Central Europe part 2

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Just finished day two of Strasbourg and still going strong! I stumbled upon a European fair today and saw, among other things, an immense Alsacian cow, a footvolley competition, the Tesla Roadster, as well as possibly the worst car in existence. With that, back to Poland!

After we left Berlin for Poland, I quickly came to realize that the Polish countryside rivals Nebraska and Wyoming for most boring drive. At one point I fell asleep looking at a stand of trees, and when I woke up a few hours later, I thought we were still passing the same stands of trees! We arrived at the Barcyz Valley, though, and the scenery became much nicer. The Barycz Valley has the largest number of freshwater ponds in Europe, and consequently also hosts an amazing array of birds and fish. While we were there, we were lucky enough to see a black stork flying in the distance, which is apparently a big deal, because our guide had only seen it once before since she'd been living there. We also visited a carp pond, (which turns out to be a very delicious fish!) and I sprained my ankle very badly while running. Because we walk so much it still hasn't completely healed, but I don't notice it too much anymore. The people here were so nice, and I was pleasantly surprised by how delicious Polish food (especially perogies!) is. We then left the countryside for the city of Wroclaw, which was much less appealing...

Although the city was nice, and incredibly cheap, I didn't actually like the people that much. It may have been because I couldn't communicate with them beyond saying yes, no, and thanks, but in general they were fairly hostile to Americans. Despite that, we saw some incredible cathedrals, as well as the Centennial Hall, which absolutely dwarfed every other piece of architecture on the trip. It was here that I wished a had a zoom-out feature on my camera the most. It was basically impossible to capture on camera just how immense this center was, but I tried anyways and have since put my attempts up on facebook. We also visited the Wroclaw zoo, which turned out to be completely different from American zoos in a couple of ways. First, the animals are really poorly guarded against escape and against people; the lemurs had a 3 foot high fence, and you could walk into their exhibit! An arboretum with birds was guarded by a door with flaps covering it. Most troubling to me was the horse/zebra exhibits where you could pet the animals, and again, if they wanted to, they only had a small 3 foot fence hindering their escape. Despite the complete lack of animal security, the zoo seemed very nice, and clearly cared more about species preservation than displaying the animals for profit. Later on we were asked to give a formal presentation on our trip to the zoo, which we very informally presented by pretending to be animals; I was an endangered Polish horse that explained the zoo's financial situation...

Overall, I was very glad to be out of Wroclaw when we left, and I found the next stop, the Czech Republic, to be much more appealing. More on that soon!

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