Boleslawiec

After spending the morning horseback riding, we decided to take a drive to look around some of the surrounding areas.

This house is right behind the castle; in fact, I took this picture from the castle grounds.  I just thought it was a cute house, and I wondered how old it was and who still lives there.

This is just one example of a phenomon that we saw on all the houses surrounding Kliczkow Castle.  It looks like the house is a couple hundred years old, except for the satellite dishes hanging off the walls.  As we drove through this little village, we didn't see any house without a satellite dish.  In some cases, the houses seemed barely habitable, yet there was at least one satellite dish.  But, hey, who am I to judge?  I know I would lose my sanity if I didn't have my "stories"...

About 15 minutes away from the castle is the city of Boleslawiec.  This is the city that has all the cool Polish pottery.  This part of Poland was part of East Germany under Soviet rule, so there is a lot of evidence of its communist past.  The city was obviously bombed at some point during World War II, as there are old and new buildings intermixed on nearly every street.  The old buildings are obviously old, and not particularly well-maintained, but you can get a sense that they used to be lovely.  The new buildings have the signature communist architecture - no frills- just walls, doors, and windows.

It was very interesting to me to see Boleslawiec after having just been to Rothenburg ob der Tauber a week ago.  Both cities are more than 500 years old, but Boleslawiec had none of the charm of Rothenburg.  Clearly, the years under communist rule took their toll on poor Boleslawiec.  And now it appears that it is still quite a poor area, because everything is pretty shabby.  Maybe it was the gray weather, but I thought it was a depressing place.

But then, I stopped and bought some pottery and I felt much better!  Poland is famous for its hand-painted pottery, and I just love it.  We stopped at a little shop and I bought a platter and a covered baking dish, so I got my souveniers. 

That evening, back at the castle, Brad and the kids swam until they were pickled and I got to read my book.  We all took a break at 10 p.m. to watch "Bully Beat Down" on MTV (the only English show we could find - it's amazing how un-picky we are as long as it's in English), and called it a night. 

The next morning, we had another weird breakfast and drove home to Berlin.  By the time we got home, there was a good snow storm brewing so we were glad to be safely in our house.

And now we can say we have stayed in an old Polish castle.  So cool!