Zapiekanka: The National Snack of Poland

The zapiekanka is one of the few popular relics of Poland's communist era.

It's all the things that quick and easy snack food should be - filling, tasty and a bit messy.

Basically it's a long flat toasted roll, hand-prepared with a topping of cheese and fresh mushrooms laced with tomato sauce.

Some zapiekanki (the plural form) are huge, they're always cheap (about $1.50), and they're ideal for warming you up quickly on a chilly day.

You can buy the zapiekanka all over Poland, usually from informal street stalls.

On top of the basics, any number of other ingredients may be added: garlic sauce, ham, salami, corn, etc. 

Some zapiekanki stalls go a bit crazy in the variety they offer - check out the bewildering array of options on the menu below :

As with all fast food, quality varies; once you find a place that serves a great zapiekanka, however, you'll never go anywhere else.

The best zapiekanka I've ever eaten came from a small take-away window at an old-fashioned cafeteria near the corner of the market square in Toruń, a city of Gothic architecture in the north.

If you're visiting Toruń, look for its window on the corner of ul Różana and ul Ducha Świętego.

Another top zapiekanka outlet I encountered was housed within this circular building in Plac Nowy, Kazimierz, a neighbourhood in beautiful southern Kraków:

I'm due to go back to Poland soon, for the first time in three years. I hope those zapiekanka stalls have survived. If so, smacznego!*

(*Bon appetit!)

Poland: Signs and Portents 5

An occasional series in which I display interesting signs encountered in Poland. This collection is from my Lonely Planet research trip in 2007, when I was accompanied by Narrelle Harris...

1. We saw this excellent hotel sign in the northern city of Słupsk (pronounced swoopsk), in Pomerania. Poland in those days was full of retro neon signage of this sort. Sadly it's now slowly disappearing. I used this pic as my desktop wallpaper for a long time, I liked it so much:

2. We found this stone memorial in a park behind some big communist-era housing blocks in the town of Malbork, famous for its huge Teutonic Knights' castle. It was a monument to the artificial language Esperanto and its creator Ludwig Zamenhof, a multilingual resident of northeast Poland back when it was part of the Russian Empire:

3. This sign in the western city of Poznań translated as "second breakfast", a hobbit meal created by JRR Tolkien in his novel The Hobbit. It also happens to be Poland's version of the mid-morning snack:

4. We encountered this station sign on the Żnin District Railway, a narrow-gauge tourist railway northeast of Poznań. The place is pronounced venetsya, which made me wonder if it had been named after the city of Venice, Italy. Of the scary wicker animals waiting for the train, we shall say nothing:

5. Another hobbit reference! This was a bookshop in Toruń:

6. This delightful Toruń sign is a bit difficult to make out, but says "Mechanical Workshop, H Wakarecy" beneath the cyclist:

7. Finally, here's a hotel sign on Toruń's beautiful Gothic market square. It says "Hotel". But you worked that out, right?

Shakespeare Untranslated: To See, or Not to See?

To be, or not to be? To see, or not see a Shakespeare play in a foreign language? Now, that really is the question.

When travelling in a country with a different language from your own, a lot of its culture is still open to you.

Music and dance are no problem, opera is OK, and films might have subtitles. However, theatre is a problem, so reliant it is upon language.

But I love theatre, so I've always been keen to see it when travelling, if I can.

A few years ago, I hit on a solution to the language barrier - choose a Shakespeare play you're familiar with that's being performed in a foreign language, so at least you know the plot.

That frees you to focus on the acting, intonation, costumes, set design, direction and other elements without feeling bemused by the storyline. And if you know a little of the local language, you can still pick up something of what's being said.

Here's some of the foreign-language Shakespeare I've caught over the years:

The Merchant of Venice in Japanese

I caught this production in 2001 at The Other Place, which was then a secondary venue used by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, the Bard's hometown. To be precise, it was a Japanese production with a Romanian director, staged by the Euro-Japan Theatre Organisation.

