Polish Hospitality

June 25th—We had arranged with Michael to leave the apartment about 9:00 a.m. to head off to Warsaw, but when we arrived at his apartment, he wasn’t ready due to a bad headache. So, we took the kids to the small playground at the apartment complex while waiting on Michael to get ready. We left the apartment about 10:30 to head to into Warsaw. While we were only about 20Km or so from Warsaw, it was a long drive due to heavy traffic. The small towns outside of Warsaw are connected by small roads with many stop lights. It makes you appreciate our highway and interstate system. We arrived into the Old Town area about noon. We found a place to park the car and walked toward the Castle Square. Before entering the square, we stopped in St. Anne’s church. Warsaw’s Castle Square is absolutely beautiful with the amazing architecture and bright colored buildings. The Old Town area was all rebuilt after World War II. In 1945, not a building remained standing in the Old Town. It’s a little ironic that it’s considered Old Town yet all the buildings are new, but they are rebuilt in the same manner as the original Old Town. Anyway, we walked into the Castle Square and decided to eat lunch. Michael recommended a restaurant that he had eaten at before so we sat outside and enjoyed the food. After lunch, the kids climbed on part of the defensive wall surrounding Old Town and we walked into the courtyard of the Royal Castle. The Royal Castle pretty much dominates the Castle Square with its size and color, pink. We decided against touring it so we continued walking around the area seeing Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and the Old Town Market Square. In 1944, the church was drove into by a Nazi tank during an uprising. We saw a part of that tank’s tread hanging on the outside of the wall. That was pretty neat to see. The market square has a mermaid fountain in the middle of it. The mermaid is an important symbol in Warsaw—legend has it that a mermaid lived in the Vistula River and protected the townspeople. The mermaid is mild in comparison to the other statues we’ve seen in the center of squares. From here, we all got ice cream, a postcard, and headed back to the car. Michael was so nice to drive us to the Hard Rock Café where we bought a pin. By this time it was almost 4:00 and we were in the crazy, Warsaw rush hour traffic. So, we decided to start our drive back to Grodzisk. The ride was pretty much stop and go traffic most of the way. The good thing about being in the car so long with Michael is that we had more time to visit with him and get to know him better. By the time we were about 10 minutes from the apartment, we got stopped by a road block where a police officer informed us that the road was closed so we had to turn around and go a different direction. Once we arrived back into Grodzisk, Michael took us by the church that he and Dominika got married in. Unfortunately, it was closed so we were only able to view it from the outside. From the church, we went back to the apartment for a little rest. Unfortunately, Dominika wasn’t feeling good after a long and stressful day at work. It was really storming outsides so Michael offered to drive us to a restaurant to eat dinner. He took us to a wonderful pizza place, Dominium. The pizza ranked close up there with the pizza’s we had in Italy. We arrived back at the apartment around 9:00 and everybody was tired from a busy day.