We’re in Warsaw right now, 4th day. There’s been a Rick Steves tour group staying at our hotel, but we’re traveling on our own. We had an EatPolska tour yesterday, starting at 13:00. There were just the 2 of us, and we thought, “great, we get a private tour!” Well, it was far from pleasant.
Rick’s guidebook raves about EatPolska. OK, so we did reach each food stop, and got so much food that we weren’t hungry for dinner. However, the guide can make or break a tour, and at more than $100 a person, it’s an investment that should provide some pleasant experiences and enriching learning. Instead, our guide was confrontational and accusatory. She spoke very softly, even though the restaurants and outside spaces that were visited had lots of ambient noise. It was very difficult with just the two of us; I don’t know how a group of eight would’ve managed to hear.
She also walked very fast, and we had trouble keeping up. This wasn’t a group of other fast walkers with long legs, with us being the stragglers, but she kept charging ahead of us in the distance. Pushing through crowded streets and sidewalks in Warsaw, and once crossing ahead of us on a red “don’t walk” signal, when we hadn’t yet gotten to the crosswalk behind her, when traffic was coming so we couldn’t ourselves get across, was puzzling.
If the pace was because there were a lot of food providers to cover, and the tour only lasted so long, we lingered in restaurants long after we’d finished our tastings, and could’ve left each of those places sooner and not had to be in such a rush on foot to get to the next. But in the first restaurant, trying two rounds of excellent soup, my husband hadn’t yet finished his first soup tasting, and our guide insisted that he give the server his bowl, with several spoonfuls left. Afterwards, my empty bowl continued to sit on the table until the next soup was served, many minutes later. It’s not as if they needed to keep the courses coming, one immediately after the other, so getting a bowl confiscated prematurely was unsettling.
Our guide was originally from Warsaw, but lived in England and Australia for several years. She was only 4 when communism ended, and started the tour saying that she would welcome any questions, even if they weren’t about food. Throughout the afternoon, questions were often met with contradicting answers. Before I could completely get out my question, I was usually interrupted with a response that didn’t answer my question, and I often had to repeat my question. Sometimes I never got it answered.
We did the main (food) part of the tour, and didn’t add the alcoholic drinks option. For some reason, at the penultimate stop, the “main course” restaurant, she launched into a diatribe about alcoholism in Poland. What if we’d gotten beers, too? As we ate the schnitzel that the tour included at that restaurant, she said she’d become vegetarian. This was uncomfortable. A building across the street had a poster with an image of Andy Warhol (with a saying about not living forever, but creating something that would), and she insisted it wasn’t Warhol (even though his name was at the bottom). Strange. And then we sat in there long after we were done with the course, before racing to our final stop, at the E. Wedel chocolate emporium.
There, they’ve got all kinds of chocolate treats, in bars, bon bons, and for drinking. Most packaging was in Polish, although one product, boxes of chocolate-covered praline wafers, seemed to be exclusively labeled in English. As I started to mention that only that one product was in English, she shot back at me, “What country are you from?!? What language do you speak?!? You’re a tourist!” That didn’t clarify anything, other than we weren’t welcome customers and that this wasn’t like food tours that we thoroughly enjoyed in other countries.
