Discovering Poland

Food, lodging and getting around

Food. After my first trip, a friend asked me if it was all cabbage soup. No! Although I like cabbage soup. Poland has by all accounts a thriving food scene and I had more recommendations than I could use. And I was seduced by the milk bar. Before I arrived, I’d looked at TripAdvisor and Like a Local where I found cascades of high ratings and recommendations. There’s such a variety of restaurants that you can go in almost any culinary direction. And if your bliss is pizza, it’s a great favorite, so no worries there.

I didn’t worry much about food in Poland. I generally had good luck. All of the places I stayed offered breakfast and I usually alternated between cafés and bakeries for other meals. I dined from the grocery store, too, where I got mostly fruit and packaged salads. Some of these are not for the faint of palate. (I am known to eat “meals of desperation” now and then but usually stick to my café-a-day meal plan.)

Without chronicling every meal, I’ll just say I ate very well when I wanted to. In Kraków I ate dinner out at three hotel-recommended restaurants (I got pierogis at one but the pricey pierogis in Warsaw were more luscious). All of the meals were good. I had a fair number of sandwiches from kiosks, too. In Gdańsk, I enjoyed a bakery / tea room and small café, plus the inevitable sandwiches. But my real surprise was at La Petite Fleur hotel in the smaller city of Toruń, where I bought room and board, and had three wonderful meals a day. Polish inspired with a French flair, prettily served in the hotel’s cozy Gothic-era cellar.

Lodging. I like hotels for shorter stays, and the larger cities in Poland have all the big hotel brands. My home away in Warsaw is the InterContinental but there are other choices like apartments and Airbnb. In Toruń, hotels in the old town took some looking into and I was very happy with La Petite Fleur. In Gdańsk I chose the Mercure for its predictability and location. In Kraków, I stayed in the charming Cracowdays Hotel, just a short walk from the center of the old town. For this trip I looked at but didn’t choose Airbnb, and didn’t look for apartments otherwise. When I was picking up something for supper one evening in Gdańsk I met a woman from Taiwan who told me about the nice apartment she’d rented for a few days. Strangely enough, this woman and I had met earlier that day on the way to Malbork castle, an hour by train from Gdańsk. Imagine running into each other several hours later in a Gdańsk bakery. That’s one of the great things about travel.

Getting around – train. Warsaw’s main train station, Warszawa Centralna, is easy to navigate, and it’s right in the middle of downtown. Skip the information window and the long queue at the ticket windows. The Intercity office is across the terminal. Take a number and an agent will help you. The two times I used the office my agents were helpful, spoke pretty good English and humored me when I tried out some Polish on them.

First class wasn’t particularly expensive so I took first except on my day trip to Malbork. On a train with older carriages, first meant a closed compartment for six, except that there was only one other person in mine. On new express trains – the Pendalinos – we had open seating and a light meal served at the seat. Second class, which I took to Malbork, was comfortable but crowded, and I would have worried more about where I was going to put my luggage than my body on the longer trips. A big benefit of first class is storage space.

I didn’t use an Intercity office everywhere. In Gdańsk I queued up at the windows to change a ticket. The agent spoke English and all was well. In Malbork by contrast, I had to buy my ticket back to Gdańsk. The ticket agent was helpful but didn’t speak English and I could only say things in Polish like hello, thank you and where is the train station. I’d copied out the online timetable, but the agent consulted a big book along with her computer and proposed (in writing) times that weren’t at all what I wanted. I wrote the time I wanted. She pondered. We persevered and eventually I got a ticket for my chosen train, not long before it arrived. That’s what to do. Stay mellow and persevere. And we both kept smiling.

All of my train trips went smoothly, with only one delay on the way to Gdańsk, about a half hour at Bydgoszcz, where I spent my time practicing the pronunciation of Bydgoszcz. It’s actually not very hard to say.