Country 10: Poland

We spent 2 nights in Poland. [Note to self - do not go to a city where there is a Taylor Swift concert scheduled on the same night.]

Warsaw was the most cosmopolitan city of any we visited so far. It's bigger than any of the others - 1.7M people. But another factor was that 90% of the city was destroyed during WWII. This meant that a much larger part of the city had to be rebuilt in the last ~60 years.

We went to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum was very well done, but it was super tough to learn about all of the persecutions of the Jews in Poland.

One thing that worked out really well - we happened to be there on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. We were in the middle of a food walking tour at 5pm - the official time to celebrate the Uprising, so the tour went outside and watched the festivities. Everyone gathered in the Old Town. They sang the Polish national anthem, there were flyovers, sirens, etc. It was quite touching to be there. It seemed like the entire city came out for the celebration.

Here you can see us with the official flag of the uprising.

Alex has always liked Poland (he says the Polish have gone through a lot and that makes him respect them), so he was super happy to spend some time there. Mike liked the roads in Poland much better than the Baltic countries. Most of them time we were on 4 lane highways (2 lanes each direction) and the speed limit was 140 which was much better than the average speed limit in the Baltics which was probably 90.

We stopped for lunch in a small town. It was clean with lots of parks. No one spoke English, so we had to order lunch through Google translate. But it made us think that the Polish economy is likely doing quite well.

Two more countries to go: Czech Republic and Germany. Then home (home 2.0 that is)...