Okay, today is going to be the day we catch up on all of Europe. Certainly have been running around a lot the past couple of weeks, but thankfully, we have had a great few days of rest with Ashley's aunt and uncle here in Vilnius -- but onto how we got here.

Unfortunately, I think we spent more time in Poland in transit than actually exploring places - or atleast equal amounts of time. It started with our trip into Poland. Wroclaw was our destination, and although its only probably 200km or less from Prague as the crow flies, its a rather unvisited town, compared with the crowds that embrace Prague. Based on some advice on Thorn Tree, we decided to head for the border at Nachod, then cross over to Kudowa Zdroj on the Polish side to catch a train to Wroclaw. The first problem with this plan was that our train was late and we missed the connection to Nachod. The second problem was that we missed the next connection that could have taken us to Nachod because it was labled with some other town on it, and so we end ed up waiting at a train station somewhere in the Czech countryside for two hours. Once we finally got to Nachod, we had to wait two more hours for the local bus to take us over to Poland, during which time, I looked for somewhere to stay, because we knew we had probably already missed the train to Wroclaw. But, we decided to push on and went to Kudowa Zdrój, which was a bit scary at first, we thought we were going to get dropped off at a really small town with no hope of getting out, given the backroads that the bus took to get there. But, Kudowa turned out to be really nice, and we almost ended up staying there for a night, just because of how pretty the town was. But, we managed to catch the last bus out of Kudowa to Wroclaw (we had missed the last train by a long shot) and pulled into Wroclaw somewhere around 10pm. We had left the apartment in Prague I think about 9am.

Wroclaw (pronounced vrot-swaf) is being promoted by the local tourism board as the 'new Krakow' now that Krakow is 'the new Prague'. Personally, just coming from Prague, Wroclaw really doesn't have anything on it, but turned out to be an interesting, quirky little town with lots of history none the less. Most of the town was rebuilt after WWII, since then it was known as "Fortress Breslau" and pretty much leveled by the Red Army. Known now as the city of 100 bridges, it actually has approximately 137 bridges linking all of the little islands that form the Ostrow Tumski district (Cathedral Island) - lots of churches to see all over town as well, but the most impressive ones were located within a few hundred feet of each other, which makes you question the city planners. Wroclaw also has a number of funky little cafes tucked into the crumbling communist buildings in the back alleys, and a lively university situated right along the river. All in all, a nice place to spend a few days strolling along the cobblestone streets. Also, it being Poland and all, we had some pierogies here and there.

One of the fun things to do around town was to spot the little gnome statues that have been appearing since 2005 in various locations. The history behind these statues is quite interesting -- they represent the Orange Alternative, which was a protest movement started in Wroclaw in 1983 that used absurd and pretty funny methods to oppose the communist regime. They demanded "Freedom for Santa Claus" and sung communist hymns to the monkeys at the zoos. They also spray painted orange gnomes at nighttime around town wherever anti-government grafitti had been removed - thus the gnome statues now. As their leader, Waldemar Fydrych said, "Can you treat a police officer seriously, when he is asking you the question: 'Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarfs?'"

So, that was pretty much our time in Poland. Oh yea, and then we took an overnight train to Warsaw at midnight, got in at 6am, then took a train pretty much from 7:30am to 6pm to get to Vilnius. So that was fun. But, as we approach the end of the trip, I'm glad we got the opportunity to see the 4th largest city in Poland - certainly one of it's finest.