Warsaw there was almost immediately a train for Krakow, and once we arrived in Krakow, everything suddenly became easy. The hotel was clean and comfortable, and we spent three days wandering around, looking at all the art galleries and some of the museums (for some reason most of the museums have hours like, 10-3 on tuesdays and thursdays) Krakow has a big "historic" center which is a manic conglomeration of Oooooooold stuff with, McDonalds, antiques, teen fashion, and swarms and hordes and clots of tourists like us. It was good to see some familiar faces, if only archetypically so. Krakow is also BRIMMING with accordionists! You can only imagine the joy, the delight, and the utter lightness I felt when I saw people walking around, with an accordion casually slung over one shoulder! Little children with little accordions slung over one little shoulder! True, not all of them were very good accordionists, like the guy who showed up EVERY DAY and played the same song ALL DAY LONG!-With flourishes. But a couple of the guys out there are real geniuses. The old town has a very large square in the middle, the largest medieval square in Europe according to the guide books, the buildings are all lit up and a trumpet plays from the highest steeple every hour, and it's very fun to wander around at night and get lost and keep coming back to the same damn square you just left a minute ago and don't you recognize that bar, I think, or was it the red one? Overall Krakow was a great antidote to Byelorussia.

One of the days I went to visit Auschwitz, which is not far from Krakow in a town called Oswiecim (that was actually the name before the Nazis took over and renamed it Auschwitz, now just the remains of the concentration camps are called Auschwitz.) Actually the number of camps around Poland is astonishing, only a few have been kept as memorials compared to the number that were operating 1940-45. There are two main camps in Oswiecim, Auschwitz I and Birkenau- Auschwitz II. Birkenau was an enormous death machine, train tracks right down the middle for dropping people off, rows upon rows of barracks, four large crematoria (which were all dynamited when the Nazis fled.) Auschwitz I is relatively small and contained, and nowadays without all the electrified barbed wire looks almost like a wierd village, with its rows of three story brick buildings and tree lined walkways. There is one gas chamber and crematorium and a gallows, and a wall where they used to take people to shoot them. Now it just looks like a crumbling brick wall, apart from the flowers people have brought to remember the dead. Inside the buildings they have exhibits, some of which are very sad like all the hair they found when the Soviet army freed Auschwitz, there were bales and bales of hair which were usually sent to Germany and made into cloth, this was just whatever was left when the Germans fled - It fills a space about 150 ft2. Also, there are rooms and rooms of shoes. You think you are done with the shoes, you get to the next room, there's more shoes. In those days I guess people used to put little horseshoe-like metal attachments on their heels, I saw several of the shoes had them. One of the displays is of family photographs that people brought with them when they came, they thought they were being relocated so they brought all their best stuff. Someone actually went through, and researched all the families in the photographs so they could tell their story. Most of the people in the photographs were killed in the camps, whole extended families, maybe one person lived. It made it more personal. When I was wandering out where the old storehouses for the people's stuff use to be, I was taking photographs and I dropped something. When I leaned over to pick it up I saw the ground was covered with buttons. I picked up one button, a white pearly button. I felt it between my fingers and thought about taking it home with me. A button that was worn by someone who was killed in the camps. I put it back down and walked away in the direction of the piles of ash that used to be people.

OK enough. I am now in Zakopane, a mountain town near the Slovakian border, the air is extremely pleasant and tomorrow, hiking.

Send your comments to Renee email Renee@hazelst.com