Po-Land, Warsaw!

Our flight left at the slightly awkward time of noon. Good because we arrive at a decent hour , not as good that we can't even make it to a half day of work.....But thats fine. ha.

Anyway we arrive fairly early and are roughly the size of our own tour group. At that point 15 (Monika had yet to join us) people were haphazardly trailing Arthur (the only polish speaker among us). Poor Arthur,little did he know....

We all got hour 3 day transit tickets sorted out and hopped on a bus that actually took us directly accross the street from our hostel. It took us a little while to get check in and everything since we had apparently all put different approximate arrival times but were all taking the same flight. ha, oops.

SO on our first evening we decide to go to Łazienki Park but unfortunately it closed at 5. So then there was a little segregation...Girls went shopping and boys went to the bar. We were going to meet back for dinner though...

Here is the group outside a dark and firbidding Łazienki Park....


The girly crew, navigating the winding Warsaw ways... I didn't have a map and was little to no help, but documentation is important too right?

At dinner at a little polish place near the hostel. Most of the boys made it on time......... The food was excellent. We split in to slightly more manageable groups and shared various specialities. I got to try potato and cheese, spinach feta, cabbage and beef, and poppyseed and raisin perogies! They are pretty much their own food group....



AFter dinner a bunch of us headed out to some teeny tiny pubs. REally neat, cool vibes and great music. no room either so you have to meat someone!

Day one! So because there were so many of us, the little tour groups that split off were mostly designated by what time you managed to drag yourself out of bed that morning. We headed up the street toward old town. It was really cold and visibility was zero but everything was still beautiful. Most of old town was actually reconstructed after the war so it's not quite as old as it might look.......

Rachel Sondie, Arthur, Luke and Dave.

RAchel W!

Dave the Lion.

The guy on the pillar in the center here was King Sigismund III Vasa who moved the capital of Poland from Krakow to Warsaw in 1596. Apparently Krakow is absolutely stunning as well, since it would have some of the older legislative buildings....but another time perhaps.

Arthur, fortifying himself with caffeine as we stroll.

This building housed a museum and I think may have been an old palace type thing. I couldn't find any details though..... Anyway we went to a portrait showing here spanning old court life all the way till present. It was actually really neat seeing the styles evolve and the use of color and new materials and techniques develop.


WArsaw was cold and wet. Very wet. And the use of eaves troughs is far from liberal. I couldn't find any statistics on death by icicle or falling ice shrapnel but i'm sure it has happened. I mean we saw some close calls and we were only there for 48 hours....

RAchel W, carrying her munich bag and taking a picture of me taking a picture......

Luke's alien eyes. He only brings them out for special occasions.....like this one, old town market square!

RAchel .

If you are interested in seeing exactly how extensive the reconstruction efforts needed to be to return this square to it's former (quaint) glory check out :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Town_Market_Place,_Warsaw


Some of the crew...

My feets again. i was particularly taken with the cobblestones here, perhaps they were so glistening.

Some warsaw souvenirs which appeared to be hand caraved by the man sitting below, not pictured here....

Old castle wall, complete with pigeons..... you have to look close though.

A small cafe that was on our tourist map. A local favorite apparently and has been visited by the Dalai Lama? Ok thats what i heard, don't quote me on it....
We tried some delicious borscht with white beans. It was very sweet and good. Beets are a phenomenal root vegetable, i just want to throw that out there.

When we finally made it back to Łazienki Park in daylight we found this guy, just relaxing. I always pictured them to be warm weather loving fowl but apparently i'm wrong again!

Here is a lovely Mandarin duck specimen, inauspiciously trying to mingle with the regular ducks. The only one the trumped him really though was the peacock and that is pretty much just in shear bird volume.


another picture of a picture. Terrible really.

RAchel knnows the way....

MAny benches, in case you find yourself overwhelmed by the presence of the Chopin memorial.

A terribly akward group, and the chopin memorial.

better....

