Poland

Hi! We have been in Poland, staying in a little village near Warsaw (the capital) since last weekend. We are staying with a wonderful Polish family from the hospitality club who are teaching us all about Polish history and geography, and their daughter is showing us around, including all the current Polish trends.
Last night we went to a Polish pirate bar that was well decorated like a ship, to listen to a Polish sailor band that she was friends with. The whole bar was dancing on the benches and the tables all night and drinking beer from one meter tall cylinders in the middle of the tables that held 5 litres of beer and you filled up your mug from a spout at the bottom. Mike was very impressed with the ingenious design. Carli-Ann drank the most beer she has had in her life, a whole 0.5 litre glass over 2 hours, only possible because it is not taboo in Europe to mix beer with fruit juice or lemonade or cola and drink it with a straw. She is not making it a habit however.
We have enjoyed walking the streets of Warsaw, and we have visited their National Art Gallery and Museum of History, and have been discovering many monuments dedicated to various important moments in WWII and before. The history of this country is so evident everywhere, and we appreciate having good hosts to ask our difficult questions to and to get some new perspectives from. We even cluelessly bumbled right through a Polish music video being filmed on the street, so we might even be on Polish TV!
Our Polish family will be taking us to some other little towns this weekend, and then next week we will be visiting the Baltic sea and then Krakow and the Polish Tatra mountains. Anyone who is geographically keen will probably notice that we are not taking the most logical path around the continent, but rather the scenic route. Mike was joking that we are trying to write our names across Europe.
An interesting fact: dogs in Poland do not say BARK, they say HAU. In Germany, the dog says WAU. In Japan they said WAN. We may not be fluent in Polish yet, but we are excelling in our international dog noises. (They found it hard to beleive that Canadian roosters actually say COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO)
We recently acquired a little, very basic dictionary that has Polish, English, German, Italian and French, so that is helpful to a certain extent. Mike is very brave about trying out new words in stores and post offices and what not, but Polish is a very difficult language to learn. Everything is pronounced very differently than how we would read it.
We put some photos online from Germany, and hopefully we will put some on from Poland too. We will update again when our adventures unfold further! Thanks to everyone who has been keeping in touch with us. It's great to hear how everything is at home!
P.S. We are thrilled to discover that the occasional perogi is filled with cream cheese and berries!