Of Poland: The Cheap Thrills of Night Photography

One thing Poland and Latvia have in common? They're both dark a lot these days. Something else in common? Flowers. I'm not sure where they import cut flowers from during November/December but it's got to be a decent distance from both Latvia and Poland. And yet there was a decent-sized flower market in Krakow, as in Riga.


One difference: Although the highways in Poland are notoriously terrible, I don't think there are many six-lane highways going through Riga, as the one pictured below in Warsaw.

Of Poland: Don't forget the beer!

Also in Krakow: A lot of really good bars. An embarrassment of good bars. We couldn't visit them all. Didn't stop us from trying. I guess if you want a town with good bars, it doesn't hurt to have a lot of students and a seasonal burst of tourists to keep them rolling in cash.

In Warsaw: Not so many good bars. The above picture is from a typically Central-European bar; I.e., a dark basement with a bunch of wooden tables and a tap somewhere. Lucky for Central Europe, they have good beer. The other bar we stopped by in Warsaw did feature maybe the happiest, drunkest group of 50-year-olds I've ever seen, so at least they were putting the bar to good use.

Below: Walking proof that the people of Krakow are dedicated to the lively art of beer consumption, or at least getting money from tourists who are.

Of Poland: Le Waffle

Continuing our thoughts from yesterday about street food: Our hosts home is across the street from perhaps the nicest park in Warsaw. They report that Poles line up "for hours" during the summer at the waffle stand in the park, which is thankfully open year-round so we didn't miss out on this cultural experience. Also: peacocks! He wanted waffle, but left disappointed.

Of Poland: Cuisine

If you watch as much CNN International in various hotel rooms as our correspondents do, you have surely seen the near-infinite array of tourism and/or "someone build your factory here please" ads for random countries from Malaysia to Montenegro. Well, Poland's ads tout their wonderful cuisine, fresh produce, and innovative restaurants. It sounds like a joke - surely Polish cuisine is like all its Eastern European brethren: fry pork, boil potatoes and cabbage until soggy. Well, yes and no. We had one really nice meal in a restaurant in Krakow. (We had another really nice meal in Warsaw, but that was Thanksgiving dinner cooked by an American, so, disqualified.) Nice ingredients, well prepared, a step above what you'd expect.

Of course, our other meal in Krakow was, as pictured above, pierogis bought outside at the Christmas market on the square. And really, they were delicious. In fact, I would say that if I could choose to have in Latvia either the restaurant we ate at the night before, or the street food options we had for various snacks in Krakow, I would undoubtedly choose the latter. Latvia, I love you, but where is your street food?

Thankfully, one thing Latvia and Poland share is Christmas market mulled wine. We made many stops at the cleverly barrel-shaped wine stand below, and look forward to similar in Riga sometime soon.

Of Poland

OK, even your correspondents are beginning to get a little tired of being in Riga so little. But such are the burdens of being an international journalist and part-time diplomat. We only have so much time in Europe, and there's a lot of Europe to see.


So, we went to Poland. Good friends there, and good pierogis, and old castles. Find here pictures with serious technical problems that we like a lot anyway, from Warsaw (top), Krakow (bottom), and somewhere in between (in between).

Of Copenhagen: Special Saturday Edition on The Famous Tivoli Gardens

If you buy a guidebook to Copenhagen, the number-one sight typically listed is the Tivoli Gardens, a park with rides and shops and shows and such. They're closed in November. But here are a couple pictures of what you can see from the outside.

Of Christiania (Copenhagen)

This is outside the show from yesterday's post. (It's the front door that I didn't find, because it faces on a dirt road rather than the proper street.) Having come in via the wrong way, I didn't see the big signs indicating that they would prefer visitors didn't snap any tourist photos in Christiania. Being a self-proclaimed independent "free town," there is some fairly lax enforcement of drug laws. And maybe other laws. Luckily, nobody beat me up or smashed my camera or anything. Of course, I was giving the hash dealers a pretty wide berth. On the more typically licit side of things, they had a pretty good post-show kebab stand.