I had been looking forward to Poznan for some reason. But it turns out my history was wrong. I thought Poznan had survived the war intact, but it turns out it had sustained damage, just not catastrophic damage like other Polish towns.
Poznan is known as a market city and is famous for its universities. The market square was very nice. What was interesting for us was that in the center of the market square was another block of buildings built in Baroque style. The buildings are very well done and decorated with different motifs. The block in the center of the square was built to replace wooden stalls that sold various goods in the 1600’s.
Poznan is famous for a unique type of croissant called a St. Martin croissant. It is not light and flaky like a French croissant. We decided we wanted to try one. Also, every noon at the town hall clock Poznan has a famous display where two goats (the symbol of Poznan) come out and butt heads twelve times. So we decided to kill two birds with one stone.
There was a coffee shop that served St. Martin’s croissants and was directly in front of the town clock. We ordered a croissant and a beer (don’t judge us we are on vacation). The croissant was interesting, we couldn’t agree on what it reminded us of, I thought a scone and Ton thought a less sweet cinnamon roll.
As we were eating our croissant a large crowd was gathering in front of the town hall. About 10 minutes before noon, a guy came out of the building and made a long announcement in Polish. The people who understood Polish started to drift away. Those of us who didn’t hung on hopefully until noon, but as we suspected the announcement was that the goats were not going to appear today.
A little disappointed (with both the croissant and lack of goats) we headed off to our next destination. As we were leaving Ton started to sing to the tune of a French song she had learned in school called Le Coq est mort (the rooster is dead), Le Goat est mort. I told her they weren’t dead just on vacation, and she said no they are dead to her.
We have fallen in love with Pirogi’s which is a dumpling. Ton had read about a Pirogi restaurant that was supposed to be fantastic called Na Winklu. We weren’t sure we would get in as it is a hole in the wall with just a few tables. We were lucky and got the last table. We have had boiled Pirogi’s which are very similar to Chinese dumplings in several places in Poland. Na Winklu also had baked Pirogi’s which we have never had before. We ordered a plate of each. They were both fantastic, the boiled ones reminded Ton of Thai dumplings, her only regret was that we didn’t have the Thai sauce for the dumplings. The baked ones were like another Thai dish called Curry Puffs and were also very good.
When we came out after lunch we saw dark skies building up, so we decided to head back to the campground a little early. We timed it well as it started to rain just as we arrived and continued for the rest of the day.
