Poland with Cameron Hewitt and Tomasz Klimek

foreign and welcome to Monday night travel with Rick Steve zero tonight we will be venturing to one of my favorite corners of Central Europe Poland my name is Ben green and I'll be your moderator this evening and now I would like to actually introduce the places we are going to be visiting tonight with a flyover tour I had the Fantastic experience life-altering experience of studying abroad in Krakow Poland for six months in 2016. I think you will soon see why the charms of this city impressed me so much I was also going to visit Warsaw pretty tarun malbarg and the old antiatic city of good dance [Music] thank you so please hold on to your hats and be prepared to be surprised by the wonders of modern Poland and now I would like to introduce our guidebook co-author and a guidebook researcher in this region for more than 20 years Cameron Hewitt dobrevature Cameron Ben good to see you thanks for having me back here on Monday night travel I always love to be back uh with the gang here and uh we're in very very capable hands with Ben who as he mentioned has a personal connection to Poland like a lot of you probably do as well and by the way that was some Chopin we were hearing during Ben's intro and boy when the second I hear Chopin playing I just it takes me right back to Poland we'll talk a little bit about that coming up well thank you all for joining us tonight to talk about I think it's one of the great underrated destinations in Europe but really one of the most fascinating interesting beautiful wonderful places you can go Poland so I'm really thrilled to share this with you tonight I'm going to start by giving you a couple of uh pictures of Poland and then I'm going to introduce my co-host and then we're gonna take that tour together so starting out um I just wanted to say for a lot of Americans maybe who have kind of an outdated idea of Poland this might be what you imagine when you think of Poland you think of maybe the Cold War days where everything's kind of dreary and Industrial and it's not a very pretty Place well I'm here to tell you maybe that was true 30 years ago but these days when people go to Poland they're absolutely stunned at what a simply beautiful place this is this is a country that has some of the most beautiful cities and squares and architecture that you'll find anywhere in Europe I find few places are as delightful just for exploring a beautiful place it's also a place where new and old come together this is the old Canal along the city of Gdansk and Northern Poland will be there at the end of our talk today and you've got the old town on one side and then the other Town other side you can see that they're building some super modern brand new construction and that's kind of what Poland is for me there's all this beautiful old tradition there's also a lot of modernity in Poland and a country that you feel the metabolism of a place that's really racing towards the future it's also a place with wonderful people these are some of my many of my very long list of my favorite Polish people Mrs B in the driver's seat and Robert the bus driver for Eric Steve's Poland tour just two of the many polls that I've enjoyed spending time with over the years and this is just a wonderful place to go and connect with the people uh Rick and I have been both really passionate about Poland for many many years I'm coming up on a guidebook research trip I'm leaving very soon to go back to Poland we're going to be updating the material in our guidebook which I first wrote about 20 years ago I think it's the 20th anniversary of when we first had a guidebook section on Poland back in 2003 and I'm very excited to be back there soon updating that material post pandemic uh Rick loves Poland as well but he doesn't it doesn't have as much time to travel as I do beyond the kind of core of Europe so he entrusts me to do a lot of our work in Poland and that's been really fun over the years for me to get to do that year after year and get to know so many wonderful people the other thing we're really excited about this year I think think I'm kind of breaking a little news here but we're heading to Poland me and Rick and our camera operator Carl in the middle there and Simon Griffith our producer we are heading back to Poland in September to uh do two new brand new Rick Steves Europe television shows about Poland we're gonna do two 30-minute episodes now hold your horses it takes a long time to produce these things these are the first two shows of a new season it might be even a couple of years before these actually hit your Airwaves but rest assured we're very passionate and excited about Poland and this September we're going to be filming to tell people about what a wonderful place this is you know Rick and Simon and Carl they filmed in Poland I think it was also around 2003 2004 about 20 years ago and we watched that old show and we said this is a destination that really needs an update in terms of the TV this is a place that's changed a lot over that time Poland is a really thriving place that's fun to kind of see how much it's changed even over the just the last few years much less much less the last 20 years and the other thing we're really excited about just last year we start started our brand new best of Poland tour in 10 days we were supposed to do this for the first time in 2020 but like everything else in 2020 including those Poland TV shows that got canceled for the pandemic but we finally got back at it and it was really fun for me to go over there and work with a team of wonderful guides on this tour we'll tell you a little bit more about the tour at the end of the talk but just rest assured everything we talk about here tonight is covered on our brand new Rick Steve's best of Poland in 10 Days Tour this is our second year doing it and last May I went over there and I worked with a team of amazing polish guides this was a very lucky tour because they had four polish tour guides plus me uh in tow and one of the tour guides I really got to know well is someone who we already knew a little bit as a local guide but now he's a tour guide extraordinaire for our best of Poland tour and that is our guest host tonight or co-host and that is tomash klemek I'm gonna go to full screen and let tomosh introduce himself live from Krakow so much how are you hello hello welcome welcome from Krakow this is really a pleasure for me to be with you Cameron with you band that I consider like two greatest ambassadors over of Poland over the West Coast so I'm really happy we are uh we'll be talking about Poland today uh so um I'm having my head on so this is not a Cook's head not a waiter's head part of a traditional krakovian dress that over the years has become a national dress and we still use it we still put it on special occasions as this is a special occasion as we're talking on Poland on this Monday night travel so I decided to put it on peacock feather on the top and it's just a part of it so and it's such a strong symbol that you even see like on the battle of the pier ah yeah by the way speaking of beer uh tomash and I both stocked up on local polish goodies so you've got the original jiviets and I've got the juviette's biaweh which is the white the white version of jiviats and by the way if you're struggling with the Polish language we're not going to give you a lot of help tonight but just trust me that that's pronounced jeviets um so tomash let's talk about before we get into our travelogue and talking about Poland you and I I think both had a lot of fun the last few days getting a lot of food and drink items that we wanted to share with our reviewers tonight so where do you want to start with your do we should we start with the Pierogi yeah I always say that getting to know the culture through its food is always like one of the best ways and of course if you think of Poland if you ask like 100 000 posts what is the most typical polish dish you get 100 000 answers pierogi so of course I have them just freshly boiled on this Polish pottery [Music] that I love yours Cameron too yeah so we are on the same page here very well we'll eat them shortly so of course pierogi is number one and nothing can beat that and this is the Polish it's from uh is it is the famous Polish pottery let's see what other food actually I'm going to bite into mine here well you tell us about the next item I by the way I got all of my items and if you're tempted by this food a lot of American cities have really good Polish delis or polish grocery stores there's a couple here in Seattle I went to one called European Foods that's up in Shoreline along 99 and I walked in this weekend to get ready for this show and they had handmade pierogi which I'm very this is a cheese filled beetogi and everything else I'm about to show you is from that store as well so if you've been to Poland or you just love Polish food whether you're in Seattle or not a lot of cities have a Polish supermarketer Polish grocery store for most most of what you're going to see here is available there but I'm gonna have a bite of this you tell us about the next item you got there Thomas so um how to chop a pole uh another way would be pound check so like that that has no hole inside as you can see it the most traditional version of it is with the rose marmalade however nowadays many things can go inside and this is such an important dish that we eat it on uh actually a few weeks ago we had this fat Thursday before the land starts everyone in sponge can we organize a special competition for the best punchki in town so it's really a big deal So Fat Tuesday you have punch key and pretty much every other day too yes pretty much every other day but this is the day where everywhere you go any office any school any institution there are always punch key there okay on the table so this is a day where each cannot go through without having at least seven and we've got jelly donuts here but the ones that I think of that are really distinctive you mentioned are the it's a rose flavored Jam so it's got a very floral pungent Aroma I have a couple of my own polish treats here I went to the store and I picked up a couple of Prince Polo bars which doesn't sound polish but trust me these are these are every polish kid grew up eating these they're kind of these wafer wafer cookies dipped in chocolate I have a friend who was in the Peace Corps in Slovakia and he refers to these as Kami candy talks about how back when the people our age were growing up in communist Poland they ate this kind of thing so it's Kami candy but um Prince Polo is the big brand name you see everywhere and then I also have another very special very special delicacy I found a box at this store of potassium which means Bird's milk am I right about that tomash that is correct it's like a marshmallow that's dipped in chocolate and the tell us this is by by the way Emil vedil which is the kind of the Cadbury or the Hershey's of Poland tell us a little bit about why this is important so Poland has a pretty big tradition and generally Sweden chocolate and we have a lot of companies they still do the traditional version another delicacy you can find it's we call it Delicia it's actually um this is how you translate it um it's again chocolate topped with some jelly inside and a biscuit at the bottom and they are like many different ways how to eat them so we actually have like teams of people who first eat the chocolate teams of people who first eat the biscuit from the bottom so in every family there will be the way of having the Delicia and when this appears in our house it's gone like in 10 seconds I looked for dilizzi at this store they didn't happen to have any but it's kind of like a Jaffa Cakes if you're if you've been in Britain I think there's other places that have Jaffa Cakes that's kind of what the the Delicia is by the way these I'm gonna have another one these birds birds milk sasian lishko are just absolutely delicious because they they're marshmallow marshmallow inside so they really they just kind of melt in your mouth really good um what other Foods oh we were going to talk about I have something that is extremely American not only do I have a bagel but I have an everything bagel tomash do you know what have you heard of an everything bagel do you know what that is well I can kind of Imagine yes everything you can put on the top it's very American it's just basically can we think of everything we can possibly cram onto the top of a bagel we're gonna do it but you were telling me that this isn't we say it's this is a very American thing but tell us about the the similar food