A jewish cemetery and jewish food

In the Gromada hotel in Łomża we had seen on a city map that there is a jewish cemetery in the eastern part of the city. On Friday morning we said goodbye to our hotel, of which we liked the elevator best. Never been in such a fast elevator in Eastern Europe before. The cemetery we visited is the old cemetery in Łomża, there is also a new cemetery which we didn’t visit.

The old jewish cemetary in Łomża

Only on a few tombstones the texts were still readable

Tombstone covered with snow

Impression of the old cemetery in Łomża

We had quite some kilometers ahead of us for this Friday. We had decided to skip the visit to Łódz and to travel to Poznań instead. Thus we could make a lot of kilometers on Friday, do a couple of things on Saturday and still be back in Berlin on time to have dinner with some friends. Furthermore Larry would still have to drive back to the Netherlands of Sunday, so he was keen on making not too many kilometers on Saturday.

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Our Friday route

We got pretty fast in Warsaw, because route 8 from Białystok was perfectly clean. The route has some new by passes which the navigation system didn’t know about. It was funny to see how we were going cross country according the Garmin map on board.

Driving cross country according to the Garmin map

To my surprise there was a narrow gauge steam locomotive standing along the road in Warszawa Maki, for the fans of steam trains, click here for a website.
In Warsaw we got stuck in the Friday afternoon traffic jam, that cost us some time. What was worse was that I made my only map reading mistake here … Instead of taking route 2 + 14 towards the A2 high way we took route 8 further south. Somehow I had in mind that a section of the A2 is crossing route 8. Well, as I discovered it doesn’t. Hence we were forced to take a detour via Rawa Mazowiecka. To make it worse it started snowing again when we were driving on route 72 towards Łódz and the direct road towards the highway was blocked due to reconstruction work.

Once we reached the highway our fate took a better turn. It had stopped snowing and we reached Poznań pretty fast. The last bit of todays journey we didn’t use the navigation system, for it would have sent us through the entire old city – and that would have cost a bit more time. Instead we used the highway as far as possible.

We soon had found our hotel. The night before I had already booked a room in the Orbis Hotel in Poznań. It was a special offer that was worth its price! We had the most spacious room of the entire trip! Furthermore we had a good parking place for the car as well. The only two things we didn’t book was internet (Zł 39,- per day) and breakfast (because that costs Zł 44,-!). Since we had driven 514 kilometers we first took a nap before we went into the old town.

The hotel is perfectly located so it takes less than 10 minutes to walk to the old town of Poznań. The Stary Rynek looked great with all the snow. Larry quickly discovered a jewish restaurant, Cymes, close to the old market square and after a short look at the menu we decided to have our dinner here. It was to be the best meal of the entire trip! If you go there, I can recommend the Szmulganz! A tiny remark is that the food is definitively not kosher, but within the menu map there is a nice explanation for that.

Of course we had brought our cameras and tripods with us, so after our delicious dinner we made a tour through the old town. Below are some impressions of Poznań in the snow.

The tower of the Fara church and the former Jesuit College