Warsaw

Warsaw – Stare Kaczkowo, Poland

When we left off we were having a little trouble with Polish food. Some good ingredients, but, in the end, maybe a little off.

We’ve had some strong culinary experiences since then. First off, we met our friend Aga on our first evening in Warsaw. We know Aga from Minneapolis, but she is originally from Poland. She grew up in western Poland, and brought her childhood friend, Gosia, and Gosia’s husband, Wojtek, to dinner. 

We had a grand time. Aga and her friends did all the ordering – we just ate. Pickled herring. Duck. Dumplings. Pierogied stuffed with goose. QLamb. Bread and schmaltz (sp?) – which is basically lard, I think. We enjoyed it immensely.

But the big thing we’ve figured out: the key to Polish food is that there are lots of good ingredients around here – you just might need to do the cooking yourself – so as to avoid the strange spices that otherwise seem to find their way into the meals . . .

For instance, this morning we had buttermilk pancakes with blueberries from the forest. Delicious. Now, you might be thinking – what’s the big deal? I could make blueberry pancakes anywhere . . .

Wrong.

First pancakes we’ve had since someplace in Central America. You can’t get pancake mix just anywhere. Indeed, they don’t even have it here in Poland. But they do have flour. And someone left baking soda at our Airbnb. Better yet, buttermilk is readily available here – which we can’t say for lots of the countries that we’ve been in. And the blueberries around here are amazing. 

These are not your typical store bought blueberries either. I hate those things. They’re the size of cherries – blueberries were never meant to be that big … Almost completely tasteless. No. These are the little blueberries you can only find in the forest. The blueberries of my youth. Sweet. Full of flavor. Yummy.

My grandparents used to buy copious amounts of these blueberries every summer. The kind you can only get along the side of the road – where someone who just picked them has a stand. They would can the blueberries; it was always a special treat to break out a new jar and have a bowl. I loved the sweet blue syrup they were canned in . . .

For some reason I have a vivid memory of eating blueberries while watching Dallas and the Love Boat with them – while sitting on their giant plastic-covered couch. (Whose grandparents didn’t have plastic covered couches back then?)

So blueberries – real forest blueberries – hold a special place in my heart . . .

And, of course, pancakes do too. My Grandpa’s pancakes were kind of famous. He served them to all his political friends at the family motel and coffee shop. My Dad makes a mean pancake as well. 

Anyway, the point is that eating blueberry pancakes this morning was kind of a revelation on the homesickness front. Again, more points for Poland. After all, it’s not like Turkey, or Bosnia or Serbia have buttermilk, let alone blueberries along the side of the road . . .

Wait, sorry. I was telling you about Aga and her friends. 

I can’t remember the name of the town that they grew up in – but it was a town that used to be in Germany. At the end of World War II they shifted the whole country of Poland about 100 miles west. On the east side, Ukraine gained about 100 miles of what had previously been Poland, and on the west, Poland gained about 100 miles of what had previously been Germany. 

All this led to quite a bit of craziness. The Germans all left the town, and Poles, like Aga’s and Gosia’s grandparents, moved in. They just came to town, looked around, found a house they liked, and that was it . . . Kind of a unique time in history.

A little on Warsaw itself. The place was pretty much totally destroyed in World War II. Most of it was rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. Which was nice, but I guess I think that maybe they should have just started over – use the opportunity to redesign things a bit …

To start, the city is sprawling. Both biking in and biking out seemed to take forever. Miles and miles of Central-Avenue-in-Blaine type riding. Not inspiring. 

But more important than that – when you finally do reach the main city, you find yourself wondering where the real center is. There’s the old town, but it is, of course, not old – nor is it that charming anyway. 

There’s this big group of grand-ish stone buildings that the Soviets constructed in the ‘50s, complete with a giant clock tower, but because the Soviets built it, the Warsawians don’t seem to love it, and it’s kind of in disprepair. 

There are a few other shopping streets, and an old Mall from the ‘60s – but they’re kind of dated and sad. And then there are some scattered modern skyscrapers – but, again, they seemed to lack any real gravitational pull in terms of being the center of town. 

And as far as we could tell there was no big avenue or circle or anything – just a winding grid with no real pattern. 

I guess if it were me I would do a lot more with the river. Warsaw is pretty darn flat – at least the Vistula offers some opportunity for a central area that has some character. 

All that is not to say that we didn’t like Warsaw. We did. Like the rest of Poland, there is just a good vibe to the place. It’s just that Warsaw seems to need some new big picture thinking. My two cents . . .

Finishing our food and foraging theme . . .

I guess Poles are the second biggest consumers of mushrooms in the world! Today we saw a ton of people out foraging, and a number of stands along the road selling both mushrooms and blueberries. 

I love that! 

This is my kind of place. Forests. Lakes and streams. Mushrooms. Blueberries. They even have moose in Poland. I guess they went extinct at one point, but were reintroduced in the ‘50s and now they’re thriving again. Expecting to see one any time now . . .

Tonight’s dinner? Kielbasa, mushrooms (some purchased along the road and some foraged),

and sauerkraut – all cooked over an open fire at the campground –

along with Diana’s delectable cucumber salad. 

I mean, when you combine the blueberry pancakes with the kielbasa and sauerkraut dinner, and you also have foraged mushrooms, I’m not sure we’ve had a meal day that we’ve felt better about on the whole trip. (For the record, I messed up on the mushrooms and they turned out kind of gritty. But they tasted good.).

The Polar Express toward Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and, ultimately, Finland, is chugging along. Which reminds me of a math riddle I’ve been meaning to include for you all . . . 

I think my Grandpa fooled me with this one when I was young . . .

An electric train is going north on the track at 40 miles per hour. There’s a wind coming out of the south at 10 miles per hour. Which direction is the steam from the train heading? And at what speed? 

First correct response gets major blog points!

Last thing … The Polish character.

You could easily conclude that Poles are standoffish and unfriendly. Very difficult to get people to say hello, give you a smile, or even acknowledge you at all. It’s like riding a subway in New York City…

But what I’ve discovered is that you just need to be pushy about engaging with them. Some bikers we saw yesterday are a good example. We were in a store together and we’re waving and trying to smile because they are fellow bikers. Nothing! But then I asked one of them if they spoke English and where they were from. The floodgates opened. They’re from Warsaw, they work in tech, one of them has travelled to Kansas on work, and they compete with East Indians for work as less expensively employed engineers. All this in about a minute. And that’s the pattern. Poles are wonderful and warm, but you do need to draw them out a bit…

On toward Lithuania. We’re pretty excited because tomorrow we see our friends Piotr and Laura for dinner.