June 19, Poland

Hooray, we're all together in the same time zone at last. She visited Auschwitz with her group, to a bus to Krakow and had her study abroad farewell dinner at Restauracja Morskie Oko--which we found out more about when we got to Krakow ourselves. But that was still in the future. While she was doing all that, we were still just trying to get to Poland.

Our Day,

Sometime in the blur of airplanes it became June 19. To our relief, the airport in Wroclaw (pronounced wrote-suave) had English signs. Also large Gnomes. Wroclaw is famous for having cute little gnomes all over the city to entertain the tourists. The airport ones were huge. I guess they figure the tourists are all jet-lagged and need extra help.

I also liked this flying gnome.

We arrived with some Polish money, but thought we'd better get a whole lot more. To my amusement, the ATM's are called "bankomats."

We also found a very helpful lady at the info desk. We opted to take a taxi because we wanted to be sure of getting to the right place. The driver was lots of fun. He labored with very limited English, but he kept sprinkling in German words. Dave told him we spoke a little German, he lit up with joy, immediately assuming that we were fluent. And off he went--he told us everything about everything we passed.. I was proud of us. We understood pretty much everything, and dragged a respectable amount of petrified German out of our jet-lagged brains. I asked him how to say thank you in Polish. He did his best and also tried to teach us hello and goodbye. No luck. Clearly, the Poles think if a word isn't at least 15 letters long, it isn't worth saying.  We're actually renting an apartment here rather than a standard hotel. He dropped us off at the place where we picked up the key. Which was a good 10/15 minute walk from the apartment IF you know where you are going. It took us one wrong turn with all of our luggage, but we made it in the end. SCARY outside. The apartment is an ugly yellow in a little  alley complete with graffiti.

Up the ugly green stairwell to the first floor (three flights up) and into---a lovely spacious apartment. The bedrooms are easily twice the size of ours at home.

We freshened up a little, and went out to explore with the goal of staying awake until a reasonable hour. The old town was nearby and completely charming. We saw our first real gnomes. Just like the real Wroclaw, I'll be sprinkling the gnomes throughout the rest of our stay without explanation.

The old town had lovely buildings straight out of Disney.

Greenery

and even a "beach."

We tried our first street food from the most interesting cart shaped like a train.

 I had a huge kebab, a big scoop of little potatoes and some veggies. Dave had a huge sausage (excellent mustard), a traditional saurkrautish dish and veggies. We also got some overpriced lemonade from the stand next door. The weather was overcast and a little rainy. We looked at the stalls in the old town. They were selling things like cheese, pastries, wooden toys, dried fruits, clothes and purses.

The next day we were going to meet Catherine at the train station so we thought it would be a good idea to know where this was. We walked about 1/2 an hour in the wrong direction. Tried again and found it. Along the way we found the mall, the opera house, our first of many H &M stores,

A delicatessen thoughtfully named after my mother, 

and these cool street statues.

                                                                      Down on one side of the street,

Up on the other

We stopped for a rest by a beautiful river with trees--Wroclaw is the "Venice of Poland."

Pigeons, of course. 

We didn't have time this trip to discover the full meaning of life, but I'm sure we could have found that answer here.

Passing a grocery store we bought bread, a string of small round bagel looking things,

jam, spreadable cheeses (laughing cow style, but in 4 different flavors), milk and woolite. Check out the cakes at this little store.

We also learned the most important Polish word, "Lody" it means italian ice-cream. Got some of that of course!

We went back to our apartment and slept until 2 a.m. when the slats gave way on Dave's side of the bed.  We fixed it enough to get by and slept like the dead for 11 hours. Getting up at a respectable 9. a.m.