you've got there in Krakow so was it invented in America probably not the idea was brought over from where from Poland because in Poland we have something that we call obvious if you want to practice some of your Polish language skills which is like a great grandfather of a bagel uh how was that we know that in the 1300s this is already produced as a royal snack for the court for the king so they were actually designated bakeries they would do it with the King with the special license you have to know the answer today they do it with a special license but now for us uh daily around 150 000 of version are being sold on the streets of Krakow and interestingly this is only sold in the city of Krakow so it's like a registered by both polish and European Union law as a local snack where nowhere else outside of Krakow you're able to get it so great grandfather of a bagel and very often it's if they're in I want to say they're like blue they look like a blue aquarium on Wheels if you walk down the street corner there's there's big glass cases that are full of those junkie and they're really delicious and then to wrap up the food we both have some drinks here we've got we'd already talked about the jeviets which is one of the main brands of Polish beer and do you have anything else anything else drinkable anything else but you can uh maybe toast with while we're here in Poland so another must and another thing that you think of Poland is of course vodka okay yes or a country of vodka and generally vodka is a very special it's not just a drink it's more like a social thing you don't drink vodka with just anyone you drink vodka with you know that you respect and of course we have many many different types of vodka and today I'm having one of my favorite that is called krupini which is like a a honey and Herb vodka that's honey makes a little bit milder if you're not such a great fan of the like very bitter vodka taste so I highly recommend it it's delicious it is you can drink it in shops you can drink it also with warm Waters with lemon uh that's how it's being served in the bar which is by the way the thing to put you up if you are suffering with some maybe colder flu yeah I remember when we did that tour together somebody had a tickle in their throat and you you pulled them aside very seriously as you then we gave him a covet test they didn't have covered but they had a cold and we said you were like here's what you're gonna do you know go to the pharmacy you go to the liquor store it sells alcohol the big sign and you buy some of that vodka and you put it in a glass with some hot water and some lemon juice and you said that would be that would take care of the cold and I think that's a probably as effective as things you can buy at the pharmacy and it worked so yeah yeah I remember that yeah okay are we have we gone through all of our edible Poland bits and pieces probably will be nice to add I'm not sure with all the sweet things would be Polish sausage um of course we don't have any with us but yeah it's funny we we know that word even Americans know kielbasa that's been kind of adopted into the American vernacular as well but of course Poland is a land of great sausages and we'll talk maybe a little bit more about some of the Specialties but I think in terms of what we're actually eating tonight I think we've kind of we've kind of covered it and by the way feel free to take your hat off if you want to make yourself comfortable that doesn't it looks fairly comfortable we put the head on special occasions you don't want to kind of mess with your traditional food uh clothes and food so yes let me take it off for now okay good great well we're gonna go dive in and uh go back to our slideshow and tell you a little bit more together about Poland and we're going to start just with sort of introducing Poland so tamash and are going to just have a little conversation about uh Poland in general and about some specific places there's Poland right almost close to the very middle of Europe you can see it's just east of Germany and there's a couple of ways in which Polish geography has really impacted its history and its culture and that is just two things really one is that Poland is very flat now we're going to see some pictures later of some mountains in the South but most of Poland is extremely flat the other thing about Poland is it's between the Germanic world and the Russian World you can see Russia and Belarus and Ukraine and all of that is just to the east of Poland so it's kind of sandwiched between two of the great traditional powers of Europe and that means there's been a lot of war and fighting and um push and pull going back and forth through Poland so it's got a very kind of tumultuous history and you see a lot of stories when you're in Poland big epic paintings this is by Jan matako who's a great polish um kind of battle scene and historical scene painter just depicting these incredible blowout battles of the Middle Ages so polish history is very very tumultuous uh and very epic and so it's a place that if you're interested in history it's a very rewarding place this is the Battle of gruenwald if I'm not mistaken tomash is that right yeah and I think maybe because of that a lot of people ended up leaving Poland and so something else that I think of when I think of Poland is there's a lot of us polish Americans my great-grandfather my grandfather's parents my great-grandmother and great grandfather both came from Pig farming Villages just about an hour and a half east of Krakow where Tomas lives um and you know anybody from any background I think can really enjoy Poland there's a lot to offer but I think for those of us who have Polish ancestry there's sort of a special connection and it gives us Insight maybe into who we are a little bit and who our family is and maybe some of our traditions and when Tomas and I did this tour last year we knew there'd be a lot of interest among Polish American people but actually about half of the people on that first tour so out of the 20 some people you know 10 or 12 of them had Polish ancestry including this woman here and it was kind of fun for them to be back in the in some cases they'd never actually been to Poland some of them even grew up speaking polish in the home and had never actually been to Poland so it was really exciting for them to be able to come and be in Poland and kind of feel connected to that culture and that's certainly how I feel when I'm traveling and one uh something else that I connect with Poland is the Catholic the Catholic faith is extremely important to the Polish people both sort of as their religion but also some ways as their cultural identity like during communism the Polish people really um their their Devotion to Catholicism was a way that they kind of protested against the Communist Regime Tomas you want to talk a little bit about how does how does being Catholic connect with being polish yes definitely there's still big impact but uh what you mentioned like during those difficult times the church was always like supportive of the changes of the freedom of the people and it never hooked up with any of the regimes that it was happening in some other countries so maybe this is the reason why it's still uh sort of strong even though it's changing it's still percentage-wise is something that cannot be seen anywhere else in Europe and truly under the communism like coming to church was like a sign of Rebel so even if you were not religious you would be just going to church to uh sort of show um and do some statements because after the mass the people would be just kind of meeting intellectuals talking so this was like a center of the opposition at the same time so it's always been there um Krakow by the way 100 35 churches so this is like the second largest after Rome that's why the people call it sometimes the ultra Aroma by the way the church is seeing here right now it's build on the plans of Rome's church ill-jazoo so it's another like argument calling krakows uh the other own and you know as a traveler when I go into Poland I really am aware of the how important the faith is because in a lot of there's a lot of Catholic countries in Europe like Italy or Spain or Portugal and you go into the churches and um certainly there are worshipers there but it feels like it's kind of a beautiful tourist attraction and there's a few people practicing you know worshiping in one corner but when I'm in Poland I really notice that the churches are full of people who are actively worshiping they're there to pray and so I'm especially mindful in Poland to be very discreet if I'm visiting a church visitors are welcome especially if there's no Services going on but you do have to keep a low profile and I think that's something to tune into as a traveler visiting Poland and then of course there's another piece to the Polish Heritage which is Judaism this was traditionally the home to a lot a huge part of the European Jewish population that goes back to a great medieval King called kashmirs the great one other lands and kingdoms we're persecuting and expelling Jewish people because you Mirch the great actually invited them to come in Poland which isn't to say that they were necessarily treated as equals or that they had some great life here but they were more welcome here than a lot of places and that continued all the way through the Holocaust unfortunately and we'll talk a little bit later in the talk about some of the places where you can learn about the Jewish Heritage and and sort of tease out that strand of Polish history and then something else that really strikes me as a traveler I always think of Poland as being kind of like Spain if you've Been to Spain it's a very big country 40 million people and a very a lot of space and there's sort of this sharp contrast where you have really big fascinating interesting vibrant cities and then you have lots of little Villages and kind of farming communities in the countryside and there's not a lot in between there are of course small towns in smaller cities but I find a big contrast between the urban Krakow which urban Poland which has a certain feeling to it and a real modern vitality and then the very traditional idyllic romantic bucolic Countryside is that a fair would you say that's a fair characterization tomash well generally Poland is very ruler as you said in the beginning it's mainly flat country but not only flat in terms of the surface but also it's a very good soil so agriculture is still a very important part of our economy which of course um kind of um decides on on what you've just said so it's very much rural country okay so there are some big cities rural countries those smaller towns they would appear from time to time but I would say they have the least charm so yeah big cities and Rural I think you're right and for travelers in particular I've always sort of struggled for my guidebook to find the the small town in Poland like chesky krimoff and the Czech Republic or something and it's hard to find a small a small town or a small city that has a lot of charm the cities the big cities which we'll mainly be talking about today have tons of charm and tons of interest but there's a lot of rural area in between so um anyway that's just kind of just to give you a picture of of Poland and now we're going to get into sort of a destination by a destination tour of Poland we're going to go through some of the main sites in the country and Thomas and I are going to take turns telling you a little bit about each place we're going to start there down in the South Krakow which is where Tomas lives and for a lot of people it's sort of the one play place they go if they've been one place in Poland it's very likely crack out because it's just a beautiful Town very accessible easy to see and there's lots of very convenient day trips right near Krakow that we'll also talk about further up right in the middle of the country then we'll go to the capital city of Warsaw which is the modern capital city of Poland and it has a very different feel it's not quite as traditional romantic old town it's sort of the urban modern kind of Urbane Vitality lots of hipsters running around and people really dress well between business meetings on the streets of Warsaw and then from there by the way we're gonna follow the Vistula River you can see if you look up the map there's a faint blue line that kind of makes an S through the middle of Poland with Warsaw right in the middle that goes through Krakow we're going to follow it up through Warsaw it just so happens all the great cities of Poland are along this River we're gonna end