Day 2 Poznan
Poznan has put on a cracker of a day for me today. Must be in a good mood after the party last night.
I start out today with a bit of a wander around the old town then a free walking tour of Poznan.
The Poznan market square is pretty bloody beautiful. They've got all these fabulous colourful buildings in a big square with some fountains in the corner and their town hall and some other buildings in the middle. Fantastic place.
The tour started in front of the town hall. In the middle ages sometime a dude put a pair of mechanical goats in front of the clock on town hall and when the clock strikes midday the goats come out and start to fight. Judging by the number of people standing in front of town hall it's a pretty popular tourist attraction too.
It's also really shit. I'm sure it was the height of mechanical wonder for the folks of the middle ages but now it's just a pretty crap mechanism doing something boring for far too long. You could feel the disappointment in the crowd after about 10 seconds of the goats fighting but they all stood there until the end in a vain hope they would do something interesting like spew fire or something. The tour guide told us all the guides have a competition to see which one of them can get their group to exclaim in wonder the loudest at the goats' antics. I don't think we won.
I forget pretty much everything I learnt on the tour but it was interesting!
After the walking tour I headed over to what they call Cathedral Island which ... believe it or not ... has a cathedral on it! It's a pretty nice cathedral. There are also a few other churches and museums there as well but the museum I was interested in did one of those stupid things where it sold tickets in timed batches (like the Kremlin Armory in Moscow). I could only buy tickets for a session starting in 2 hours so I didn't bother.
Wandered around a while longer then headed back to the hostel for a break.
Went to dinner at a really nice place about 5 minutes walk from the hostel. The place is called TOGA Polish Cuisine and they are bringing back the goose into polish dishes! Apparently goose used to be a very popular dish in Poland but it started be very in demand in Europe and became too expensive for Polish people to eat so they kind of forgot about it.
Anyway I had this delicious 4 course meal from their St Martien's day menu.
1. Dip of goose fat, Apple and onion
2. Goose tongues with pumpkin purée and truffled butter <-- favourite dish. the tongues were so buttery and rich
3. Goose blood soup (a local dish that's traditionally done with duck)
4. Baked goose roll stuffed with chicken liver
It was a great meal and I'd heartily recommend the place to anyone visiting Poznan. Since they only had a menu in Polish one of the owners took the time to walk me through it and helped me pick out my meal and he had a chat with me at times throughout the night. Fantastic service and well worth a visit. Really cheap too! Love this Polish exchange rate.
No photos of the food. I was too busy eating it.
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