So, there’s a lot of photos and text in the other posts.
Here’s kind of a summary of our thoughts if you just want to skim or ignore the
rest:
- Poland is straight-up cheap, while Prague is affordable, especially compared to Western Europe and big U.S. cities. Admission to sites in Prague was a little steep at times (no free museum days and several places were $10-20 admission), while it was very reasonable across the board in Poland (either free or a couple bucks for the most part)
- Neither Czech food or Polish food is outstanding, but it’s OK in moderation. Lots of meat and potatoes.
- Prague’s Old Town has incredibly lovely buildings, but it’s incredibly touristy to the point where it’s difficult to imagine an actual human being living there, and it’s difficult to have any sort of authentic human experience. The tourists are quite ethnically diverse, though, with huge groups of Asian tourists especially. We had a better time when we hung out in the Holesovice neighborhood.
- Krakow’s Old Town has slightly less lovely buildings, but it is less crowded and also seems to attract tourists from primarily Eastern Europe (read: all white people). We spent two full days there and felt like we would have been repeating things on day 3.
- Warsaw is not nearly as beautiful as either Krakow or Prague, but its bike infrastructure is surprisingly great, and I had a much better time there than I expected. The Poster Museum is fantastic.
- Stores in Prague outside the Old Town have an *extremely* lax approach to open hours, and don’t seem to be open on the weekends at all, even when their posted open hours say they should be.
- The Cross Club in Prague was really the only place the whole trip where we saw any people who could be considered a little weird, and even then they pretty much followed a standard dress-like-a-punk playbook. Not that I have any room to talk, but it's just an observation.
- We saw several examples of blatantly sexualized and/or racist advertising throughout the trip, moreso than we expected.
- The beer was almost uniformly excellent and cheap throughout the entire trip. Similar to Germany, the restaurant would generally have one light lager, one medium or unfiltered lager, and one dark lager, usually all three from the same brewery. With the exception of Pilsner Urquell, we rarely found the same beer twice; there are a lot of different, great beers.
- Serving tap water in restaurants isn't a thing in either Poland or Prague, and bottled water and soda both cost significantly more than beer.
Here are links to each day's posts:
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