June 4-Saturday
In transit for a long day toward home
Our last full day in Warsaw and Europe was a great ending to a wonderful five weeks away but home is looking really good now. We feel like the horses that see the barn in the distance and are ready for the final gallop back! Even though we have about 15 hours of flying and numerous hours in airports waiting, we are looking forward to a great day back to WA. and will return to the island by Sunday.
Yesterday, we were on our own in the lovely city of Warsaw and decided to venture back to the old city using the map in Polish as our guide. At least they use the Roman alphabet in this country even though the words are so full of consonants that it is difficult to read or pronounce. We walked under the streets using the underground shopping/metro center and bought Metro subway tickets and rode to the stop that we were able to decipher on the map as Old Town. We were correct on our few words of Polish and got off on the right stop. From there we walked for 20 minutes to the city gate. We were anxious to find the last of the gift items that we had wanted to bring home but to our dismay, lots of tourist goods but nothing like we wanted was available. We had passed up much nicer items in other countries but were afraid of overloading our bags for the flights so had decided to wait until the end to buy some of the gifts. Not a great idea as we realized that we should have bought them in other countries. Rule for the day: if you find something that you like, buy it then and don’t wait as you may never see it again or may not be able to find the shop that was selling it.
After spending many hours walking in the old city, we took our trusted old hand-held GPS and followed it back to the transit area where we got off and this time decided to board the street cars back to the hotel. No problems on transportation but we encountered another one of the many funny situations here. A girl was standing and holding on next to us while the bumpy street car moved along. With her arm around the metal pole, she was talking on one cell phone while texting on a second one! The younger generation in Eastern Europe likes their mobile phones even more than those in the US. as everyone has at least one in their hands at the same time.
We wanted to spend our final night in Europe doing something different and special so we dressed up and walked back to the center of town for a nice quick dinner in an outside café. We couldn’t find one with a menu posted in English and did not want to trust our very limited Polish to a chance encounter with something we didn’t want to eat so we chose to stop in a Turkish kebob place and ordered by the picture and each got a delicious gyro prepared by the owner who spoke some English and told us he was a native of Yemen. Another cultural experience: Turkish food prepared by a Yemenite speaking both Polish and English in the center of Warsaw!
After dinner, we walked further to the Warsaw Philharmonic Theater where we had bought concert tickets earlier in the day. We were surprised at how lovely this concert hall is, knowing full well that it was destroyed during the bombing of Warsaw and rebuilt to its old elegance after WWII just like the rest of this gorgeous city. Our seats were wonderful with a huge amount of leg room and the concert was excellent. Of course Donna had to make the joke that wherever you sit in this concert hall you are always sitting “behind a Pole.” This is the largest symphonic orchestra that we have ever visited and enjoyed this very much. Europeans find it important to bring culture to the masses so the tickets were only about $10 each and we were only 24 rows back from the orchestra on stage. We enjoyed our final evening immensely as we marveled at all we had experienced and strolled hand-in-hand back to our hotel.
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