Travelling Poland

I've put a ticker to measure my walking at the bottom of the page (thank you Robin!).

As I mentioned in my last post, my friend came from Pakistan for a short visit this weekend. (She has requested to remain anonymous:). Here's what she brought for us:

Look at all those gorgeous Pashminas! My favorite is that red one:)

When you have a visitor (which is quite rare for us) you determine the amount of time that they have to see things and plan accordingly. Warsaw, while I love it, is not the prettiest city. It's becoming a very modern city, but it doesn't have much in the way of old buildings (it was 85% destroyed during World War II and the entire old town was flattened). Now, as a part of its history, there are many communist era buildings which, having not lived through communism, can be very interesting - but not pretty - to see. So, Saturday we took her to the Palace of Culture where you can see the city of Warsaw from above. They currently have a great kids exhibit going on inside called "Playing with Einstein" "Zabawy z Einsteinem" (showing until the 15th of September for my Warsaw bloggy friends). The exhibit has a children's museum feel to it.

Blaise was confused by the hologram balls.View of the Old Town from the Palace of Culture

Then, after having talked to my Polish friends, we headed down to Krakow. Krakow is a beautiful old city and THE place to come to see the old Polish architecture. It remained virtually intact during WWII.

The Cloth hall in Krakow's Rynek.

Now, this was the most bitter cold weekend we've had the entire winter, so we didn't actually spend that much time outside. We did a lot of coffee shop stopping to get warm:).

Of course, visitors to Poland all want to see Auschwitz (Oświęcim). This was Dylan's and my second time, but he wound up taking the boys for McDonald's and to play elsewhere. Pamela had never been before.

The end of the railroad tracks at Birkenau Concentration Camp.