up where it exits out into the Baltic Sea in Gdansk up in the far north of Poland and we'll stop off at a couple other smaller places which is between godansk and Warsaw if you're looking for that sort of smaller City it's still a city but a slightly smaller city than that does have a lot of charm that's a great choice and then Melbourne Castle up near gdesk and we're going to start off in tomash's Hometown krakov as they say in Polish or Krakow is we Americans say and I just have to say there's a good reason why this is the one place if people go to one place in Poland like I said it's probably Krakow and for very good reason and I I just want to start so much by talking about the main Market Square which for my money might be the the best most beautiful most inviting most Charming most enjoyable to explore most enjoyable to just sit out and nurse a beer Square anywhere in Europe so tell me as someone who lives there tell me what gets you excited about that square what what is it what's so special about it so you should know that this is the largest medieval Market Square of Europe okay so the size is also something important the charm and also something that we should mention at this point is that Graco is the place one of the very few in Poland that was left untagged during those difficult times of first world war second world war so everything you see on the square around the old town is authentic is original which also influences on the ambience of the place so I have to tell you I I'm in love with my city and whenever I come back from some family travel I just go run to the Market Square do a Roundup there and then I feel like at a home I mean I'm the same for me Krakow feels like a second home and not only because my ancestors came from near here but it's it might be the one place in Europe it's probably the city in Europe I've been through the most times and maybe even the most number of days in my whole life I spent so much time here Feels Like Home to me too and I'm with you when I get back to Krakow whether it's been a couple months or coming up in this next trip maybe even a couple of three years walking through that square and just taking it all in again is just such a special experience I mean it's really it's really just a magical magical place um so you're very lucky to get access to this kind of all the time um and the other thing I like about Krakow is in general is it's very walkable it's a very strollable City it's a big city actually but the old town is quite Compact and that's the part that estimash is saying is incredibly well preserved it's just like a museum of architecture Untouched by the ravages of war that have really shaped so much of the rest of Poland um and it's it's all beautifully contained within the old wall which has now been placed with this park there's kind of lots of benches and places to sit and relax and Gardens and cafes and it's just for being such a big city once you're in that Old Town that's very kind of buffered from the from the urban part of the city it's just it's just super fun and relaxing yes krakows also Less on the UNESCO is the board natural cultural heritage which is not that unique anymore because there are thousands of sites and objects but you have to know when the UNESCO lists started back in 1978 it only had 12 sites and Krakow was one of the first 12. so it was an important decision to say that this is an important place not only for us here locally but also globally for the humanity and also as we looking at the bar I have to know that since 2017 European Union has been giving a title of the culinary capital of Europe and the first ever title went to Krakow wow I didn't know that actually that I'm not surprised though it's a it's a great Food City our French and Italian friends were going like what right yeah and uh bologna where they had steam coming out of their ears it's but I get it it's a great City and I think another reason it's so important and how it shows up on all these cultural heritage lists is now these days Warsaw is the capital of Poland but historically it was Krakow that was the capital of Poland and down at the southern tip of this Old Town so really from that main Square it's a 10 15 minute walk at a leisurely Pace you come to this place it's called vaval and it's a hill where you find the traditional castle of the Polish Kings up until about 500 years ago more or less and then you also have vowel cathedral which is the main Cathedral as we've learned this is a a country and a People For Whom Catholicism is extremely important and if you think this is their main Cathedral for Polish Catholics this is sort of the Westminster Abbey of of Poland and I mean it's a tour guide what do you how do you present wobble to people do you think this is this is uh an exciting place for people to see so sometimes we use the term the place where heart of Poland beats because that's what it is it's one of the most important places not only in Krakow but in the whole country and not only because of the religious aspect that you just mentioned but also because of those political patriotical aspect because inside this Cathedral not only polish kings were crowned and they are buried but also our national heroes our national poets generals all those people who throughout the centuries have contributed to what is Poland today are there so you could truly cover the full polish history in relatively a small place so yeah I'll give you a heads up so Rick and I were just going back and forth about the script for these new Poland TV shows and we've got a section about Volvo and uh we we start rattling off and uh king javiga and kashmir's the great and all of these great polish kings and queens and I think Rick is sort of debating how many of these Polish names is is too many taroshi you know how many of these Polish names is too many we got to figure out a way to make this accessible because you could just I've been with uh tomash and other guys like tomash in the Crypt of this Cathedral and it's just it's it's actually very um you get carried away with the passion of the Polish people for their history as I said earlier there's this kind of epic history and all these great figures and heroes and a lot of them are buried in this Cathedral so that's that's really exciting um yeah actually my my family name is dombroski and everyone tells me when I'm in Poland that there is a general Dombrowski to whom I am probably not related but there is a general dombroski who's mentioned in the Polish national anthem um so I I'm distantly related to potentially or at least have the same name as uh one of these great polish Heroes um and then we were talking about the Bible Cathedral being so important and churches being so important and I would say from like a sightseeing point of view there's some beautiful churches this is The Franciscan Church um we also saw the Saint Mary's Church which is that one with the two towers on the Old Town Square if you're sightseeing any of these churches or maybe all of these churches are worth dipping into tomash do you have what are some of your other favorite museums or sites or attractions that you recommend to people if they're exploring Krakow so even cracker if you want to go deeper into the history you can go underneath the level of the market square there's this great museum that we call just Underground Market uh during the archaeological Works they just started to find out about the history and this museum is a sort of side effect of those works but it's amazing because the level of the city has gone up around 15 to 18 feet so whatever was underground was kind of covered we didn't know about it and we find out only recently so you can take a travel uh in time and space actually once you go down to this Museum very accessible easy to be done on your own because it has a lot of touch screens presentations in different languages so this will be something I would truly recommend yeah yeah I think that's that's a great museum I know the one you're talking about um the other thing though speaking of the kind of Catholicism and the religion and the traditions of Krakow tamash when we were brainstorming for this talk he has there's all these different local traditions and Customs that he wanted to talk about so we decided to narrow it down and I think this this one sounds really cool so tell us what we're looking at here at tomash so in Krakow for a little bit for nearly 100 years now we have this tradition of making those uh nativity scenes in the form of uh like architectural objects and you're looking at some of the um examples right now what are those nativity scene it's for Christmas and they are they so oh that's a great picture they're supposed to resemble the architecture of Krakow in a way and every year first Thursday of December in different categories those Beauties are being exposed to the people are being presented to the people so this is a picture it looks like a photo of shop but it's not it was actually taken on the main Market Square where on the Statue of our national poet those um objects are being um presented and in different categories they are being judged and they receive the rewards it's quite a lot of money in some of the cases and and then for many months they can be seen both in the museum and on the streets of Krakow amazing tradition that has a lot of like uh personal stories of the authors of the artists that make them uh so truly truly if you are there around winter time this is something that you will see on the streets of crackle a lot and my sense is the whole calendar of the year of uh Krakow there's things like this going on all the time in fact I happen to be there coming up on my trip I'll be there on Easter and I think kamash is going to show me a few of the just for fun so a few of the Easter Traditions while I'm in Krakow I'm really excited about that uh it'll be exciting to be back in crack out such a festive time of year another thing by the way that's really fun to do in Krakow and this is something we do on our tours but also tomash has a tour company I'll just put in a plug right now called crack out Urban tours that does these kinds of really fun experiential tours for independent Travelers as well but we did this on our tour last year and that is you can go shopping in the market and buy your ingredients to learn how to make pierogi and so the first thing you do is you go to the market and they give you a list of the things you need to buy from the different merchants and this is not a tourist Market this is there's this old old Market they call it and it's tucked just outside of the Ring Road surrounding the old town and it's very local and it's just kind of rustic people who just brought their stuff in from the from the farm fields that morning and you go around and you buy all of the ingredients and then you go into a local home in my case I was lucky enough to be in tomash's home and then he teaches you how to from scratch make this fantastic dish pierogi that we were sampling earlier and it's very traditional incredibly delicious I remember it so much this was this is is one of my favorite experiences on my tour and I may be one of my favorite experiences I've ever had in krakauer in Poland and everybody who did it it was just so much fun also being in these smaller groups within our bigger group we had all split up and go into a different family home and do this and I think that there's something really nice about Poland it has this really rich culture that's it's fun to kind of get your your fingers dirty with it right there's it's it's it's one thing to go to museums but I think Poland is a place where you really want to find a way to connect with the culture so I'll just say thank you for setting that up I think it's such a cool program you're very welcome I always say that like hands-on experience is something that you always remember the most that you can refer to and what could be more local than like going to a someone's home and making this traditional uh a national dish so that's that's what we do and for us it's also a great experience to meet people from all over the world and and just be able to share a part of our culture with them it was also fun too because we did like I said we had quite a few folks who had a Polish ancestry and some of them were like oh yeah my grandma taught me how to make this you know way back when and it was kind of fun for them to reconnect that as well so and uh pierogi is such an important part of the culture it's sort of It kind of ties everything together I think speaking of food we've already talked a little bit about the Vodka