Warsaw: Cooking Class, the Little Insurgent, and Autumn Colors

Phillip and I are now in Barcelona, but I need to share our last days in Warsaw. We like Warsaw and would return if a flight took us there, but Wroclaw and Krakow were our favorite stops in Poland because of the dwarfs in Wroclaw and the friendliness and number of things to see in Krakow. Food and plenty of museums are what we will remember about Warsaw. On Monday, we had a great cooking class, learning to make pierogis.

It was a hands-on class with Nina, the instructor, giving us tips such as how long the dough must rest (at least 10 minutes, 20 is ideal, and no more than 30), what to do if we have a blow-out when we fill the pierogis, and the importance of thoroughly squishing the edges to seal the pierogis before making them fancy with a fork or special crimping. Four students for the class, so four different fillings for the pierogis that we ate after cooking them! Delicious….

Warsaw has a lot of museums. We walked to the POLIN museum. POLIN is one of the larger museums focused on Polish Jews, from their arrival in Poland thru their decimation during World War II.  During the Middle Ages, Jews became merchants and bankers because, due to religious intolerance, they were prohibited by the local rulers from owning land. Some Polish rulers integrated Jewish people into society, however, over 90% of the Jewish population in Poland was killed by the Nazis in just five years.

While the weather was good, we walked in the Stare Miastro (Old Town). Warsaw’s Old Town was actually almost totally destroyed during WWII, but the reconstruction after the war was so accurate that the Old Town got a UNESCO World Heritage site designation.

Some pieces of the city walls from medieval times remained.

The center Market Square was much smaller than that of Krakow and Wroclaw.

The Square was graced in the center with a mermaid statue. The mermaid as a symbol of Warsaw dates from 1622, when she appeared on a Warsaw coat of arms. The legend is that the mermaid decided to stay after stopping on a riverbank near the Old Town. Fishermen noticed something was creating waves, tangling nets, and releasing their fish. They planned to trap the animal, then heard her singing and fell in love. A rich merchant trapped and imprisoned the mermaid. Hearing her cries, the fishermen rescued her. Ever since, the mermaid, armed with a sword and a shield, has been ready to help protect the city and its residents.

Tuesday, we walked in the largest park in Warsaw, Lazienki Park. We didn’t go far enough in to find its peacocks, but the changing leaves were beautiful.

We saw the Chopin statue in the park. I had to use Google to find that it is a willow tree represented with Chopin in the statue, that he sat under the trees in the park to consider his musical compositions. Looks like an alien or a ghostly hand to me.

And like Berlin, the trees were reflected beautifully in the water in the parks. This is from another park, Ujazdowski Park.

Saxon Park had trees that showed the changing to autumn.

Just east of Saxon Park, we found, near the Presidential Palace, Poland’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with an honor guard and an eternal flame.

The following day, we returned to Stare Miastro so that I could take a proper picture of “The Little Insurgent.” In addition to mermaid statues in the souvenir shops, we saw replicas of this guy. At one of our many museums (we were in more than I’m describing), we found the story of the Little Insurgent. During WWII, twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys volunteered to join the Resistance effort. They were mainly couriers and sentries, and their contributions were vitally important.

Also, during our second visit to Stare Miastro, we visited the wishing bell. According to a legend, it grants wishes, but you must walk around it while keeping your hand on its top. So, Phillip did!

I had to get a picture of this guy… he looks to be straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I was afraid he would boom out “None shall pass!” as I neared for the photo.

On Wednesday, we went to the Warsaw Rising Museum, the museum that was most educational because it had interactive displays even though the subject matter was the failed Polish uprising against the Nazis in 1944 that led the Nazis to kill 200,000 residents and destroy most of the city. Many displays of weaponry.

The museum had a mock-up of the sewer tunnels used by the Little Insurgents. Visitors could crouch down and walk thru, getting a sense of the confined spaces, but not the smell, that the boys endured in their resistance efforts.

In addition to a 3-D fly-over movie showing the totally destruction of Warsaw in 1944, authentic film clips were used to show how the weapons were used. The video behind this anti-tank device showed how it was used to sneak up on German tanks and disable them.

We didn’t just visit museums and Old Town; we also went to a market. I’ve mentioned the mushroom soup that Phillip loved, here are the mushrooms. Vendor after vendor had stalls selling all manner of mushrooms!

On our final evening in Warsaw, we managed to visit a restaurant we’d passed several times. It always had a line of local people, the sure sign of good food. We hadn’t eaten potato pancakes yet, so I ordered mine with stew and Phillip had his smothered in mushroom sauce. As it was chilly and raining, I also ordered mulled wine. All was indeed delicious, but very, very filling!

