Long trip to Poland, part II!

As previously promised, here's part 2 of our Poland trip... if you missed the first post, here's a link to the first post, so you can catch up! 

Next up was the city of Wrocław. Before we get any further, we need to talk for a moment about the Polish language. 

Let's look at the name of this city. Looks fairly straightforward right? "Roe-claw," right? Nope. To start out with, the Polish language is evidently related to German, because the Ws are pronounced V.

Also, that funny looking L (look - it's wearing a belt or something!) isn't pronounced as an L, but I'm honestly not sure how it's really pronounced.

Circling back to the city name (Wrocław), I'll try to spell it out, quasi-phonetically: Vro-suav. For what it's worth, the city name in German is Breslau.

Probably easiest to just pronounce it Roe-claw in your head - I won't tell anyone... but does this mean that we've all been butchering the pronunciation of "Warsaw" though? Is it supposed to be pronounced "vor-sahv?" I simply refuse to call it that.

We took a tram from the train station to (close to) the hotel, and walked the remaining couple of blocks. This was going to be a quick stop, but this felt like a pretty cool city. The city is filled with gnomes. Yeah, you read that right. To give you more information, I really need to step back a few decades...

Back in the old days, Poland was a communist country. Us old farts remember Lech Wałęsa, from the Solidarity movement and the fall of communism, right? Well, at about the same time, there was an underground revolutionary "group" (started in Wrocław) called the Orange Alternative. They specifically offered a way for people to oppose the authoritarian regime, using absurdity and nonsensical actions. The thought was to do things that the authorities wouldn't arrest them for, as arresting members of the opposition for silly demonstrations would open the police up to ridicule.

Other groups would paint anti-government slogans, and the regime would cover the slogans with splotches of paint... at which point, the Orange Alternative would go out and paint playful pictures of gnomes on the paint splotches.

This movement grew and grew, becoming one of the most important parts of the Solidarity movement. To blatantly copy a short part of Wikipedia:

The culmination point in the movement's history was the action organized on 1 June 1988, known as the "Revolution of Dwarves", during which more than 10 thousand people marched through the center of Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats. The happenings usually terminated with the arrest of hundreds of participants, who did not manage to escape in time from the hands of the militia. At one point, the participants were even able to provoke the Communist militia to arrest 77 Santa Clauses or, on another occasion, anyone wearing anything orange.

Where I was going with this story though... to honor Wrocław's place in the fall of the communist regime, there are over 800 bronze gnomes scattered around the city, in various poses, and with various accoutrements. There's a gnome at an ATM, a gnome drinking a cup of coffee, there are a couple of them trying to push a granite ball that's about a foot taller than they are, right next to a chimney cake store there's a gnome eating a chimney cake... just whimsical statues doing normal, everyday things. The family photographer took a few pictures of those.

Whimsical gnome

Whimsical gnome(s) #s 2 and 3 -
unless you're counting the picture as the number of gnomes

The Chimney Cake Bakery... honestly, "Chimney Cakery" was RIGHT there!
You can see the gnome on the right hand side of the picture.

Said Chimney Cake Gnome

Whimsical gnome #3 or #4
(depending on how you're counting... you know what?
You just go ahead and count them however you want. I won't tell.)

Yet another whimsical gnome

Look - more whimsy!

We were pretty happy with the Christmas Markets in Wrocław... one thing that we noticed was that the markets in the last three cities we visited (Gdansk, Wrocław, & Krakow) were all run by the same company, Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy. All of the huts were the same styles, and all of the mugs have the name and logo of that company on them... Warsaw, though. Nope. Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy evidently hasn't made it into Warsaw yet.

As an aside, I've wondered for a while how the financial side of the Christmas Market industry works. I know that the huts can sometimes be used for other markets (Easter Markets, etc.), but when you see the size of some of the decorations that they set up specifically for Christmas Markets, there simply has to be a huge industry around just storing all of these decorations and huts for 11 (or so) months out of the year. Are there just warehouses across Europe that store all of this stuff outside of market season? Are the huts all broken down and flat packed, or are they stored in a huge warehouse like a sad little abandoned village? How do they move these things around? I've never (knowingly) seen a caravan of trucks carrying Christmas Market huts on the Autobahn. Welcome to my head. Exhausting, huh?!?

We were pretty impressed with the markets in Wrocław as well, and had fun wandering around. There were a few different market areas in the main portion of town - the wife had some Authentic Polish Kielbasa(TM), and I ended up with a new glühwein mug. We stopped at a little grocery store on the way back to the hotel, and I went upstairs. The family lush stopped in the bar for a couple of drinks (she got some sort of bonus for her Marriott Bonvoy level). 

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel, then headed back over to the main part of downtown to explore. On the way back to the hotel, the wife stopped at The City Museum of Wrocław. I'm guessing it showed her something about the history of Wrocław - you'll have to ask her about it.

A picture of the museum she stopped at, at different points in history 

We took the tram back over to the train station and I managed to avoid getting a ticket at this station.

