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Our week in Poland was great! Although it felt a little soon to be going on vacation from Edinburgh already, I was excited to see a new country and experience a new culture.

The food was generally quite good – the fermented rye soup (żurek) and the assortment of perogies were great – and as Poland is not known for its wines, we enjoyed many pints of local beer and some flavored vodka. The Å»ubrówka (bison grass vodka) is bottled with a piece of bison grass which a bison has supposedly urinated upon.

Oana was quite excited about the cake shops:

We rented a little kitchenette suite for the week which was recently renovated and had a shower that could put out a good amount of hot water – the shower we have here in Edinburgh puts out only moderately hot water, just hot enough not to be cold but not hot enough to want to remain.

I found Polish to be rather difficult – take the name of one of the local beers, Å»ywiec, pronounced “Je vie ets” and that is an easy one. Try NAJCHARAKTERYSTYCZNIEJSZEGO on for size.

Kazimierz

The first walking tour we took was to the The Old Jewish Quarter of Kazimierz. I didn’t know that Schindler’s List was both filmed and based there until we went on the tour. Overall the tour was a bit of a disappointment as the leader’s tour skills were poor.

Nowa Huta

After the disappointing Kazimierz tour experience, we decided to do the Nowa Huta walking tour on our own and save a little money to boot. We bought a guide book from the tourist center and had a pretty good tour – the only down side was that you needed to be in an organized group in order to tour the steel factory so we missed out on that. The area was designed and built to be the perfect community. Some of the interesting architectural features that were put in include

• fall-out shelters in each of the 5 areas
• the rows of buildings are spaced to prevent the spread of fire from one row to another
• each row of buildings has a line of trees out front, supposedly to cushion a nuclear blast (seems unlikely to be effective but then again the US school nuclear drills at the time of ‘duck and cover under your desk’ aren’t very effective either)
• the streets between the rows of buildings are wide enough to allow tanks to pass through to supress demonstrations
• the rows of buildings were spaced to allow a building to be bombed and have enough room in the street for the resulting rubble to fall out without damaging neighbouring buildings
• each building was no more than 5 stories so that no lift was needed – a good thing since lifts were apparently not made in Poland and were very expensive to import from Sweden
• each building was made of prefabbed concrete panel construction created in a specially-built factory
• there are areas in the attic of each building that give a sniper a good lookout and area to shoot from
• each building row had its own separate surface parking lot
• the buildings were meant to give a sense of community to their inhabitants

Another of the most interesting things from this tour was the Arka Pana church (literally, Lord’s Ark). It was shaped like a boat, with a big mast in the middle holding up a cross. The coolest thing was the facade, made of two millon river rocks which were brought by hand by Nowa Huta inhabitants from their weekends away from the city over a period of ten years.

5 years into its use, a 5,000 piece munitions cache was discovered under the church! The other unique feature of the church is the Christ statue, which is unusually placed in the middle of the church. It is not the usual pose of Christ on the cross, but rather a flying pose. It was made of shrapnel extracted from patients during the war, The altar also contains a moon rock crystal donated from Apollo 11, and outside the church there is a set of bells donated from Sweden.