Poland Day 9

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The entrance to the Muzeum Narodowe
We reached our final destination! The first half of our day was spent traveling from Krakow to Warsaw. During the last 45 minutes of the drive, I started paying attention to the scenery around me. The buildings weren't very big and there were a lot of industrial businesses and a few companies that had Chinese as the primary or secondary language. That caught my eye because for the past week or so I have really only seen Polish, English, and occasionally German. I also noticed a large use of solar panels which is awesome! When we arrived in the city the traffic picked up a lot, there were many more tall office buildings and a huge shopping mall. After arriving at the hotel with one wrong hotel in our recent past, we waited for our rooms to be ready. While we waited, we were given a map and I spent the time figuring out where our hotel was and where the places I wanted to go to were. The transit map was very vague, so it was difficult to figure out how to get to each place by public transit, so we had to use an app. 

A piece of work depicting the Last Supper and Crucifixion

After about 25 minutes we got our room keys and went up to our rooms. At 3 I went with a few others to the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe). I was very excited, thinking this would be a museum on some of the major parts of Poland's history. We found our way there on the bus, which was very exciting and get off essentially at the entrance. We go to get a ticket and find out its free today! Another win. The museum turned out to be exclusively art. It was art from the middle ages to now, so that was very interesting. I'm not good at understanding art, but it was cool to see all the different pieces. Most of the pieces were made by Polish artists, so a lot of the work I had never seen before, and some of them were breathtaking.

A collection of modern pieces

A piece of modern art using impressionism

After the museum, we went to a pierogi restaurant which was pretty good! I was able to try a lot of different kinds of filling, which were all really good. Another person I was with got them filled with fruit and those were apparently really yummy as well! After dinner, I came back to the hotel to work on my blog and some math homework (woohoo summer classes!). 
My order of perogies

One of the walls of the restaurant

There is a lot less structure to our time here in Warsaw which is nice because we are able to explore on our own and find museums and other places we want to go, but it is tricky to figure out where those places are. Tomorrow we're going to a museum on the history of Polish Jews which will be very interesting because that's what a lot of our course has been on. After that, I plan to explore the Old and New Town, as well as the riverfront. 

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