The Royal Castle - Days 30, 31

Sunday (Day 29) was pretty quiet.  We went to church and stopped at a huge mall nearby afterward, just to walk around in some air conditioning for a while.  There is a Burger King there,  so we stopped to eat too. :-)

Businesses and home in Old Town

 Monday, we went back to Old Town.  It took us      twice as long as it should have to get there because the GPS kept trying to take us to some unkknown location that was not where we were trying to go.  It was extremely frustrating - in fact, driving in Warsaw is an adventure.  Roads are often blocked or closed down for construction and the GPS tries to send us down streets that are clearly marked as one way. To get to many places you have to go in a very (seemingly - perhaps unfamiliarity with the area contributes to this?) roundabout way (ha ha...no pun intended, though they are everywhere here too) instead of just driving there directly.  There are limited bridges to cross the Wisła (pronounced Vees-lu in Poland) River, making where you want to go more challenging to get to.  Anyway, I digress.

Businesses and Homes in Old Town

We did get to Old Town and really enjoyed walking the area again.  It was cooler than last week and all the tall buildings in that area block the sun in the afternoon and evening hours.  We toured the Royal Castle which the three older kiddos thought was very cool. Everything is written in Polish and English, so though we opted to not have a guided tour, we could read about the room we were in and what was around us.  We could easily have taken a couple hours in there, but we squeezed it into one hour. :D  The youngest child had little patience for not being allowed to just run around and touch everything, and of course, this is very much a "look, don't touch" place.  I am pretty sure that damage to anything on that property would cost waaaaayyyyy more than I will see in this lifetime. It was definitely worth seeing and many of the rooms were amazing, boasting original artwork from a long gone era.  One can almost picture what it was like back then...except for the air conditioning, which was awesome! 

Using a flash was not allowed in the castle, but we took a 

few pictures in between keeping up with kiddos. :-)

The Castle Courtyard

The Castle Courtyard

Ceiling Art

Sitting in front of the throne

From inside the Castle

Can you imagine the cost if this was knocked over?
(insert shudder)

 I think this is a government building.
 I took the photo from the van and forgot the name of it. :(

The Palace of Culture and Science

A random photo outside a souvenir shop :)

Old Town - Days 24 and 25

 Monday was again pretty routine except that it  included a shopping trip to Auchan, a mall about 30 minutes or so from our house.  There is a store in there called the Hipermarket that is much like a Super Target or Super Walmart.  Though we have heard that Tesco is like Walmart, the one near our house is very small and more like a small Food Lion.  It was great to shop in a larger store with more options.  That is where the candy aisle picture from the last post was taken.

Last week at the park we met a sweet Polish lady who speaks a good amount of English.  She lives in our neighborhood, but we did not see her again until Monday evening.  Our daily park visit was made after dinner, and this lady rode up on her bike to give us the ping pong paddles we'd left at the park the day we first met her.  She had been going to the park daily, sometimes multiple times per day, trying to catch us again, just to make sure she could return our paddles. Since we bought some replacement paddles on Sunday for the ones we'd left at the park, we now have four of them and can play doubles. :-)

Bread is delicious and inexpensive here, but it seems to go stale quickly.  To use up the bread, our oldest son has had some cooking lessons in making stuffed French toast. (Stuffed French Toast is easy to make.  Make a cream cheese and your favorite flavor jam sandwich.  Dip in a mixture of egg, milk, vanilla flavoring, and cinnamon and fry it on both sides in a dap of butter until browned.  Serve topped with powdered sugar, syrup, or whipped cream and fruit.)  He has made it for breakfast just about every day since then and this morning (Tuesday), he fixed breakfast for me.  MMM!

Today (8/4) we went to Old Town with the Sock family, missionaries here in Poland and the couple whose church we have been attending. They met us at our house at 10 a.m., and we followed them into the city.  We walked around and looked around the area, ate lunch outside at a Polish restaurant (Old Town Market Place is filled with outdoor seating for various eating establishments),

Rabbit

Cheese, cracker, and fruit appetizer
(For those wondering, that is a water bottle on the left. :) )

Chicken salad and Spinach and Feta Stuffed Pierogi

U Barssa - The outside of the restaurant where we ate lunch.

looked at some of the shops, viewed the outside of the castle at Castle Square,  old churches, and various landmarks, and ate some ice cream.  We were also reminded that it is unwise to take a three year old into the small shops filled with displays, especially when said child grabs for a display of shot glasses.  Ahhh!

A pretty good idea of our expression...

We caught all but one of them, and even though you could hear it hit the floor, it did not break. Phew!   All the rest of our shopping was done while one parent stayed outside with DD.  We will save teaching that lesson for another time.

We were also introduced today to paying for public bathrooms.  It costs 2 zloty or 1 euro. Sorry, no photos of that are available. :-) 

The architecture in Old Town is beautiful, and the history is really interesting.  It is so named because it is the oldest part of Warsaw and was originally built in the 13th century. For various reasons, including being bombed by the Germans during WW2, it has been reconstructed, often using as much salvaged material as possible.  Today the temperatures were in the 90's, and it was hot, but we are planning a trip back there on a cooler day to tour the castle and look around more.

The outside of the castle (middle building)

The Castle

Zamek Królewski w Warszawie
(translates The Royal Castle in Warsaw)

The rest of this week's weather is forecasted to be hot (between 95 and 100- eek!), so we will be missing our air conditioning.  Still the house here is cement and the inside has stayed bearable.  It has a tendency to become stuffy upstairs in the bedrooms, but the nighttime temperatures drop down in to the 60's.  Our activities this week will need to include staying cool.

Here are a bunch of pictures from our day:

The Old Town Market Place

A cool, old door

Castle Square

This is an actual Inn located in Castle Square.

Not everything in Old Town is unfamiliar....Subway and Pizza Hut! :D