O God, you exist! You exist, yet you take not vengeance! Haven’t you had enough of Moscow’s crimes – or – or are you yourself a Muscovite? – Frédéric Chopin.

I visited Poland in December 2019 with some friends just before COVID started. We covered Kraków and Warsaw, and stayed a night in the city of Ostrołęka.

Polish Cities

• Warsaw – 8/10 (2019)
• Kraków – 7/10 (2019)
• Ostrołęka – 6/10 (2019)
• Wieliczka Salt Mine – 9/10 (2019)

Surprising as it seems, both Kraków and Warsaw were probably my two favorite big cities in CEE. Most young people are basically Anglophones, though as a Russian speaker, I’d be able to pick up Polish within 3-6 months (this is the typical amount of time needed for the multitudes of Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants). If I had a gun pointed to my head and forced to downshift in CEE/Balkans, then I think Warsaw or Kraków would be my first choices before Belgrade, Prague, and Budapest in that order.

Poland is secularizing at a very fast clip; a long-time expat told me that back in the 2000s, Poles would cross themselves when their bus passed by a church, but now this never happens. Certainly an encouraging development for Polish liberalization. Perhaps my most surprising observation is that Poles have the closest national character to Russians of all the peoples I have encountered in my travels. This isn’t necessarily an accolade, because this includes not just positive aspects but highly negative ones as well. I expounded briefly on this at Hanania’s blog and elsewhere, though I do intend to do a proper travel post on Poland sometime soon (now that I’ve begun to organize the Travel section).

Kraków hosts a beautiful historical ensemble, many exquisite museums, and a wholesome Christmas market albeit one that’s next to a much less wholesome prostitution district whose madams are aggressive about pushing their “wares” (not regulated as in more civilized/liberal countries like the Red Lights district in Amsterdam). The nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine was one of the highlights of our trip, although my companions were too lazy and disorganized to arrange the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Warsaw was thoroughly leveled during WW2, so it’s now a bland modern metropolis, but that’s fine; at the end of the day, the vast bulk of all major East European cities consist of soulless commieblocks (which are at least in Poland often renovated). It has a nice Chopin museum, one of my favorite classical composers (and also where I discovered the quote that headlines this section). The lost Jewish heritage of Poland is ever present and there are a large number of lavishly funded museums and cultural centers catering to Holocaust descendants from Israel and the US who constitute a significant share of the tourist influx.

Polish cuisine is very good to the Slavic palate, reminiscent of Russian, especially in its diversity of complex soups. I think I would be able to subsist on Polish cuisine indefinitely.