Visiting Poland in RL
 

Has anyone here visited Poland in real life? Just come back from five days in Warsaw myself.

Krakow
 

The high school at which I teach [history] has a World Travelers' Club. I talked them into choosing an Eastern European trip several years back, mostly because I wanted to visit Krakow (that's 100% to T2k!). It was worth the social capital I had to spend. As a chaperone, all I had to pay for was lunch, snacks, and souvenirs. I toured the Wawel, dipped my fingers in the Vistula- it was awesome! The only bad part was having to choose between a guided tour of the nearby underground salt mines and free time in the old town. I chose the latter. I don't really regret it, but the folks that went to the mines had a blast and it was a really unique experience.

The most powerful part of that particular tour, however, was the visit to Auschwitz, which isn't all that far from Krakow. I don't believe in ghosts, but that place has a feeling that I've never felt any place else in my travels. I shed some tears there.

IIRC, @Spartan-117 actually lived in Poland for a bit.

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Humble brag?

My wifes family is Polish. Blew them away 23 years ago when i knew so much about Poland. Expecting a young lad (me) to be talking about footy, drinking, cars etc and then during the first family interrogation i got all deep and meaningful about poland! I didn't share my knowledge only came about because in my T2K world Poland had been razzed to the ground in a fictional WWIII, but its still funny to this day.

We were this close to going to Europe in late 2019 but it fell through. Then covid. Visiting Poland was on the cards though.

Hope you loved the trip Silent Hunter.

great story Raelus.

Rae is correct. I lived in Warsaw for three years and loved almost every minute of it.

If you just got back, you probably had great weather. And everything was probably green and lovely.

For follow up trips. Krakow is the obvious next step. After that, probably the tri-cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot. For a longer trip to Poland, these (Krakow to the South of Warsaw, and the tri-cities to the North) are all accessible from Warsaw via the high-speed 'Pendolino' train. Going North to South from Warsaw is easy - east to west typically requires longer train trips or longer drives.

It was actually rather hot at times.

I went over to Lublin by train, where the old castle is now the city museum. They had some images of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa and I immediately remember that was in T2K.

I went to Katowice and Sosnowiec 18 years ago to visit my then-girlfriend. The 20 hours bus trip from West Germany alone was an experience. I loved the trip immensly and found Katowice very worth to live in. Sosnowiec? Not so much, it's a typical socialist crime in architecture.

We did Krakow and environs, the salt mine and Auschwitz. Krakow was a gem of a city. It's like Prague or Italy beautiful, and I routinely fed the four of us for around 12$ for sit-down meals, not just zapies and big pretzels. After having lived a few years in the UK by the time we visited Poland, I was deliriously happy with the food. Everything was great. There were some seriously good Middle Eastern restaurants in the Jewish Quarter. The people were really nice, especially to our kiddos.
Alas, the covid wrecked our follow-on trip to Gdansk but so it goes.