Poland Shopping Trip Day 1

While David was taking the kids to international day at school, I was busy elbowing other women out of my way so I could pick a certain plate off the shelf of a pottery store in Poland. Just kidding. But I was in Poland and I was buying pottery.

The American Women's Club of the Taunus is a group of expat women who do a great variety of activities: bookclubs, coffee socials, local tours, museum outings and trips all over the world. I had heard about this shopping trip to Poland before as a "must" while living here, so my friend Kathy and I decided to sign up.

We boarded our bus at 5:00am and drove to eastern Germany. Our tour organizer, Erika, gave us some interesting information along the way. We were traveling on a highway that during the days of a divided Germany, was one of the few transit routes free Germans could use to travel from West Berlin (which was fully surrounded by Soviet Union-controlled East Germany) to West Germany. There were high security fences all along the hundreds of kilometers of highway and guards posted every so often to be sure that no East Germans could escape. And heaven help you if your car broke down.

A wind farm in eastern Germany.

Erika also told us the history of Polish pottery, as buying pottery was the main purpose of the trip. Augustus II was a king of Poland who lived from 1670 to 1733. He was called "the Strong" for his bear-like physical strength and for his numerous offspring (he is rumored to have fathered as many as 385 children -- only 1 of them legitimate). In 1701 he imprisoned the young alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger, and forced him to reveal the secret of manufacturing gold, as Böttger had boasted he could. Instead, Böttger discovered during his imprisonment the secret of porcelain: the high quality of the local clay and baking it at higher temperatures than ever before. Augustus the Strong proudly offered the pottery as gifts to impress other nobles and monarchs, and the area became famous for its porcelain stoneware. Ceramics and pottery continue to be a definitive part of the identity of the city of Boleslaweic, Poland, our destination.

As we entered Poland, and any other time we crossed the border or saw border security personnel elsewhere, Erika would say, "Say a prayer that we don't get stopped. On the last trip, they took everyone's passports, entered all the numbers into the computer to check everything and we sat here for 2 hours." The bus would fall silent for a minute every time she reminded us of that. Thankfully, we were never stopped and sailed through the borders.

And just like that, well, about 5 hours after we left Frankfurt, we were in Poland and stopped at our first set of pottery shops/factory outlets. Erika had instructed us on what to look for in pottery and if we saw something we really liked, to buy it. We couldn't be sure we would see a certain pattern again.

It was a strange experience seeing all these American women exit the bus, enter the 3 or 4 pottery shops on that block, and start buying. And they just kept on buying. Now, many of them had been on the trip before and they knew exactly what they wanted. I walked into the shops and looked around, but really didn't know what to do. We didn't need any dishes. My baking dishes would do, even if they were regular Pyrex dishes. The pottery was beautiful and inexpensive, but I really didn't need anything.

Finally in the third store, I got hit with the bug. The store had triangular pizza plates. We had had cheap plastic pizza plates back home and the kids still say every so often, "Do you remember those pizza plates we used to have? I miss them!" So I bought six heavy pizza plates. Then I remembered that David has been saying that we need egg cups, so I bought 6 sweet little egg cups. And a matching bowl to put the shells into.

I also ended up buying 6 large mugs with matching oval plates, all in different patterns, for soup and sandwiches (one of our favorite lunches). So I caught up pretty well with my fellow shoppers. We probably hit 15 pottery shops in all, and we would see the traditional patterns over and over, but then there would always be something new at each shop.

Our group spent the night at Kliczków Castle and Kathy and I had an authentic castle experience. Our room had no heat. Did I mention it was cold and rainy? I once again thanked God for warm featherbeds.

This castle was built in the late 13th century and was thoroughly restored in 2001.