**this post has been in process for a couple of weeks now...sorry for the delay. Gillian came to visit and then I left for another little trip, but I am trying to get back on top of things before my mom gets here. This is part one of a multi-part series chronicling my travels and adventures of the past few weeks. Enjoy.
I'll start from the begining. I am one of those weird people who has really wanted to travel to Poland for quite awhile now. I have rarely met anyone who shares or even understands this desire, which is also understandable. I can say with conviction, that Warsaw in every way exceeded my expectations and I would recommend a visit to this city to anyone. Amy and Isabelle (my travel companions) had no real burning desire to go to Warsaw and decided on this stop only because a good friend of ours grew up there and offered to show us around the city and introduce us to her family. They loved the city as well. A trip to Warsaw is worth your time and money, I heartily recommed it! We arrived there mid-afternoon after leaving Karlsruhe at 5:30am (not my favorite part of traveling...) and promptly found our hostel and saw a bit of the old town. Honestly, the 3 days we spent there are a bit of a blur on this end of things, so I will save you the play by play and just give an overview of highlights (in no particular order)
1. Dinner with Ewa's family was maybe my favorite couple hours of the entire week. Her family was so friendly and really pulled out all the stops to introduce us to (a LOT of) Polish food and culture. Her mom even prepared one of the dishes gluten free for me. Their hospitality and the humor of cultural interactions is best illustrated through the following incidents. First of all, they put the food on the table and everyone started serving up food. Not realizing that this was just the first course, recoginzing that there was a lot of food on the table, and being quite hungry, Isabelle and I filled our plates. Only to learn 2 minutes later that that was just appetizers. Very very delicious appetizers. So, by the second course, we were both pretty full. Oops. We stuffed ourselves full with the rest of the food anyway. It was all delicious. Anyway, the second incident went as follows: Isabelle, after finishing her glass of juice, reached for water to refill her glass. Ewa's father jumped up (speaking mostly Polish with a few German and a few English words mixed in...) and communicated that she should not drink water, but that she should try this other kind of juice. Ewa and her sisters, after recovering from their embarassment (good to know that dads all over the world embarrass their children...haha!) explained that water is seen as "not nice" or not fancy somehow, and was only on the table for the family. In Poland, it is especially important for them to offer their guests only the best...in this case, juice. At any rate, their hospitality was a generous display of familial love for which I am very grateful.
2. A visit to the musuem for the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was absolutely wonderful. The museum is quite new and does a great job of combining interactive elements with displays to effectively memorialize the brave actions of the residents of Warsaw in their 1944 fight against the Nazi occupiers. This memory is still very fresh in the minds of all Warsaw residents, Ewa's own family was torn apart and deeply marked by this event, as were all families at the time. It was amazing the way that visiting this museum opened up so many different conversations. Ewa shared how her great-aunt waited for 50 years (until the day she died) for her husband who disappeared during the uprising - his fate is still unknown. Isabelle shared her perspective of being German in a world so marked by Nazi atrocities and illuminated the difficulties of German self-identity, even a few generations after Hitler scarred Europe and the world.
3. Polish food. I have never eaten so much good food for so little money in my life, ever. We ate so much good food we decided we all probably gained a few pounds (hence our founding of the "Polish diet" for those looking to put on the pounds as fast as possible!). Delicious soups, sausages and ribs are just a few of the amazing things we ate, all for just a few euros - amazing! We were also quite thankful for the hot wine and beer that was available to help ward off the below freezing temperatures (every time we went outside, I had about a 5 minute regimen of wrapping my head and neck to protect from the bitter cold...brrr!)
4. Summer palace and gardens. The parks in Warsaw are beautiful, also when they are covered in snow! We fed birds (they would really come land on your hands) and toured the summer palace of Polish royalty. The most interesting fact that we learned was that people in times gone by would sleep sitting up due to a fear of contracting illnesses and dying in their sleep. A lesser motive was to preserve the elaborate hairdos of the times. After years of touring palaces and wondering at the extraordinarilly short/small beds, it was interesting to learn that it is not because people back then were that much shorter (as I had always assumed) but rather that their method of sleeping was so different.
All in all, Warsaw was definitely the high point of our trip for me. The people were so incredibly friendly, helpful and hospitable, the city is a treasure trove of historical sites, and the feeling of a city that has such a long, complicated and beautiful history lends to the whole place a mysterious granduer that should not be missed.
After three days of snow, sunshine and freezing temperatures in Warsaw, we bid Ewa goodbye and headed to the airport in Lodz to travel to our next destination: Scotland.
