We awoke to some snow overnight, a nice dusting outside our window and on the roofs. It was minus 1 but then the weather forecast proved correct and it started warming up and became foggy and rainy. This meant we decided not to go to Lazienki Park, as planned for the morning. The Park is huge and has many things to look at, but we figured it wasn’t going to be enjoyable in the rain.
The view out our apartment window was very pretty until all the snow washed away!
Family ice skating…..
With the park off the agenda, and the rain continuing to fall, we decided to let the kids go ice skating again since it’s both cheap and apartment adjacent, so when we all got wet and cold we could duck back and warm up or get changed.
Unlike the evening session, the day before, it was pretty quiet down on the rink. It was also rather wet. At 10am there were far less people than at 5pm. All five of us skated this morning and I’ve had far less practice on these holidays than the others, and continued to be terrible (although not as bad as some other people on the rink, surprisingly).
Due to my questionable skating ability I quickly got soaked gloves from grabbing onto the railing. The kids were doing much better and having plenty of fun and there weren’t too many crashes this morning.
After an hour of skating, most of us had lost feeling in our hands and the rain was bucketing down, so we went and got dry gloves and quickly warmed up in our apartment before heading out for the day.
Off, across the river….
We head out towards the Vistula river and across the bridge to the Praga neighbourhood. The walk down behind the apartment gave great views of the back of the old town and Castle gardens.
We’d only seen the Castle from the Square side, and the Castle and it’s gardens looked much bigger from this view.
As we head off on foot over the Vistula River, it definitely wasn’t looking all that inviting. The Vistula river had frozen sections as we crossed it but by now most of the snow on the banks had melted. We had great views of the river from our apartment but hadn’t ventured down this far on foot until now.
On the far bank of the Vistula river is the Praga neighbourhood, which is known for it’s street art and many good restaurants and bars. It looks rather different from both the Old Town and New Town areas we’d explored the previous day.
Praga….
Just on the other side of the river is St Florian’s Cathedral (or the Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel and St Florian the Martyr). Not only does it have a long name, it’s also huge as we could clearly see it from our apartment window, 2.5km away.
We explored the neighbourhood and found some interesting buildings, and plenty of street art.
We had a tour at the Polish Vodka Museum booked for 1.30pm so thought we’d better have an early lunch. Anto had found an interesting little restaurant on the way to the museum, and after our uninspiring takeaway dinner the night before we were keen for some good food.
The lunch place turned out to be rather good. Astrid varied from her usual chicken Caesar salad which she’d had a million times on this trip, and got a chicken Caesar burger. Anto and I found food with vegetables! I had a celeriac gratin with cherries and Anto found some brussel sprouts with his chicken. Soren ate an entire beef cheek while Zinnia harvested all my cherries along with her foccaccia.
While we were eating lunch the rain had stopped and it was now a whole 3 degrees. We had another 900m to get to the museum but our lunch had been more leisurely than we hoped so we had to high-tail it there to make it in time.
The Polish Vodka Museum
We had to run from lunch to get to our 1.30pm tour of the Polish vodka museum, which is located in an old distillery, that was used up until 2007 and is in a rather interesting building.
The Polish Vodka Museum rated pretty well as an attraction in Warsaw, and we thought a museum tour would be fun and something different to do. It was certainly different to anything else we’d done so far on this trip. With the word ‘museum’ in the title the kids were not super impressed that they were being dragged to a museum, but ended up quite enjoying it as there were plenty of interactive exhibits.
While we were waiting for our tour to start we checked out the funky vodka display in the shop and gallery area. This part of the museum is free to visit without a tour.
We’d booked the tour as it was meant to be interesting and good value. As a bonus kids are free on the tour so it wasn’t a particularly expensive activity.
Our tour guide was Marta and she was very good. It ended up being just the 5 of us and 3 other guys (1 from New Zealand and 2 from Chile). We learnt a heap about the history of vodka in Poland. It’s often been used for medicinal purposes and is very culturally ingrained. Polish weddings definitely sound wild!
We learnt about the different methods of producing vodka and a lot of history about how vodka production changed through the wars and changing boundaries of Poland.
The kids had fun with the interactive bits of the tour and asked heaps of great questions.
