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in bialystok which was nice because she speaks some english all the brothers come over at various times to help out with milking even though it was primarily jozef s business jozef and his boys fraciszek and antusz one of the barns for the cows jozef explaining the cattle feed jozef s wife ewa the language barrier was a challenge i had a hard time understanding old jozef but lydia and the kids made a big effort to help us understand lydia mostly communicated about food and was constantly urging us to eat saying prosze and motioning at the food i understood a few words and used my google translate but it s far from ideal lydia is a good cook but it amazed us that nobody ever puts the food away it just sits out until the next meal when they re heated the soup and put out the same bread sausage and desserts that we had for the previous meal and had been fly bait for hours most days lydia would cook something new for the main meal like chicken cordon bleu for example but they staples are bread sausage and milk the day we arrived was bread making day they have a brick oven in the basement that jozef was proud to tell me he built himself he kneaded the dough and i took my turn punching it up for a few minutes then they let it rise and get the oven just right old jozef built a fire in the brick oven and when it was hot they clear out the ashes and use a paper test to find out if the temperature is right when they stick a paper in and it doesn t turn brown it s ready half way through the baking jozef bastes the top with olive oil then when they take the bread out they baste it with water i guess that keeps it moist the bread is dense brown stuff with sesame sunflower and flax seeds in it it tastes great and they are clearly proud of it and wouldn t eat any other kind of bread heating the brick oven for bread ready to baste the bread stanislaw helping with bread finished product old jozef can hardly get around because his knees are so bad he spends most of his time pottering around the yard sweeping or sitting on his bench under a tree he has a bike that he rides everywhere even if he just wants to get to the other side of the yard he s very religious and he goes to church early on sunday riding his bike to help out he reminds me of my grandpa szymanski with similar facial features and the same large hands with sausage sized fingers old jozef working in the yard jozef on his bench under the tree that first night we went over to marian szymanski s house it s the house that my great grandfather helped build when he was a kid marian has an education and a government job advising farmers he doesn t seem to work nearly as hard as his cousins across the street and has a much nicer house he gutted the old house and rebuilt it into as nice and modern a house as you could ever want he has a nice garden in the back and his property goes way back to a creek where some old trees grow that might have been there when grandpa ben used to sneak away to play his concertina marian has limited english but we still tried to have a nice visit with him cathy and jackie stayed at his house which seemed like a 5 star hotel compared to where we were staying he has an adult son that must be somewhere on the autism spectrum marian szymanski s house sunday we went to church in konarzyce with everyone else in town the service lasted a little more than an hour at catholic mass there is a lot of standing up and sitting back down the congregation joined in a few hymns and they had some big tv monitors displaying the words a couple of priests blessed the wine and wafers and then they walked around the chapel putting a wafer in the mouth of anyone who wanted it it seemed to me like the priest dipped a wafer in wine and then ate it so he took the wine on behalf of everyone there not everyone takes communion every sunday there might be some requirement to go to confession and prepare properly for it it might be better if mormons took the sacrament as seriously lydia braiding leah s hair before church after church we had a nice sunday dinner lydia made chicken cordon bleu brita and leah weren t feeling well so they napped a lot i wish they would have been a little more social with the cousins because some of andrzej and piotr s kids came over i played soccer and volleyball with them in the yard andrzej suggested we go see a guy s dairy farm that had a bunch of robots to do the work so we drove a few miles to check it out agricultural methods must be the most interesting thing in that town it was cool to see a milking machine that the cows go into when they are ready and a robot that cruises around the barn cleaning up manure there was even a motorized back scratcher for those cows jozef jr didn t come because he was either jealous or too busy milking his cows we found time to go to the cemetary in lomza and see some family graves the cemeteries are crowded but it s a family pride thing to take care of the graves although dorota was gone to germany her sown pawel is a wwii history buff and he took us to some monuments out in the woods where the nazis killed disobedient poles in order to terrorize the population there were three of these places not far from the szymanski farm and supposedly 12 000 people were killed there he also finds relics and has quite a collection of weapons from bayonets and unexploded hand grenades to an assortment of bullets in the evening we went over to andrzej s house to see his operation he raises lots of pigs but the place is much cleaner and not nearly as pungent as a normal pig farm he showed us his butcher shop and trailer that he takes to do the jobs on site for his under the table clients after the tour we had to go in the house which was small but a little more modern than jozef s we had the obligatory treats and food and then he pulled out the wedding album everyone wants to show us their wedding albums andrzej and his trailer butcher tools rachelle and her piggy in her sunday best on monday we did a few tourist things around lomza there was an open air museum of old farmhouses and beekeeping methods we walked around the town square and saw the cathedral that had been miraculously spared destruction at the hands of the red army after the priest prayed all night and refused to leave it there was also a statue of a polish actress we did a little amber shopping because it s a lot cheaper in small town poland than the tourist areas brita and leah at open air farm museum lomza cathedral where great grandfather ben was baptized famous polish actress in lomza main square we made it home for dinner and everyone wanted to know if they could talk to lon he s kind of famous around here becasue he corresponded with them when the kids were all little back in the 80s i called him and we were lucky enough that both he and eric were home working in their shop everyone was thrilled to hear his voice and see his face jozef sr said it was like looking in a mirror skyping with lon and jozef after dinner jozef and piotr greeting lon on skype after dinner we went over to andrzej s house to watch him slaughter a pig he was remarkably efficient he had his son hold a pig down then he hit it on the head with a sledge hammer as hard as he could the stunned porker just lay there twitching and squealing while andrzej cut it s throat and he bled out into a basin in a little over a minute in the next half hour they had the pig gutted shaved and cut in half with a hatched