Luke and Ryan, always paparazzi ready.

Cyclops Sondie. This doesn't happen very often.

Chris and Bruce, misplaced themselves temporarily but were found in time to avoid any serious confusion.

After the park we headed back to the hostel went out for Pho and then met up with the rest of our crew. We were going to go out that night. One of the places recommended to us was apparently one of the best club/bars in warsaw and it was seriously 30 paces behind our hostel. Lucky us! so we got all dressed up and headed out. It was a successful evening i would say. I don't think the hostel would invite all 17 of us back again but considering the circumstance we did fairly well!

Tulips everywhere! and for cheap! I seriously considered bring some back but realized that that was probably a poorly thought out idea.

Luke looking especially tall on the way to the WArsaw Uprising Museum.


DANCING. nice! but i think it was closed....

The Palace of Culture and Science! Was one of Stalin's monstrosities, interesting effect on the city scape don't you think? WE didn't really go visit it since apparently the space is mostly leased out to businesses now but and interesting landmark all the same.

The Warsaw Rising Museum.
It was really good, informative and personal. I learned a lot and at the same time have so many questions. One thing that i had a hard time following as i drifted from exhibit to exhibit was the time line. I still need to look it up....

We continued our day by heading over to a giant outdoor market. being sunday i guess, and february, most of the stalls were closed making it the perfect setting for a zombie movie or an abduction. I got this picture before one of the security guards came by and told us the sellers perferred not to be in pictures. black market maybe. lol.


Mannequin, Mannequin, Ryan.

After picking up some pertinent souvenirs, we made our way back to the hostel, grabbed our bags and headed back to the airport. We had work the next day after all........

Buda-PEST

We left from directly from work and headed to the zurich airport. caught our flight, no problems. we even took a legitimate airline so hypothetically we could have brought a checked 23kg bag for no extra cost! awesome! but we didn't, to bad.
anyway, we arrived at a decent hour and hoped on a well vandalized bus to head into the city. we followed this with a train and finally arrived at our stop. Unfortunately Buda-pest transit seems to use their human resources really ineffectively and so, located at said train station, we found a veritable army (ok just three) of ticket checkers. turns out we were supposed to purchase TWO tickets one for the train and one for the bus, no transfers allowed! jeez. so we both got stuck with a 40CHF fine and while we were getting hassled by these two guys a nicely dressed couple came over to see what was up. The lady argued for us but couldn't change the guys mind and apoligized profusely. I guess she felt terrible because she came back and handed us 5000hf approximately one of the fines. then she apologized for hungary and ran away before we could give her money back.

hungarians are very nice. moral of the story.

k after we got all that sorted out we walked the few blocks to our hostel. It was a little wierd, essentially an apartment with tons of bunkbeds. it was neat but a strange dynamic. as you can see below, it was a "yoga" hostel sorta. pretty cool decor and nice and clean.

This room is the one we stayed in on the upper floor kinda where this picture was taken from. purty cool.

here is the yoga room! there were also beds in this room though. a big group of Malaysian guys and one brazilian named daniel who was an evolutionary biologist.

Day one we decided to try out one of the free walking tours. This window picture was the result of our wandering before the tour. we left the hostel quite a bit earlier than was strictly necessary.



this is a cute little courtyard that we found complete with munchkin benches and a snowman with a shy smile.
Our tour started with a brief into to the city by our tour guide whos name was Agnes. she had excellent voice projection.
Some of the interesting facts we learned right off the bat include that hungary has the second highest suicide rate in europe after finland(??i think). also the avergae salagry is 500 euros a month which is approximately a quarter of my current intern monthly salary in switzerland. Ridiculous.

This building was some sort of music hall but apparently the acoustics were so bad that no composer ever played there twice. to make up for this lack of use they allegedly rented it out every weekend for big raves. good decision i think.

This statue is the first one erect post communism. her knees are super shiny because they get rubbed for luck.