we've talked about the ovarjanic uh the Polish Bagel which is more delicious and certainly less filling than the American everything bagel um let's talk about a few more foods that people can try this is a street food it's uh there's it's really good in Krakow but I think it's other places too um tell us a little bit about it looks like a French bread pizza but it's not exactly that tell us about this tomash so the name of the snag is and this is one of those things that again goes back to the Communist times because what is it's like an open Bagel open uh baguette uh like a oh piece of bread with cheese and mushroom on it put into an oven and ready to eat so it's warm it's quite filling as you can see quite warm quite large and it can be seen all over Poland the picanka they even sell it on the gas stations they sell it everywhere it's good to know where to go for the best ones and we have a couple of places in Krakow that we recommend to our guests when they come and this is something that we still do at home so it's like a street food sort of but with a home origin yeah I love these little local street foods and the first time I saw one of these I couldn't figure out what it was but once you've had a couple it's one of those things you acquire taste for and it's a great kind of a meal on the go when you're when you're out and about um we talked a little bit about Polish sausage I I think tomash there's so much to say about Polish food let's each maybe talk about one or two dishes that we really like I'm gonna I'll start with my favorite dish I'm a borscht connoisseur and when I'm in Poland it's like when I'm in Italy not a day goes by that I don't try a gelato maybe two gelatos but when I'm in Poland it's borscht because they're they're all a little bit different some of them have dumplings like this one some of them are are clear that don't have anything in them some of them can be really the Ukrainian style can be really chunky it has lots of vegetables and beans in it and I just love if you haven't had borscht it's this Savory beet soup uh and it's just absolutely delicious super satisfying on a cold day or really any time so that's kind of my favorite quick quick uh pickup meal um so for me that's that's a big one tell us a little bit more about Polish food and what are some of your your favorite dishes tomash so generally like if you want to speak about Polish food you have to look at the climate Okay and because we would not be able to survive on this nice Mediterranean diet so Polish food is heavy is greasy it's Saucy it's meaty carbs you need this energy to warm you up to help you to give you the energy to work uh but it's still on the other hand it's very much comfort food because it's always made from scratch so it's not a processed food it's always made from those fresh ingredients from the market usually uh so yes there are plenty of dishes bars is also one of my favorite soup but if we were to mention one more soup I would say is sometimes being translated in the menus as a this traditional sour soup it's very difficult to um explain the flavor you just have to try it but it tastes kind of like it tastes kind of like um if sourdough bread word liquid it's got that kind of savory sour oh man it's so good I love sugar yeah then it's and it's I think we are the only country that served that so even in the neighboring countries nowhere else you find Zurich so this is definitely a soup that you should try it's our soups are always uh quite filling they come with potatoes they come with egg they come with sausage so they are it could be like a whole meal actually um and another dish that they were to mention a potato pancakes they are quite popular easy to make and accessible everywhere and one dish that you might want to try it's called Bigos which sometimes they translate as to Hunters stew which is a fermented cabbage with meat with sausage with a lot of spices that is boiled for many days it's like a One Bowl type of meal that you can prepare for the whole family for a couple of days um not many restaurants would have that so you have to know where to go but if you have a chance to try it Bigos b-i-g-o-s I highly recommend it I love Migos I agree with you and it's um someone explained it to me once not in this flavor profile but just in kind of the sort of a dishes it's kind of like chili in the U.S meaning everybody has their own recipe you can kind of throw in whatever's in the pantry sometimes it has more meat sometimes it has more vegetables everyone's got their own way of doing it but it's very satisfying it's it's always super delicious and like you said it's not that easy to find in restaurants so if you see beagos on the menu in restaurant you should definitely give it a try any other final thoughts on food before we move on to other topics you're making me hungry I just had another pierogi oh yeah so we spoke of vodka and you know that's uh what goes well with vodka is Herring so this is something that you find a lot in Poland it's a kind of old traditional way that is now being kind of uh revitalized uh Herring being served in those many interesting modern ways and there are certain bars that kind of specialize in Herring and vodka serving so it's this is something you do get to see a lot yeah and it's interesting because you're right 10 or 15 years ago you didn't see it as much but it's it's a very old traditional food Herring and it wasn't really um current for a while but you're right there's this new relatively new trend now where there's all these bars that are kind of popping up that are kind of Herring bars and it's uh it's a good thing to go with the Vodka ma'am well good thank you for giving us a rundown of a few more Polish foods um but we've got a lot more to cover in Poland and one thing we wanted to talk about next was a particular neighborhood of Krakow this is about oh maybe a 15-20 minute walk from the old town or a quick tram ride and it's the neighborhood called kashmirsh now it's known mainly for its Jewish Heritage which we'll talk about in a moment but what's interesting about kajumish is it's also kind of a very trendy hipster neighborhood these days and so you have this sort of interesting dynamic in the same streets in the same area you've got these synagogues and cemeteries from the old Jewish Heritage but you've also got like food truck pods and like really trendy restaurants um so consumers just kind of a fascinating place to see both of those things but specifically the reason you might be familiar with consumers or it might look familiar is this was the location where Schindler's List the events of Schindler's List actually took place and it's also where they filmed the movie Steven Spielberg actually came back here and chose to film that story in the place that had actually happened and until that time under communism the whole Jewish story of Poland kind of got rushed under the rug like a lot of things under communism if it wasn't part of what the regime's messaging was it just got kind of Forgotten and pushed to the edges and it was actually Schindler's List as I understand it that helped Revitalize intro interest in this old Jewish quarter and now you've got all of these various synagogues that have reopened in some cases after being partially deserted or destroyed for many years they've reopened and they've been turned into museums and a lot of cases they actually have a practicing congregation as well and you also have these very poignant graveyards and cemeteries and in this case when the Nazis did occupy Krakow which is what the Krakow that you see if you watch Schindler's List they actually destroyed a lot of the Jewish cemeteries they ran their tanks through the cemeteries and destroyed all the headstones and so in some of these cemeteries you see these fragments of headstones that have been fitted back together into kind of a mosaic it's really interesting that this is just right there in the outskirts of of Krakow tomash is also kind of symbolic because you can see the culture being rebuilt from the pieces that's what the slide shows you so uh there's a great like rebirth and sort of reactivation of the Jewish culture both in the cultural and religious sense which is super unique there are seven pre-work synagogues that are still standing in this neighborhood so definitely if you're interested in this part of the history that's a place you should not miss and of course a big piece of that story unfortunately the re the reason that it's it's sort of has something that has to be preserved and brought back is that when the Nazis the Nazi Germany occupied Poland they used the space that they had in Poland as a place to build a lot of their most notorious concentration camps including Auschwitz beer Canal concentration camp which is just an hour and 15 minutes hour and a half Drive outside of Krakow so it's a very uh popular day trip for people who want to kind of you know some people say you shouldn't say make a pilgrimage because that implies a holy place but for a lot of people who go here it really feels like a pilgrimage in terms of you have a sense of obligation and a responsibility to learn the story and having been here a lot with our with our tours um I can tell you it's just a very powerful sight to walk through it's a huge area you see all these iconic sites like this arbite box fry gate which literally translates in German is the work will set you free which is a cruelly sarcastic message on the part of the Nazi Germans who ran the place but there's actually two parts to Australia it's first is Auschwitz won the main camp this was actually a Polish military barracks and now those brick buildings have been turned into incredibly powerful just wrenching museums where you can for example walk into a Hall that's just filled floor to ceiling with these suitcases and if you remember the stories that you might have seen in Schindler's List or documentaries or learned about in history books they told the Jewish inmates to write their names on their suitcases before they were sent to the gas gas Chambers believing that they would reclaim the bags later on and of course instead they were just rifled through and plundered and thrown away or burned or whatever you can actually see some of those actual items in these museums and then the second part of the camp which is a mile or so away is called beer canal and this was actually custom built by the Nazis as sort of a uh the tour guides there like to say it's sort of a factory for the mass production of death it was basically designed to do nothing but House people until they could be killed and their bodies burned in these four giant crematoria that were on the uh outside edge of beer canal and it's just incredibly powerful to go and see these places and stand for example this is the famous notorious dividing platform looking back at the Gatehouse of the beer Canal part of the camp and if again you've probably seen this dramatized at some point a Nazi doctor would stand here as these train cars would pull up and the the prisoners would be unloaded and the doctor would take one look at each person and he would Point One Direction which meant that they would be sent directly to the gas Chambers but if they looked healthy and able to work he would point the other direction which meant they would be basically checked in as inmates and allowed to live a little bit longer as long as they could be useful and actually do labor and this was the place where in a lot of those stories we saw families were torn apart forever literally when one set of the family would go in One Direction the other in the other and they would never see each other this is just an incredibly powerful place to visit and I think for a lot of people uh it's it's a difficult place to visit but it's very important and it's it's maybe the best place I've seen anywhere if you really want to understand the story of what happened during the Holocaust this is a just an incredibly powerful place to do it homash what are your what are your thoughts on this is the tour guide who takes people here a lot what's how do you think about this place how do you present it to people so this place is definitely nothing to enjoy that's for sure but I always say a must be done because there's a saying that if you don't learn the history well it likes to be repeated so the whole idea of having this museum is so this story is never ever repeated again and also asked the guides taking the people there for us is more like a mission okay to tell the story to to educate uh we go there a lot with with the youngsters from all different parts of the world and sometimes