More English than We Have Heard in a Month!

Monday, Aug. 18, 2014--Warsaw

We have heard more English spoken here in Warsaw than we have anywhere else on the trip.  It's not all tourists, either.  English seems to be a language with major usage for business and other purposes here.

Museums were closed today because it is a Monday, but we weren't really interested in visiting them due to having seen so many on Saturday in Poznan.  Instead, we walked the streets.  We explored the area around our hotel seeing mainly the Palace of Culture which is the famous Russian-built tower that is a symbol of Warsaw.  Then we visited the Saxon Gardens, the first public park in Poland. 

We were headed for the Old Town which was rebuilt after WWII and is a World Heritage Site.  Although not very large, it seems almost completely as it must have looked before the war.  It is different from the Old Towns in Wroclaw and Poznan--not having squares as large as those and not having buildings quite as fancy.  But it as a nice feel to it.  In the area, we extended our walk to include New Town which is also an old town but was new when it was built just outside the city walls hundreds of years ago.  We saw a new statue (a gift of France which I cannot find on the Internet in a photo search) of Marie Curie who was Polish and a monument to those who led the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in 1944.

After exploring all the streets of Old Town, we headed down the Royal Way, a street with a series of names that goes from Old Town to the Royal Lazienski Park where we attended the concert.  It is lined with massive buildings and later with exclusive shops.

Warsaw likes to put up posters to tell its story, so it was like we were in outdoor museums most of the day.  My favorites were a series telling the story of the Warsaw Uprising and a series showing the changes in the city since the fall of communism 25 years ago.  The later had contrasting photos to show the differences in buildings/neighborhoods from 1989 to 2014. 

Eventually, we left part of the Royal Way for tomorrow.  It was getting late in the afternoon and we were tired and hungry.  We went to a neighborhood milk bar hoping to eat there, but it wasn't the kind where you can see the food.  They had a menu posted, and you have to know the dishes by name and pay a cashier first.  Then you take the receipt to a window for service from the kitchen.  An Asian man had given us a copy of his menu on our way there, so we returned to his place and had a bowl of very spicy noodle soup and a dish of chicken teriyaki with rice.  I took photos of the menu at the other restaurant.  If we have time to study and translate them, we may go there tomorrow.