The family travel agent booked us in a First Class compartment - a little separated section with 6 seats (there are whole train carriages full of these compartments). She'd reserved the two seats against the window, facing each other. This time though, we had to share the compartment with some other travelers. For the first part of the journey, the two guys in our compartment left and went to the dining car, coming back after a while. The guy on my side "fell asleep" when they returned to the compartment.

A few stops into our journey, two more people joined us, filling our compartment. It was a little challenging getting our luggage out of the compartment with 6 passengers in there, and one of those passengers still "asleep," not moving out of the way to make it easier for us. After we'd gotten into the little hallway, we could see that he had an empty fifth of vodka tucked down next to his leg, explaining why he didn't move when we and our luggage "accidentally" bumped into him a couple of times as we tried to exit the compartment.

Next up, beautiful Krakow. At this point in the post, go ahead and pronounce those w's however you'd like to. We took a taxi from the train station to the Grand Sheraton hotel. Now that I think of it, the family travel agent booked us into a bit nicer hotels this trip than usual. 

We walked over to the Old Town section, and explored the main Christmas Market, another Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy market. We wandered for a little while, then headed over toward another (smaller) craft-focused market a couple of blocks away. As we passed the center of the square (around the Krakow Cloth Hall, more about that later), the family travel agent encountered some sort of Flash Mob, or maybe it was just a DJ set up on the backside of the town square - not sure which. She went in that direction, and I headed on toward the craft fair, meeting up with her a few minutes later.

After exploring for a while, we wanted to get a little bite to eat, so.... get this, y'all... we stopped in a Bavarian Beer Hall.

Wife had a beer, I saw an intriguing "whiskey sour" on the menu. Only issue was that the menu said it was made with Scotch Whiskey, and I'm not a big fan of Scotch. I saw that they had some bourbons on the menu as well, so (it took me a few minutes) but I was able to get our waitress to put in an order for a whiskey sour made with bourbon... and lemme tell ya, it was one of the top 3 or 4 whiskey sours that I've had... in a Bavarian themed Beer Hall in Krakow, Poland, made with an American bourbon. Uneventful walk back to the hotel that night.

Next day... well, let's talk about szopki krakowskie for a moment, shall we? Evidently, this is a folk tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. They do these... they insist on calling them "nativity scenes," but I encountered a better description while researching this competition: "Something of a strange cross between a nativity scene, a gingerbread house, and a dollhouse, these unique handmade structures more resemble colourful, foil-covered castles or cathedrals than cribs"

A random example of a szopki krakowskie

Another random example

Turns out, Krakow is known for this particular display/competition; the first Thursday in December, townspeople carry their... szopki... through the town and they all meet up at the town square, where the DJ was set up the night before. 

The boss got a bit perturbed at me when I expressed a bit of disbelief that they call these things "nativity scenes," but take a look at that picture for yourselves, and tell me if you'd call this thing a "nativity scene." Or, go ahead and agree with her, and make me the bad guy - I just know what I saw, and I wouldn't call them "nativity scenes."

After the competition, the family cathedral junkie took a walk through St. Mary's Basilica, on the main square. There's evidently an altarpiece that's pretty famous in there.... it's called Altarpiece by Veit Stoss, and he carved it between 1477 and 1489. It's considered a national treasure of Poland, and in 1941, it was dismantled and looted by the Nazis. It was recovered in 1946, hidden in the basement of Nuremburg Castle. It was heavily restored back in Poland, and was put back into St. Mary's Basilica in 1956. The boss saw a nun opening the altarpiece while she was in there. 

Another interesting thing about St. Mary's. Every hour of every day, a trumpeter plays a "five note bugle call" from the windows atop St. Mary's, in the four cardinal directions. I put the part about five notes in quotes, because I heard it (a few times), and I distinctly heard more than five notes. That's their story though - who am I to cast doubt?!? Anyway... legend says that during the Mongol Invasion of Poland in 1241, a trumpeter was sounding the alarm about the incoming attackers, to tell the soldiers at the gates that the gates needed to be closed. The gates were closed in time, but unfortunately, the bugler took an arrow to the throat and died before he finished the full "close the gates" bugle call - and that's why the bugle call is cut off before the end.

The earliest written account of this story dates to a children's book from 1928. To be clear, the bugle call has been going on for hundreds of years, but the whole "Mongol story" part very well might be an embellishment. 

We wandered around the main square, walking through the Cloth Hall. During the 15th Century, Krakow was the capital of Poland, and was a center of international trade. Merchants would meet in the hall to trade their wares, and you'd frequently find a variety of exotic imports from the east – spices, silk, leather and wax – while Kraków itself exported textiles, lead, and salt from the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Now, it's a big hall filled with tourist shops. We didn't see anything that we couldn't live without.

The Cloth Hall

We walked over toward the train station, and stopped at a "famous" theater for coffee and some sort of cake. Evidently, this is the oldest "art cafe" in Krakow, and at some point in the past used to be a puppet theater. It was established in 1895, and the cake was pretty good, as I remember. The family travel agent had seen some video on YouTube with this place in it, so when we walked by while were looking for a place to have a snack, we simply HAD to stop.