it's for the first time they hear the story so I think it's very important and uh to go there for education in this case and it is happening and I think it's very good um yeah and as I said Auschwitz is is one reason we mention it right now is it's close enough to crack out that it's very common for people staying in Krakow to devote a day to go out there and there's various ways you can do that you can join a tour you can hire a local driver a local tour guide to take you there door to door and set everything up for you so you have a smooth visit you can take public transportation but I would say if you're going to Krakow make a point to set aside today to go out to Auschwitz it's a very powerful experience and a very important one as Tomas is saying there are some other day trips that I would suggest if you're going to be in Krakow other things that might interest you and one of them is actually just a neighborhood just on the outskirts of of a Krakow that's a really good place to learn about this communist Heritage that we've talked about tomash tell us a little bit about Nova huta literally translates as a new still works if you were to translate it uh directly and that was the city that was built after the second world war from scratch from zero That was supposed to be this ideal communist City uh to show to the world how great the Communist system is that was the whole idea was built right next to this it was at certain point the largest European still works uh that still partly exists there so there was a lot of money pouring there there was no limits in terms of money no limits in terms of space so the architecture that was sort of like social realist architecture as you can see on the picture but with those arches with those balconies that if you remember a few slides ago we were seeing the courtyard of the royal castle so amazing mix also of the architecture now it's kind of a blooming Arya kind of trendy and with a lot of greenery with a lot of space with a lot of like social aspects so it have it is having its like Second Use but as Cameron said uh yes this is the place where you can learn the most recent polish history because literally you can go block by block piece by piece learn about the communism how it all started you can learn about everyday life and you can also see a lot of symbols of the uh fall of the communism and I think we have a slide on this one yes uh so Central Square of this ideal communist city today there's a name of American president Ronald Reagan could put the communism down so such symbols very uh ironic sometimes let's be honest history likes to be ironic sometimes are all over the place so really really great place to learn about this more modern uh polish history and one thing too much when you've shown me around here one thing that's impressive is from the outside it looks kind of Bleak and gloomy and it's big but it's this people lived here and still live here it's a very desirable place to live and tuck back behind some of these sort of stern facades you find these very Charming little pockets of like playgrounds and really nice relaxing places this actually wouldn't Not only would this not have been a bad place to live under communism it's not a bad place at all to live today in fact it's there's a lot of amenities there that I think make it quite nice and that is true it's it's very spacious it's very green it has a lot of like the social infrastructure so kindergartens Day Care schools which in modern part of the city are more difficult to find uh but underground you find some of the like Risk um remains of the past because just behind this beautiful and peaceful playground we have ventilation shafts for the bunkers uh shelters that were built underneath because remember this was built during the Cold War times where the uh threat of the attack both conventional and nuclear was very real on both sides so around 90 of the buildings they have those underground Bankers still yeah and you know it's for those of us who this is within our lifetimes I was in the eighth grade when we watched the Berlin Wall fall on television and so I kind of have these vague memories of what the Communist block or the Eastern Bloc kind of was supposed to have been like before that happened and it's really fascinating to go as an adult and all these years later and and walk around and you kind of you have to recalibrate a little bit some of your assumptions when you actually see the way you know we were afraid of of Soviet bombs but polls were afraid of that that frontal President Ronald Reagan who's now we're honored on the main Square was going to drop a bomb on their on their Hometown you know it's it's it's interesting to look back at this with the hindsight of History um also some really I forgot about this but there's this really uh amazing modern church with the connection to Saint John Paul II tell us a little bit about this church and about John Paul II if you don't mind too much so Nevada was supposed to be this ideal communist City meaning with no religion whatsoever okay and no churches however still people living there that were kind of wanting a church and eventually uh this church was built is this church is called the Ark of the Lord if you look at it it's roof resembles a boat that is kind of floating on this uh on the water uh it was a very clear like a message by The Architects of Poland we're talking 1970s so still in the middle of this heavy communism uh Poland floating on those like difficult Seas of the communism but as the Ark of Noah it will eventually settle down on the free land and this is what happened 12 years after this church World built and the bishop of Krakow who consecrated this church and officially opened it in 1977 was in one year to become Pope John Paul II and that's the the little statue you see there in front of the church is John Paul II um and then before we leave this part of Poland one more side trip we wanted to mention actually Thomas wants to talk about this as we said earlier if if you have a mental image of what Poland looks like you might think it's a very flat country and most of it is extremely flat farmlands but there is this little Ridge of beautiful mountains on the southern fridge so tomash this is this is your chance to talk people into checking out the mountains of Southern Poland tell us a little bit about this area yes thank you for this opportunity for me it's one of my favorite parts of Poland are the mountains and you're looking at the small town of zakopane that is surrounded by the mountains this is the highest part of the Carpathian range that is after Alps the second largest range of the mountains in Europe it's not only beautiful in terms of landscape as you can see here it's a beautiful in terms of culture it's a beautiful in terms of activities that you can do both in summer time for a lot of trekking opportunities winter time a lot of skiing amazing wooden architecture that you can see on the picture uh some of the wooden churches are dating back to the oldest ones to 4090s so we talk in Columbus times and they are still standing in this area beautifully located in the forest so the places just Charming uh whatever the weather is and um it's a great place also for activities uh please take a look you wouldn't expect that in Poland yes it is in Poland and also underneath the mountains we have a lot of thermal Waters that are now being used for those thermal uh spas and that both in summertime and winter time are a great place of relaxation so you can combine your one day visit to the mountains with a nice relaxation afterwards with with such amazing views yeah I have yet to spend a lot of time here I've been down a couple of times just to check it out years ago and the weather wasn't very good it was kind of socked in so I don't I haven't had the full polish mountains experience but one of these days I'm going to make a point to go in the summer and enjoy it's I I hear amazing things about it um so that's good uh we're gonna move on now to another part of the country we're gonna go right to the center of the country the capital city the modern capital city of Warsaw and it's the biggest city in Poland by far and it feels like a big City compared to everything else we're seeing here they're already big cities Krakow and gadance but Warsaw is a very big city and it feels it and the icon of Warsaw is this giant skyscraper that was built under the Communist period called the Palace of culture and science and it's it's it's interesting I always wonder so you're not I know you're not from um Warsaw tomage but when someone of your generation looks at this do you kind of say this is an unwanted reminder of Communism or are you kind of over it and it's just part of the skyline tell us kind of what what space this building occupies in the Polish imagination so you're looking at the palace of Science and culture and for many of us it's um unfortunately the first version okay it's unwanted gift from Stalin that was built here in the mid 1950s well gift I say when I say gift I say like this because we have to pay for it anyway so uh it's until very recently it was the highest building in Poland it's nearly 800 feet high uh now uh it's a part of a Skyline definitely it's a very important Cultural Center because there's a Congress Center there are two theaters movies a lot of Institutions uh that occupy the spaces Within and now it's on the list of The Monuments so it has been decided it will stay with us for longer so whether you like it or not just like when you first got it you're kind of stuck with it so you might as well get used to it it's interesting there's a there's a when you talk to Polish people it's that's I like to ask those questions because it's people have different relationships with these things and uh all different kinds of ways of processing this little chapter we tend to I think for a lot of Americans our view of Poland is dominated by this communist period but when you look at the whole history of Poland it was a very short period of the history and these days it's so far in the past that you know a lot of times Polish people don't think about it until a visitor like us asks them about it uh an important part of the history of Warsaw is that it was completely flattened after World War II this is an artist's rendering of what it would have looked like right after World War II basically Hitler was furious at Warsaw because there were a variety of uprisings against Nazi Rule and to punish Warsaw essentially he bombed it to the foundations um as the Nazi army was withdrawing but what I got to tell you is the city has been really beautifully rebuilt and it's actually a very in Parts a very sophisticated very beautiful European Capital City it maybe isn't quite as It's Kind of Perfect as it was during the interwar period between World War one and World War II it was kind of this pristine beautiful national capital that um kind of was a trendsetter for all of Europe and there's still some parts that were not built as nicely as this but in general it's there's a lot of beauty a lot of pockets of great Beauty in Warsaw they've reconstructed the old town this was bombed flat and they reconstructed it very precisely in a way that's really impressive what I go to Warsaw for is partly for the you know the the cute old town but I really like it as a place to really get in touch with modern Poland it's a great place to for example explore the food scene this is a Market Hall one of these great food halls that you're you see popping up all over Europe these days where you can go in and Sample a couple of dozen different local restaurant tours have little either fancy sit-down restaurants or little Windows where you can try their food uh really wonderful it's just a great place for me to get a taste of contemporary modern Urban Poland um it's just it's just a nice contrast in some ways to all the old world stuff that you get elsewhere I also think Warsaw has some amazing sightseeing this for me that you're looking at here is one of my favorite history museums anywhere in Europe This is the Museum of the history of Polish Jews and we talked in Kashmir and Krakow and at Auschwitz the sites there tend to be pretty dominated by the story of the Holocaust which is important and very tragic but I always for years I always felt kind of disappointed because when you you go to Poland you learn about Jewish history what you're really learning about is the Holocaust but when this museum opened a few years ago for me it was a breath of fresh air because of course the museum discusses the Holocaust but it also tells this whole beautiful