Eastern Europe - Warsaw. Poland

Barrack in Birkenbau

Email 28. Warsaw. Poland 16 May 2010

Note: The email date very seldom matches the writing with the physical location (for a variety of reasons)

Warsaw was a pleasant surprise and is only surpassed by Krakow’s proximity to other interesting sites. Having said that, what I think about a city is largely influenced by the total experience in that city. This may include: the interesting sights, the accommodation, the people I meet, the eating-out experience, and some other hard to define factors.

One pleasant surprise in Warsaw was that the visit of the impressive castle revealed that it contains 23 Canaletto paintings. Canaletto was commissioned to do 25 paintings of various part of Warsaw. Today, the city has made copies of some of those paintings and displays them (under glass) at the place where Canaletto set out to paint the scene. This allows comparison between parts of Warsaw today compared to the Warsaw at the time of Canaletto. Most of the areas show little changes. How clever and fascinating!

Another unusual attraction is a series of benches spread out along the Royal Walk. These benches are made out of some plastic material and are fitted with speakers. When you press a button, the bench plays one of the Chopin piano composition. How cool is that? Somebody in charge has a very good imagination!

The Royal Walk follows the way that the king followed when returning from a trip. The walk ends at the Castle on the main square in the Old Town. The Castel has impressive wooden floors that reminded me of the floors in the Hermitage Museum.

The walk is lined up with restaurants, cafes, including (of course!) a Starbuck. The unusual chocking feature about it is that one of its letter missing. I hope I can download that picture so that you can play a little game called (Replace-the -letter-with-your-favorite-choice) my only favorite that I dare to tell you is “S”. The sign reads as follows: STAR UCKS

Use your imagination!

There is a huge building built during the Communist time. It is so typical of the classic Soviet style that for a minute I thought I was back in Moscow! One good thing about it is that you can get a great view of the city from the 31^st floor.

I have had some problem loading picture because the blog does not recognize the Nikon NEF format.

So here are two more pictures of Krakow. One is the inside of a barrack at Birkenbau and the other is the beautiful sculptured wood triptych inside the Cathedral.

LUBLIN - Poland

A nice city without a lot of sights. The Old Town Square has some nice medieval building and there is also a Castle. Most impressive was the extremely helpful Tourist Office. They even found out how to get from Lublin to Bardejov in Slovekia. It was incredibly complicated and I gave up the idea to go there.

I book many of my Hostel on Hostelworld. They list all the infos required for a booking but they leave the hostel describe how to get to the facility from the airport, the train station, and the bus station. They also provide a (totally useless) map. About 80% of the descriptions are very poor and need lots of additional info. The description by this last hostel was particularly poor. I mentioned this to the woman that was there when I finally arrived. She admitted that she wrote the description (as requested by the boss who owns the place??!!). You would think that this is would be important enough to at least double-check the description written by an employee. So, guess what happened, she brought the site up and asked me to rewrite it!!

So I did and I assure you that it isn't easy to write any idiot-proof (foolproof) set of instructions.

Not only did I rewrote it, but when I went back to the train station I try to follow my own instructions to the letter and I ended up making a couple more changes. Sounds a bit like teaching doesn't it?