The reason we were on our way to the train station is that we'd decided to check out a nearby town (again, the family Social Media Monster saw something online... ergo, we simply HAD to go!). We had purchased tickets to Katowice for that afternoon, but were a bit early for our train, so we figured out how to change the tickets for an earlier departure. We didn't have tickets to come back, simply because we didn't know how long we wanted to spend there. I made the argument that I didn't want to get stuck in this little city waiting all night for a return train to Krakow. According to the family travel agent, this wouldn't be an issue, as there were fairly regular trains all evening long. If you pay REALLY close attention later in the post, you'll get to circle back with us when we revisit this topic.

This was a monument outside the train station

Intriguing story about that monument, but I've gotta share some backstory first (Don't I always? The things I do for you folks!)

Ryszard Kukliński's father was a member of the Polish Resistance during WWII. he was captured by the Gestapo and died in a concentration camp. Kukliński joined the Polish People's Army, and eventually (in 1964) he started working in the espionage and counterintelligence operations section. Bear in mind, this was during the Cold War, and Poland was a member of the Warsaw Pact, a group of nations "aligned" with the USSR. 

In 1968, he started working on plans for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was so disturbed by the invasion and the brutality of the Polish Government against demonstrators (in Poland) that he sent a letter to the US Embassy to Germany (in Bonn, West Germany) in which he explained that he was an army officer in a communist country and asked for a meeting.

He was concerned about the purely offensive nature of the invasion, as the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact would force NATO (and the United States) to resort to nuclear weapons to protect Czechoslovakia. He didn't want to see Poland turned into a nuclear wasteland.

For 9 years, he passed documents related to the USSR to the CIA. At the end, he, his wife, and their two sons were spirited out of the country right before martial law was declared, and they defected to the United States.

United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński described him as "the first Polish officer in NATO."

In the eyes of some Poles, he's a hero, aligned with the United States and NATO. To other Poles, he's a traitor who sold out his country. Regardless, they unveiled this monument in 2006. It's been vandalized several times since then.

Now that I've (looked up and) told you this story... while we were next to the monument, a middle aged gentleman passed us while the boss was getting ready to take the picture, and a random commuter (I'm guessing) walked past the monument on his way to the train station. As he passed, he said something under his breath and spat on the monument's placard. 

Honestly, we don't have as many pictures to attach to this entry and this was one of them, so I figured I'd share.

Katowice Christmas Market was run by Jarmark Božonarodzeniowy (like all proper Polish Christmas Markets), and was pretty well done. One thing that this market really leaned into was these dioramas with animatronic Christmas figures in them. There were probably 20 of these plexiglas cases scattered around the market, with parents dragging their kids up to them to make them listen to the little Christmas songs.

Throughout the Christmas Markets in Poland, we'd been seeing this cheese for sale, and we finally got a chance to try it. It's called Oscypek, and it's a smoked cheese, made with salted sheep's milk. Vaguely similar flavor to pecorino, quite tasty. We got some served in the traditional way, one with cranberries, and one with bacon. Don't tell anyone, but we dipped the bacon covered one in the cranberries as well. Quite tasty. I'm adding it to the langos list of things I've encountered at Christmas Markets that I'll be keeping an eye out for.

Yes, we all know they kinda do look like pierogis. Nope, just smoked cheese.

One thing about the glühwein mugs in Germany versus Poland (at the markets that actually have them - looking at YOU, Warsaw!): in Germany, you get your glühwein in mugs and pay a deposit ("pfand" in German) that you get back when/if you return the mugs. In Poland, the mugs are a separate purchase. I just found that interesting, the different mindset between the two countries.

One of the things that the boss wanted to purchase while we were in Poland was some authentic Polish pottery. She'd popped into a few pottery stores, but those felt too "touristy" for her, so she found one in Katowice that wasn't touristy at all. 

I have no idea how much she spent there, but she bought enough pottery that she didn't want to hassle with trying to get it home on the plane, and had them ship it for her. Yay, more pottery.

As we walked back to the station, she started looking for the next train back to Kraków on her Polish Train App.

There's a very fine line between predicting the future and visualizing something into existence. We had to wait for over an hour for the next train. I'll let you decide for yourself whether I was able to predict the future, or whether I actually visualized the delay into existence. I'm guessing that you can figure out for yourself which viewpoint each of us hold.

Eventually, we had an uneventful train ride back to Kraków and took an Uber to the hotel.

We had signed up for a guided tour of Wawel Castle - and I have no idea how I'm supposed to pronounce that one.

The inner courtyard of the castle, with netting to keep the ubiquitous pigeons out

Evidently (according to the Wiki machine), the castle (and Wawel Hill, upon which it sits) is "the most historically and culturally significant site in Poland." The castle dates back to the 13th and 14th centuries, but some of the stone buildings on the site can be traced back to around the year 970. The Historic Center of Krakow (including Wawel Castle) was among the first selected sites upon the creation of the UNESCO World Heritage Site list; on the inaugural list, 12 sites were selected for inclusion. The only other one from that initial list that you might have read about on this particular blog is Aachen Cathedral. There's one other site on the list that we might make it to while we live over here, but I'll wait to tell you about that one if it happens.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this tour was that it was called a "hidden treasures" tour, or something along those lines. It was a guided tour, and the guide skipped over lots of the normal stuff that you'd see, to focus on the more significant items in the collection, including Szczerbiec, the ceremonial sword that was used in the coronation of most of the Polish monarchs from 1320 to 1764. Other individuals and groups were touring the castle at the same time, and we'd completely ignore rooms that other tourists would stop in to jump to the more important artifacts. More focused tour than we normally take, and quite enjoyable.