It was great - the costumes were particularly memorable, an eye-catching mix of traditional and modern (eg Lorenzo in Japanese robes with a biker's jacket on top). 

Antony and Cleopatra in Italian

Well, it's a perfect fit, isn't it? Saw this in 2001 in a magnificent horseshoe-shaped old theatre in Rome - the sort of place you imagine opera being performed. It was done in a striking modern style on a candlelit stage - the men in Zegna suits, the women in classy black dresses.

The Tempest in Lithuanian

When I saw the poster for Burza in the Polish city of Toruń, with Shakespeare's name attached, I was puzzled as to which play it was. A look at my Polish dictionary produced the translation "storm" - of course, it's The Tempest! It was being staged in 2008 as part of the city's annual Kontakt festival (see the cool poster above). Kontakt started in 1991, and primarily aims to bring together great theatre work from Western and Eastern Europe.

To aid comprehension, patrons hired little radio-pickup boxes with headphones, which played live translation of the Lithuanian delivery into Polish, Russian and English. I did occasionally dip into the Russian, just because it sounded so portentous.

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Polish

All that time in Poland, and I finally got to see a Shakespeare work in Polish in 2007, courtesy of the much-respected Stary Teatr. It was magnificent. Working from a fresh translation (a luxury we English-speakers don't have), the company produced an edgy work in upmarket contemporary costumes and settings, laced with black humour.

The company managed the impressive feat of turning Shakespeare's famous comedy into something dark and uncomfortable. The scene directly after the four lovers are released from their magical enchantments was pricelessly awkward, and reminded the viewer that the characters had just been drugged and psychologically manipulated in the most humiliating way. Not really a laughing matter, when you think about it. 

There was also a nod to the original text - of the Rude Mechanicals, Snug (the one who plays the lion) could only speak in English. So we did get to hear some of Shakespeare's text, along with his attempt at a roar. That was fun.

Companions on the Polish Road 2: Toruń to Lublin

“A good companion shortens the longest road.”

This sentence is an old Turkish proverb, and it proved very applicable to my recent research trip through Poland for Lonely Planet.

(Though I won't mention the three wars the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fought with the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the 17th century - for that would be tactless)

Last week I described the Poles I met while travelling from Kraków to Gdańsk. This week, let's hear about the fellow foreigners I met up with on the way...

Toruń: From the train station serving this beautiful Gothic city in southern Pomerania, I had to catch a bus across the broad Vistula River to reach the Old Town. As I walked through the station underpass to the bus stop, a cafe advertisement caught my eye, as it was largely in English.

When I dropped into the Kona Coast Cafe the next day I discovered a genial American, Jon Greene, behind the espresso machine. He and his Polish wife had decided to live in Poland for a while, and he'd refused to consider anywhere but Toruń (a fair call, in my opinion). We sat a table and chatted for a while, and I gave my approval to the coffee. It's worth dropping by if you're in town - the cafe's at ul Piekary 22.

Giżycko: For some reason on this particular trip, I had to catch a lot of buses and trains around 6:30am - for some reason the next choice would always depart too late in the morning. So on a chilly weekday morning I found myself sitting on a bench in front of the humble train station in this attractive lakeside holiday town in Masuria, in Poland's northeast.

Another early train had just left so there was just me on the platform, eating my packed breakfast from the hotel I'd just checked out of (Polish hotels will always pack you a breakfast if you have to check out too early for the in-house breakfast, which is much appreciated).

Then a young guy walked up to me and asked something. I explained that my Polish wasn't fluent, then found out he spoke reasonably good English and was on holiday from nearby Belarus.

Aleksandr and I were both heading to the city of Białystok, which required a change of trains at Ełk. Now I love Ełk, because it looks like the English word 'elk' but in fact has a letter 'Ł', which sounds like the English 'W'. So the name of the place is pronounced 'e-w-k'... which sounds adorable, for some reason.

(You can learn a lot of utterly unreliable but amusing nonsense about 'Ł' at its Uncyclopedia page, which describes the letter as "The evil twin brother of L. He is an ally of ∩ and controls the Unicode Villain Organization of Eastern Europe, or UVOEE for short.")

