Hint: Under the meat choices menu, do NOT order the one marked "other".
My plan was to check out the mermaid statue this is famous in Warsaw. So I went down Swietokrzyska and found my favorite pirogi place (the chain I first went to, Zapiecek). Ordered the blueberry pirogis in sour cream, apple juice with crushed mint, and a latte.
The trip down the street, once past the touristy shopping areas, ran me through a more working neighborhood with a nice collection of street art. Now that the tourist season was essentially over, the road construction was on full force. Unfortunately, this meant that when I finally did get to the mermaid stature, they were rebuilding the entire area around her - so she was in a protective cage.
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a chick fish in a cage...
Meh, there was still a way around the construction luckily along the river. This was actually kind of cool because, with the weather, construction, and weekday - I was the only person walking along the riverside. This allowed me a lot of peace and quiet along with some incredible views of the river and bridges.
The walk eventually dumped me off into the park. Again, there were very few people about and the leaves had just started turning and dropping in force. I love overcast fall days when the weather is just between a warm long sleeve shirt and having to wear a fleece sweater over it. It lets you walk at a slow pace with he zipper up, or a fast pace with the zipper down and the cool air hitting your chest. I think I like it so much as it reminds me of my days as a child in Boston. Regardless, the park was one long massive park filled with trees, street lamps, and a yellow, orange, and light brown carpet of leaves.
There were statues and monuments littered about the park to surprise you as you walked along. And occasional fountain, bridge, or art gallery would crop up. When I passed over a major freeway, the are just past it had a modern art gallery in a building that used to be a summer palace. It was showing an exhibition of the Polish and British art that shown in the early 90s. A time when Britain was in economic turmoil and Poland was trying to adjust to a life post-Communism. During this period some famous art works came into being whose sole purpose was to essentially shock the art world. As with most modern art galleries, I found about 70% of it to be not to my tastes and the rest to be oddly fascinating. I was especially taken by a set of three black and white photos showing a nude girl, then young woman with child, and then a mature woman with her late teenage son naked on her lap. If they weren't the same person, it was an incredible job of finding models that looked to be the same family. There was also a brilliant group of boxed "Barbie" dolls labeled as Ken's aunt. But instead of having the grotesque over sexed Barbie figures, they had Barbie faces and average middle aged housewife bodies in 1940s matronly nightgowns. They painted a subtle picture that the Barbies were a mockery of a real female form.
And, of course, they had weird shit like this. Its Mr. It's teenage siamese daughters.
The museum was fun but I couldn't wait to get back out to the park. The more interesting views and monuments were located on the southern end of the park where the Modern Art Gallery was located.
View from the back of the gallery.
There was also another palace of some sort that was built directly on one of the mini lakes that decorated the park. Surrounding that were peacocks and tiny red squirrels zooming around int he trees. I even heard a noise and zoom in with the camera to catch a tiny mouse head peeking out from underneath the leaves. Unfortunately the pic was out of focus and the little guy bailed prior to me getting another snapshot.
I wandered about until about 4:30 when I realized I had seen pretty much everything in the six hours I had spent cruising around. Awesome day was had. I might be changing my mind about this Warsaw thing.
So anyway, I headed out to the bus stop and figured it out enough to head back to the hostel. I found that there is a bus stop just around the corner that I can hit, which made me very happy. On the way back I stopped by the cafe on the corner that happened to have some tasty smells wafting from inside. I ended up getting a beef and lamb cooked in an open filo doughish pastry, olive plate, beef tenderloin in a white wine basil sauce over noodle, and a glass some some excellent white wine. Yums.
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