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.