Anyway, we got out at Ełk, marched into the station building to discover which platform our connection was on, then trooped off to Platform 3 to board the next train.

We had a good talk along the way; I was intrigued to learn that Aleks, a keen sailor, had been due to join the Soviet navy just before the USSR dissolved and the career opportunity disappeared. Now he works in an automotive business in Minsk and sails as often as he can. Poland's northeastern lake country is perfect for that, of course. And not far from Minsk.

Białystok-Warsaw: A few days later I was leaving Białowieża, a small town in the eastern Podlasie region, which is famous for the wild European bison which still live in the surrounding forest.

I was waiting for a bus at about - of course - 6.30am, when I got into limited conversation with an elderly couple in Polish, who were impressed that I hailed from so far away. Then a waiter from the hotel restaurant showed up, on his day off, and we had a more fluent conversation in English.

When I left the bus at Białystok, I had the vague impression I heard some people speaking English. But at that stage in the Polish journey I do sometimes imagine hear English - my brain seems keen to twist what it hears into something I can recognises. Odd, but true.

Anyway, I shook my head, walked across the pedestrian bridge that led to the train station, and bought my ticket for Warsaw and onward to Lublin.

Then I realised there really were people speaking English - two middle-aged American women being helped by a young Polish woman who, I discovered later, had walked them all the way over from the bus station to assist them, even though she was due to catch a bus herself. Nice to see the Good Samaritan spirit at work.

After she'd left, I introduced myself to the ladies, and also introduced them to the dubious delights of Polish train station coffee (a choice of instant coffee or percolator granules served in boiling water, which you allow to sink to the bottom).

We shared a compartment on the train to Warsaw. Pam and Margie (I think those were their names, from memory) both had Polish ancestry and had been travelling to various parts of the country; they would be transferring at Warsaw to a train to Kraków. So we chatted, then I waved them goodbye at the grim Warszawa Wschodnia Station, where I was catching a connection to Lublin.

Lublin: My final meeting came courtesy of microblogging tool Twitter. I'd exchanged a few comments about my Polish adventures with Polish-born Twitter user @rusticbynature, then realised she was tweeting from my next stop Lublin, so suggested meeting up. So myself, Ania and her American husband Jaime, a keen photographer, got together at the Złoty Osioł in Lublin.

It's a hidden-away pub-restaurant in the centre of town, dimly lit and full of rustic atmosphere, and I wouldn't have found it easily by myself. If ever in Lublin, see if you can locate it, starting with this address: ul Grodzka 5a. Its name, by the way, means Golden Donkey...

Poland 3: Stalked by Copernicus

Wherever I go in northeastern Poland, I inevitably encounter a man in a robe holding a globe of the world. This is none other than Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who first proposed that the Earth orbits the sun.

He’s also a member of an exclusive club - famous Poles who outsiders sometimes don’t realise are Polish. I think of them as the Four Cs: Copernicus, Curie, Conrad and Chopin.

In fact the first three of this group were christened Mikołaj Kopernik, Marie Skłodowska, and Józef Konrad Korzeniowski. Chopin really was Frédéric (or Fryderyk) Chopin, by the way, as his dad was French.

No chance of mistaken identity within Poland though, especially in Copernicus' old stamping grounds in Pomerania and the neighbouring region of Warmia & Masuria.

Here are a few snaps of the great astronomer that I've taken over my years of researching for Lonely Planet in Poland...

1. A Star is Born. This is the most striking statue of Copernicus, in front of the Gothic town hall in Toruń. This is where he was born, and there's not much danger of this fact escaping you as you stroll around this attractive city on the Vistula River - there's a Copernicus Museum and a Copernicus University, for a start.

Toruń isn't only famous for Copernicus, though. It has an age-old reputation as a manufacturer of gingerbread. And you can buy this gingerbread baked in the shape of Copernicus, if you like.

