August 21-22 Polish food! And 'do widzenia' Warszawa

August 21. After our day taking in lots of sites on foot, we took the next day a little easy. Lindsay went wandering to try and find a way down to the river and I did some ‘travel-keeping’ – catching up on various things (including some foot rest!). That evening we slipped out to eat locally. Lindsay was very taken with the Polish sausages and I had Polish sour rye soup with a white sausage, horseradish and egg which was delicious. That was topped off with dessert - a rather scrumptious apple tart accompanied by a selection of vodkas. They were delicious and interesting and vastly different from what I have tasted before. 

Delicious sour rye soup

Late afternoon the next day August 22, our last day in Warsaw, we took a 4 hour foodie tour – this one included dinner.  Before we met up with the guide Lindsay had to dash back to our apartment to get new batteries for his hearing aides – but he couldnt get it! It wasn’t the first time we had been locked out of our accommodation. They disabled the door codes a number of times and we wasted many hours waiting for them to be restored. Wrasw was our worst experience with accommodation to that point in our travels and we weren’t very happy. However ….. 

… we finally set off with a small group of 5 plus guide to sample some of Poland’s cuisine. Our guide gave us a little background to some of the dishes and a smattering of information about Warsaw but it was a bit thin on for our liking and we ended up visited only 3 places.  Of course there was the mandatory stop of for ‘pierogi’ (stuffed dumplings), Polish sour rye soup (which was not as good as the one I’d had the previous night) and dessert - a choice of vodkas. They were wonderful and all different  – honey and herbs, cherry, plum, quince (delicious) and potato.    We were supposed to have been given a booklet with recipes and cultural facts to take home but that didn’t eventuate. 

A great selection of vodkas

My favourites were the honey and quince

And so our visit to Warsaw ended. We were to be picked up around 4:30am - that is morning! so we did a hasty pack that night before a very fitful sleep. We had to get our luggage down a few flights of stairs in the wee hours and we weren’t looking forward to that but ……  I have to say that the essentials in our days here and elsewhere have been comfortable shoes and walking poles – and where possible, interesting food, we try it all (almost)!  The Polish food we sampled was OK but lacking a bit of zing. My shoes - and my stick! They’ve carried me over 100s of Kms on this trip and are still comfortable and the stick is surviving held together with rubber-bands and string.  I simply could not have survived the distance without them. I stole a name for my stick from a woman we had travelled with in Sardinia – ‘Hugo’.  Where you go, I go! Very appropriate.

'Hugo' and my Sketchers