Summing up Poland

Photo: Just one of many fascinating moments from the bus ride home.

We arrived back in Berlin yesterday after a ten-hour bus journey from Krakow a little tired but otherwise in good condition. (Fortunately no vomiting this time.) It was a little tricky figuring out which bus was ours at the station; there were lots of signs suggesting which bus was going where, but in the end the only way to find out was to ask the driver. So, that was the end of the trip; I could write a few detailed impressions of the Polish-dubbed, French language comedy Le Raid that was played for our entertainment on the way back (in one word: shitty), but here are a few general thoughts about Poland instead:

Food: It took us a little while to figure out what the most interesting items were, but I think my two favorite food items were zapiekanki and zurek. (Not that I knew what they were first before consulting the guidebook.) Zapiekanki is essentially Frenchbread pizza; it’s a half-baguette with melted cheese, mushrooms and onions, topped with some sort of spicy ketchup. We got ours at a street-side kiosk in Krakow for 4 zloty (about one Euro). Zurek is a rye soup with sour cream, filled with hard boiled eggs and sausage. I got a bowl of it at a small restaurant in Warsaw for 10 zloty, and we ended up going back there the next day for more.

Beer: I can’t say I was crazy about any of the beer varieties I had here; the last two bottles I sampled here in Krakow were Zywiec and Warka. Of those the first was better; Warka was a little more bitter although apparently made by the same brewery. Throughout Poland I could not seem to find a Polish beer that came in a variety other than lager, which to be was somewhat disappointing. I suppose it might have been fun to try some Polish vodka, but I think that’ll have to wait for a time when I’m not travelling with a pregnant wife.

Language: I came here without any previous language preparation, and indeed, I didn’t understand much of anything that wasn’t completely obvious or translated into English or German for me. (At one point, plundering my memory for the Polish „thank you,“ I inexplicably and most puzzlingly produced the Russian word for „four,“ which certainly says something about my improvisational language skills.) That said, it didn’t appear as though the written language would be all that difficult to understand once the basics were mastered; it seems to have many of the same consonant clusters as Russian, but without the challenging Cyrillic alphabet. Listening, on the other hand, struck me as more difficult; even though I thought I knew the words for „thank you,“ it seemed as though I was never pronouncing them properly and as though no two Poles pronounced them the same way. And there’s also the Polish letter „L with a line through it,“ which if I understand correctly, is supposedly sounds like the English „W,“ although when listening closely to Poles speaking, I could never hear it. (Perhaps I was actually hearing Russians speak what I thought was Polish.)