There are some... concerns about the veracity of some of the claims about the origin of the sword. I think the most appropriate reaction to some of the stories I could come up with was actually spoken by Michael Palin: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government... You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

Then again, I'm not Polish, so what do I know? 

The ceiling in this room had these faces inlaid in it.
Originally, there were 194 heads, but now there are only 30.
Some of the heads are of famous people (royalty, etc.), some are of unidentified people.

The castle was right around the corner from the hotel, so we came back to the room afterwards to relax for a little bit before our next tour, then took an Uber to our next location, Kazimierz, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Kazimierz is named after King Casimir III, the last king of the Piast Dynasty. He was very protective of Krakow's Jewish neighbors, and their town was renamed after him in 1335. Kazimierz was absorbed as a district within Kraków in 1795. 

On our walking tour, we visited the sites of "the" seven synagogues of Kazimierz. There were evidently quite a few other synagogues throughout the city, but but these were the seven most well known ones, and the ones that the tour guide specifically pointed out to us.

The last portion of the tour took us across the river to the Jewish Ghetto, where Jewish people were forced to live by the Nazis. Before the war, there were around 68,000 Jews living in Kraków. The Nazis forced the Kraków Jews to relocate into one small neighborhood, and classified them into two different categories: employable, and not employable. They were moved into different sections of the ghetto, depending on their usefulness to the regime. Jews were repeatedly reclassified, with those judged as being not as useful to the regime being shipped off to the (either work or death) camps.

By the end of the war, there were about 4,000 Jews remaining in Kraków.

There are currently more Jewish people in Panama than there are in Poland.

Now that we've broached the subject of Concentration Camps, I have to address this really briefly: We decided when we moved over here (this time) that we'd do one Concentration Camp, as we've heard the emotional toll can be quite high. We decided to do Auschwitz. Unfortunately, tours of Auschwitz were all booked during our visit, so we were unable to go... this trip. We've already decided that we'll be taking a long weekend and making a special trip back to Kraków.

The final stop on our tour was the Empty Chair Memorial at Zgody Square. Zgody Square was one of Kraków's main market squares before the war, and during the war, it marked the entrance to the Jewish Ghetto. That particular square is one of the locations where Jewish people were judged as to whether they were useful or not, and they frequently never went home after being lined up in that square. The square also turned into one of the dumping grounds for the personal effects and furniture cleared out of the (now abandoned) apartments of those shipped off to the camps.

Today, 70 empty chairs in the square face in the direction that the Jews walked to board the trains to Concentration Camps.

After the tour, we walked around the neighborhood looking for a place to eat. We first tried to get into a local Polish place, but didn't have reservations, so we had to move on. We ended up in an Italian place that was full of locals, and had a dinner that was quite good. They had a deal running where you could buy one drink (pretty much any kind), and get a second drink for 1 Zloty (about 27 cents)... so of course, the boss took advantage of that - hell, she was thinking of getting a second glass of my wine for an additional 27 cents (but she didn't).

After dinner, we took a tram back over to the main Christmas Market so I could get a Kraków mug. Next day, we took an Uber to the airport and flew back home - I talked the boss into taking an Uber from the airport, rather than dragging our luggage home on the metro.

We've got visitors in town for the next couple of weeks, so expect a couple more entries in the weeks coming up!

A LONG trip to Poland!

This is a pretty long post, so I'm going to split it in half. I'll post Part I now, and Part II in a few days... now, on to our story!

We didn't have any plans for Thanksgiving (or, as they call it in Germany... Thursday), so we decided to make a long weekend (plus an extra week) of it and take a long trip. Perhaps too long, you can be the judge.

Gonna try something new with this entry. I've created a map to go along with our travels. Click this link if you're interested, and it *should* show you where we went, so you can follow along.

One country we haven't gone to yet is Poland. I've been a little leery of getting that close to a warzone, especially with incursions of Polish airspace by the Russians happening pretty regularly, but the boss finally talked me into visiting.

Thursday evening, we took the subway to the airport and flew from Frankfurt to Warsaw. We'd researched the bus/tram system there a bit, and were planning on using it to get around the city, but figured we'd Uber from the airport to the hotel. 

Our research told us nothing at all about how Uber works at the Warsaw airport. There was a line for Ubers. A line about 45 minutes long. You'd go into the app and book your trip, then get into the line. Once you got to the front of the line, the next Uber would come by to pick you up, and you had to give him a PIN number. When he put that PIN number into his Uber app, it would tell him where he was going. 

If we fly into Warsaw again, we'll figure out a better way to get from the airport to the hotel. Bolt had a similar system, but the line was much shorter.