right down its spine it looked like hard work even though we had just eaten we had to go back for a homemade keilbasa roast it was kind of a farewell dinner or second dinner the kielbasa was excellent but the blood sausage was nasty it s soft and seems to be made of congealed blood and ground up kidneys pancreas liver and other stuff that you wouldn t want to ever eat it was fun but i felt like we were kind of party pooper guests because we didn t partake of any home brew vodka or wine and we wanted to go to bed just as they were getting started i did connect with marian s son because apparently he likes to watch nba basketball so after asking him if he liked lebron james he spent the rest of the night watching and imitating me cathy and jackie at the kielbasa roast staying with our cousins on the ancestral farm was definitely the highlight of the trip it was great to see how real poles live and connect with our heritage i wonder how long their way of life will stay like this it was like going back in time 50 years except for the wifi if i go back in 10 years will they still be making bread like this will the next generation still be farming or will they move to the city like kristina and her family i wouldn t blame them for leaving because it s a hard life and technology and the global marketplace is changing everything even in a small town like lomza will people keep their faith or will poland turn secular like the rest of europe i d like to go back someday and learn the answers posted by jaredski at 9 25 pm no comments sunday august 9 2015 krakow krakow is a big city full of young people the roads are crowded and the parking seems crazy because people park the front of their cars up on the sidewalks some areas people parallel park on the sidewalks and that was where our host expected me to park the van was tricky to maneuver into a tight spot up on the sidewalk our flat was a little nicer than the one in prague with at least some not quite comfortable couches to sit on they were better than a futon though we are not impressed with the beds that have just a mattress with no sheets and a comforter that seems to be the polish way though the first night we went to the grocery store around the corner for some bread cheese and cold cereal in some ways i prefer staying at real apartments in a part of the city where real poles live to the sterile artificial environment of a hotel in the tourist places it provides a totally different experience the next day we went to the salt mine at wielicka it dates back to pre historic times when cavemen used to evaporate the water from briny springs to make salt when that was insufficient they started digging in the middle ages to mine the rock salt at that time salt was called white gold and was rare and valuable the mine closed in the 1990s and now is just a tourist attraction the tour starts with a descent down about 50 flights of stairs into the darkness there is a guide who told us about things through a little radio with earphones the miners carved some amazing statues from the salt including a couple of ballrooms and a spectacular underground cathedral at one point we went in a bell shaped room that had great acoustics and listened to something by chopin then we had the obligatory shopping where the women folk spent way too much money on specialty salt before we started the interminable march to the lifts to get out we used the same lifts as the miners crowding into tiny elevator cars that i couldn t even fully stand up inside at least it was a short ride as we were only down about 65 meters we were all tired from all the walking in the mine but we had a tour scheduled to see the main sights of the city at 2 30 we postponed it until 3 30 so we could eat and rest but most of us still wanted to do it i m not sure brita and leah wanted to tour anymore that day but they trooped along anyway aleksandra was our guide and she first showed us a building where john paul had stayed when he was pope he opened his window and greeted some people and now it s a famous place in poland there is a park all around the old city where the defensive walls used to be they tore them down around 1800 and replaced them with a green belt but you can still see the ruins in some places anyway there was a display of photos of john paul in the park too i get the feeling that he s kind of like a rock star in poland they give him some credit for the fall of communism that coincided with his reign next we walked up wawel hill where we saw the palace and cathedral we like climbing towers so we jumped at the chance to go up the bell tower this was different than other towers because we had to crawl around and through the heavy timbers that support the structure there were several enormous bells along the way but the biggest one at the top had a legend that if you touched the heart with your left hand a made a wish it would come true entrance to wawel hill one interesting thing about the cathedral was that women couldn t enter with bare shoulders so jackie and aleksandra had to put on shawls or sweaters before entering this was the place where polish kings were crowned there was an elaborate silver coffin just inside that had the body of st stanislaus who had a dispute with the king and was martyred and chopped into pieces but the pieces miraculously re formed symbolic of poland itself several other kings had their own chapels with statues of them as well as sarcophagi containing their remains in the crypts a few more modern people including the poet mickewicz and heroes like pilsudskie are also buried there overall this cathedral wasn t quite as grand as st vitus in prague but it seemed to contain more history we saw the palace that was modeled after italian palazzos and heard stories about how the austrian soldiers lived there for a while after the partition and trashed the place my favorite thing was the ruins of another church on the top of the hill that they had made into a pretty flower garden after the austrians had torn it down we went down the hill to the river bank where a statue of a dragon stands every 5 minutes fire comes out of his mouth there is also a legend about how a clever shoemaker tricked the dragon into swallowing a sheep stuffed with something flammable and that s what killed him from there we saw a couple more smaller churches and the jagiellonian university the oldest in central europe there was a nice old hidden courtyard and museum there we ended in the main square that used to be a major regional marketplace we went in the big church on the square st mary s and admired the blue ceiling and stars although there was a service going on the nice thing about krakow is all the buildings are original because both the polish army and german army declined to defend the place so it avoided major damage it is definitely all about tourism in the old town now although unlike prague most of the tourists are not foreigners they seemed to be mostly poles palace on wawel hill university courtyard st mary s church i once again pumped our guide for stories about the change from communism to a market economy and enjoyed hearing her tales about shortages and long lines to get things she wouldn t tell me much about how she felt about putin it seems like we spent a lot of time in krakow eating we mostly had polish food at nice restaurants we tried italian one night and it was disappointing i had herring one night and it was not very good we liked eating right on the square ou...