Highlights: Poland

Warszawa Warszawa Uprising Museum: An overwhelming amount of information with impeccable and interactive presentation throughout including the listening wall - a wall that is meant to look like it has been littered with bullet holes, each one embedded with a speak playing sounds of the time such as war noises, radio broadcasts and songs. There's also a room where they do live printing press demonstrations of fliers and newspapers from the time. The story of the Uprising, when Warszawa went to war against Germany while Russia and the allies stood by in August and Septemer of 1944, is a huge point of pride for the city and we were lucky to be there right during the first week of the 67th anniversary.

Warszawa University Library Green Roof: An amazing green roof that is extremely well maintained both by a small team as well as naturally. Winding paths snake through the entire thing with 360° views around the city and over the Wisła river, a water runoff system carries it beautifully down the side, and you can see down through the skylights into the library...which you can't actually get to otherwise without a card.

Use-It Map: We found this off of a hot tip from our Couchsurfing host. It's actually a network of maps around Europe created by locals, but we found this one particularly helpful. Downloadable or printable. And free!

Sen Pszczoły: Awesome bar in Praga district hiding down an alley behind a photography gallery, complete with great outdoor barbecue, nice beer selection, weird video projection, and butterflies painted all over the inside.

Critical Mass: For those not familiar, Critical Mass is a bike ride that happens in a lot of cities. Usually once a month, tens, hundreds or, in the case of the one in Warszawa during the Uprising anniversary, thousands, of people turn out and take over a specific route through the city in the effort of raising bicycle awareness. In Warszawa, the organization effort behind the ride, including police escort, was incredible, as well as the feeling surrounding it. At the front of the pack was a truck with loudspeakers telling the story of the Uprising throughout the ride.

Grycan Ice Cream: Think Haagen Dazs but Polish and, depending who you ask, better.

Toan Pho: Warszawa has a large Vietnamese population which means excellent Pho noodle soup.

Białowieza (The strictly protected area of) The Białowieza Forest: We already posted about this, but it was certainly a highlight. Just don't get fooled by the sad "bison reserve" which is little more than a game park. It's worth the trek to see the forest, though.

Ostoja guesthouse: A great little family run guesthouse with more amenities than the hostel in town, at the same price. Their restaurant also featured some more-than-delicious blackberry pierogi with creme fresh.

Storks: We weren't expecting to find these in Białowieza but they were everywhere; huge and beautiful, perched with their nests on the corners of buildings. Apparently, one in every four storks comes from Poland and they serve as a sort of national symbol. In the winters, they migrate to Africa.

Kraków Nowa Huta: A former soviet planned community started in 1949, it's now a place to see the communist building style - grey apartment blocks all built with inner courtyards for safety - laid out in the shape of a star radiating from the central square. It was never completed so there is only the streets on the top half of the star reveal the intentions. Also home to a hole-in-the-wall waffle shop that is just ridiculously good.

Massolit Books: An amazing English language bookshop that snakes through the rooms of a house. The selection is curated perfectly with a little of everything, they buy books back, and there's a built in cafe. The perfect atmosphere for camping out and reading for a bit.

Cafe Culca: A cafe built for children but with a menu catering to the adults that take them there. We went on the recommendation of our Couchsurfing hosts for a smoothie and it was one of the best: cherry, banana, vanilla ice cream, honey and mint.

Alma: Simply put, Alma is one of, if not the best grocery store we've seen on this trip yet. Well organized and well kept.

Wódka Cafe-Bar: A wee vodka bar just a couple blocks off the main square in Kraków. It just wouldn't be a visit to Poland without sampling one of the many flavored vodkas they have. We found the wormwood vodka and the quince vodka to be particularly stellar. The wormwood was disgestive-like and herbal while the quince had just enough sweet and herbal, not too syrupy like some other traditional options.

Herbaciana: An amazing (and completely hidden) tea shop tucked in a back courtyard basement right on one of the main tourist streets. Once again, our Couchsurfing host brought this to light or we would've never found it, or the perfect oolong they had there.

Kazimierz: Nothing specific, this is just a cool area to explore. It's historically the Jewish quarter of Kraków so there is a lot to see connected with that, but there also seem to be a ton of nooks and crannies, many filled with interesting looking cafes, shops, etc. There's also a flea market in the square, as well as the undisputed best place to get the most delicious Zapiekanka:

Location:Černovice, Czech Republic

Puszcza Białowieza

So there's this forest, right?

It's ~14,149 strictly protected acres in a 146,397 acre national park called Puszcza Białowieska. There's a wall that goes through the middle of it marking the border between Poland and Belarus, it is home to wild European Bison, and it is the largest (as well as one of the only) remaining forest in Europe with primeval qualities. It's where Casey and I spent the past week, crossing off one of the first places on our must-see list when we started talking about this trip two and a half years ago.

I read about the forest in a book that is essentially a thought experiment; exploring the idea of human impact on the natural world, and how the planet has a tendency to want to right itself. The Białowieza forest (roughly pronounced: be-ah-woh-vee-ay-zsha) was used briefly in the book as an example of a place that has been protected and/or lucky enough over the years, to remain essentially without human impact, despite the aforementioned wall being built through it, multiple wars, and a changing of managerial hands as borders shifted.

The only way to get into the aptly named Strictly Protected Area, is with a tour guide, which we did on Tuesday. It's hard to explain exactly how it's different from any other forest (birds, trees, mosquitoes, etc.), save to say that it just kind of feels different - lush and alive and green. What's easier for me to put into words are some of the things we took from our guide. Things like the fact that we asked a few questions that he said just weren't answerable yet, as a place like this is so rare there hasn't been enough time to observe and study it. Or things like how the bison herds, which are wild here, were hunted nearly to extinction in the early 1900's, reintroduced from 12 specimens in the 1920's and now, with no major natural predator, have taken off again. (This on top of the fact that what was once one heard is now two, thanks to the wall dividing Poland and Belarus - an irony not lost on us coming almost directly from Berlin.) Or finally, how even with a guide, you can only trek a 4km path through the southwest corner of it, knowing that the rest is only visited by scientists.

We spent the rest of the week exploring the rest of the national park: - Some walking around the Palace Park, where until 1944, there was a palace built for Russian Czar hunting parties. - An accidental mountain biking trip that will remain a source of pride in having completed it on Monday, the day after a flash flood style downpour resulting in a "trail" that was more mud than forest, and what might be a personal best 41 mosquito bites on my ankles. - Another bike ride to through the park, to the nearby village of Narewka...a roundtrip of 38km on rented bikes that went forward, but only mostly. We're headed now back to Warszawa, another city rich with history (not to mention the most amazing green roof either of us has seen on the University of Warszawa library) that we got to know with the help of some Couchsurfing hosts (and now friends) last week, where we'll touch down again briefly before heading towards Krakow. There'll certainly be more to talk about concerning both of these cities, but we felt it appropriate to start the Polish portion of our program with the forest that got us going in the first place.

Location:Białowieza, Poland