sunnuntai 12. syyskuuta 2010

26.8. Seeing Poland – Warsaw part 2

We had another evening to spend in Warsaw, and we headed to  Warsaw Uprising Museum. Once again on my shame I have to confess that I was very unaware about this important occasion in Polish history. But luckily I’m civilized now. The museum itself was built from very human perspective, showing that behind the events, historical and sometimes cold facts there are real human beings with feelings, hopes, fears and in this case amazing bravery. In addition to photos, fact texts, plane replica and “usual” museum things the collection includes personal artifacts like clothes and love letters.

The most touching part was a film reconstructed from old photos. Here is one example, loaned from Wi-kipedia. The film was an aerial view showing the total disaster of Warsaw in the WW2. And the numbers. I do not remember the exact figures, but the scale was something quite near… Before WW2 Warsaw had several hundreds of thousands inhabitants. In the beginning of uprising less than 100 000. After uprising 4000. Again, human evilness is something totally inconceivable. Link to Wikipedia article of The Uprising.

As I have been in trouble with the language and menus, the fact that it can happen to native Pole also cheered me up a little. In an Italian restaurant a colleague of mine is a vegetarian he was ordering pasta and asked from the waitress about “speck”, the mystic word on the menu. None of us knew the word neither in English, Polish nor Finnish. The waitress was helpful and said very firmly that speck is a vegetable, green and showed that it’s about 5 cm long. Allrighty, sounds suitable for a vegetarian, so pasta with speck was what my colleague ordered. After quite long wait the food finally arrived, and turned out that his plate was full of pasta with ham. Not good. He asked where did the ham come from, and waitress said that’s it’s one of the ingredients of the ordered dish. Interesting, especially as there was no sign of the promised green veggie on the plate. With more studies, Google told as that speck really is a kind of ham. After little negotiation Greg got another dish – this time with lots of confirmations that it really is vegetarian version. But ten points to the waitress for keeping poker face; she was strict with her opinion and did not doubt for a second that possibly there was a slight mistake somewhere…

Oh, almost forgot! On the previous evening I ate cactus :D Previously I mentioned that I am a fan of those spiky plants, but then I meant it as decorations… However, a tex-mex style restaurant in Warsaw offered tortillas with cactus stuffing, and I tried it. If I wouldn’t have known better, I would have assumed that I eat green beans – but cactus it was!

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