Retail Stores and Pig's Necks

We started the day with a breakfast meeting with Szeczpan Figiel, who is the Associate Dean for research at the University. He was headed to a conference and wanted to meet with us before he left. As we finished breakfast, Wojciech came in to pick us up for a visit to various retail distribution outlets in the city. I happened to mention that I wished I could have bought more CDs and he said that we would start at Media Markt, which is an electronics “hypermart.” This place was incredible.It is about twice the size of Best Buy and had all the CDs, DVDs, and electronics one could want. I quickly found a few CDs that I was looking for (I’ll be featuring them in my other blog next week) and walked around the store. The CD selection was about as big as a typical Best Buy and I found the same CDs I had purchased the previous day for about half the price. Since our objective was to visit as many different types of retailers during the morning, we couldn’t linger there. I of course could have spent all day there, but I was forced by the others to quickly pick up something and move on. So I did, with great regret.We then visited supermarkets, discount stores, convenience stores, independent kiosks, different styles of furniture stores, and more. It was a whirlwind breathtaking view of a variety of retail outlets available in Poland.

We then headed to the University for lunch followed by more meetings with groups of students. This sequence of meetings led directly to our presentation to students and faculty at the college. We had 46 people at the presentation, of which 7 were faculty. So, it was a relatively large group. The room was just steaming hot. I was wearing a full suit (with an undershirt) and so was sweating like a pig. Halfway through my presentation, it started pouring with rain. This was an incredibly heavy downpour. So, they shut the windows, which only raised the heat in the room another notch. Seriously, my entire shirt and suit were soaked in sweat by the time I was done. I must have looked funny, standing in the room spouting sweat like a fountain. Still, I think the presentation went well and was quite well received.

After the presentation, Wojciech was supposed to run us to the hotel to get changed before heading out to a restaurant for a Polish barbecue. Well, the downpour had flooded some roads and the streets were jammed with cars that weren’t going anywhere. After a few futile attempts to find a way around the traffic jams, we gave up and headed straight to the BBQ.

In addition to my ever present beer, I also really enjoyed the delicious kielbasa (commonly known in the US as polish sausage) and karkówka. I have discovered another characteristic of Polish and their cuisine. Meat is meat. More than once, I noticed that I had clearly startled my hosts when I asked them what meat it was that I was eating. Usually, the response to “what is this?” is “It’s meat.” Everything is either meat or not meat. So, when I tried to inquire what meat the karkówka was made of, they looked puzzled and said “I don’t know. It’s meat!” When I insisted on knowing what meat it was (because I thought it tasted great and I was on my second helping), they started asking around at all the tables if anyone knew what meat it was. Finally, the answer was found and Wojciech came back to me with “It’s pig’s neck” Actually, it is just the meat from the neck/shoulder region of the pork (Google found me the answer faster). A couple of people who were a little more comfortable with English, cracked up when the answer was “pig’s neck.” So, for the rest of the evening, people would help themselves to more karkówka, point to it and exclaim “pig’s neck!” and cackle before eating it. All in all, a very enjoyable evening.

We were dropped back to the hotel at about 9 PM. I just finished packing and we leave at 6:30 tomorrow morning for Warsaw airport to catch our flight back home. I had a great time on this trip, as usual.