We didn't have many real items on our agenda while we were in Warsaw, so while we were at the hotel the first night, the family travel coordinator found a fun activity for the next day. You'll have to be patient for a moment before I tell you about it though! The activity wasn't until the early afternoon, but we headed in that direction a bit early and stopped at a museum on the way.

The museum was called POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Unfortunately, we had less time to spend there than we wanted, but the museum did a great job of talking about Jews in Poland throughout history. Everyone's heard about the Nazi attacks on (and following occupation of) Poland in 1939 (the start of WWII), but a large portion of the museum (that we were able to go through due to time constraints) talked about... I've puzzled over another phrase to use, but I can't come up with one... Jews in Poland throughout history. It's right there in the name of the museum people - I honestly don't know what you're expecting from me!

The monument outside the POLIN Museum

Evidently, Jews have lived in (the area that became known as) Poland since at least the year 966. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant community of Jews in the world - I didn't know that before, and now I do. Since you've gone out of your way to read this, now you know it too. See? We're learning stuff together! You're welcome.

After rushing through the museum, we walked a couple of blocks to our activity... one thing Poland is known for is pierogies. That's right, we went to a pierogi making class to learn to make pierogies. For those who aren't familiar with pierogies, they're basically Polish dumplings. You can fill them with whatever you'd like (according to our instructor, usually leftovers) and then drop them into boiling water until they float. 

Interestingly enough, the boss came up with this idea. Y'all know I do the majority of the cooking in the house, right? Anyone wanna guess what the boss is expecting me to do with this newly acquired knowledge? 

It was actually a pretty cool class. There were 8 of us in the class - four pairs of two people. Each group was given a station with everything that we needed, with the stations arranged into a horseshoe shape, with the instructor in the middle, walking around and helping everyone.

Our setup before we got started

We were provided with one of three kinds of fillings: chicken (with some veggies and chickpeas mixed in), vegetarian (potato with cheese and some other veggies), and vegan (lentils, chickpeas, and some other stuff I don't remember). Our pair and one other pair were given the chicken mixture. A quick aside about the other "chicken pair": they were a couple, a younger (probably early 20's) Polish girl and an American "meathead" kind of character. I was immediately expecting to hate this guy - he originally came across as the kind of muscle-bound freak that everyone hates to be around, but I was pleasantly surprised by how affable and friendly he was. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Be that as it may... back to the story.

We were given the filling ingredients in a bowl, and we seasoned it with salt and pepper, then stirred and smooshed the hell out of it to mash it into smaller pieces. Then we set it aside and started on the dough. We mixed flour with salt, water, and oil, then kneaded it all together and let it set for a few minutes to allow the gluten to form. Then we divided our dough in half and started rolling one half of it out. Once we got it to the right general thickness, we cut it up with a circular cutter and she taught us a few different ways to crimp the edges. We repeated it with the other half of the dough and ended up with a half size baking sheet covered with pierogies (each pair of people had their own sheet). 

Your follically challenged narrator, mixing the pierogi dough

After we'd finished making all the pierogies, we stood around and talked while our instructor cooked them, then we sat down to eat. The pierogies came out in batches, one of the team's trays per batch, so we all got to try each different kind.

Our "beautiful" creations, with a few different crimping styles

Our instructor, cooking one of the batches of pierogis

As an aside, the flour that we'd been given had been color coded with spices - it was supposed to indicate later which type was which. The meat ones had a teaspoon or so of paprika in it, and the vegetarian ones had some dill, and the final product was supposed to be tinted, with the vegan ones having no tint. I didn't see any difference in color between the meat ones and the vegan ones, perhaps they needed more paprika to really make a difference in the color. As it ended up, the color coding wasn't really necessary, as each batch was passed around individually in turn, and we all ate all of the different types anyway.

So, it turns out... the process for making pierogies is pretty simple - my sous chef even proved that you don't have to be a chef or cook to make them properly. To make them *well*, perhaps you do... but it was a pretty easy process that I can see going through at home occasionally.

After pierogies, we walked for a little while to get to the location of the "Christmas Market."

A monument we stumbled across while walking around Warsaw

One of the main reasons that we wanted to visit Poland (this time of year) is for the World Renowned Christmas Markets. Imagine our disappointment to see Warsaw's entry into the Holiday Season, at least the one right outside of Old Town. It was just a single line of stalls. This may have some significance to my Christmas Market Peeps out there, but... y'all, gluhwein was only available in cardboard cups. Y'all should know by now what kind of a freak I am about Gluhwein Mugs. I was bummed.

After that letdown, we wandered away and stopped to warm up in (supposedly) the "Oldest Coffee Shop" in Warsaw. We had hot chocolate and shared a pastry. Afterwards, we wandered around a bit more, then took a tram back toward the hotel. To help us remember what tram stop to get off at, I'll admit we "Americanized" the name of the stop to: "Hala Microwave." The name of the stop was actually Hala Mirowska, and it turns out there's a mall right there called (ironically enough) Hala Miroska... and y'all should know by now how much I love shopping malls... so of course we had to go in!

We stocked up on some drinks and snacks to carry along with us on the remainder of our trip, then walked back to the hotel.

Next morning, we headed out and walked over to the Warsaw Uprising Museum. I had a lot of hopes for this museum... at first. We had to wait outside to get in (which was fine), then checked our coats at the coatroom.

