After shopping for the pet supplies yesterday at the Galleria, which looks like any indoor shopping mall in the US – except perhaps more beautiful desserts we were walking to Airbnb on a different street and I found this piece of litter. It was day 6 of our trip and walking around in Krakow and the first piece of litter I have seen. I picked it up and threw it away. The lack of any trash on the streets is a bit disorienting.
There is also very little obesity and I have seen nothing I would consider morbid obesity. In general the vast majority of people young and old are normal weight with some overweight but obesity is very uncommon. Why? Perhaps they walk more and don’t eat while they are walking creating litter. Certainly the diet does have a fair amount of starch. The piergi are quite good – nice texture and some flavor. They do have quite a few without meat, but I think much of the flavor of Polish food come from meat and meat broth.
This is Polish borscht – beet broth with mushroom and cheese dumplings. I did get some sense of taste from the broth and dumplings. It was one of my more positive eating experiences here.
We discovered a shop on outdoor market that does only loaded baked potatoes – several without meat. The Polish really know how to do a baked potato. They seem to pretty much mash the potato in the skin and then load it up. The large one was 3 meals for me. It wasn’t as flavorful as I hoped but I had brought some Tony’s seasoning with me and that really helped.
Polish beer is quite good. There is a variety of other foods here as well. There are a lot of Pizza places, a few sushi, Indian, Vietnamese and vegan places. There are lots of desserts and ice creams. My companions are really enjoying the Polish meat dishes.
After seeing a fair bit of Old Town and new Krakow, we had not noticed anything that looked like low-income housing so we asked Teresa where the slums were and she emphatically indicated there were no slums in Krakow. We have seen a total of 5 homeless men in 6 days.
It almost seems too good to be true. It has only been 30 years since Poland became a democracy. Perhaps they have not had enough time to create the concentration of wealth we have in the US.
Tamara Unleashed 