The only thing i caught about this guy is that we can thank him for being able to make it back to our hostel after a late night of partying, he is apparently the reason for the nice grid city plan. Note Agnes energetically describing this in the lower left corner.

A downspout.....

This is one of the main squares and below these pools is a giant underground club. apparently in the summer when the water is clean you can watch the young (and old) people party the night away.

This is inside the St. Stephens Cathedral. The most ornate church i've ever seen! Absolutely gorgeous. All gold inlay and marble. The "paintings" on the ceiling were in fact mosaics.

This window is in a little chapel off the side of the main catherdral. It depicts St. Stephen, the first king of Hungary and the reason it still exists today. It was under his direction that the pagan tribes turned to catholisism and survived as a nation.

This terrible picture is of an ornate glass box containing the mummified hand of St. Stephen. Apparently (ie Agnes said...) after the kings death many miracles occured at his resting place and they finally opened up his tomb to figure out what was up. They found that his arm had been naturally mummified, a miracle they cried! Agnes assured us that there was also a scientific explanation involving flooding. Anyway, whoever these people were, they got so excited they lopped off the arm in question, chopped it in half, sent one half to vienna and kept the hand in this chapel.

Outside of the Cathedral. Not quite as ornate as the inside but still quite lovely.

This was our first crossing of the famous Chain Bridge. It was the first bridge to connect the Buda and Pest ( peshhht) sides of the river. Notice how much nicer there lion statues are than the calgary center street bridge.... Don't worry i think i got a close up later...

This shot was taken from the Buda side of the chain bridge and the Cathedral in the background. It was coooold that day...

RAchel with the ghosty outline of Parliament behind her.

Bunny woman? yea dunno, but i liked it.

This we found as we walked along the ridge towards the Fishermans Bastion which sits on the hill almost directly accross from parliament.

The Fishermans Bastion. I'm not 100% sure what is was built for if anything. Hold on I'll google it. Ok it was built in 1905 and is made up of seven major tower each one symbolizing one of the original Magyar tribes that settle in the Hungary area in 896. Take that with a grain of salt, i'm not going to reference it or anything...


A little bit of graffiti up at the bastion and parliament, one of Europes oldest legislative buildings. There was a design competition held before it's construction and the design you see below obviously won but I guess they were short on sense and had the blunt so they went ahead and built the two runner up buildings as well, situatied behind the winner. We didn't acctually get over to see the runners up but the story was, in my mind, entertaining.

owl.

Man. We went on valentines day weekend which may or may not have been a great idea but there was so much making out everywhere! I'm fairly certain that people thought rachel and I were lesbians. jeez it's wierd how often i get that... Anyway I just thought this picture was kinda cute....

A miscellaneous building. This was the most beautiful (in the sense of ornate buildings) i've been to. Many of them still look like the war finished last week and they havn't started rebuilding but that original charm is still there and a little grime makes them all the more endearing.

This was budapest's biggest indoor market. We were told specifically by our hostel owner that we should go here to look for langos. a traditinal (apparently) deepfried dough pancake covered in sourcrea, cheese, garlic, and in my case onions.

This was one of the stalls, I think these are incense burners that look like they are smoking.... either way, very neat. in hindsite i maybe should have bought one but at the time i was just thinking about what a sweet picture it would be....

Tons of little stacking dolls, handmade lace and traditinal hungarians dress on the sceond floor of the market.


This was...."the gree bridge"? I actually don't know but we were heading from the market to gerlert hill on the other side of the river.


Ummm I don't know how or why this would have happened but we managed to locate the only mini-van i have seen since we arrived here and it had ontario plates. Bit of a shock really.

Liberation monument on top of Gellert Hill. Originally put up by the soviets. Agnes says it was to remind them who did the liberating but after the fall of the soviets they kept the monument thought they did cover her with a sheet for a few days to wash off the communism. So now she's a semi-comunist statue...



A view from Gellert hill of the Pest side of the river.

