Warsaw Day 3 and 4

The last two days have been excellent. On Tuesday we went to a place called Wilanow. It's a park in the very south of Warsaw with some very old castles. It would probably be much more beautiful during summer but during winter it had an interesting feel to it. The bus ride there was fairly long but quite interesting. On the way back there were some very drunk men on the bus. I took a sound recording with my camera which I hope to post somehow. We got Andrzej and Ana to take a listen to it. I guess the guy was talking about some beautiful teacher with long brown hair he had once.

Yesterday, we explored the museum of the Rising. In August 1944, after many years of Nazi control, the citizens of Warsaw staged an uprising, which was quite successful considering the odds against them. It lasted only 63 days but they had large parts of Warsaw under control and even instituted their own government again. The USSR could have helped them but didn't, because they eventually wanted to take it over themselves, and such a group of young, well-trained insurgents might have been troublesome for the Stalinist regime to come. The people of Poland really had it bad in the 20th century. They finally get independence in 1918 and then in 1939 they are brutally oppressed by the Nazis, and then they get "liberated" by the Soviet Union.

After the museum, Austin and I began preparing a Mexican feast for Andrzej and Ana. It was comprised of beans, beef, home-made salsa and tortillas.

Will