A quick aside about the weather while we were there. It fluctuated between cold and bitterly cold for our whole trip. There was little to no precipitation while we were there - I think it might have sprinkled on us twice during the whole trip. Y'all, just to be clear - I wore pants for the whole trip. We took all of our "Extreme Cold Weather Gear" that we purchased for our Arctic Circle trip. We were fine, as far as temperature goes. In fact, one (fleece lined) pair of pants that I took was too hot to wear. Honestly, I probably would have been fine in shorts for about 60% of the time, but I chose to fit in instead. So... everywhere we went, we both had on our big, thick, subzero coats - and had to check them at the coat check whenever one was available. And now, back to our narrative...

We rented audio guides, and started through the museum. I wanted to like this museum, and for the first part, I did. It was devoted to the Polish Uprising of 1944, against the German Occupation. The first level of the museum was laid out quite well, with the exhibits in a logical order. When it came time to go up to the second floor, that's where we both felt it lost the narrative a bit. 

On the first floor, there was a designated flow - start in this section, naturally move on to the next. When you got up to the second floor though, there were no directions as to which way we were supposed to go, and whichever way you headed it felt like you'd missed a part of it, as the story that they were attempting to tell would have made more sense from a chronological perspective. It seemed that the second floor is where they just started throwing things at you. For instance, I ended up heading into a section dedicated to the "Silent Unseen," Polish Special Forces paratroopers trained in insurgency tactics by the British. Fascinating story... let me touch on them for a moment:

2,613 Polish Army soldiers volunteered for the training. Only 606 of them finished the training, and only 316 of those ended up parachuting back into Poland. These soldiers were sent back to form and feed the insurgency, fighting the occupying Germans from within the country. Well worth reading of their exploits... but then...

It continued the story of the legacy of the Silent Unseen, and got into details about GROM, Poland's elite Special Forces unit, and their exploits during missions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s and 2010s. Still an interesting story, but completely halts the flow of the narrative that the rest of the museum is dedicated to. 

After we left there, we took the city metro across town to the Copernicus Museum, but I have to take a quick break and talk about the city, and what we didn't appreciate about it.

Most cities that we've visited over here have a distinct "downtown" area, where all of the museums and tourist sites are clustered in the same general area. Warsaw doesn't. Everything is much more spread out, and it's not very convenient to walk across the whole city visiting all of the places you want to see. Our hotel was pretty centrally located, but to visit any museum or tourist area, it was quite a hike in a specific direction... at which point, we were too far away from the rest of the museums or tourist sites to walk to those. We'd have to walk (pretty much) right back through the same neighborhood as the hotel, and when it's taking a half hour plus to walk to these places from the hotel... we just didn't like the layout much. 

Anyway, we got off the metro and headed to the Copernicus Museum, and there was a line for the coat check room, that looked to be about a half hour long. I waited in that line while the boss went over to look at buying tickets, and it turns out that they sell tickets based on your entry time. The next entry that they were selling tickets for was about an hour and a half later, and we decided that it wasn't worth it to us to wait that long.

There was a little "mall" across the street - I put the word mall in quotes because it wasn't what I'd consider to be a standard mall. It used to be a power station, now its name is "Elektrownia Powiśle." The power plan dates back to 1904, now it's an eclectic (read: "artsy") collection of stores with an extensive food hall, where we ate lunch.

The power plant mall

Once we were done at the power plant mall, we hopped on a bus to another museum, the Museum of Life Under Communism. It's a little privately owned museum that's situated above a KFC in one of the shopping districts. They had quite a selection of goods that you'd typically find in stores back then, with a couple of different rooms set up to give you the feeling of what living conditions were like back then. I'd been looking forward to this one, and I found it quite interesting, gave me a good perspective that I hadn't seen before on daily life during Communism.

This woman was evidently quite excited to live under a communist regime,
as she poses with one month's ration of food

Numbers such as these were used by the communists to try to convince
the populace that they were better off than they'd been prior

We took a tram to another Christmas Market... turns out, this is the main Christmas Market of Warsaw. Much bigger than the other, but... still not impressed, to be honest. This one used paper cups too. It was overcrowded, and the stalls were all grouped together weird - the spaces in front of the merchandise booths were all overfilled by the people waiting at the food lines. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how German markets are run, but this one just felt like it was put together wrong.

The best thing to come out of this market was my exposure to an cherry vodka liqueur, made by a company called Wiśniewski. The booth caught my eye because the guy had a big bowl filled with cherries, and he'd drop a handful of cherries into each cup of what he was serving. I bought one, and immediately fell in love with this stuff. Here's what their web site says (shamelessly copied):

Wiśniewski is a ruby red, uniquely tasting craft spirit accompanied by a bunch of carefully selected aromatic, succulent, whole cherries which matured slowly in Polish orchards. Every drop of Wiśniewski is crafted in a traditional way - without haste but with passion and care. We chose a winemaker’s approach to produce small batches of this cherry cordial. Once distilled, it is aged in oak, naturally, to develop a bolder expression.