At the end of the tour there was a tasting session. This was for the adults only… the kids were only allowed water and pretzels. Despite vodka consumption being very much a part of Polish culture, they have very strict rules on consumption of alcohol by minors. In the tour the kids weren’t even permitted the smell the vodka. The had to make do with their water and pretzels!
We tasted 4 vodkas and they were all very distinct. We learnt to tell the difference between potato, wheat and rye vodkas. Our wheat vodka had a charcoal flavour. With each taste we got to judge the vodka type by the smell how much it burns and where the burning occurs. Yes really! The descriptions of flavours, smell and how much it burns were very accurate. Potato vodka doesn’t burn past the mouth, and wheat and rye between. It was all rather entertaining.
Anto and I enjoyed the Vodka museum tour and it is definitely worth checking out if you are in Warsaw. I’m not going to be enjoying too much straight vodka any time soon but it was very informative. The kids also found it quite entertaining, and while it wasn’t as fun as ice skating it turned out to be a good afternoon activity. The museum shop also had a great range of vodkas at very reasonable prices and we picked up a couple of interesting ones to take with us to Scandinavia.
We escaped the tour, just after 3pm with no one being too drunk, and found an Aldi nearby to purchase some cheap snacks for our long travel day the next day. It had finally stopped raining but was still only a couple of degrees. We had thought we might try for Lazienki Park in the afternoon but it was now getting a bit dark to go to the park, with the early sunset. We decided to catch the tram back to the Old Town.
Sunset wanders…..
On the walk back to the tram stop we saw more of the Praga area and it certainly looks different to the Old and New town areas.
As we waited for our tram back across the river we had a beautiful 3.30pm sunset to watch as we head back across the bridge and into the Old Town.
As we reached the Old Town, the sun was definitely gone for the day but it meant we were treated to all the pretty lights again.
The Warsaw Museum…..
Much to the kids annoyance, Marta had alerted us to the fact that the Warsaw museum (which is in the market square near our apartment) is free on Thursdays….. and today was a Thursday! The kids definitely did not want to go to a museum of ‘old and boring things’ and were not impressed with this plan.
The Warsaw museum is actually square, behind the ice skating rink. We’d been looking at these buildings for the past couple of days and thinking how pretty they were but not realising what they were.
It was an amazing museum. The 6 buildings side by side are 6 floors each and all 6 floors are interconnected. The basements are original from before the war time destruction. Other bits of the buildings have been restored and as you change between the buildings there are different levels, with various exhibits.
Many of the exhibits were about the history of Warsaw and a lot of pre-war artifacts recovered from the destroyed sections of the city. Each building and floor had different exhibits and we did visit a fair few over the course of about an hour. The kids, despite being initially resistant to the museum plan did find quite a few exhibits they were interested in.
You could easily spend several hours to see all the different exhibits but the kids were starting to get restless and hungry. Before we agreed to leave we did drag them up to the top floor observation point where you could see the ice-skating rink below. The staircase and chandeliers leading up to the top floor were also rather spectacular. It was certainly an interesting museum, and worth the visit.
Our last Polish Dinner….
It was now a whole 5.30pm and time for dinner. It had been dark for so long that it felt much later!
This was our last Polish dinner so we all voted for somewhere with some local cuisine and found a restaurant in the Old Town not far from the Warsaw museum and our apartment. They had an interesting collection of watches on display and it appeared to be a small family run restaurant. The owner/waitress found us very amusing and was somewhat confused by Soren’s desire to continue his festival of Steak tartare. We did explain he knew exactly what it was and assured her he would eat it.
Soren declared it the best steak tartare yet, even better than some in France! Astrid and I had our last lot of dumplings and Anto and Zinnia had some more potato pancakes with goulash.
On the way home from dinner we engaged in a bit of last Polish souvenir shopping in the many stores around the Old Town. Then it was back to the apartment for the dreaded packing up again! There were only a few more times we had to do this, thank goodness.
We’d been in Poland a week now. It was our first time to Poland and had all enjoyed it, but tomorrow we were heading north bound for Scandinavia….
Up next…..
We farewell Warsaw and with a long day ahead there are various travel mishaps including airport IT problems and Norwegian trains stuck in tunnels! A big day with Poland, Oslo and then into Sweden for a weekend with friends in the snowy Swedish countryside.