2. Rebel With a Cause. Copernicus looks a little sinister here I think, as if he's about to peel away from this wall in Toruń, trap the little beggar kid within his globe of the earth, then give him a good sharp lesson in astronomy.

3. Do You Want Cosmology With That? I spotted this Copernicus figure outside a hotel restaurant in the little town of Frombork, east of Gdańsk near the Russian border.

It was here that the great man made many of his observations and wrote his revolutionary work, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres ("A cracking read... guaranteed to make you question everything you've ever believed about an earth-centred model of the universe." - Nuremberg Times, 1543).

4. Touching Genius. I took this photo three days ago outside the drawbridge of the former Teutonic Knights' castle in Olsztyn. Copernicus was the administrator here after the Kingdom of Poland captured Olsztyn in the 1460s. The astronomer finally gets a chance to sit down here (must be tiring carrying that globe everywhere) and visitors sit with him and rub his nose for luck. Hence the shiny hooter.

5. You Say You Want a Revolution? The final shot is one I snapped in February 2006 on my first-ever Lonely Planet assignment, when the weather was very very cold. In those days this Copernicus statue sat in the centre of a roundabout - quite appropriate really. Recently the area surrounding him has been closed to traffic and repaved, creating a pleasant square in which to marvel at the Copernican achievement.

As you can see, I run into Copernicus everywhere. But is he stalking me... or am I stalking him?

Signs and Portents: Poland 2

This week, more odd, crazy and downright strange signs that I've spotted on my travels. Here are some more from my journey through Poland for Lonely Planet in the frosty winter of 2006...

It was a killer costume, but Anna couldn't help wondering how she would actually get to the fancy dress party while wearing that tail.

This gracious lady greets the stranger labouring up the stairs to reach the Oki Doki backpacker hostel in Warsaw (okey dokey... get it?). She's actually an irreverent reinterpretation of the city's coat of arms, a mermaid bearing a sword and shield. In true Central European fashion, no-one has any idea where the emblem came from, but there are some beguiling legends concerning its origin.

Warsaw prided itself on its diversity of shopping outlets.

I saw this sign as I walked down into an underpass that leads past a set of shops to a tram platform. On the left, of course, is an ad for a sex shop; on the right, an ad advertising natural food for diabetics, vegetarians, and the gluten-intolerant. Kind of a yin and yang of the sinful and healthy.

Marcin was actually a vegetarian, but was in it for the funny hats.

I like to see a man who enjoys his work! This guy on a giant poster in Wrocław enjoys his luncheon meat so much, he dresses up to get into the right spirit. The slogan beneath the ham says something like "tasty life", or "life is tasty", though both my own knowledge of Polish and online translators are having trouble with the word Mościpaństwo. I suspect it means something like "gentlemen". Help from Polish speakers welcome!

If one more person mentioned Monty Python, Agata was going to scream.

This curious poster was spotted outside PRL, a "communist nostalgia" bar in Wrocław, an attractive city in the southwest. The pub is very much a tongue-in-cheek take on the bad old days, and its interior is festooned with authentic communist memorabilia taken from people's attics, with waiters wandering by in red tracksuits, and stirring socialist anthems playing over the sound system. All very amusing.

PRL, by the way, stands for Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, the communist-era People's Republic of Poland. And śledzik is a little herring, eaten as an appetiser with vodka.

Leo couldn't wait to get off work and go bowling.

A lion above the door of a pharmacy in Toruń, my favourite city in Poland, a charming middle-sized burg in Pomerania with a vast collection of Gothic architecture. None of this airy-fairy Renaissance architecture for Toruń, no sir; if a church doesn't look like a red-brick fortress, you just aren't trying.

Anyhow, the pod in this sign means "beneath", as in "The Pharmacy Beneath the Lion". You can have lots of fun in the older areas of Polish cities by spotting business names involving pod (there are a lot of them), then looking upward to see if you can spot what object the business is actually beneath.

My absolute favourite, in Kraków, is Apteka Pod Złotym Tygrysem: Pharmacy Beneath the Golden Tiger!

To be continued...