Torun to Warsaw

Sunday, July 5

After another wonderful breakfast at the hotel, we drove to Torun, picked up the ladies, & headed toward Warsaw by another route. As we neared Warsaw, we looked for my aunt’s grave. We didn’t find it before it started raining heavily, so hard that it became difficult to see the road ahead. July is the rainy season in Poland, but we’d been fortunate to have lovely weather up until this day. We consequently gave up the search. I enjoyed seeing the road signs & took quite a few photos of them. A silhouette of a town indicated we were entering a village and needed to lower our speed. As we left the town limits, the same silhouette with a red line through it meant we could resume highway speed.
We had lunch at one of the Sphinx restaurants, a Polish chain with 96 locations all over Poland, 17 of them in Warsaw. Modern, good food, reasonably priced, large portions, Oriental & international menu. A trio of dipping sauces accompanied our meat, and there were several accompanying salads, as well as an assortment of breads. Dinner for five, including tip, was 125zł - $38.
We dropped off the ladies at their home and returned to the hotel. We all changed clothes for the evening mass in Old Town, where my cousins attended. I contacted my facebook friend who said she & her husband attend the same church and were married there. We arranged to meet at a coffee house near the church at 8pm. I don’t remember the name, & although we took photos in the area, I do not know if any were photos of this church.
Needing a couple of items, I went to a couple of stores at Centrum Galleria – the larger ones were open until 8pm on Sundays. Bought some costume jewelry, went to Empik bookstore & found tote bags to carry my Polish pottery onto the plane back to Barcelona. One of the bags features the 754-foot Joseph Stalin Memorial Palace of Culture and Science as a giant gorilla – a bit of a joke. Many, if not most, Polish people in Warsaw loathe this structure. They call it the “Russian Gift” and say that the luckiest man in Warsaw is its caretaker who lives on the top floor – because he is the only one who cannot see it.
We picked up our tour hosts again & went to the café to meet my facebook friend and her husband. It was a nice visit. We had coffee, tea, cookies, & Polish cheesecake. The milk for the tea is always served warm. We took a few evening photos of the church and one another, then went to the 9:30pm mass. There were lots of folding chairs in addition to the pews – a lot of people attend this popular service, all in Polish, of course!
The next morning we had a flight to Barcelona, and my relatives wanted to send us off, so we arranged to meet at the hotel at 9:30am. As we were dropping them off, they invited us for tea, so we had another enjoyable visit. They own a Doberman, who cries when they leave him, likes people and hates other dogs. Although he went to obedience school as a puppy, it didn’t last, so he wears a spiked collar and muzzle when going out for a walk so that he can be controlled if another dog is nearby!