We board our cruise ship on Sunday, but we will be wandering around Barcelona for a few days…

Polish Food, Snacks, and Drinks

We are now in Warsaw, arriving yesterday to our final Polish location. It’s Sunday and the first day of the trip with enough rain to keep us in our hotel room. We had drizzle and sprinkles of rain, never even enough to use our umbrellas. Today, however, it’s raining enough to create deep puddles on the cobblestone sidewalks. So, time to talk about food and drink! Pierogis aren’t the only good food we’ve found in Poland, although the pierogis have been delicious.

At our Poznan hotel’s breakfast, one of the items available was stuffed pickled peppers. We were walking thru a local market later and found them for sale. I bought 200 ml (about 7 ounces) and ate them for my lunch that day. Absolutely delicious and the best I’ve eaten, preserved sweet peppers, with a slight heat, filled with a cross between cream cheese and feta cheese, in an herbed oil.

Although potatoes are native to Peru, they have been welcomed for centuries in Poland. We had delicious individual potato casseroles, with layers of cheeses and mushrooms. (Poland is the world’s largest exporter of mushrooms.)

I tried the Polish cabbage rolls. They were good, but I prefer the sarmale cabbage rolls of Slovakia which are more seasoned.

Poles love to serve soup and stews in bread bowls. I had goulash in a bread bowl one evening. Phillip had a pork cutlet which was just like a German schnitzel at that meal, so I didn’t get a picture of it. My goulash had tender meat and lots of mushrooms. I could only eat the top of my bread bowl with the goulash as serving sizes are quite substantial.

Since it has been cool here, high temperatures usually in the 50s, we’ve eaten hot soup several times. Phillip’s go-to soup is mushroom, which he says is very mushroom-y and usually served with noodles in it. Early in the trip, I tried zurek, the Polish sour rye soup. It is a flavor that Phillip would not like, as it is slightly sour, but I found it delicious and have eaten it at least four times. I plan to try the zurek in Warsaw to see if there’s any regional difference.

I’ve written more about my favorite foods, but here’s one that Phillip really liked, sauteed chicken livers. He said they were the best chicken livers he’s had, cooked with onions and mushrooms, tender and savory.

Zabka is a convenience store chain with a store on every block. They advertise a hot dog with condiments in a tube of bread. We decided to try it for lunch one day. The Zabka we stopped at had sold out of the 6 zl (about $1.50) hot dogs, so we got the kielbasa ones (about $2). The kielbasa was already on a roller grill (just like our QT and Racetrac hot dogs). The clerk put the bread tube on a grill to heat it and add grill marks. Then, she squirted the condiments in the bread tube and dropped the sausage in. It was quite tasty and the mustard coated the enclosed sausage all the way to the final bite, but it wasn’t messy because the tube of bread had a bottom.

This is our very favorite snack in Poland. Bacon-flavored. Not just flavored, but thoroughly flavored, as in they taste like eating crunchy bacon strips even though they are some type of corn/wheat snack chip. We go thru almost a bag a day of these. They were 3.5 zl (about 80 cents) in Wroclaw and Krakow, 4 zl here. Notice the bag size, they’d be at least $3-4 in the US. 

Phillip has ordered chocolate milk shakes. In Poland, a chocolate milk shake is blended cold milk and chocolate. No ice cream or the thickness he was expecting. As he said, it is what they say it is, shaken flavored milk. Still tasty to him, he just no longer expects an American milk shake!

Cherry is a popular flavor in Poland. We tried these tea bags this morning after breakfast. I’ve seen them at our previous hotels, but usually we just have coffee and water. We’ve been missing out as the “tea” from this bag doesn’t taste like tea but rather concentrated cherry juice. We will be drinking more of it this week.

And, speaking of cherry, I mentioned the cherry vodka that our Krakow hotel presented us. It was so delicious that we went looking for it in Krakow to bring some home with us. Zabka and the souvenir stores sold some type of cherry alcohol, but we didn’t buy any of it. I found a liquor store just off the main market square in Krakow. True infused vodkas, cherry and many other flavors, three shelving units of these glass containers! We tasted quite a few of them. The shopkeeper sold bottles, so we bought several 200 ml bottles, and she siphoned our selections into the bottles. Then she wrapped the bottles securely in bubble wrap for travel. We did go back the next night to get more, including one that was not securely wrapped, to drink while here.

