Wednesday took us on another day outing, this time to the pretty little town of Kazimierz Dolny. It's an arts and music centre of cobbled streets and higgledy piggledy houses beautifully set on a river south of Warsaw and is renowned as a centre for Jewish culture and Klezmer music. It's often used as a film location and has become a well known artists' colony and film centre in Poland. It was really hot as we walked through the quaint streets and up to the castle ruins which are being beautifully restored. Kasia, Bruce and I had to buy hats to protect us from the sun, and the public "mister" in the town square was a welcome relief. The town is also well known for its bakery which has a rooster as its logo. Some of us could not resist a pose.
Next stop was a popular topographical landform known as the "roots gorge". It was also the place where Ange and her choir filmed a recent music video. The soft loess soil erodes in a particular fashion to create a tunnel-like effect around the roots of nearby trees and gave the feeling that we were actually in Middle Earth. The hippie cafe near the entrance made us feel even more Hobbit-like, with offerings of iced tea made from nettle (yuck), linden (not bad) and hawthorn (the best of the three).
Hippie juices are fine, but Kris was ready for some good craft beer, and so we stopped on our way home at a restaurant and brew pub. Drinking and driving laws are very strict here, and even one drink can put you over the limit, so while the rest of us tried the local recipe Kris had to be content to take a six pack home with him for later sampling. I am very impressed with how conscientious people have been. If you are driving, you don't drink, at all, not even ONE, and on the morning after the wesela Kasia even purchased a blood alcohol monitor to test everyone who was driving home just to make sure. We should be doing this in Canada - tightening the laws and forcing drivers to be more responsible. I believe the legal limit here is 0.00, in other words zero tolerance. MADD would approve.
We were all tired and sleepy on our return, especially the drivers. High fives all round to Kasia and Kris for another great day out in the Polish countryside.
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