Poland

Poland was colder than expected. It is also under construction. Poland is a beautiful country with a very sad history. Most of what we saw had been stolen, hidden, burned, torn down, raised to the ground, and then returned or reconstructed from photos and artwork. Poland is still very religious. There are churches everywhere, as well as nuns and even monks still wearing their brown robes and rope belts. One of our guides told us that the only South America has more practicing Catholics. It was a fun trip. We started in the city of Krakow, which still has original older buildings and walls. It also had a great town square or Rynek. It had a church that we called the trumpet church because every couple of hours a trumpeter would climb to the top of the tower and play a sad Polish song that helped rally the people during a battle. There were also all kinds of shops. Poland has a lot of wood work. I bought a couple of beautiful little wooden boxes, and when we went to palaces and castles, they had the most amazing carved tables and chests, and intricate wooden floors. Poland also has a lot of amber, with a amber mine operating out of Gdinsk. I got some beautiful pieces there. We toured churches, and went to the castle at Krakow, which has a series of caves underneath which, as the legends go, used to be the home of a mighty dragon. The dragon is the symbol of Krakow, and you can find him everywhere. We also ate street food (there are donner kebab stands everywhere), belgian waffles, and pirogi (Polish dumplings). The dumplings we got at milk bars, which are little street cafeterias left over from the Soviet era. They now operate as a sort of Polish fast food. I had the best Russian pirogi (cheese and onion) at the milk bar in Krakow. Poland is also good at mushrooms. Ordering anything with mushroom in it was a good bet, and I got some amazing pirogi stuffed with mushrooms, cream, and parsley at a pirogi shop in Warsaw. I also tried Borscht, which is beet soup. But honestly I had this inclination to use the bright soup for an egg dye rather than a meal. While in Krakow we took a bus to Aushwitz. Every major Polish city has a concentration camp nearby. I never realized just how badly Poland fared during World War II, or how many of them died. Its estimated that 5.5 -6 million Poles died during the Nazi occupation, 3 million of them Polish Jews, the rest Polish citizens. And its everywhere. We were always running across plaques that said things like "Here is where 30 people were shot by nazis" Anyway, Auschwitz and Aushwitz-Berkowitz were hard places to tour. The size and scale are enormous, there's a room that has several tons of human hair, and another with thousands and thousands of shoes. Rough. We also toured Schindler's factory, which has been turned into a really good museum about Krakow during WWII, and the Jewish quarter. In Warsaw we went to the last remanents of the Ghetto, the Ghetto musuem, which was hard, the Gestapo headquarters, the uprising museum, and even during our day trip to Lublin the group I was with voted to tour another concentration camp instead of going to the castle. I don't know why. Both my roommate and I were pretty much done with horrible things by that point. So after 4-5 days of Nazi Atrocities, we got to see some pretty things, such as the gorgeous park in the center of Warsaw where they have professional pianists come and play free Chopin concerts every Sunday. We also saw the beautiful summer palace there, compeletly reconstructed after the Nazis burned it down. During the Nazi occupation, Warsaw staged a major uprising that lasted several months, and when it was finally put down, Hitler order the city to be destroyed. About 85% of it was. But they've done some amazing things. We went to Old Town, which has been so faithfully reconstructed from old photos and paintings that all the buildings down there looked at least 200 years old. We also saw the royal way, which was reconstructed to the prettiest street in Warsaw, where they have city benches that will play Chopin if you press a button, and we saw some amazing art in various palaces and castles. I took loads of pictures, mostly of buildings and statues, and honestly, anything beautiful that didn't have a horrible story attached to it.