I am finally back home after two weeks in Poland to visit my son. It was a perfect trip! I took 600 photos, and needless to say, I won’t try to post them all today! I’ll be posting little by little, mostly to keep the vacation feeling going as long as I can!
After arriving in Warsaw, our first task was to head over to the train station to get tickets for our trip on Thursday to Poznan. Public transportation is awesome in Warsaw. Ian easily navigated us onto buses, trams and the beautiful underground, arriving here at the Warsaw train station, all the while keeping in touch with the rest of the world! Phones are big here too and everyone makes good use of the SMS as they get about 300 text messages for a dollar. And yes, Ian’s Polish is amazingly good for only being there six months and he seems to have the transportation system down pat!
Poland didn’t feel as different to me as I expected. The people are quiet and reserved for the most part until you get to know them. Things are very clean, people dress nicely, no sloppy American stuff. The only times I noticed that I wasn’t at home were when I saw those funny looking words on the signs around me and heard the foreign speach coming out of people’s mouths! 
In the malls, I had an especially difficult time remembering where I was. After the train tickets, we headed next door to this amazing downtown mall. Several stories high, laced with escalators, and filled with boutique shops and numerous restaurants and cafes, it was at the top of the modern scale. Not sure if our hotel room would be ready yet, we hung out here for several hours. My doctor had given me suggestions for how to eat in Poland, and for the first meal at least, I paid attention and got a Whopper Jr. while Ian boldly visited Salad Story. And then, guess who joined us for lunch??!!
It was a treat to see this friend from Indiana days who now lives in Ukraine and was visiting Poland. Small world!
To get to Poland, I drove from Iowa to my sister’s in Peoria, then took a charter bus to O’Hare, changed planes in Frankfurt, and finally arrived in Warsaw. My first trans-Atlantic flight wasn’t as bad as I expected, but by afternoon, I was starting to sag. I managed to stay awake until about 6:30 before falling to asleep in this perfectly cozy nest of a room, right in the middle of the Old Town of Warsaw. I’ll finish this post with some pics from our room at the Castle Inn and the views from our windows.
A Passion for Green 