Day 75, Torun, March 24th 2012

Tea 75: Green Pepper Hot chocolate, Madame Chocolat, Torun

The first and only full day in Torun.  Marta, her Mum and myself all went into the city centre in the morning for a little bit of a walk around (mostly in shoe shops for Marta and her Mum’s amusement), but also to the old Teutonic Castle ruins, past a little model of a dragon where the world’s only confirmed sighting of a real dragon was made, also a sight of a screeching pair of Peregrine falcons flying about their nest just across from the castle.  I wonder how long Peregrine’s have lived near the castle?  Maybe they are a medieval throwback!?!?

Then we went into this cafe / chocolaterie called Madame Chocolat.  This is a fairly new place in Torun apparently.  The decor is a little basic and plain, I think because it is so new, and it is potentially slightly naively named, and decorated also…  We ordered:  Green Pepper Hot Chocolate, Advocat Hot Chocolate, Chocolate Fondant cake, Chocolate Advocat cake, and another chocolate cake, whose contents I can’t really remember, but it was very tasty none-the-less!  The chocolate was tasty and rich, nice and thick.  Sadly the green pepper part was just some fresh green pepper on the top, it hadn’t been cooked with the pepper in it, so it hadn’t really got any chance to infuse the flavour.  But it was still quite good hot chocolate, nice and thick.  The cakes were all very good.  My fondant came with a nice, but small blob of ice cream and a chocolate twirl.

After this rather indulgent start to the day we went for a bit more of a walk, to burn off a bit of the sugarific-ness.  We ended up in a Gingerbread shop along with a crowd of rather merry polish guys out on a team building weekend.  They appeared to be buying the who shop up, gingerbread gift baskets were flying off the shelves!  All for their boss apparently, though I’m pretty sure lots were for wives and girlfriends too, an apology for the horrendous hangover they were likely to be suffering the next day…

We then headed back to the car and back to the house where lunch was being prepared.  Another huge meal with everything you could imagine, including another traditional wrapped Polish dish called Gołąbki.  Minced meat, rice and spices are all wrapped in boiled cabbage leaves.  They were very good, despite looking a little anaemic initially.  We ate until we were royally stuffed, as usual. Then sat in the beautifully sunny garden for a while drinking tea and eating (more) cake!  This all took a couple of hours and then we decided to head back into the town, to visit the Centre of Contemporary Art, or CoCA.  We got back in the car and were dropped off.  The gallery is a nice space, surprisingly large and the work on show is of a good quality generally.  There is a show on at the minute entitled The Fourth State of Water: from Micro to Macro.  This is obviously all about water.  It’s a strange show, a bit hit and miss and some of the curatorial decisions are a little dodgy, but it is a definite improvement on the work I saw in Krakow!  The other show on at the minute is called People and the City, a collection of photography, video and the occasional painting.  There are some big names here, Henri Cartier Bresson, WeeGee, Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Blake to name a few.  The collection of works is good, and is put together in a straightforward, simple, but effective way.  This space is much better than the other.  More open and higher ceilings.

We eventually got asked to leave the gallery, the place was closing, but luckily we had made it around everything.  They shuffled us out pretty quickly, but I still managed to get a photo of this hilarious sign declaring that the gallery had been estimated as a very good gallery…

We left the gallery and went for a walk around the town as the sun began to set.  The town was quite quiet for a Saturday night, that was until a group on bikes cycled past us with music blaring out from a speaker system being pulled along by one of them.  We went to see Copernicus’s residence, then to this leaning tower which I fully expected to be an actual tower but turned out to just be a four story building, but it was definitely leaning…

Then we got picked up again by Marta’s mum who had been on a trip with her gran to visit the grandfather’s gravestone.  We then drove across the river and found the panorama, a spot across the river where you can get a really wonderful view of the whole of the old town.  Postcard perfection!

Back home and more food was prepared, pierogi’s, bread, cheese, salad.  Everything!