Being a Millionaire in Poland

Yesterday was my last day at work for the summer.  Cleaning up my office a little bit and I found this old receipt folded up on a table.  It must have fallen out of a bin where I keep all my old travel logs while I was looking for something.

Well, to make a long story short it's from a family vacation that we took to Eastern Europe in 1994.  During the vacation, we took our Dodge Caravan and camped in most places, like outside of Prague,  then in Poland and Slovakia.  Around the halfway mark, we stayed in a Holiday Inn while in Krakow.  I remember this was just after we went to Auschwitz the concentration camp.  The cost on the receipt for a 2-night stay was 5,594,400  złoty.  The hotel was outside the city center set amongst old Soviet-style block housing.  We took cabs back and forth to the city center.

At the Polish border, I exchanged $100 for over a million zlotys. More bills than I could begin to fit in my wallet.  In 1994 visiting eastern Europe was still considered a little dicey.  The Soviets were still in the process of withdrawing from eastern Europe and the economy was in transition.  Most stores were the old Soviet-style where all the goods were behind the counter.  It was mostly a point and pay affair.  Krakow was a beautiful city not yet corrupted by tourism. As fate would have it we were there for the 1st annual Jewish Festival.

The whole trip we did not see another English speaking person, Lots of Germans and Dutch who spoke broken English.  It's interesting how something like this can trigger a memory.

For the complete story read; The Czech Republic, Poland, Krakow and Auschwitz (1994).