Polska

I've gotten the question several times, "why Poland?" The honest answer was a combination of: I wanted to go somewhere I knew little about, somewhere different from western Europe, somewhere not too touristy, and somewhere that I wasn't sure would be a safe place to travel on my own (it is completely safe, by the way, I've just read to avoid night trains).

Panorama of Krakow.

Poland was the first surprisingly excellent choice I made for travel this summer (the other being my first-ever solo trip to Sweden, Estonia, and Cataluña in northern Spain, but more on that in another post). I had relatively high expectations for Poland, and they were more than exceeded, in Krakow in particular. The whole country, from the Tatra mountains at the southern border with Slovakia to Warsaw (I really still can't believe that this city was more than 85% destroyed during WWII and managed to rebuild and bounce back in a matter of only about 20 years - incredible) to the Baltic coast, is all really beautiful. And, like Hungary, everything is really cheap and the cuisine is awesome (provided that you like potatoes, cabbage, sausage, and dumplings, to all of which I say, keep it comin').

Morskie Oko, the largest glacial lake in the Tatra mountains.

Sunset in Torun.

PIEROGIS!

So anyway, this blog is really more supposed to be about Spain and the joys of living here, so I'll keep the non-Spanish stuff to as much of a minimum as I'm capable. I'll leave you with two things:

1. in Poland we went to the cities/towns of Krakow, Zakopane (in the Tatras mountains), Warsaw, Torun, Malbork, Gdansk, and Poznan,

2. and a piece of advice - if you have the chance to travel to Poland, do it. It's so underrated and so worth the visit.