The Westin Warsaw

We love riding trains in Europe. Usually they are comfortable, somewhat clean (depending on the country), and people are nice and helpful and usually friendly. So rather than hop from city to city by plane in Poland, I found Polrail on line (very good and useful site and helpful) and purchased tickets from them for our two inside Poland train rides, Gdansk to Krakow then Krakow to Warsaw. I had hoped originally to book tickets from Warsaw to Prague but that took too much time as did the Pragu...

Well, let's say Polish words I think I have learned.
Tak = yes
Lody = ice cream
Gofry = waffle
piwo = beer
Now those are probably the only 4 that I will remember after leaving Poland until I return. Hopefully I will return because it is a beautiful country and very historic and now also very dynamic.
A lot of words are surprisingly Latin based since it is not a Latin based language. But I'm thinking that these words are more recent into the lexicon, like computer and enginee...

In our hotel room, we have coffee service. Usually means a coffee pot, cups, sugar, creamer and a coffee filter full of ground coffee. It also means you are at the mercy of the cleaning staff and how much coffee, sugar, and creamer that they leave you each day. We have discovered that there is never enough sugar and never enough creamers. Haven't figured out how to get more creamer yet but sugars are available in the bar. We slip a few into our pockets each time we go down to use the "free in...

Our last full day in Poland as tomorrow we move backwards (in the only fly east genre) and move to Prague, Czech Republic. We wandered about the city, getting a late start again. Problem with traveling with a computer, you always feel you have to check emails and such, especially when you are also trying to buy a house and are about 6 hours time difference from said house.

Following the "Warsaw in your pocket" guide, we decided to hit a Tex-Mex restaurant for lunch. Asking for directi...

White Women:

Not an ethnic reference but a clothing reference. Apparently it is a custom here for brides and grooms to take wedding photos about the city. We saw two different couples in Gdansk strolling about with a photographer. In Krakow, even more. We could hardly walk about the city without finding a woman in a beautiful white wedding dress and a tuxedoed groom posing for photos. Most of the time it was just the couple and a photographer. Only once did we see a couple with an ent...

These days I usually travel in larger blocks of time, like month to 6 weeks. I can almost always be assured of catching a cold somewhere along the trip. You'd think that by this time I would have enough foreign bugs roaming around in my system that they could fight off new foreign bugs but it is not to be so. My husband has been fighting a cough which he has jokingly called his Piglet flu. Now I think I have it as well. Drat. I do have enough cold tablets and such that I can fight it but it d...

Day 19 & 20 - 21-22 August 2005 Boy !! Am I getting a seat sore from sitting during all this toooooo long a drives. Just imagine the distances between the places we have been - between 350km to 650km ( 4 to 8 hours at a time.) Elena treated us and shown the movie " The Pianist " which is so appropriate since we are coming to the city depicted in the movie. At least we were all entertained for awhile. Arrived stiff and numb at our hotel in Warsaw and we arrived in a place like paradise - T...

After visiting Auschwitz we drove for our lunch stop to the Paulite Monastary at Jasna Gora which is famous for its portrait of Our Lady 'The Black Madonna' supposedly painted by St Luke. Was very very crowded (I think there was an event on). Got to see the Black Madonna from a distance-but was too crowded. Went to thier museum which had some interesting relics. Had some rosary beads that had been made our of breadcrumbs by concentration camp victims which was amazing and moving at the same t...

Started the morning with a trip to Wilanow Palace. Very nice and very well kept. Built in the 17th Century by King Jan Sobieski III for his french wife who apparrently wanted a palace like versailles-hence she was never that happy until things were perfected. So took a while to complete. LOL. It had many items stolen by the nazis and then by the communists. Some they have managed to get back and some they never have (the communists claimed them as repariations from the nazis-even though they ...

I am sitting in a Noodle cafe in Warsaw across the road from our hotel on John Paul 11 street. The hotel wanted to charge us $36 per hour to connect but this cafe advertised free internet so we have had a good chinese dinner and an internet session!!! We flew here yesterday from Glasgow via London Gatwick. The travelling took up most of the day. At 6pm we met with our guide and fellow travellers for our 14 day tour that will take us from here, through the Baltic States to St Petersburg, Mosco...