Poland 01/03/2012

Here’s the second blog about our trip around the world. Yesterday we flew from Minsk to Warsaw. It was a very short flight, which took about 1 hour and 10 minutes. Afterwards we took the taxi to our bed and breakfast.  

I hope that everybody knows that Warsaw is the capital of Poland.  The country is a unitary state made up of 16 voivodeships. A voivodeship can be compared with a province.

First I will give you some general and economic information about the country. Poland has a population of over 38 million people. This makes Poland a populous country (if we compare it with the other countries in the world). Poland has a democracy with a president as a head of state. The current prime minister is Donald Tusk. In 2011, he became the first Polish Prime minister in history.

Poland is member of the European Union, NATO, and the United Nations… However in Poland they don’t use the euro. The official Polish currency is the zloty.

But here we are in Warsaw and I’m going to tell you something about it. Warsaw is located on the Vistula River, that’s about 300 kilometers from the Carpathian Mountains and 260 kilometers from the Baltic Sea.

Now I’m going to tell you something about the name Warsaw. Yesterday we met an old woman who told us that there is a folk etymology around the name Warsaw. She said that the name came from a fisherman Wars and his wife Sawa. Sawa was a women living in the Vistula River who fell in love with Warz.

We wanted to visit Poland because the country has a lot of historic elements. Before and during the war, Poland has known its worst time. A lot of people died during the war and it was hard to defend their country properly. However I was mostly interested in the capital because Warsaw is a major international tourist destination and an important economic center in Eastern Europe. The capital also survived many different wars.

Today we walked a lot in Warsaw. We visited the New Town and the Royal Castle. Tomorrow we will visit the Saxon Garden, which is Warsaw’s biggest public park. But I hope we can also visit some sculptures this week. The rest of the week we will visit some other delightful cities. The owner of the bed and breakfast has made a promise to go with us and show us a lot of beautiful places in Poland.

Also I hope that we will see some museums with information about the war in Poland. We have chosen a bed and breakfast for our stay because we wanted to meet new people. This way we learn to live with different cultural aspects.

Up till now I think that Poland is a beautiful country. I hope that I will learn more about the Polish habits.

Kind regards.

Jolien Masscheleyn

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland
http://www.poland.pl/
http://www.um.warszawa.pl/en