story of the Jewish people in the Polish lands going back to the Middle Ages and how the Jewish Society was interwoven with the dominant polish Society Catholic polish society and how the two communities interacted with each other this is a beautiful interior of a wooden synagogue that was recreated from a small town in the countryside Tomas do you agree that this is kind of a good showcase for that very important part of the history yes I completely agree with you Cameron I think this is one of the best museums and what is important is changing the perspective of the of the Jewish culture because it's 1 000 years of this culture here in Poland uh and if you think of holocausted was just six years so uh of course it talks about it but it talks what was there before you have to know that before the outbreak of the second world war Poland was the largest Jewish country in the world in terms of number of Jews living in in one country so this is the story that is being told you get to know a lot of tradition you get to know a lot of the history it's amazingly done a lot of modern high-tech um explanations and touch screens that you can see and learn and touch and look uh so really one of my greatest museums there and yes we take our guests there on the Poland tour of course yeah that was the fun thing about designing this Poland tour that we got to brainstorm and say what do we think are really the best experiences and the best sites in Poland and we got to string together exactly what we wanted to show people including this so another thing that we love to introduce people to on our tours and our guidebooks when they go to Poland is Friedrich Chopin and for a lot of people you might think isn't Chopin French didn't he live in Paris but what actually when you study the life of this great composer what you realize is he had a Polish mother and he was born in Warsaw or near Warsaw and he felt very culturally polish until a certain point in history when he ended up moving to Paris because of certain complicated political issues so even though he lived a lot of his life in France he always was very nostalgic for his childhood in Poland in fact this is a beautiful statue in wajenki Park which is this great kind of modern Park Urban Park in the middle of Warsaw and it depicts this idea that Chopin said when he played his music even when he was in France it reminded him of the wind blowing through the willow trees of his native land Poland and for this particular statue this particular Park is really a beautiful thing on a Sunday in the summer they do these beautiful outdoor concerts where around this statue of Chopin I mean hundreds and hundreds maybe even thousands of our sovians come out and they fill this park and they listen to a Pianist playing the music of Chopin in front of the Chopin statue this is such a beautiful thing that when Rick and I were making our schedule for filming the TV show our first draft we realized we weren't here on a Sunday and we said we can't miss this this is such a beautiful cultural expression of the Polish love for Chopin so we rearrange the entire filming schedule to make sure we could be here on a Sunday in order to film this it's it's important to do that if you're not there on a Sunday there are other ways to get a little taste of Chopin and one of those is there's this wonderful little BNB that we love that does nightly Chopin Salon concerts and it it was because the guy who runs it his name is yadek you can see him here he was frustrated I've known him for 15 years or so we've put him in our guidebook years ago as a BNB and he was frustrated because people would come to the city of Chopin and say where's the concerts and he would say there isn't any concert tonight unfortunately so he started hosting the concerts himself and this is a great example of of just kind of the cultural Pride you find in Poland and we're really lucky to be connected to people like yadak in fact when we decided to do our tour we said let's make sure we stay at yannick's hotel we have a nice sort of happy hour Up on the Rooftop deck looking out over the skyscrapers of Warsaw where we introduce our tour members to the attic and he can kind of answer their questions about uh what it's like to to be a basically a Polish urbanite living in the big city in these kind of crazy times and one thing that we really appreciate having partners like yarik on the first poll and tour last year we had a dinner booked for a group at just a standard Polish restaurant that was going to be fine but nothing special and we felt like like we could do something more so we talked to yadek and he said you know a lot of the people in my kitchen that I employ are from Ukraine a lot of them are even recent Ukrainian refugees and I bet they would love to prepare a traditional Ukrainian dinner for your groups and we just jumped at the chance and said that would be beautiful and so sure enough um just pretty much on the spur of the moment a couple of days notice yadek's Ukrainian kitchen staff prepared this amazing not polish but Ukrainian traditional dinner they were so proud to be able to cook their food from the heart and yadak even invited a local musician to come and play the local traditional stringed instrument bandura I think it's called during dinner uh which was really a very powerful experience and it became an important part of our tours I think we're going to be doing it again this year um but speaking of Ukraine I think that's kind of the elephant in the room when we talk about Poland so I think tomash and I before we move on to our final destinations we want to talk a little bit about what's going on in Ukraine and how it might affect considering a visit to Poland and how it's affecting the Polish people and I'm going to start with just a little geography lesson which is to say yeah Poland shares a border with Ukraine and as you can see we're sawing Krakow a couple of the places we just talked about they're an hour and a half two hour drive maybe from Ukraine and you might think well there's this horrible War that's going on in Ukraine it can't possibly be safe to go to Poland but I think this is a good chance to kind of recalibrate and get a new perspective and maybe an education in the modern realities of Europe um and one of the things I wanted I was thinking about is I think the reason people think Poland and Ukraine are so close together they're basically the same thing so Poland must be dangerous is because when we think of Europe some of us we imagine the Iron Curtain right this was the Iron Curtain that separated the East and the west and so anything that's sort of east of that line is part of the Soviet world and it's it's all kind of the same right and I've really devoted a lot of my career uh mainly through our guidebooks to educating Americans about the fact that there's a tremendous amount of diversity and variety on the east side of that line and actually these countries don't have much to do with each other at all other than a few cultural ties and historical ties um and that Poland is a very different place from Ukraine and from everywhere else and these days the current political reality is this is kind of the new Iron Curtain in a way because everything to the west of this line is in the European Union and it's all in NATO so we're going to rename by the way our Eastern Europe guidebook Rick and I just decided we're going to rename the next edition of this Central Europe because people who live in the countries on the west side of this line including tomash feel very strongly that they're not Eastern Europeans they're Central Europeans they're they're fully integrated with Europe and so if someone gets nervous about going to Poland because it's close to Ukraine I kind of understand that but when you look at this line you realize if Putin were to cross this line and put someone in Poland in danger that would be a much bigger problem than then you're on vacation when it's happening um that would mean that there's a pretty major crisis going on um so just from the geopolitical point of view we've been kind of disappointed this year and last year that a lot of people aren't going to places like Poland or the Czech Republic or even Croatia or or Slovenia or Hungary because they're close to Ukraine and we've been running tours and you know sending independent Travelers there this whole time and everyone who every single one of them who goes to these countries comes back and they say we're so glad we went we felt perfectly so safe and comfortable um we were a little nervous before we went but now we realized that that wasn't necessary um and in fact when we took our tour members there it was interesting to be walking through this novahuta Zone and we saw this old Soviet tank and it was kind of an interesting reminder that Poland knows what it's like to sort of be on the front line against the Russians and this is a part of the world that's very comfortable with the position they have at kind of uh holding the European line in some ways um but I feel like I'm going on and on but I'm actually curious to hear your point of view tamash as someone who lives here I'll get off my high horse for a while but tell us a little bit about what it's been like to live in Poland while this is going on kind of next door and how you felt about it so everything you said is like very important like to to to to know and to repeat because Poland is we are an independent country the Border we share with Ukraine is more than the border with those two countries in the border of those two important worlds so we keep we feel kind of safe being a part of a NATO and yes Poland is safe and all the people that have been traveling the past year they can tell you that never ever for one moment they felt somehow endangered but by the situation in Ukraine on the opposite coming here could be a sort of a sign of support because you have to know that since last year when the war broke out in February 2022 level over 3.8 million Ukrainian refugees just crossed over the border to Poland uh and it was you know because as you said we know what it's like to be attacked by Russia we've been there so there reaction from the polls was very spontaneous so we opened not only our hearts but we also open our homes everyone that I know that has like a room to rent was or is hosting someone uh in my house we already had like four families that spend that that we hosted because they had nowhere to go because sometimes they just arrived with their like plastic bag with a couple of personal things and then their stories turned out differently some of them went more to Western Europe to families returned to Ukraine as the situation started to stabilize one they left Poland so they decided to live here and it's estimated around 40 percent of the ukrainians are coming here they want to continue their life in Poland so there's a lot of support going on from individuals from institutions uh and um Ukrainian flags are not only hanging all over but there's actually the real help of people helping into this uh particular people who who just run away because they had nowhere to go and Poland opened them with those Open Arms parts and homes yeah it was very inspiring to be there this I was there last May most recently and it was a you know a couple months three months after the invasion and boy it's just so stirring and so like you said it was just so moving you you know I think people thought are we the tour members said oh are we going to be seeing a lot of refugee camps and people camping out and you didn't see any of that because all of the ukrainians who came in had been rehoused somebody had taken them in given them a guest room they'd repurposed old buildings to turn them into accommodations for for all of these desperate refugees um it's been really impressive to see the way that Poland has risen to the occasion and just from there's that solidarity this is the Trade union solidarity and I this was a poster I saw that reminded me that Poland is in solidarity with Ukraine and I guess I'll just say from a traveler's point of view if you're thinking about going to Poland and you're nervous about it you know no one has a crystal ball we can't guarantee your safety but I will say having been there last year going twice this year it doesn't give me even the the slightest bit of concern about it in fact it feels really good personally to be traveling in a country that's rising to the occasion and trying to help these desperately needy people and this is a picture of Andrew he's this wonderful driver that we've had in our guidebook for 15 or 20 years and every day of the