Poland!
I’m on a train now from Crakow to Warshow after our first day in Poland. We left Thursday morning at 9:30 am from the Hauptbanhof in Berlin and arrived in Crakow six hours later. The ride was uncomfortable; the train car was packed full of heating, the air conditioning was broken, and it was 84 degrees outside. Luckily I was able to sleep for most of it (although not comfortably or restfully) as I had stayed up the entire night before getting prepared to leave. Truthfully, that was fairly easy and took only an hour of the night. All of my stuff fits in a single backpack (and I didn’t need to bring a sleeping bag and pillow).
The greater challenge was deciding what food to take with me and what to eat before I left; I had recently gone grocery shopping, totally spacing that I would be leaving home two days later and not returning until the week after. So I’ve been carrying around a bag full of bread, cheese and sausages, all of which I am sure are slowly going bad but I am eating anyway.
Poland is pretty, or at least the countryside is, which we have gotten to see during our train rides. Crackow used to be a German city named Breslow, before the Yalta agreements after world war II allotted Poland a portion of German territory. In that regard, Crakow looks a lot like parts of Berlin, but smaller and less metropolitan. Polish language sounds a lot like Russian (which I am told is due to a rooted connection between the two as Slavic languages, as opposed to Germanic or Romance languages) kind of like Dutch sounds a lot like German. The written language is similar to German, save for maybe six or so unique characters, though their pronunciation has nothing in common with either English or German.
After arriving we took our bags to the hostile where we would be staying, which turned out to be quite nice (wifi, but no electricity; odd). We then went on a tour of the city (tiring but often interesting) ending with a group dinner at a Polish restaurant (our entrees were salad dishes, but completely filling and amazingly good). Afterwards we went for drinks with Jeff and the tour guides. Everyone had an apple-something (with cinnamon and wodka) which were quite good and I taught Michaela and Peter the basic steps (follower and leader, respectively) for tango, which was what the local couples were dancing on the floor in the bar. None of us ended up taking up the floor though, as even I am not a confident tango dancer; it’s been *years*.
We got back and dropped dead in our beds. Breakfast next morning was cereal and toast with butter and/or jam. We visited one of the last two remaining Jewish cemeteries in Crakow, left by request of a German ambassador during the treaty signings after the Yalta agreements. The woman leading our tour was an American who studied undergrad at Indiana University as an anthropologist (very cool, we talked a lot about Bloomington while walking from one famous grave to another).
Our guides from the day before met us there and together we visited the city convention halld under-renovation. We were given hard hats and taken beneath the dome which was shockingly large when seen from the inside. I commented that it was interesting how impressive a large open space can be when surrounded by a barrier or boarder of some kind. We were lead here by the director of the project, a Ukrainian woman who studied in the US and married a Polish man. She showed us a very interesting power point presentation on the history of the dome, the sources of income and expenditures which the project faced now, as well as the renovation of the fountain courtyard and the plans for a subterranean parking lot, both of which being outsourced to private companies.
After a rushed (but delicious) lunch in the on site cafeteria (spiced baked potatoes, a seared whitefish dish and the best cream of celery and mushroom soup I have ever had) we rushed back to the hostile, picked up our bags and headed toward the train station. More about Poland later.
