Day 4: 24th April. 2019

With a personal guide, we were the only one on the tour, we set off on an "off the beaten track" walking food tour of Warsaw. Our mode of transport was a old Communist era van. These had been built to allow farmers to transport produce to market.

Our first stop was a market in what had been the Jewish Ghetto era. This was an authentic local market with no tourists about just normal people doing there shopping - you could buy anything - all types of food, clothing, household items, flowers and so on. The market actually starts on the footpath outside where you could buy soap powder and other household needs, eggs straight from the dashboard and clothes.

Inside the market our guide started purchasing items for a mini picnic starting off with 2 types of pickles. The vendor was more interested in the fact that we came from Australia as he had recently watched a show on a train that went from the bottom to the top and stopped at a big city along the way. He then googled the info to reveal the big city was Alice Springs.

The end result of a number of stops at market stalls was a picnic set up on some boxes in a quiet corner of the market. We had sausages, cheeses, pickles, plums which had been smoked, bread. Because of Easter some stalls were closed, especially those with fish as there was no product left to sell. This meant that specialities like herrings were not available.

The drink, a speciality in Poland and Belarus, is made from bread - in a word DISGUSTING!

We then headed off to various restaurants tasting some soups (very nice), hot mead (not on our drinks list any time soon), stew (worse than the bread drink), dumplings (delicious) and rose jam donuts (not so good). Whilst not all food was to our liking it was a good experience to taste what other people think is normal.

At the last restaurant we parked in what looked like an abandoned lot but was actually a rag n bone type market area. The guide had hurt his foot when he kicked it against the bath that morning so was not keen on the walking part of the tour. His focus was finding a park close to where we needed to go each time.

Our guide had been arrested at one point in the Communist era and was bailed by the local Catholic church. He said Church was where you went to talk politics as you were banned from doing so elsewhere. I was able to impress him big time by saying I had met Saint Pope John Paul II. He thought I meant I had seen him from a distance, so was VERY impressed when I said we had shaken hands and spoken.

After over 4 hours the guide was kind enough to drop us off at the Polin museum and he headed off into the sunset with our leftovers from the picnic. BTW - we think he ordered the stew cause he knew we would not like it as he gobbled it up quick smart.

The Polin Museum is a history of the Jewish people in Poland and was a combination of information walls, artifacts and reconstructions. It was a lot of information to take in but has provided us with a good history lesson to inform the next few days.

This monument outside the Museum is wonderfully ironic. Hitler imported the materials with the intention to build a monument to his success at defeating the allies and taking over Poland. Instead it was used post Hitler and post Communism to build a memorial to the Jewish people.

Our last adventures of the day were walking to a shop to look for some sunglasses for Channe (it's a tradition!) and following google maps to the specified address. So what happened was that google maps make us walk all the way around a Westfield type shopping centre, enter via the car park and then proceed up to the many levels of shops to find the shop. Just so you know - yes we did walk past more traditional entry points to the shopping centre to find our special entry point! But there was always an off chance that the shop was on a road on the other side of the shopping centre. (stop laughing … there was a chance!) However there was success as the brand of sunnies Channe was looking for were there with lots of choice and about 25% cheaper than in Australia.

To get back to our motel we jumped on a tram hopping off not too far from our motel. Oh and then we found out the next stop was at our hotel!!!! We have also discovered that there is lift from the street to the railway tunnels so we do not have to trek with our bags the long way via the above ground paths or carry our bags up and down stairs to get to the station for our train.

So ends our Warsaw experience. Next stop Krakow.