Artillery left at the top of gellert hill beside the citadel which was built by the Habsburgs after they the suppression of the Hungarian War for Indapendance.

Just another beautiful facade on a beautiful city square.

This was the end of day one. The walking part anyway. We had been at it for about 7 hours so that was aout enough. We headed back to the hostel to warm out and then set off to the metro to take the train up to the Szechenyi Bathhouse. Don't worry we headed back the next day to take some pictures but that will come later.
We got there and treked halfway around the building (it's a large building) until we found an entrance. We then waited in line for quite a while and finally managed to rent ourselves some watches. yes watches with some sort of chip in it that is programmed to let you into the loccations you've payed for. pretty cool. you could also automatically lock your locker, no key required. Then it took us another little while to figure out where we were supposed to change but once we got that figured out we had no problems putting on our bathing suits!
It was a chilly night and the water wasn't extremely warm but it was certainly pleasant. there was a lot of steam and mysterious statues and romantic lighting. I'm quite glad we went at night.
We hung around the first of three larger outdoor pools for a while then sprinted down to the other end past the cooler lane pool to the other warm pool. It contained a circular water chute where all the jets pushed you in the same direction, around and around in a circle. a strange an exilirating experience particualrly when shared with some of the character in there with us. You had to keep your wits about you...
There was also a whole inside wing with hottubs all over the place. as far as i could tell , my hungarian is a little rusty, they were all different temperature and had different mineral contents.
After the baths we were soooo warm. we got back on the train and then headed to a more local hungarian restaurant for dinner. tried their goulash and paprika chicken and it was lovely! We went to bed early that night though....

Party picture on day two of myself with on of the other monuments on Gellert Hill. It was much nicer on the sunday, blue sky and sunshine! we did much of our previous days trek

The lower portion of the Palace. We didn't do a tour or anything of the building because apparently between all the usupers of power in hungarian history, the inside of the building was decimated, and it's walls white washed. which is a shame.


Some creative icicles formations.

The back corner of the palace.


me and prliament is sitting on my head and the chain bridge. i had a lot of trouble with this one.

A REALLY cool eagle statue.

K so you know how sometimes people will dress up in costume and make tourist pay them for the priviledge of joining them in a picture. Ok this was much better tham that. That giant bird was real. tThe kid got to hold it in one of the pictures. super neat.

Parliament. Reminiscent of london yes?

Chain bridge again.

This was an amphibious bus that we had thought about doing. it ended up not making it onto our final list but we did see it both days.....

Some jugglers along the budapest equivalent of "Les Champs Elysees".

A very funny couple. they didn't even notice me!

The budapest Opera house. We were thinking about getting tickets to something but when we showed up it ws pretty much the only day of the year they were closed becasue the biggest party of the year had happened on saturday night! darn.

Absolutely gorgeous inside. we got kicked out precipitously though.

House of terror where first the nazis then the soviets set up there "workrooms".

Carzy lady balcony, they have them everywhere.

"Les Champs Elysees" of budapest. actually apparently the same guy designed both...

My house at some point. maybe.

Heroes square.


ahhhh the grim reaper? yea he looked friendly so we asked him for directions.

Here is the bath house. A sprawling building.

inside the baths. we got a couple looks for this one.

Some communist art!

The biggest synagogue in europe and the second biggest in the world after one in New York. Pretty neat.



The holocaust memorial behind the synagogue.

And finally the Hungarian national museum where we spent our sunday evening. Very cool collection and everything you'd ever need to know about hungarian history.

Sunday night we went out with Sasha and benidict, viannese students down for the weekend, and daniel to a bud directly across the street from the hostel. they sold beer by the meter so you got 10 beers in a meter long wooden holder for about 4 euro. excellent deal i think. Benedict turned out to be a philosophy student and daniel being the evolutionary biologist had lots to talk about. I learned a lot that night. :)
our flight left the next morning at 7:30 and then another monday at work! lifes hard right?