year he takes people from the Rick Steve Sky book and does day trips with him to Auschwitz or side trips from Krakow or whatever he's based in Krakow and I went and saw him last May when I was in town and I said how's it going he said it's it's tough he said you know we had two years of covid when our business completely dried up and we thought 2022 like the rest of us in the travel industry we thought this was going to be our year to rebound and then this thing happened in Ukraine and now we're going to have another year or maybe longer where we're going to have you know really tight on business and so he's I said well what are you doing instead he said well I when I don't have clients because I don't have as many clients he said I load up supplies into my car and I drive him to the Ukrainian border and I volunteer my time and that gasoline to deliver supplies to Ukraine and I just I just thought about the fact that it's there's something almost sort of ethical about supporting a country and people like tomash and like Andrew and all of these wonderful Polish people who are rising up and Rising the occasion and standing in solidarity and taking all these ukrainians in and for us to say I don't want to go there because I'm a little nervous about it I understand if you're if you're concerned but it sort of feels to me like it's the right thing to do in some ways if you're on the fence going to Poland spending money there supporting these people is the right thing to do because it is going to trickle down and help all of the ukrainians who are there as well Tomas you think that's a fair obviously uh I'm speaking to the choir here but do you have any final thoughts about this or what what what would what would be the last word you give to Americans thinking about going to Poland so uh I remember Cameron like after your visit last year in May you rolled you wrote the blog or how coming to Poland can actually support Ukraine and a lot of people read that and actually on my tour in September I had people who read the blog and decided to sign up on the tour because of you so thank you very much again for for saying it out loud for being such a great Ambassador and truly coming here could be like a great sign of support thank you and let me guess those people had a terrible experience and went home wishing they'd never come to Poland right yeah they were so happy they came it was like one of the best decisions they have taken so well good all right well we'll get off our soapbox now but I think that's a fair uh it's worth it's worth delving into that a bit because it's there's something going on right now in our lives that's kind of unprecedented and kind of scary and so it's important to think about it carefully when it's right next door to Poland um we're gonna wrap up with a couple final destinations and then we're going to take uh your your questions in just a few minutes so if you haven't put any questions in the Q a widget and that would be a good time uh Gabe and Ben are collecting those to share with us in a few minutes uh but first the last couple stops we want to make one is up on the North Coast of Poland and this is the beautiful city of Gdansk and now if you know your history there was a time when this was known by its German name Danzig but these days it is a Polish City and it's called garensk This is first of all an incredibly beautiful city this is kind of like it feels a little closer or even to Amsterdam or to Scandinavia I think than to what we think of as Poland because it was part of the Hanseatic League of trading cities back in the Middle Ages and through the next several centuries this was a major shipping center so it had all these connections with all these northern European cities it was a very vibrant diverse eclectic Society with just absolutely stunning architecture I love that main Square in Krakow but this Main Street in Gdansk for me is sort of neck and neck with krakow's main Square as just one of the most beautiful places in Poland I just I just love strolling around it's also got some great museums that tell you about this history it's also got just some beautiful back streets it's a fun city to just explore so in addition to all that history you can ask is just an enjoyable place the other thing you might associate with Gdansk is that back in the 1980s this was the birthplace of the solidarity movement which was the first legal trade you not not initially legal but later the first legal Trade union that was allowed within the Soviet Bloc and the person that you might associate with that is valenza who is this electrician who worked at these shipyards in Gdansk who basically LED this strike that ended up having some real impact it actually created some real reform that kind of slowly gradually over the next decade started chipping away at the uh the the the dominance of the Soviet regime the soviet-controlled Communist Regime here Tomas tell me a little bit about I mean you were growing up kind of at this point what are your memories of of this period of the sort of transition slow transition out of communism so we use the word slow transition but let's be honest it was full of pain and and and suffering uh and uh uh and victims and such and like for me like I was a child at that point but I remember the moment when the Communists kind of like wanted to put down the solidarity idea movement that was born in 1980 so and December 1981 they introduced martial law in Poland and martial law and also in Polish translated like a state of War literally so there were tanks on the street uh I remember this day was Sunday and this Sunday was the only day where we had cartoons on TV and there were no cartoons of that day so young Thomas remembers that their way there was a curfew you couldn't travel there was a lot of people being arrested and it lasted two years until 1983 but the momentum that the soldier just got even before that was so strong they would not stop but nothing would stop it and eventually 1989. 4th of June this is the moment when we said goodbye to Communism this date was the date of this first free parliamentary election in the post-war Poland that kind of started the process of changes so let's be honest still continues until today but the direction was set at that point and I think the direction was set well and I will say in this picture that big kind of rusted metal looking building in the background is a fantastic Museum called the European solidarity Center and it's the state-of-the-art museum that tells the whole story of Lech valenza or as we say in English and the way he created helped help help start this Trade union and let it and this kind of like he said like Thomas just said just it was not an easy process there were pits and starts there was like climbing a sand dune right you take a couple steps up and then you'd slide back three steps but very gradually over about a decade uh they managed to to end this communist system and it was a very important moment for all of Eastern Europe it was sort of the first the first kind of uh Domino that toppled that eventually ended up freeing all of Eastern Europe really you could say started right here not just in Poland but right here in Gdansk in fact right here in this exact place you can stand at the Gate of that Shipyard which was then called the Lenin Shipyard and what what basically during those original protests Le Valencia and all of these workers were behind the game 8 and all of their family members would come to this side of the gate it was the only place they could interact or get updates or find out what was going on inside so this was the spot exactly here where basically the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and communism that's a drastic oversimplification but you could really make a case this was the first point at which the tide began to turn and very slowly ended up having a chain reaction across all of Europe it's amazing to stand in this place and this is just a 15-minute walk from those beautiful old buildings that I just showed you all of this isn't godesk beautiful city uh just wrap up very quickly a couple more towns just down the road from Gdansk is a beautiful red brick town called torun and as I said we were saying earlier there's not really a lot of charming small towns per se in Poland but this is sort of if you want something a little bit smaller a little bit less Urban todon is just a very beautiful traditional town it's famous for a lot of things including its gingerbread so with our tours we take people to actually a Hands-On gingerbread making demonstration and it's also just a beautiful time to relax and enjoy yourself exploring and then also very close to Gdansk is a very impressive amazing Castle called Melbourne Castle it's the largest brick Castle on Earth this was the headquarters in the middle ages of the Teutonic Knights who dominated this part of Poland and it's a fascinating fantastic castle to tour the outside is amazing and the inside also has some beautiful architecture and it's a great place to kind of learn a little bit more about polish history um I just wanted to remind you we're going to wrap up here in a second and go to our q a but before we do that I just want to remind you a lot of these pictures we're taking on this great Rick Steves tour um and we're about to find out from some of our colleagues in a minute a little bit more about that best of Poland in 10 Days Tour but I specifically wanted to say one of the joys of going on a tour or if you can find these people as well uh contacting them directly through our guidebooks is connecting with local people and you've just gotten a taste tonight in the last hour and 15 minutes or so of one of our wonderful european-based tour guides and boy as you've learned having someone like tomash this is his business partner with him Monica to take you by the hand and explain to you these stories of Poland and give you that Insight is just makes these experiences so special tamash before we kick it over to Ben to give us our q a do you have any final thoughts or any anything you want to impart to people who are thinking about going to Poland I would say just keep calm and come to Poland well said uh Ben I'm gonna hand it off to you and we're gonna sit tight and be ready for your questions in a minute all right thank you so much Cameron and tomash I'm so grateful that we were able to dedicate this time to Poland and I appreciate so much your Deep dive into the history culture of the country well done well thanks for having us it's my pleasure before we get to some q a that Gabe and I have been scanning during your presentation I would like to present tonight's word from our sponsor and as you mentioned earlier we get to learn more about the Poland tour the itinerary from two of the people who helped design it our co-workers Casey and Robin hi I'm Casey Gould I work in tour operations managing the best of poll and itinerary I work with our local polish partners and friends and I'm Robin stenzel I was the product manager when we were developing the tour and we're happy to present to you today the best of Poland in 10 Days Tour starting in Gdansk we'll spend two nights and we continue on with the stop at the malbert castle before arriving at our next destination to roon where we sleep for one night we continue on for our three night stay in Warsaw and finally stop at Yaz nagora Monastery on our way to Krakow um finishing the tour and one of the things that I like the most about putting this tour together was being able to Showcase all of Poland's best sites from north to south yes and I the thing I love about this itinerary is it's so experienced Rich from vodka tasting to gingerbread and pierogi making as well as getting a really deep meaningful experience of the Jewish history this tour is jam-packed and I also really appreciate being involved in this itinerary because like some of our tour members I have polish roots myself if you've ever been to Krakow and are curious or more or if you've never been to Poland at all this is the tour for you we invite you to join us on the bus of Poland all right thanks to Casey and can I just I'll just interrupt to say that we're just so lucky with all these great people we get to work with here at Rick Steves you're up we call ourselves the merry band of Travelers and sometimes people like me get sort of the spotlight but we're representing a whole team of a hundred plus people in Edmonds and about 150 tour guides like tomash all over Europe were just two of the people of that are part of this this wonderful team and Robin who you saw in that video it was really fun working with