Couch-surfing in Warszawa.

We left Berlin early Sunday morning to board the Berliner-Warsaw Express. The train left out of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, which kicks the pants off of LA's Union Station and (according to Steve) NYC's Grand Central Station in terms of snazziness. I wish we'd taken a picture; it was that cool. I mean, seriously, who wants to take pictures of train stations? You will, if you ever go there.

Outside of the station was a "Wildlife of Europe" photo exhibit, and there is a national park in Croatia that is GORGEOUS and very close to the border of Hungary, so we may try to fanagle (finagle? fenagle? fannagle? How do you spell this word???) a trip down to Croatia at some point this summer.... Hmmmmmmmm.

Steve was excited to see that the train compartments on this train were more like the Harry Potter train compartments, with six seats and a sliding glass door, rather than the standard Amtrak seats, which are more like bus seats (but with wifi!). Both of our faces fell when a family of four joined us in the compartment. The family had two boys, both under six years old, who were already crying and kicking each other and we hadn't even left the station yet. Ugh.

Thankfully this family got off the train after about two hours, and the rest of the train ride was uneventful.

We made our way to our host Anna's house via public transportation and had a nice, quiet dinner and talk. Anna is a Polish girl a few years older than we are, and she is a frequent Couch Surfing host. For those of you who don't know, CouchSurfing.Org is an international organization that basically connects travelers with other travelers all over the world. On this site, people offer up couches (or extra beds, or floors, or whatever) for visitors to sleep on (for free), or sometimes they simply offer to have dinner with a visitor and show them around. People traveling can search by area to find couches. It's set up kind of similar to Facebook in that every member of the site must have a profile set up, and people use this site for networking and for searching for places to stay cheaply or for more information about the city they're going to visit. It's a cool organization and luckily we found an awesome host for two nights in Anna. She lives in a quieter section of Warsaw, and from her balcony, we could see one side of National Stadium Warsaw, which is one of the EURO2012 venues.

Monday was really our only full day in Warsaw (we arrived in the evening on Sunday and left in the afternoon on Tuesday), but since Steve has been a bit sick and we have plans to come back to Warsaw at the end of June, we figured we would walk around, get used to the city and its public transportation routes, and do our sightseeing later. It was a gloomy, drizzly day, and since we were stuck out of the house until Anna got off work, we set off for Old Town Warsaw, which is very close to her house.

Old Town Warsaw was very nice, with lots of older-styled buildings (I say styled because the originals, like Berlin, had been destroyed in the war and rebuilt) and little caffes. The thing I instantly liked most about Warsaw is that there are Polish restaurants EVERYWHERE!! Yay, we finally get to try local food. Steve and I stopped for lunch at a pierogarnia. Pierogis are one of Poland's most popular dishes; they are small dumplings typically filled with pork and cabbage, or cheese. We tasted four different kinds (and unfortunately for you guys, gobbled them up way too fast to take any pictures) and they were all delicious.

Somehow, even though it was supposed to be a more relaxed kind of day, we ended up walking a LOT. Like, more than all the days we spent in Berlin combined (maybe). It's harder to gauge how far anything is, because when the sign says "2 kilometers to the fan zone" it doesn't sound like that much... Until you do the math and realize that 2 kilometers is over a mile, ON TOP of the mile you had just walked to get to that point. (I sound like such a baby, complaining about walking two miles. My excuse is that, due to my lack of certain ligaments in my knee, I have not been this active in about two months.) Anyways, we explored the area around the EURO2012 fan zone a little bit, but as EURO2012 doesn't start until Friday, the fan zone wasn't open yet. So we spent the rest of the day basically just walking around until we met up with Anna in New Town Warsaw to head back to her flat. She took us on a beautiful, scenic route that led up onto the university library's rooftop gardens and along the river.

This scenic route was also exhausting. And Anna did it in heels! When I asked her how far it was from her workplace in the city center to her apartment, her reply was "Probably only about 3km, maybe a little more. Still walking distance." Umm, WHAT?! That's two miles! You call this walking distance?? Americans drive to the bus stop down the street to drop off their kids for school, or around the corner to McNasty for a midday snack. No wonder Europeans aren't obese--they consider anything within two miles "walking distance." Awesome. Impressive. Exhausting.

That night, as a thank you, we offered to make Anna Mexican food, since she had said on her CouchSurfing profile that she loved Mexican food. The night before, we had gone to Carrefour (basically Europe's version of SuperWalMart) because it was the closest grocery store to her flat, but we made the mistake of going without Anna. We couldn't read anything because it was all in Polish, and unlike Southern California, there is no Mexican aisle at the store. We ended up making carnitas, using my mom's delicious recipe, with tomato-lime rice and refried beans (Anna had never even seen refried beans before! What the heck kind of Mexican food do they have here??), but we couldn't make tortillas because they didn't sell ready-made tortillas, and the corn flour they had was way too fine ground to work. We tried making tortillas and they ended up more like pancakes. All in all, it was a pretty standard California Mexican meal (although no salsa, because they didn't have any sort of hot peppers and absolutely no cilantro) but the lack of readily available ingredients for such cuisine was kind of a culture shock. :P