Pay no attention to the giddy smile on my face! You can see the bowl of cherries
on the far side of the booth

I enjoyed this stuff enough that once we got back to the room, I looked up where I could buy some of this, and one of their stores was about 2 blocks away from the hotel. I talked the boss into taking a late night walk over there, and discovered the coolest little food hall area, surrounded by bars. If we'd discovered this before, we'd probably have eaten here a couple of times. Just a cool feeling. I bought a bottle of the stuff to bring back to Germany, and the wife had a shot of the liqueur that was served in a chocolate shot glass.

I couldn't find an equivalent product at Total Wine, but for my readers in the Austin area, it looks like a similar product might be available at Specs... If anyone buys some of this, you have to tell me how it tastes, then you can come over here and try some of mine and give me a comparison.

We carried the bottle back to the room and settled in for the night... more traveling tomorrow!

The next morning started off with breakfast, then we checked out and walked to the train station. Next station: Gdańsk... or as Germans call it, Danzig (we'll get back to that in a moment). 

There's a exclave of Russia on the Baltic Sea... coming down the coast from St. Petersburg, you encounter Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, then Poland, with the exception of a little exclave of Russia called Kaliningrad Oblast between Poland and Lithuania. Gdańsk is about 80 miles (as the drone flies) from that exclave. So... I've spent more than three years avoiding Poland because it's too close to Russia, and now here we find ourselves, right next door.

Gdańsk is Poland's main port city, located in the north of the country, on the Baltic Sea. It was a bit colder than Warsaw, more of a biting cold. We walked from the train station to the hotel, it was about a 15-20 minute walk, not too bad. Our hotel was right in the middle of the tourist area of the city... ironically enough, immediately next door to the hotel was a Wiśniewski store/bar. More ironically, I didn't go into the place the entire time we were there. No reason, just didn't make it in for some reason.

This pic is out of order - we actually saw this after our walking tour,
but it fit here perfectly in the narrative. 

We got all checked in and walked over to the Christmas Market, and for all of our disappointment with Warsaw's Christmas Market, Gdańsk made up for it. Finally, a real Christmas Market, and finally real Christmas Mugs!

On the way over, we found a little inside section of the market with craft booths, we explored in there first, then headed back out to the real market. After we explored for a while, our hunger got the best of us, so we headed back to a booth we'd seen earlier, where they make pasta in a big wheel of cheese and served the boss's favorite variety: cacio e' pepe. It's an Italian dish with just pasta, Pecorino cheese, and pepper. As a way for this booth to catch the attention of passersby, they do a flourish as they hand your pasta over to you - they throw handfuls of cheese into your bowl after they've handed it to you, invariably getting grated cheese all over you and anyone nearby.

I got a currywurst at a nearby booth, and no, they didn't squirt ketchup at me when they gave it to me.

We bought two mugs and kept wandering the streets, eventually finding a big mall. It being Sunday night, the stores in the mall were closed, but the mall itself was open, and the mall was a little over the top, with a water feature running through it. 

If you haven't noticed, the family photographer
seems to be obsessed with reflections.

See?

We wandered back to the hotel, checking out more squares and booths on the way back. Once we'd warmed up a bit, we headed out to dinner, to a tapas restaurant across the street from the hotel. We didn't end up getting tapas though, we each ordered Mexican food off the menu instead; I had some tamales, and the boss had three street tacos. 

The next morning, we met up with our guide at 10:30 for a free walking tour. He talked a lot about the history of Gdańsk, and showed us the locations of some of the many gates that used to be used to control access to the city, and detailed the different classes of people who had access to each area (nobles in the inner area, for example). 

He explained that some of the architecture of the city was designed by Dutch architects, and because of that (and the similar taxation structure), that's why a lot of the building looked Dutch, quite narrow but extending back quite a ways (owners were taxed on the width of their building, not the square footage or height). 

Interestingly enough (to me, so now you get to read about it!), Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was born in Gdańsk; not only did he come up with the temperature scale which bears his name, he also invented the mercury thermometer that us old farts are all familiar with. There's a monument to him in one of the town squares.

The big mercury thermometer / monument to Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit

Our tour ended at the old Post Office... which deserves its own section. Please bear with me, I've gotta cover some history to put this all in perspective.

Following WWI, the Free City of Danzig was created by the Versailles Treaty (the treaty which ended the war). This city/state encompassed all of the city of Gdańsk, and around 200 communities nearby. The city was created under the protection and oversight of the League of Nations. It was independent of both the Weimar Republic (Germany) and the Second Polish Republic (which was established in the final stages of WWI).

Also established in the Treaty of Versailles was an extra-territorial Polish Post Office inside the Free City of Danzig.

In the years between WWI and WWII, Danzig aligned itself closer and closer with Germany, with many of the members of the city administration aligning with the Nazi Party. 

Tensions started to grow between Poland and Germany in early 1939, and in April the Polish High Command assigned a combat engineer to the Post Office to prepare to defend the building.

September 1st 1939, Germany's invasion of Poland started, kicking off WWII. At around 4:45 in the morning, one of Germany's battleships began shelling the Poland controlled port of Danzig. The police and military force of Danzig, bolstered by the Germans, surrounded and attacked the Polish Post Office.

