Poland

After 100 plus degrees of heat in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Dubai Poland’s 44 degrees was quite a change.

When we landed in Warsaw, Bo’s godson Marek together with his totally cute 5-year old son Jasio picked us up at the airport and took us to their new apartment in the suburb of Warsaw. His wife, Ania was visiting her brother who works for the EU in Brussels. It’s a new development of attractively designed residential buildings with a 4-storey limitation. It’s near a forest and a lot of green areas. In Poland, new apartments are completely bare (no floors, no interior doors, no kitchen or bathroom fixtures). They have done a magnificent job decorating the apartment. It’s spacious, uncluttered and very modern. We had a dinner of home-made pierogis made by Ania’s mother. Yummy.

Change of plans. The plan was to go to Wroclaw to meet two friends. The friends had change of plans so we took a train to Gdansk (formally, Danzig formally Gdansk ….) Between WWI and WWII it was an independent city state. The old town is very picturesque. October is low season for the Polish coast so there weren’t many tourists there. Especially, in the evening it was a stark contrast with Kiev and especially with Yerevan.

The next day, we took a commuter train to Sopot, which is part of what is called a tri-city (Gdansk-Sopot-Gdynia). It’s only a 20 minute ride from Gdansk, but it has a completely different character. It’s a small very pretty beach community on the Baltic. It boasts the longest wooden pier. In the summer, it’s probably the most crowded city in Poland. People even call it the summer capital of Poland. We were told that the number of German tourists in this area is overwhelming. We got very lucky with the weather. It was an absolutely perfect fall day – sunny, relatively warm, with gorgeous fall colors all along the coast.