Polish Pottery Trip

Amber and I had to try to make the most of her last few months in Germany. We both had been wanting to make the trip to Poland to shop for pottery and see the sights. She found the most amazing guesthouse to stay at, the Blue Beetroot. The story goes: there was a time that alcohol was banned. farmer of this place used to smuggle alcohol underneath the beets that he took to market. One day the cart went out of control and rolled into the lake, beets, alcohol and all. Occasionally, a beet will float to the surface and magically it is soaked through with alcohol. Regardless of the truth of the myth, it was a beautiful place to stay. I'm not sure I've every shopped so much in my life! We must have gone to about 7 different shops. Most of them had new stuff, but some were very close in their patterns and it was a bit boring after awhile. That didn't matter though because we just had so much fun together filling my entire care with pottery. I even had the chance to speak Korean with a couple of women who were shopping! I listened in and once I determined they were speaking Korean I snuck in the few words I knew....it was so cool to speak Korean in Poland!

On our way home we stopped at Buchenwald concentration camp. It was a bit out of the way, but we both agreed it would be worth it and boy was it ever. It was extremely sobering to walk where so many had died. It was also exhausting because all the exhibits were in German and I had to spend so much time translating. We finally just stuck to looking at the pictures. The ironic part was all the letters that were written in English were translated into German, but not vice versa. At Buchenwald the most moving aspect is the zoo that the Nazi soldiers built just outside the fence.

The "prisoners" were a zoo on one side and the animals were a zoo on the other side. The animals were probably fed better when you consider the deplorable conditions the people were forced to live in. Also, it is situated on a hill so it was impossible the villagers below didn't know what was going on above them. Yet when the camp was liberated and the villagers were force to walk through, many of them were astonished at what they saw.