The original Polish plan was for the personnel within the Post Office to defend it for around 6 hours while waiting for reinforcement by the Pomeranian Army. Yes, that was a real thing, and no, it didn't involve fluffy little dogs.

Unfortunately, the Pomeranian Army found themselves otherwise engaged, having their asses handed to them in the Battle of Tuchola Forest. Finding themselves quickly outgunned and outmanned by the coordinated might of the Germans, the Pomeranian Army wasn't in a position to reinforce anyone. In the Battle of Tuchola Forest alone, the Pomeranian Army lost a third of their personnel.

Back at the Post Office, the defenders were able to hold off the Danzig Militia and the Germans for 15 hours.

All of the 56 people in the building (including the building caretaker, his wife, and their 10 year old daughter) either were summarily executed, or died as a result of their injuries sustained during the battle. 

The defenders of the Post Office are rightfully hailed as heroes in a "David & Goliath" story, holding the building against  the SS of the city of Danzig, local Brownshirts, uniformed German police, and special units of the Danzig police force.

There's a touching memorial on the wall behind the Post Office, with handprints permanently memorialized against the wall (where they lined them all up), including a set at a lower level for the 10 year old girl.

A picture taken for posterity's sake,
after the capture of the defenders in 1939

The adults' handprint memorial

The child handprints -
you can the the first set of adult handprints above and to the left

Gdańsk (or Danzig, depending on your nationality) dates back to the Bronze Age, and it's been a major port on the eastern end of the Baltic Sea for all of that time. While the modern port facilities have been moved closer to the sea, some of the old buildings have been rebuilt and repurposed. We had lunch (and warmed up a bit) in a food hall that has been built in an old granary building. Across the harbor, you can see the crane that they used to use to load and unload cargo; interestingly enough, our tour guide showed us how the crane was "powered." We walked underneath it, and were able to see two giant hamster wheels above us, about 15 feet across. Workers would climb into the wheels and their motion inside the wheels would power the crane. 

On the way back to the hotel, we popped into some random shops and walked through the indoor area of the market again. After we warmed up in the room for a while, we went to the craft beer place next to the hotel for a drink, but nothing else that day.

We had a slow morning the next day, I popped out and bought a shirt. We eventually checked out of the hotel and walked back over to the station. Right outside the station is a memorial/monument to the Kindertransport program... that's important enough to take a break and talk about.

Evidently, pretty much everyone in Europe knew that war was coming - the only question was when.

Five days after Kristallnacht, a delegation of British, Jewish, and Quaker leaders appealed in person to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children to England.

A bill was passed in Parliament which would wave immigration requirements, so that unaccompanied children from infant to the age of 17 could be admitted to the country.

Agencies on both ends of the journey coordinated the shipping of over 10,000 unaccompanied children from (mostly) Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig. There are monuments located in several different locations throughout Europe.

You may have heard of one of the most widely known volunteers, Sir Nicholas Winton, who worked tirelessly to help secure the transport and safety of 669 children from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Here's a link to a video that tells his story in two quick minutes.

The family film critic has also asked me to share with you that a movie was released in 2023 about his story, called "One Life." We'd also highly recommend that one if you've got any interest.  

For this next part, I'm gonna let my better half take over the narrative:

We each got food for the 4 hour journey and Rick went outside to vape one last time. It was getting closer to our train time, so I gathered all our luggage and waited at the escalator so we could go straight from there to save time, our train was arriving at 12:19 and departing at 12:22. I started getting nervous as the minutes went by when I get text from him at 12:13 “Oh shit. Getting ticket. Paying cash”.

I dragged all our stuff out the front door of the train station to see Rick at a police car with another individual. I head for him thinking he’d need his passport or something. He is talking with the cop in the car when I tell him to ask if we are going to miss our train that leaves in 7 minutes? The cop tells him he’ll go as fast as he can. I tell Rick I’ll head for the platform with our stuff just in case we can still make it.

Rick caught up to me before I made it to the platform, so thankfully writing a citation here is quick. Made it to the platform on time!

Then more fun, where to stand on the platform? In Frankfurt they project where the car numbers will line up with a section of the platform, they don’t do that here in Poland. Well, we ended up loading at the complete opposite end of the train. We got to be the tourist to go through almost every car to get to our reserved private cabin. Finally in our seats and ready for a drink now! Some days you just can’t make up the stories, from a relaxed pace morning, a 180 to we almost missed our train moment. Good times!

Back to your normally scheduled narrator now. The ticket was for smoking/vaping in a smoke free area. I had seen the sign out in front of the building, so I went to the side of building instead. I even asked the cop about it, as I'd done a bit of research, and I was quite a bit more than 8 meters away from the nearest door or window (as quoted in what I'd read), but that evidently didn't make any difference. The cop actually gave me a break since I was a tourist (and I was compliant and respectful). The fine was supposed to be up to 500 Polish Zloty (about $135), but I guess the officers have got some leeway, and he knocked it down to 50 for me (about $13.50).

I've got more to post, but this one's already gotten pretty long, so I'll post the second half of our trip as Part II in a few days.