We still have five days of Polish eating, followed by a few days of eating in Spain, so maybe we’ll find more notable foods to share.

Krakow & Auschwitz/Birkenau

We were sad to leave Wroclaw as we had found only about 1/3 of the city’s dwarf statues. Big smiles when I spotted this guy at the train station, pulling his suitcase as he hurries for his train!

Our Sunday train to Krakow was the most crowded train we’ve taken on this trip. We had middle seats in a first-class compartment, but it was comfortable, and we had enough room. We arrived at our hotel with time to walk a bit in the Old Town. Our hotel is just a few hundred feet from this UNESCO World Heritage site. St. Martin’s Basilica stands on one corner of the Market Square in Old Town.

On Monday, we went on a full day tour to Auschwitz/Birkenau. The entrance had the same Nazi sign we’d seen at Terezin in the Czech Republic and Dachau in Germany, “Arbeit macht frei,” which means "work makes one free." 

The opposite was true. If not selected for immediate death, prisoners were used for labor, in the camps and outside on construction and road projects. Many concentration camp prisoners were also used in factories that produced weapons and other items that supported the German war effort. Prisoners, poorly fed with rampant malnutrition and disease, died from the overwork and starvation.

Auschwitz, a former Polish Army barracks, was not established until 1940, after some of the concentration camps in Germany. However, it became the deadliest because it was where the Nazis perfected their Final Solution, the gas chambers and crematoriums. This is also where Mengele and other Nazis carried out their horrific medical experimentation on Jews, Roma, and others.

This mound housed the Auschwitz crematorium from 1940 to 1943. During 1941 and 1942, a gas chamber was added and used. In 1943, all crematory activity was moved to Birkenau as its multiple larger crematories had been constructed there. 

Birkenau, about 2 km away, is more properly called Auschwitz II. It was the second phase of Auschwitz, opened for prisoners in 1941, and the numbers of people killed at Auschwitz, 1.1 million (90% Jews), include those killed at its Birkenau location. Trains were used to ferry people here from all over Europe. The tracks lead past barracks and directly to the gas chambers.

At the end of WWII, with the Soviet Army close to Auschwitz, the Nazi SS leaders burned and blew up the gas chambers/crematoriums. Five facilities: two at which Nazis could kill and cremate 1500 people a day, three smaller ones where Nazis killed 800 a day. Ruins are all that the Nazis left of these five buildings in hopes of hiding the activity that went on here.

The tour also took us by the barracks, housing 600 prisoners each on wooden platforms with practically no sanitary facilities. The laborers stayed here until they died or were executed when they could no longer work.

Since Auschwitz is about an hour and a half from Krakow, we didn’t return until late afternoon on Monday. Tuesday, we had no scheduled tours, so I took Phillip on a walk. An over 6-mile walk, to Krakow Castle and around Old Town. 

From the Krakow Castle rampart, we had a view of the Vistula River.

We did not go into this main part of the castle, but it had a nicely landscaped area.

Upon exiting the castle on the north side, we walked thru the entrance with the drop-down gate.

After the castle walk, we walked the entire circumference of Old Town via the Planty Gardens. The gardens were put in place where the city walls, dating from the 13th century, had been. These city walls formed a complex network of fortifications, towers, and gates, surrounded by a deep moat on the outer side. However, during the 1800s, the medieval city walls fell into disuse. During that time, Krakow was under Austrian influence and Emperor Franz I of Austria-Hungary ordered the dismantling of the old fortifications, filling the moat with soil and creating a garden in its place. Now, a pleasant park in which to walk. Oh yes, I verified from several sources that the circumference, not diameter, was 4 km. I’m not making the same mistake that I made in Busan. 

We saw these blue and white carts in many locations around Old Town. They are specific to Krakow and sell Obwarzanek Krakowski.

This is Obwarzanek Krakowski, basically a cross between a bagel and a pretzel. This food is protected and on the EU traditional food list, meaning it can only be produced and sold here. A tasty, albeit chewy, treat for 3zl (about 75 cents US). 

On the north end of Planty Gardens we found St. Florian’s Gate and a guard tower with a grass-filled moat.

To get back into Old Town, we walked thru St. Florian’s Gate.

This evening, we went back out to walk around, actually, to find ice cream for Phillip. It was dusk, and we got a nice picture of the Town Hall Tower, the only original remnant of the 15th century town hall. It's chilly here, the high today was about 45 degrees. The lights on the lower left are heaters in the restaurant patio areas. 

Tomorrow: another tour, to the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Wieliszka Salt Mines.