her to design the Poland tour because she was just up for brainstorming we would she and I would sit down and we'd get suggestions from all of our polish guys and we would sit down and spread out a map of Poland and brainstorm and where can we find a good open air Folk Museum and should we include this or can we do a detour to fit this in and she just worked tirelessly to come up with this amazing itinerary and then Casey is the one who manages it day to day year to year now she's the one in touch with all of our contacts over there to make sure everything's smooth and I gotta say between the two of them tomash will attest to this when we did that first tour last may you would I thought it was the hundredth time we did that tour everything came up without a hitch it was super smooth the only problem we had was we kept getting places earlier than we thought we would because we overestimated how long the drives would be but in terms of everything that Robin and Casey set up it just worked perfectly and uh we're just very lucky to be a part of that team well said Cameron all right I have some excellent questions here we'll start with a selection of practical travel questions Alan is wondering as are several others when is the best time of year to go to Poland so much why don't you take that so uh you could answer to this in different ways in terms of the weather uh I would suggest April May June then September October uh because it's warm but not too hot however in terms of other things you have to know that most of the Travelers both in Poland and in Krakow are locals Polish people schools traveling so coming in those months you also have more people coming in July and August it's empty no lines to museums so you may reconsider and also winter time gives you completely different perspective not only super empty museums and great rate for the hotels but also some of the like winter um Traditions like the one that we spoke about Nativity since it's only there in December so um I guess the choice is yours uh in winter time even though it's cold but we have our ways to warm you up and Cameron how is public transportation in Poland is it possible to travel in the country without a car or joining a tour yeah you know I almost never rent a car in Poland uh most it's that's one of the Heritage one of the kind of positive Heritage of Communism they had a really well developed transportation system and sometimes it's slow but it'll get you there and actually these days they've replaced a lot of the slow train lines with Express trains I remember it used to be oh four four or five hours to go from Krakow to Warsaw now it's down to I want to say two hours maybe two and a half hours so I rarely rent a car and crack out in Poland there are places where it's nice to have a car so in Krakow people like to either have a car or like I showed you Andrew a few minutes ago you hire maybe a local driver a local guide to do some of the day trips that are a little trickier by public transit so if you want to go Auschwitz for the day or if you want to go to zakopane into the mountains that's possible but a little more time consuming by public transport so rather than have a car for the whole thing I would say do it by train and then think ahead about doing want to hire a car or a driver for certain strategic places another thing that's very popular in Poland is tracking down Family Heritage we talked about a lot of us have Polish ancestry that's a case where you're getting off into the countryside not only do you want some Transportation help but you want some translation help and somebody who has some know-how about how to find answers to your questions and so that's a case where this picture that I showed you of Andrew he's one of many great local guides with cars or drivers or translators who can help make sort of that thing that sort of thing easier well that's perfect Cameron because ideas on researching polish genealogy was one of my other questions so and I'll just follow up just I'll say a little more about that which is if you're thinking about that do a little research before you leave home because I did this myself a few years ago and we actually with my parents we Tracked Down The ancestral Villages where my family came from it was the woodsage family from krikov and the um dombrowsky family from and we had done a little research we dug around some of my Grandma's old handwritten notes and we figured out the names of our great grandparents that were born there it helps to know what you do what you can about birth dates marriage dates immigration dates if you have any list anywhere of some of the villages or towns that some of your ancestors might have lived in anything like that can be very helpful and then once you get there especially if you're working with someone who knows what they're doing um it's not that hard to piece it together hopefully and I'll just tell you one quick story about that we went to this little tiny tiny Crossroads Village of krikov where my great grandmother came from the family name was wusash and Andrew was driving us and we pulled over in front of the one store in the town of krikov and there were a couple of guys hanging out out front drinking beers and Andrew just walked up to them and said do you know anyone by the name of utsage and these two guys started pointing at every house in the village and it turned out we still had all these relatives with uh distant cousins who had the same family name living in the same in the same Village so it's super satisfying to do that but you do need to find you know Maiden you know what was your grandma or your great grandma's maiden name anything like that what town were they born in anything like that will help make that an easier experience fantastic that's great advice Cameron tomash we touched on this briefly earlier Kathy Christine and others are curious how expensive is travel in Poland today do you think how expensive is traveling in Poland generally even though prices are rising in Poland as everywhere in the world but still I think Poland is one of the most um price um valued country so especially in terms of accommodation in terms of food you will find it really surprising how nice the prices are so make good use of it while it's still there yeah I agree and I think you do too Cameron uh John is curious Cameron dimash perhaps each of you might have some suggestions what are the best Polish cities for Christmas markets I've never been there at Christmas time well and now Christmas markets are in different parts of uh Poland and many cities organize it but definitely come to Krakow I'm not only saying that because I'm from Krakow but remember Christmas Market is organized on this largest medieval Market Square of Europe so imagine all those amazing monuments that we just saw on the slides there are now with all the Christmas decoration and those wooden stalls and this glue wine and hot beer this is also something that we drink in a winter time may sound strange but yes it's warm beer with some spices and some raspberry syrups uh it's just amazing it's the place that we still go to so definitely Crackle now forgive me if you did mention this earlier and I missed it but we do have a quick couple questions about it Scott and others are asking about The Milk Bar okay Cameron can you can you tell us about milk bars yeah we didn't mention it yet but a Milk Bar it started off and Tomas you can tell us about the history of it but it started off as basically a government subsidized cafeteria it's kind of a misnomer it's basically like a cafeteria serving hearty portions of very traditional Polish food not just milk but it started off as a communist government subsidized way that people could get a meal out they didn't really have fancy restaurants of course back then and even though communism has long since forgotten there's still this beautiful tradition throughout Poland of very affordable self-service cafeterias they tend to be really designed for Polish people sometimes there's not much English at all or they're like it's all posted in Polish and if you ask they might have some tattered photocopied English menu you can borrow but I will say that's speaking of good value I agree with Thomas Poland is an amazing value and um the food in particular and especially in a Milk Bar you can get a very filling traditional polish for five or six dollars honestly and really good food tomash tell us as someone who's from Poland how does that fit into your kind of dining out experience so milk bars as we call it will literally translate this to Melbourne has always been with us and as you said it's like a relatively like low-key cafeteria we where the food is ready so you don't wait for it so this is an advantage when you're in a rush you just go there and they put the food on the plate okay you don't wait at all so Service uh it's quality depends on the place those places are not always the cutest ones so they have some like plastic table clothes let's say and so on um especially if you are out of the center of the touristy areas they will be like super local you'll be probably the only Foreigner inside being the one of the biggest attraction there so they're still all over the place um and yes something that we still do use when we let's say run when we don't have a time for a very like proper meal you just use those now there are some like modern restaurants opening and naming themselves the milk bars which can be kind of tricky so uh it's not only the name you just have to go inside and see it for yourself great I love milk bars yeah we have time for just one more question and perhaps we can hear from each of you on this David asks is Poland an okay destination for someone who's never traveled outside of the us before I think for sure and in fact it's interesting one of our tour members on that tour last May had never set foot outside of the U.S and Poland tour was his first time in Europe um I think first time internationally traveling except for Canada maybe so that's that's um that's an endorsement right there look I mean I would have said maybe 20 years ago there were some maybe rougher edges there was a little less English spoken it was a little more intimidating but I would say these days in my opinion Poland is every bit as accessible as English friendly and as easy to get around as anything in Europe and I would argue there are parts of that you might think of as more accessible like maybe Spain or Greece that are probably harder to get around and more challenging than you would find in Poland um so yeah I would say I wouldn't hesitate to consider Poland as a first time in Europe what do you think what do you think tomash I'm kind of difficult for me to switch from the perspective of not being polish but I would say as Cameron just mentioned is very accessible it is very uh friendly and you have to know one thing we have we pose we have this polish Hospitality in our blood in our veins we are just open this is something that we do naturally so you will see a lot of great people like working as waitresses in the hotels and so on you'll be very welcome you will feel very welcome so I think for the first encounter with Europe this is a very nice like first impression so definitely you will have the imponent I agree you know when I went to study abroad in 2016 I had never been outside of the U.S before and off I went to ground for six months with no International experience whatsoever a little 20 year old Ben and um it was life-changing but the safety and the good resources in Poland made it possible and a great experience so I absolutely agree I think Poland is a good place to go even if you're a first-time International Traveler all right well that's all we have for tonight thank you Cameron thank you tomash that hat is fabulous though to both of you thank you for having us and thank you tomash it's getting on to close to three o'clock in the morning there so we especially appreciate you staying up late for us though I should say about it was a pleasure taking you on this virtual trip to Poland thank you Bard so and thank you to all of our fellow Travelers tonight for exploring Poland with us we look forward to hopefully having you join us again next week for Prague good night Cameron good night tamash good night Ben I'm not so much foreign

Channel: Rick Steves Travel Talks

Views: 5,771

Keywords: Rick Steves, Rick Steves travel skills, Rick Steves travel lectures, Rick Steves travel talks, Rick Steves Europe, travel advice, travel tips, europe travel tips

Id: 5UgAPi-stp8

Length: 99min 5sec (5945 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023